More and more, shoppers are turning to the Internet to buy goods. In fact, research from Zagat shows that more than 30% of regular shopping is now conducted online and close to 75% of shoppers make an online purchase during the holiday season, according to Burst! Media. Recognizing this trend, Plexus Web Creations has partnered with Early Impact to offer e-commerce capabilities to our customers.

In the spring of this year, Plexus was hired to design and develop an e-commerce web site for Name Maker, an Atlanta-based company that produces personalized name tapes & labels, personalized gift-wrap, bags and boxes, and other products. With customers from around the world, including such celebrities as Katie Couric, Dakota Fanning and Marcia Gay Harden, Name Maker needed to effectively display and sell the hundreds of customizable products they offer over the web.

The company was generating quite a lot of attention in the press including write-ups in Oprah’s O Magazine, Martha Stewart Weddings Magazine, Glamour, Business Week Small Biz Magazine, In Style Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal, in addition to appearing in a holiday segment on NBC’s Today Show, radio interviews and more. With this momentum, driving consumers to www.namemaker.com in order to buy their products meant the opportunity for instant sales and rising profits.

Plexus started by enabling the site with ProductCart, Early Impact’s premier shopping cart software. It contains smart marketing tools to help grow online sales as well as timesaving management features to help run a profitable online store. Coupled with the site’s design that displays all of Name Maker’s varied products by category via a side navigation bar, Name Maker is now able to track online sales with a variety of measurement tools in addition to providing easy and secure online shopping for customers.

Log onto recent sites Plexus has created such as www.namemaker.com or www.gowiththeflow.com, a canoe, kayak and water sport supply retailer, to see how making your inventory available online is now a simple and secure process. Several components are required to develop an e-commerce site including e-commerce software (ProductCart) which allows you to enter your products into an online database without any technical knowledge; Secure Server Certificate (SSL) for protected interaction with buyers; a merchant account which allows you to accept credit cards; and an online transaction-processing system (equivalent to a retail credit card swipe machine) for accepting payments via credit card. Plexus will work with you to fulfill these extra requirements.

In turn, the site comes equipped with:

• Advanced shopping cart functionality
• WYSIWYG tools (webmaster mode)
• Web-based administration
• Ability to accept payments online
• Real time shipping cost estimation
• Inventory control, order management
and reports
• Coupon codes and Gift Certificates

Typically, these types of sites begin at $5,000, which includes a web-ready site with 25 products already entered. In addition, Plexus staff will train you on how to add the rest of your inventory.

If you are interested in enabling online shopping on a smaller scale, technology is available for that as well. Plexus recently launched a site for New York City-based artist, Laura Loving, complete with an “art store” link for purchasing original works, prints and art objects. View Laura’s work and visit her art store at www.lauraloving.com.

With fewer than 50 products and no inventory management requirements, our smaller e-commerce package, using Paypal instead of a merchant account system, was a better fit. This type of site starts around $3,500, and in addition to the shopping cart component, it includes a news database, photo gallery system and calendar of events component.