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ECommerce Solutions

Custom Ecommerce Sites Developed by WebDuck Designs:

Open Source Shopping Sites Developed by WebDuck Designs:

  • Hobby Hut

Taking your business online and offering your product to potential customers all over the world is the natural progression of just about every retail business these days. Manufacturer and supplier stipulations and regulations may dictate how or what you can sell online but for the most part if you own a retail business then you can sell your products online. Before you take your business online you might want to do a little research first to find out exactly what you are getting into. A good place to learn more about selling online is our “Guide to selling online” located on our Connecticut branch website.

The first thing you should know is that not all online stores are created equal. WebDuck Designs has built a number of eCommerce solutions for past and present clients using a variety of shopping cart programs and although each one is more than capable of selling products to customers they all have their own pros and cons. Some of the shopping cart solutions we have worked with include Zen Cart, OSCommerce, Cube Cart, and XCart. After working with all of these shopping carts the developers at WebDuck Designs set out to develop our own solution that offered a more customer friendly shopping experience, an easy to use store management interface, is search engine friendly for each and every one of your products. Our custom shopping cart solution is also affordable with very little initial investment and NO long term contracts. It took two and a half years to develop and now ShoppingDuck is finally done.

Let me introduce you to WebDuck Designs custom shopping cart solution known as ShoppingDuck. ShoppingDuck was designed and built not just to sell online, but to sell online effectively. Just like every other shopping cart program in existence, ShoppingDuck offers the store owner the ability to manually add orders they receive by means other than through the actual store such as fax and phone orders. ShoppingDuck also allows store owners to create coupons, specials, discounts, free shipping, banner ad placement, unlimited departments, unlimited categories, unlimited subcategories and unlimited products. Basically if another eCommerce solution can do it then so can ShoppingDuck.

Now that we have established that ShoppingDuck can do anything any other shopping cart application can do let’s look at what ShoppingDuck can do that the others can’t.

  • Salvage Declined Orders – To our knowledge, ShoppingDuck is the only ecommerce solution that will give you an opportunity to salvage orders that were declined. We accomplished this by integrating a “Process Declined Orders” option into the store administrative panel which will show you all of the orders that were declined. You can then go into each order and attempt to salvage the order by contacting that customer and seeing if there is anything you can do to get their business. In some cases like when it’s a stolen credit card then you can just cancel the order however more times than not the problem is something simple like a credit card number being entered wrong or an address doesn’t match because of a change of address issue. Imagine how much money you lose in sales due to simple mistakes. With ShoppingDuck you won’t lose a single potential sale.

  • Manual Order Entry – I know it seems like a no-brainer, but most shopping cart programs do not offer the ability for a store owner to manually enter an order through the store management interface. If you had an order that came in by fax or phone then you would be forced to enter that order like a normal customer and go through the entire process. ShoppingDuck has a built in manual order entry that allows you to enter new orders through the administrative panel. You can enter orders for new customers or you may choose to enter a new order for an existing customer.

  • Edit Order Information – When we designed ShoppingDuck, we noticed that sometimes when a customer places an order through an online store the owner of the store might want to make changes to that order. ShoppingDuck has a built in utility that allows the online store owner to manually adjust just about every aspect of an order including adding additional products, modifying product pricing and quantities, customer contact information, customer shipping information, customer billing information and even perform a manual price change to the order total. Other online stores require a store owner to either create an additional order or delete the original order and create a new one in order to make those changes but ShoppingDuck makes it quick and easy. The best part is that all changes made by the store owner are reflected in the order’s history so the customer can see exactly what changes have been made.

  • Reduce or Eliminate Gateway Refund Charges – Whenever you perform a “Refund” through a payment gateway you are charged a service charge. In a perfect world you would never have to refund a customer however the reality is that refunds do happen from time to time due to product quality, inventory issues, or maybe the customer just cancels the order. ShoppingDuck addresses this issue by integrating a custom payment interface that doesn’t actually capture the money for an order until the order status has been set to “Shipped”. After an order is placed by a customer or through manual order entry, the payment gateway checks to see if the credit card is valid and then places the money on “hold” so it can be captured at a later time. The store owners can then go into the store manager interface and process all these “Open” orders. If the order is able to be filled and nothing needs to be changed the owner can simply change the status to “Shipped” and the money will be captured and the store owner can ship the product. If the order needs to be adjusted or canceled then you can do so without penalty from the payment gateway company.

  • Set Tax Rates By Individual State – ShoppingDuck allows a store owner to determine whether or not to charge tax for each individual state. In the event the owner wants to charge sales tax he or she can use the store manager to set the tax rate to whatever it needs to be. WebDuck Designs also saw the need to be able to distinguish between taxable and non taxable products. Since the tax laws seem to change daily, ShoppingDuck allows you to easily determine which products if any are considered “taxable” and the sales tax is added to that product based on the shipping address and the tax rate you entered into the sales tax utility.

  • Update Shopping Cart Items – In the past, if a customer makes a mistake adding an item to their shopping cart he or she would have to click a link to the shopping cart page and either edit the product or delete the product and add it correctly. ShoppingDuck allows for customers to make corrections to products added to a shopping cart without having to leave the product page. Once an item is added to the cart, a summary of what was added to the cart is displayed above the product information. This summary includes all the product specifics with options to “Edit”, “Continue Shopping”, “View Shopping Cart” and “Checkout”. Based on what you need to do you just choose the correct option and proceed. This clever little process eliminates a lot of extra clicks that other stores require to accomplish the same tasks. This feature also eliminates being automatically taken to the shopping cart page every time a customer adds an item to his or her cart. It might not sound like a big deal but little details like this really add to the overall shopping experience and increase the potential for returning customers.

  • ShoppingDuck is 100% Customizable – Most online shopping cart applications claim to be customizable however the customization is very limited due to the way they incorporate pre-made modules. ShoppingDuck is completely customizable to every client’s unique needs. When we say ShoppingDuck is customizable we mean there are absolutely NO design parameters or functionally restraints. We have used ShoppingDuck as a standard online retail store for LiveHealthyToday and we have also made modifications to make ShoppingDuck an online contact lens store which requires a number of specific features and functions. No matter what you are selling, ShoppingDuck is the perfect solution.

  • ShoppingDuck is Affordable – Open source shopping carts are free but come with a lot of limitations. Pre-Made box shopping cart applications like XCart offer great functionality for a good price but if you wanted a completely custom online store that looks like you want it to look and include functions you want it to include then you would be looking at development costs upwards of $30,000! Because ShoppingDuck is so versatile and so easy to customize, we can essentially offer you a fully customizable online store worth over $30,000 for just a couple of hundred dollars a month and a small setup fee. If you decide you don’t want it anymore you don’t have to worry about any long term contracts. All you have to do is give us a call and let us know and we will supply you with your design files, html files, and CSS files for your store. We can accomplish this by not giving out the code that makes the actual shopping cart function.

  • ShoppingDuck is Less Prone to Being Hacked – Because we developed every line of code in ShoppingDuck and do not actually “sell” the store application, ShoppingDuck is less likely to be hacked by a malicious hacker. Most pre-made box online stores and open source online stores have all been reverse engineered by hackers and spamming companies in an effort to locate security holes to exploit. The only people that have ever seen the code that makes ShoppingDuck work are the developers at WebDuck Designs so having ShoppingDuck reverse engineered is just not an issue. WebDuck Designs is not currently aware of any security issues with any specific pre-made shopping cart applications and is just pointing out that if the code is available then the potential for it being reverse engineered is very likely.

  • Google Will Index ALL your Products Individually – ShoppingDuck was designed to create a page for each and every category, department, subcategory, and product in your store. Each page contains keywords, page titles, and other search engine friendly information to ensure that each and every product is indexed separately which in turn leads to more information heavy and keyword rich landing pages on your website. If you would like an example, just do a simple Google site search by pasting “site:http://www.livehealthytoday.org” into the Google search box and click “search”. The results will be all of the pages Google sees on the LiveHealthyToday website and as you can see it includes all of the store’s products.

If you would like more information about ShoppingDuck or are looking for an eCommerce solution that’s right for you then give WebDuck Designs a call or send us an email and we will be more than happy to find the best solution for your needs.

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