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Must-Have Features in an All-in-One Online Store Application

Posted on the 14 November 2014 by Geekasms @geekasms

If you want to run an online business right from your mobile device, then there are a few features you’re absolutely going to need to look for when it comes to choosing a company with the best online payment services. Here are a few examples of features that will help.

PCI DSS Compliant Services

One of the most important parts of any payment service is the security. After all, you’re going to be partially responsible for keeping your customers’ credit cards and other sensitive information safe.

Must-Have Features in an All-in-One Online Store Application
A good place to start to this end is to look for companies that have high standards such as a level 1 PCI DSS compliant security rating certification when it comes to processing credit cards. It helps to check with the PCI Security Standards Council website to verify the safety rating for any vendor that claims to have it.

After all, a seal on a website is just a picture file. Technically, anyone could add that seal without actually having the certification. The Data Security Standards, or DSS, ensure a whole host of different procedures for securing online payment transactions including preventing any sort of theft from happening in the first place, detecting attempt thefts when they do occur, and having the ability to act decisively in reaction if this becomes necessary.

According to Statistic Brain, around 10 percent of Americans have been the victims of some kind of credit card fraud. You don’t want to be one of the vendors responsible for letting this happen to your customers. It will be those that keep their customer’s data the most secure that tend to be most trusted by customers.

Especially with so many high profile credit card breaches happening in the media lately, such as the one from Target that occurred within the last year.

24/7 Support

If your online store goes down, people can’t pay you, it’s that simple. That’s why it helps to go with a company like Shopify or one of the other similar companies that have 24/7 live chat and phone networks.

Having your payment system go down is not only bad because it means you won’t get any sales at all during that time period, but it’s also bad because it will annoy your customers. They will figure that if you can’t keep the payment system up, then you don’t want their business. As a result, they will head elsewhere to some other business that they figure does want them as a customer. Keeping the payment system up is important for securing your online reputation as much as any other concern.

That’s why you need the round the clock support so you can contact your payment services at any time day or night if some serious issue comes up. You really don’t want to have to wait for morning and risk losing business all throughout the night.

Mobile and Inventory Syncing

Some online store applications only handle one small aspect of your business. For example, they might handle point of sale transactions for a brick and mortar store, or online web store transactions, or mobile transactions. Some applications, even if they handle all of these systems, will do so independently. Meaning, you have to go to each one separately to look at your inventory. But if you’re running a store in multiple different mediums such as from your brick and mortar location, and from mobile, chances are it’s really all the same store.

That’s why it’s important to have a service that can merge all of your inventory across all of the different media together. That way, when you sell something, you know exactly where it went, and you know instantly that it’s not in your inventory anymore when you send it out.

Templates

Setting up an online store is hard work, especially when you have to do it all by yourself. The key is to find an online store service that has a wide number of templates that can help you get started quickly. After all, your focus is likely going to be on what you’re selling. You’re a business person, not an online store design person. So, it’s likely that you want to get straight to the business part. And this is exactly what a good service with plenty of templates allows you to do. You can just plug in your particular products into the template and get going right away.

Overall, a good online store service lets you stick with what you know, with your product or service. It will handle the security, syncing and all of the other aspects of the procedure for you in a seamless way that keeps you from being distracted. Running your business is hard enough as it is without dealing with extra distractions as well.

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