ProductCart Blog

Category: About ProductCart

  • Newly launched ProductCart-powered online stores

    As many of you know, Great Online Stores is a directory of hundreds of ProductCart-powered storefronts. It’s fantastic to see all the different ways you put our e-commerce software to work, and a great source of inspiration for other ProductCart users that are looking to launch or update their existing storefront.

    So today we added a new page that lists the latest 12 ecommerce stores added to the directory.

    Great Online Stores

    Each store listing has links that take you directly to the storefront, and a “Details” or “About this store” link that tells you a bit more about the store, including who designed it or customized it, if a ProductCart reseller/developer was involved.

    When you’re ready, don’t forget to add your store: it’s free visibility, free links pointing back to you, and you can help other users see what can be done with ProductCart!

  • Using a floating price panel on the BTO configuration page

    The product and service configurator that is part of ProductCart Build To Order gives e-commerce merchants incredible flexibility when selling complex products and services.

    Take our own store: it would be difficult to sell something like the MailUp E-Mail Marketing Service without using ProductCart Build To Order. It allows us to include the bandwidth component, even if that item’s price changes based on the quantity entered (BTO supports tiered pricing at the item level within the product configuration).

    One thing that we wanted to improve is how prices are displayed on the configuration page. We think we found a good way to do it. No JavaScript, just pure CSS (so no impact on performance). Highly customizable (position, style).

    Floating Price Panel
    If you are using ProductCart Build To Order, you can turn this on very easily. See “Showing configuration prices in a floating panel” in the ProductCart WIKI. Enjoy!

  • Ready-to-go ProductCart templates

    We are getting more and more requests for ready-to-use, professionally designed store designs (“templates”) for ProductCart-powered stores. This makes a lot of sense: there are many companies out there that are happy to spend on a good template, but might not have the budget for a full, custom design (which normally costs several thousand dollars).

    A couple of clarifications on the topic:

    • Why we don’t sell templates
      At Early Impact we decided not to get in the business of creating and selling templates for ProductCart because we do not wish to compete with our network of resellers. That’s the only reason, but we believe is a good one. Designing great Web store interfaces is what Web designers do, and many of our resellers are exactly in that business. No point in competing with our partners.
    • A business opportunity
      No one, as far as we know, has created a marketplace of ready-to-use designs for ProductCart yet. There is definitely a business opportunity there. It’s not just new stores that are buyers of ready-to-go store designs, but existing stores that want to change their look & feel as well. At the right price, some stores might decide to update their store design much more frequently.
    • Business model
      The business model is a proven one: typically what you see is…

      • Low price for non-exclusive use of a template (and the same template remains available for sale). Often $100 or less.
      • Higher price for exclusive use (and the template goes off the market). A few hundred to a few thousand dollars.

    The entrepreneurial ones out there are probably already planning how to make this happen. Sounds great to us! And we’ll link to any professionally designed (and run) marketplace from the Early Impact Web site, when they’re ready. Keep us posted.

  • Store design and ProductCart: you’re in control!

    We just updated one of our demo stores on earlyimpact.com. This is a slightly edited version of the standard store design that comes with ProductCart v4. Adding Twitter updates to the right-side column literally took less than 2 minutes. It truly is empowering the feeling that you get from being fully in control of the look of your store.

    ProductCart Demo Home Page

    Many great-looking stores powered by ProductCart were also recently added by our users and resellers to the directory “Great Online Stores .com“, which lists hundreds of e-commerce Web sites that use ProductCart. Check it out if you haven’t been there recently. There are some pretty awesome store designs to get inspired from.

    Great Online Stores

    If you are just getting started with ProductCart, the WIKI article that talks about integrating ProductCart with your own store design is the place to go for detailed instructions on how to quickly apply any store design to your ProductCart-powered storefront.

    The “How To” section then contains many articles on how to add all sorts of things to your store design. Is there a “How To” article that you’d like to see added? Let us know by adding a comment below (or contribute directly to the WIKI).

  • Time for an official Early Impact blog

    Aren’t we a little late to the game? Yep.

    The reason why we didn’t start earlier is that blogs are only useful if they are often, accurately updated. Which takes time. And time is pretty scarce at Early Impact, believe me (in fact, I am totally ashamed for the fact that I have not posted to my blog in ages).

    But… we have a problem:

    • Not everyone subscribes to our newsletters
    • Among those that do, only about 30% actually read them according to our MailUp statistics
    • We really do want our customers, partners, and prospects to keep up-to-date with what’s going on with our products and services.
    • Spam filters, overcrowded inboxes, general e-mail overload might be to blame.

    So… time for an official Early Impact blog.

    And we can start Twittering too, if you want.

    See you around here soon.

    Massimo
    Early Impact, Inc.