(Published in Brainstorm! August 2005)

If you're a retailer, your holiday merchandise has been ordered and is - probably - well on its way to you. Some of it may already be in your store. But is your Internet site as well prepared for the holidays as your shelves?

Last year (2004), online sales rose 20% to a record $13.2 billion as increasing numbers of affluent, two-income households did more of their shopping on the Net. If your typical customer has a college education and is less than 50 years old, he or she visits the Internet routinely and almost certainly has shopped in online "malls".

Many of you have invested in a web site and now, to get the maximum return from it, you can still add a shopping cart before the holiday shopping season. It takes about 30 to 60 days to do the paperwork necessary to accept credit cards, establish security, programming, and make the necessary changes to your site.

At Whole Brain Technologies we have many tools available to help the retailer to get their products to the online market. With a product called Candy Press, we can easily transform a dull, ineffective web site into a robust eMarket place. It used to be that shopping carts were complex, expensive and limiting in what their capabilities are. Today, shopping carts are flexible, inexpensive (usually less than $100 for the basic package) and offer many features needed by retailers such as:

• Category and subcategory divisions for products
• Automatic calculation of tax based on your company's setup (talk with your tax advisor)
• Product reviews from customer input
• Individualized discount and promotional codes for customers
• Ability to sell eProducts for download like eBooks and software
• Online or offline credit card processing integration with the ability to connect to Paypal, Authorize.net, and 2CheckOut systems
• Online shipping calculators for UPS and USPS
• Built-in security to protect credit card information
• Sales and customer reports
• Email blasts can be sent to your registered customers in bulk
• Shopping cart is owned by the retailer not the hosting company

With the shopping cart that Whole Brain uses, you can make changes on the fly in the live store. There is no need to wait for a designer or a programmer to make changes or to reconfigure the store. And, unlike using Application Service Providers (ASP) where the shopping cart belongs to the hosting company, this shopping cart system is owned by you, the retailer. The benefit is that you can take your store anywhere, you can custom design the look and feel to match the rest of your web site and you can add more functionality to fit your needs.

Now that we are approaching Labor Day, time is of the essence and you must hurry to get your store up and going before the upcoming holiday season. Why not generate extra income using the Internet to sell your products that you may be selling in a brick and mortar or out of your home? There are less than 125 days until the end of the holiday season and the biggest sales revenues of the year. Don't miss out! Contact Whole Brain today to get your store up and running before the holidays.

References:
http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,35550,00.html
http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=56700213

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