eCrater
eCrater is an online e-Commerce venue. The venue has a support community board for its members. If you want to use this venue as a seller a shopkeeper should become familiar with the data located on the community board.
I am a fan of eCrater and will try to answer a few of the questions I receive about setting up a store or utilizing the cart. For information about the developer; read his about page.
To clarify my own interpretation of utilizing eCrater: First, it is great as a stand alone shopping cart for a small business. The shopping cart has its own search engine capabilities for your personal store. Second, as a community mall of shops from the front page of eCrater the search function includes All Shops.
Payment arrangements are decided by each store owner with the ability to use traditional payments or Google Checkout and PayPal.
Now for the answers to some of the questions I have in my inbox. All carts or stores are set to templates, which keeps the appearance of size and shape consistent. It also keeps the code behind the store swift and functional. This is a good thing for everyone.
Customizing the store: There is an image size in the top left and another image size below that one. Both of the dimensions for that customization can be found on the community board.
When uploading photos of your products be sure they are squared. You can add color or white space to get a photo squared. If they are not squared then they will be distorted and this is what makes a perfect picture look bad on eCrater. I generally keep my photos at a minimum of 700 pixels square. I don't remember the exact minimum but the information is also located on the site.
Now for the SEO items:
Inside the cart for shopkeepers, there is a tab on the left that says EDIT TEXT. This is the area I will cover to answer some questions.
Home: This will be the information that the public will see on the front page of each shop. Here is the content area for the extra crawl of search engines for your shop and the information that you want your buyers to see and know about the shop.
About Us, Contact Us, Terms and Conditions: This area needs to be filled out by every shopkeeper. This is the one business section that lets the buyers know what to expect from each business; the how's of conducting business. There are so many shopkeepers that setting your own specifics is important.
Title Tag: Name the shop! The search engines want to know what shop or page it is indexing for those search engine returns.
Meta Description Tag: Now describe what the store contains in 140 characters or less. I recommend writing a sentence.
Meta Keyword Tags: Now this is the section that will not be seen ever by the public but it is the section that search engines will use to pick-up on your listings. Place as many keywords in this section that it will hold and be sure that your store actually offers these items. Since location has become important in the new trend of vertical search go on ahead and include where you are whether by state, city, and even country.
Now that is it for the EDIT TEXT section in the eCrater Shopkeepers toolbar.
Sher2x4-Landing™ at eCrater
