SMALL BUSINESS : BUSINESS TOOLS: Software, Technology and new Products to Help Your Company : ECongo.com Offers Free Way to Open Your Online Store
The Internet offers a bonanza of free e-commerce services for small businesses. One of the latest is ECongo.com, which will not only create an online store and payment system for you but provide marketing and advertising support.
ECongo lets you easily set up your own store on the Web just by answering a few questions. There’s no extra software to run. You can import graphics such as your logo and pictures of key products or personnel.
The site also allows you to add contact information and links to other Web sites. You get a unique URL such as https://www.larrysworld.econgo.com. Or you can use your own unique domain (such as https://www.larrysworld.com) if you have one. Unique domains must be registered with Network Solutions or another registration service for a fee, typically $70 for the first two years and $35 a year after that.
ECongo also gives you up to seven free customer service e-mail addresses such as sales@larrysworld.econgo.com or support.larrysworld.econgo.com.
Once you have a store, you can create an online catalog with descriptions and pictures of your products and services.
The site is currently in beta test form. You can build a site, preview it and sell products via COD or check, but it doesn’t yet perform certain tasks such as calculating shipping costs or state sales taxes. These services, according to CEO Rick Asturias, will be added soon.
ECongo also plans to add an integrated credit card processing feature that will allow online merchants to accept Visa and MasterCard. Cards will be validated in “real time” and customers with invalid cards will be notified immediately that there is a problem.
ECongo, according to Asturias, has entered into a relationship with Cardservice International, which will approve applications to accept credit cards as long as the business has a U.S. bank account along with a Web presence on ECongo. That eliminates a key hurdle for many small and home-based businesses.
ECongo also will submit your site to search engines such as Excite and AltaVista. Being listed on these search engines increases the chances that potential customers will find your site. You will also get a listing in ECongo’s own small-business directory.
One thing I like about the service is its reporting capabilities. Whenever someone buys something from your Web store, the information goes into a database that you can access from the password-protected merchant area of the site. This enables you to access the data any time, from wherever you are. Shoppers also receive an automatic notification of purchase and shipping via e-mail, and a feature is available that lets your customer look up the status of a pending order.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the service is ECongo’s merchant network, which encourages small businesses to work together to trade advertising and share expertise and ideas.
All sites hosted on ECongo are required to carry a small advertising banner on the top of each page. The banner has text ads that scroll across the top. ECongo makes its money by selling 80% of those advertisements, so your way of “paying” for your free Web store is by displaying the ads that ECongo sells. But the other 20% of the ads belong to you.
You can display your own advertisement but you can also trade that space with other ECongo merchants to promote each other. ECongo, by the way, says it won’t display competitors’ ads on your page.
The company plans to launch a live chat area later this fall that will allow merchants to communicate with each other. There will also be a bulletin board.
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Lawrence J. Magid can be reached at larry.magid@latimes.com. His Web site is at https://www.larrysworld.com.
