Services like Yahoo eCommerce or an eBay store are great starting points to test out the waters and get a feel for your market. These services have some nice features and definitely get a person or company comfortable with selling online. The services offer some great tracking and reports while making order management fairly simple.

Though services like this are a great starting point, they are very limited in what you can do with them. They are customizable to a point as far as look and feel.  You can change color schemes and graphics, have logo control and some various styling points, but when it comes to standing out and really catching the eye of your audience, the tools that are offered are very limited. Once the market is established it is key to graduate to a more robust software-based eCommerce application like Magento Commerce.  This is where selling online really takes off!

By moving to a software solution such as Magento Commerce you will realize why all extremely successful eCommerce sites operate like this. Not only can the look and feel be changed and modified as needed, the entire software can be customized to fit the owners needs. Custom programming can be done for specific sales reports, customer statistics and inventory needs. Also, the ability to add on new features and tools can be developed and custom built for any variety of reason that the store owner sees fit.

Some of the great tools that are a part of Magento Commerce are visual graphs for tracking sales, multiple images and views of the products in the site, graphical newsletter creation and a secure backend administration area that only the Merchant has access to.

Another advantage of using Magento Commerce is the Merchant Account advantages. While using a Yahoo payment service is fine to start out with, usually Yahoo is charging more in fees and transaction percentages. A true Merchant account will be closely linked to an established bank account as well as offer the Merchant a lower fee for processing transactions.

All in all, Magento Commerce based eCommerce solution is hands down the way to go. The amount of features and flexibility that is offered with this type of system allows for infinite growth.

Pier Marketing is a marketing firm that has worked closely with various companies to develop eCommerce applications. To learn more about eCommerce applications and development. Please contact us today for a no obligation consultation.