The Shopping Cart Junkie

I watched a movie last night, which reminded me of a few things which I tend to forget sometimes.

Before I get into the movie, I’d like to ask you something.

What is your reason for being in business? What is your overriding goal?

For me, the answer can vary from day to day. Some days my reason is to make enough money to support my family. Some days my reason is to serve other people, some days it’s simply because it’s warmer and drier than the back deck of a fishing boat.

In the move “Facing the Giants”, the football coach at a Christian high school deals with the frustration of coaching a perpetually losing team. Parents, players and fellow coaches begin to point a finger in his direction, citing his poor coaching as the cause of the losses.

In fear, and in frustration, the coach turns to The Lord. After a period of soul searching, the coach calls the team together, and asks them what they think the purpose of the football team is. One of the players suggests that winning football games is the purpose of the team. The coach explains that the real purpose of the team is to honor Jesus. The coaches and players were to honor Jesus by giving him their all, and leave the results up to Him. If they won, they would praise God, if they lost, they would also praise God. What was most important was to honor God in their effort.

This movie was a good reminder to me, that evry day needs to be about honoring and serving God. I can’t concern myself with the wins and losses, but must praise Him in either. The win isn’t nearly so important as the way I serve Him and my fellows.

Over two thousand years ago, Jesus told us to seek first the Kingdom of God, and that all of our needs would be taken care of.

That, is a really incredible promise, and flies in the face of conventional business wisdom.

However, most businesses fail within the first five years, so some unconventional wisdom might be just the ticket.

Incidentally, the coach in the movie ended up taking his team to the state championships that year.

Here’s to facing the giants!

So you’ve visited the 123 eCart site, signed up for an online store, built your catalog and now have 1 cool store ready to launch on an unsuspecting world.

Now what?

Well…you’ll need to get shoppers into your store. For that to happen, they’ll need to find you.

“Easy enough” you say. ” I’ll submit the site to the search engines”.

You submit, and you wait. You check your logs every day (sometimes every hour) to see if anyone has visited, but very few people have set foot on the premises.

The problem, most likely, is that your site is listed in the search engines, but is not showing up very high in the results returned.

To remedy this, an entire industry - the search engine optimization industry - has come into existence. The professionals in this industry are called SEO Consultants. They can charge a great deal of money, or be extremely reasonable. If you have the money, finding an SEO can be a great investment.

What if you don’t have the money? Well - there’s a wealth of information out there regarding how to optimize your own website. A little time on Google can get you up to speed rather quickly.

One issue that ecommerce store owners often encounter is that their shopping cart software  isn’t flexible enought to allow them to optimize their site correctly.

If you are a 123 eCart store owner, you’ll find the opposite to be true.

123 eCart allows you to insert your own meta tags on every category and product page, and builds the name of the product or category right into the page URL so as to make it easier for search engines to find specific products on your site.

With a little work and the proper tools - like those included in your 123 eCart Storefront - You should be quite successful.