Business models available with Kodemall

An important decision while starting to use Kodemall is to select a business model with  which the store owner can be charged .
we have built in the following Business Models into Kodemall

1) Fixed Monthly recurring fee
With this business model – the mall owner can charge the store owner a fixed recurring fee every month .
the mall owner can create plans with this model by limiting the number of products for each plan

_______________________________________________________________
example -
plan 1 => 100 products => usd ‘X’
plan 2 => 200 products => usd ‘Y’

_______________________________________________________________

The shopper directly pays the store owner .
The store owner pays the mall owner at the end of every month

2) Comission on sales to be paid at end of month (postpaid)
With this business model – the mall owner can charge the store owner monthly fees which are based on a percentage of the total sales in the store
An invoice is automatically generated and sent from the mall owner to the store owner every month
The shopper directly pays the store owner .
The store owner pays the mall owner at the end of every month

the mall owner can create plans with this model by limiting the number of products for each plan

______________________________________________________________
example -
plan 1 => 100 products => comission = ‘X%’
plan 2 => 200 products => comission = usd ‘Y%’

_______________________________________________________________

3) Comission on sales prepaid credits
This is same as above business model .
The difference is that instead of receiving an invoice every month – the store should buy prepaid credits initially
when the credits are expired – the store owner will receive a reminder to refill credits

The shopper directly pays the store owner .
The store owner pays the mall owner initially to purchase credits

the mall owner can create plans with this model by limiting the number of products for each plan

_______________________________________________________________
example -
plan 1 => 100 products => credits deducted per order = ‘X’ credits
plan 2 => 200 products => credits deducted per order= ‘Y’ credits

_______________________________________________________________

4) comission on sales paid at time of transaction by splitting total transaction amount using paypal adaptive payments api

In this model the transaction is split .
The amount from shopper is spilt into :
a) store owners amount for product
b) ‘X%’ comission is sent to mall owner

The shopper pays to the store owner .
The mall owner receives comission at the time of trasaction only
the mall owner can create plans with this model by limiting the number of products for each plan

_______________________________________________________________
example -
plan 1 => 100 products => comission = ‘X%’
plan 2 => 200 products => comission = usd ‘Y%’

_______________________________________________________________

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Price comparision of indian payment gateways

This blog post is a complete analysis based on cost to decide among the most popular Indian payment gateways.

The cost for using a payment gateway for your Ecommerce business is divided into three types :

1] initial one time set up fee
2] annual rent or maintainence cost
3] comission fees on each transaction

We have compared the most used Indian payment gateways in terms of cost using below flowchart :

price comparision of indian payment gateways

paypal and transecute are marked in blue color as they accept only credit cards in India and do not offer transactions through netbanking or debit cards .

Links to pricing pages of above mentioned gateways are below
1) CC avenue Pricing
2) Direcpay Pricing
3) EBS pricing
4] Transecute
5] Paypal
6] Zaakpay
7] ABC payments
8] Ipayin

you can also have a look at our earlier post of comparision of Indian payment gateways here -
http://www.kodemall.com/wordpress/indian-payment-gateways-the-complete-comparision-guide/

How has your experience been with Indian payment gateways ?

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

2012 newsletter idea for Kodemall administrators

A very happy new year to all Kodemall fans ,administrators from the Kodemall development team.
We will come up with Kodemall v1.3 with new features for marketing your online ecommerce platform in the coming weeks and try to make 2012 sparkling for your business .
you can also request a feature in the Kodemall roadmap here -

Kodemall Features Roadmap

An excellent idea for your customers newsletter now is to share a listing of the best selling products from your mall in 2011
To design your newsletter , you can get inspired by this cool newsletter here – http://bit.ly/yq0goy from India’s number 1 ecommerce portal flipcart

In order to find the best selling products in your mall from 2011 , you can run the following sql query on your database

SELECT mc.name AS 'Category Name', op.name AS 'Product Name', SUM( op.quantity ) , YEAR( o.date_added ) AS 'Year'
FROM order_product op
INNER JOIN `order` o ON ( op.order_id = o.order_id )
INNER JOIN xproduct_mall_category pmc ON ( op.product_id = pmc.product_id )
INNER JOIN xmall_category mc ON ( pmc.mall_category_id = mc.category_id )
WHERE YEAR( o.date_added ) = '2011'
GROUP BY op.product_id
ORDER BY mc.name, SUM( op.quantity ) DESC
LIMIT 0 , 30

What other ecommerce marketing ideas are you thinking about in January ?


Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Indian Payment Gateways – The complete comparision guide

As the ecommerce market size in India is growing beyond expectations (http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-total-size-of-Indias-e-commerce-market-excluding-travel-and-classifieds), an increasing number of merchants , businesses , corporate houses are looking to integrate ecommerce with their business .

The choice of payment gateway is quite crucial to your new ecommerce platform . Indian payment gateways cannot be started immediately like paypal and require a signup and approval proceedure of 3 to 4 days for initial setup along with a setup fee

Paypal is the most cost effective method but the shoppers will see the prices in USD currency on the paypal interface where they are redirected to complete the payment through their credit cards .

CCavenue and EBS have the same range of costs and CCavenue is the one used more widely . Flipcart uses both CCavenue and EBS

Also there is a flurry of activity recently to switch from paypal due to the following rules to be acted upon from march 1 ,2011

1) sellers have to withdraw complete amount within 1 week of transaction

2) Any balance in and all future payments into your PayPal account may not be used to buy goods or services

3) In one transaction – buyer can only pay upto $500

Complete legal rule is here – https://www.paypal-apac.com/india/

To decide on your choice , you can refer to the below table .

clearly the choice is between – ccavenue , EBS and direcpay .

Direcpay is a Times of India initiative and is gaining users very rapidly .

A payment gateway similar to paypal for India with low startup fees would be like a dream come true for Indian merchants . Zaakpay is an interesting upcoming venture in this space .

which payment solutions have benefitted your online business ? what are the features you wish to have ?

Feature/ provider CCavenue EBS Transecute Direcpay Paypal
Setup fee 3 schemes :
7500/25,000/40,000
5 schemes
6k/12k/18k/24k/30k
0 minimum – 7500 0
Comission Cost for credit card payment 3 schemes
3%/5%/7%
6%/5%/4%/3.75%/3.25% 5 % 6 % 4 %
Comission cost for bank payment 4% 6%/5%/4%/3.75%/3.25% NA
Bank payments are not accepted
Awaiting data
AMC Cost 3 schemes:
1200/2400/3600
2400 0 2400 0
Set up proceedure Signup , approval
Can be set upped within 3-4 days
Ability to go online in 5-6 days Send documents , Approval
2 weeks
Signup , approval fastest
Allows customers to pay in ruppees yes yes yes yes no
Credit cards accepted VISA*, MASTER CARD*, AMERICAN EXPRESS, DINERS CLUB and JCB CARDS Visa, Master & Diners Card Visa ,mastercard Visa , master card , diners
Debit cards accepted Visa , mastercard no no 51 debit cards
http://www.timesofmoney. com/direcpay/jsp/ dpOurPartners.jsp
no
Bank payments accepted 39 banks
http://www.ccavenue. com/content/ indianrupees.jsp
Citibank , icici bank,sbi No 15 banks
http://www.timesofmoney. com/direcpayjsp/ dpOurPartners.jsp
no
ATM cum debit cards accepted Canarabank,citibank,indianoverseas bank,Punjab national bank , state bank of india , union bank of india Hdfc , hsbc , icici, union bank,axis , alhabad , dena , corporation,pnb , kotak no http://www.timesofmoney.com/direcpay/ jsp/dpOurPartners.jsp no
Is developer sandbox available no no no no yes

Originally posted in http://www.kodeplay.com/2011/04/indian-payment-gateways-the-complete-comparision-guide/

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Installing Kodemall in Lighttpd Server

Kodemall system requires .htaccess file that is mod_rewrite (apache module), but here we have come up with support for Lighttpd server which doesn’t recognizes the .htaccess file, this doesn’t means rewrite is not possible.. it is possible but the way is little different from apache server.

In Lighttpd Server there is one config file called “lighthttpd.conf” in this file all the server settings are set and even .htaccess rules has to be written in this file. so below i have pasted the code how me made it work on racingmall.com.

Edit: /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

Find for your domain in the file : ‘racingmall.com’

$HTTP["host"] =~ "www.racingmall.com|racingmall.com" {
include "kodemall-rewrite.conf"
}

in the above code just you have to include the file called “kodemall-rewrite.conf” and create the file in the same directory.

Finally paste the below code in the file : ‘kodemall-rewrite.conf’

var.kmdir = "/"
server.error-handler-404 = "/index.php"
$HTTP["url"] =~ "^" + var.kmdir {
index-file.names = ("index.php")
}
url.rewrite-once = (
"^/([^/]+)/*$" => "index.php",
"^/([^/]*)/admin(/*)$" => "admin/index.php"
)
url.rewrite-if-not-file = (
"^/([^/]+)/index.php(.*)$" => "/index.php$2",
"^/([^/]+)/find/(.+)$" => "index.php?_route_=$2",
"^/find/(.+)$" => "index.php?_route_=$1",
"^/([^/]*)/admin(.*)$" => "admin/$2"
)

Restart the Lighttpd server by running the below code in the terminal!

/etc/init.d/lighttpd reload
/etc/init.d/lighttpd restart

Note : If any Load balancing Technique is used on the server and the server is getting mirrored automatically be sure that after applying the above rules in lighttpd.conf restart the Lighttpd server individually.

/etc/init.d/lighttpd reload
/etc/init.d/lighttpd restart

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

How subdomains and top domains work with Kodemall

In Kodemall , the store owner can have all three types of url’s as below :

Assume that mysite.com is the domain name of the mall/marketplace.
storename.com is the domain name of the store
1) Subdirectory url : Example – http://mysite.com/storename
2) Subdomain url : Example – http://storename.mysite.com
3) Top domain url : http://storename.com

Let us try to figure out how this is managed technically.

For subdirectories , any server configurations are not required .We have written a php class called Urlmode .
This class reads the url and after parsing gives the output as the store name .
The kodemall code queries the database to identify the correct store id for this store name and loads all the store data for the shoppers view .

For subdomains – we need to first add an ‘A’ record so that all the subdomains of our domain point to our server.
This is easily done from the cpanel or from your hosting providers dashboard
once the subdomain points to the root directory of kodemall ,URLmode class will then read the url , understand that the url is of type subdomain , parse the url to fetch the store name

For topdomains , the store owner will purchase a top domain name and point the name servers to the mall owners server.
The mall administrator will create a virtual host and configure the store owners domain to point to the root directory of the kodemall program .
Now , the URLmode class will return the store name to the kodemall code .

Let us now try out a demo to see how the store url can be changed to one of the following :
a) subdirectory url
b) subdomain url
c) top domain url

please follow the below steps :

1) First the mall administrator will login to the mall administration panel . (contact us now to receive the administration demo links )
2) please go to – System -> settings -> store
3) In the allow url types for stores – select the types of url’s that you wish to allow
4) click on save
mall administrators enables url types

now the store administrator will login to the store administration panel
(or the mall administrator will select the store management mode from the top header bar)

5) The store administrator will go to System -> settings
click on change url , use the right type .
now click on save

store owner selects store url
In this way , it is easy to configure the url’s for a store
It can be an advantage for stores to have their own independent url’s

Posted in Product Documentation | 2 Comments

Easy shipping with Kodemall

We have developed a module called Auto Shipping for Kodemall .
By using this module – the store administrators can assign a specific shipping method on a per product , per geozone basis .

Without this module , In the default checkout flow the shopper is asked to choose a shipping methods .
The mall administrator installs the shipping modules that will be available for the store administrators . The store administrator enables the modules required for their specific stores .
The shopper selects his preferred method to use for shipping

If the Autoshipping module is used – the store owner selects a shipping method or a shipping rate for each product to be shipped to each different geozone

The following type of combination can be created :

Product 1 – geozone1 – usps
product 1 – geozone2 – royal mail

and so on for all combinations of products and geozones .
You can view a demo of the auto shipping module – video for auto shopping module

The user manual for the Auto shipping module can be found here

Posted in Product Documentation | Leave a comment

How to identify the best keywords for your multi store marketplace

Once your online marketplace is deployed and set up for the users , It is time to start marketing .
The first step to online marketing is to integrate google analytics .
Sign into your google webmaster account to get the snippet of code to integrate google analytics .
You can now login to the mall administration panel .
Now go to mall management -> mall modules and enable the google analytics module .
To learn to manage the mall modules – please visit our mall administration user manual

Keep a close count on your unique visitors in google analytics and carefully study the traffic sources and keywords every morning .

The first step to market your online marketplace effectively is to identify a niche area you will enable ecommerce for .
Try answering the following question in one line :

1) What is the one and only one niche area of products and services that my online marketplace will cater to ?

Good example answers are :

a) Pet food supplies marketplace
b) Marketplace for Handcrafted Household products
c) Marketplace for services by professional Accountants

By identifying a specific domain , you will be more focussed and be able to easily evaluate your target audience / market segments .Now It is time to look for good keywords for  your target area of business
Please visit the google adwords keyword tool

To find out good keyword ideas , Answer the following questions :

1) What would the buyers / shoppers of my online marketplace search for on google ?
2) What would the sellers / store owners of my online marketplace search for on google ?
Enter these words into the google keyword tool and you will get the list of most relevant keywords for your area of business
Try to note the keyword ideas with the maximum global monthly searches and the minimum competition .
The information pages of your online mall should contain headings with these keywords .
Try and place the keywords into the  headings and bold text of your information pages .
On completion ask a User to proof read all content . All the text should first be helpful for the users and then target the search engines . User experience will always be the first priority followed by search engines .

Analysing and using the right keywords  should be able to get you more than 50 unique visitors per day after a couple of weeks .

Watch this space for helpful tips and tricks for your ecommerce business

Posted in search engine optimization | Leave a comment

Say Hello to Kodemall version 1.2

We are happy to announce that the new Kodemall version 1.2 is ready for production .

we have added quite a few requested features and social media integrations .
The shoppers can now login to the marketplace with their existing social media accounts and also share products with their friends

A complete list of addons for Kodemall version 1.2 is as follows :

1. AutoSelect shipping module for store administrators
- Autoselect Shipping is a kodemall module which helps sellers to specify shipping methods on per product per geozone basis. The seller may also specify a fixed rate to be applied to the product in a geozone. When Autoselect shipping module is enabled by a seller, the customer will not be shown a choice of shipping method as it has already been specified by the seller

2. Advertisement Module
- Mall administrator will be able to display advertisements on any store with the help of this module. Mall administrator will enter an advertisement banner and will select the stores in which this module should be enabled. Mall administrator can also choose the position of a module for a particular store to fit the design of the store.

3. Contact Us section in mall administrator panel
- Now all the enquiries from the mall contact us page will be stored in the database and will be displayed in the Mall administration panel. Later you can select this group to send newsletter from Mail option in the mall administration panel.

4. Improved Mail/Newsletter module in Mall administration panel
The mall administrator can now send newsletters to all the store owners and also to all users who send in an enquiry from the mall contact us page

5. Excel Import/Export of products for each store administrator .
- The import and export feature is available for all the store owners. They can directly import their products from excel sheet.

6. Social Media links and sharing in mall and store
- The store administrator and the mall administrator can add social media links . It will also add share button on every product detail page to share your products through fb share, tweet on twitter, or with google plus

7. Open Login using google, facebook, twitter.
- By this module the shoppers can use fb, twitter and google for login to the mall frontend .

8. New Product Attributes and Compare module
- This will make the attribute management more easier. The attributes will appear on the product detail page and the product compare modules

9. Cleaned theme added
- A new store theme is added .The store owner can make a customized header through http://www.xheader.com/ and make there store more beautiful and elegant.

In the coming weeks , We will carefully listen for feedback , reviews to bring in requested feature updates , addons and ensure that your online marketplace can leverage the benefits of Social commerce and mobile commerce.

Posted in Product Documentation | Leave a comment

The Theme editor at work !

The new Kodemall version 1.1 is here .
A theme editor feature  is added to the administration panels .  Let us try out a quick and easy demo of the Theme editor . I have created a new store for our testing called thememall . You can login as the store administrator here :

http://www.kodemall.com/demo/thememall/admin
The username / password are thememall/kodeplay2010

From the menu bar please go to   System ->Settings -> Theme editor
Now It is time to wear your creative hats . you can change the colors and images of many sections easily to create a style suitable for the branding of your store.
After completion – click on the save button
To view your changes click on the “storefront”   link in the menu bar .
In this way , both the mall administrator and the store administrator can create suitable branding for the  stores

Some neat  themes created by the store owners have exceeded our expectations about the theme editor . You can have a look at the below screenshots :

Store Name : Cameron Candles

__________________________________________________________________________________

Store Name : Lona – A Store for bags

____________________________________________________________________________

Store Name : Trendy Pets

__________________________________________________________________________________

Store Name :sillymartycollection

____________________________________________________________________________________

Store Name : A Warm Embrace

A big Thanks to all the store administrators and mall administrators using kodemall for making the theme editor feature  a success .

Stores can create neat suitable branding in very less time and without any coding knowledge .
It is also very important to not go overboard with the use of colors  and ensure a neat look and feel for easy user experience .

We will look forward to come up with new designs so that store owners across domains can create excellent branding to create a calm and easy shopping experience for the end users .

Posted in Product Documentation | Leave a comment