Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

You might have lots of confusion and doubts about choosing a content management system for your eCommerce website and might wandering what features you should consider for its selection. Below I am pointing out a few of them which are must have in any ecommerce CMS.

Due to no limitation on kind of categories you would add later or would modify products from a specific category, it should provide URL rewriting and URL redirection so if you delete or modify any products or category, you can redirect the old one of which you have promoted.

Once users come to your website, you have to give them a way to visit again. Providing daily deals section, coupon codes, special discounts, email subscription is some of way to engage them. Some eCommerce CMS provide these features by default with no extra coding in it.

Many CMS provides ready-made web template which look professional and which can save your web design cost. Look for these features if it is available or see if there is any extra charges to make that feature available.

It should provide simple and flexible user control panel for inventory management and order processing tasks which can be understood easily by any person.

Your customers may be using different ways to make payment. So along with providing integration of the major payment gateways, it should provide facility to integrate third party application of any payment services if needed in future.

Promotion through SEO is mandatory and you must implement basic fundamental of SEO in your product and category page. It should give facility to generate Meta tags automatically in fixed predefined structure by retrieving certain necessary product information from the database so you don’t have to write Meta tags for all the products manually.

Ask developers and they’ll probably explain they have favorites from both realms. However, most marketing execs and decision makers aren’t as familiar with CMSs, let alone quick to name drop their most preferred. Feel overwhelmed or torn by CMS choices? Let’s discuss the pros and cons of developing within both open and closed source systems. And for further direction, let’s scope out the top open and closed source ways to manage content for both ecommerce and general content sites.

Given that, you can also try a new type of e-commerce platform gaining popularity, Ecwid and Foxycart. These services let you make your own site and add e-commerce functionality through js and CSS, so you can have a static HTML site and nearly complete technical SEO control with decent e-commerce functionality. Don't expect Magento functionality here, but if you're selling in a targeted market in a single language, these services are worth a look.

Your website is a direct reflection of your company, your product, and your employees. A poorly-designed website reflects poorly on you. Keep in mind, though, that merely having a website that looks good is a good start -- it won't be enough to assure e-commerce success. Having a reliable, secure checkout and an easy way for customers to navigate to it is the most essential component of any successful e-commerce site.

I believe Wordpress is a great tool and works beautifully, it is also very well read by search engines.

You can develop own CMS rather then using any open source CMS.. there many benefits of won CMS. We can develop this as we want and we can do every thing as we want. also no need to purchase plugins for few features like Banner sliders and all. You can also make website user friendly. Also i think all open source have issues about security like hacked websites. and own CMS is secure then open source CMS.