E-tailer Lite is a customizable product web site template. With no knowledge of web programming you can quickly and easily modify E-tailer Lite pages to display your chosen merchandise using familiar workplace tools. E-tailer Lite was designed for small businesses with a limited marketing budget that need to determine their products online sales potential before committing to larger scale e-commerce solutions.
All site data and product information in an E-tailer Lite site is generated from a separate Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that can be easily maintained. The built-in logic in E-tailer Lite pages combine your product data with advanced web site features – like powerful site keyword searching and personalised product bookmarking. The E-tailer Lite site flow and layout are based on extensive user-experience testing and are engineered to provide an identical display in all common browsers.
In order to use E-tailer Lite, all that is required is an online hosting account with FTP access, a copy of Microsoft Excel, and text and graphics editing software.
Main features include:
E-tailer Lite is designed for small businesses that want to make the online transition in self-justifying financial stages. Making the transition from traditional retail to online ecommerce can be an expensive and confusing process, and most small businesses cannot justify the levels of expenditure required without a projected basis for success. Small businesses need to know – from their customers – if online product representation is going to benefit their business, before committing valuable resources and funding.
In an ecommerce environment, you are required to rent or purchase two main server-based components. Firstly, you are asked to rent folder space on a computer configured for worldwide access – this is used to hold the site pages that your customers request with their browsers when choosing links within your web site You are also required to rent an online ecommerce database – to store product data and customer details behind the scenes and handle the browser requests into that database. A traditional ecommerce web page is actually built ‘on-the-fly’, using a combination of screen display tags mixed together with data from the server. The price of renting web space on a server is usually minimal ($15 – $50 NZ dollars per month for 20Mbs of space), but the price of renting an ecommerce database can range from $500 a month to $1 million dollars per year (and there seems to be no regulated pricing system in place). The two main reasons why small businesses choose not to embrace online mediums are misinformation and expense.
eTailer Lite can be downloaded directly from this website, or from popular Internet magazines. Simply download and extract to your local computer, edit the Microsoft Excel sheet and the style sheet, then upload to your account to preview the changes. Please note: Changes cannot be viewed by simply opening the html files with your browser when the files are on your desktop.
eTailer Lite took several months to perfect, so I welcome any financial donations from businesses that find it both useful and educational. Email support will only be granted to those that choose to donate.
