New UK2 e-commerce package
Hey – hope you are all enjoying this wonderful summer day, they say it’s the last sunny day for quite some time ๐
Anyway, as some of you may have noticed UK2 has launched a new e-commerce product, well – we’ve had an e-commerce package for quite some time, but we have totally redone it and now that our new product is online and live I’d like to tell you a bit about it.
What better way to do that than to actually show you how it looks, works and what you can do with it.
Right, so this is what I’ve done. My wife runs a furniture shop selling classic furniture like the Barcelona Chair and Eames Lounge chair etc at 1929.co.uk – that shop is setup using the “old” UK2 package, and its working out very well for her. Just for the fun of it, I asked her to tryout our new e-commerce package to see how she would like it. She used installed it on kopenhagen.co.uk, and this is how she did…
A standard install from the UK2 control panel takes just a few seconds and the result looks like this, a pretty clean W3C compliant shop with an easy-to-use interface without too many bells and whistles. Now, selling classic – and pretty high quality/priced furniture – demands a more exclusive look, with a bit of oomph to it, so she checked out the other templates that the UK2 e-commerce package comes with out of the box:
While they were all cool looking templates, none of them were exactly the way she wanted. She did end up going with the “Brown” template but she felt it needed a bit of tweaking with though.
The UK2 e-commerce templates are all 100% CSS based, which makes it really easy to change the look and feel or even the full layout of the shop. So, when my wife (who is NOT a techie or designer) wanted to make changes in the brown template she only had to mess around with one file, the brown.css file in the css directory.
The main changes she made incl. moving the menu’s a bit, increase size of price and putting up a new logo. She also changed the background to white to brighten up the shop a bit.
>>>It took her less than an hour and here is the result. < <<
She is very pleased with it, and might actually put the shop live.
Again, she is not a designer – and I might get in trouble for saying this, but if she could do it, anyone could ๐
Finishing off, I’d like to outline the main differences between the “old” and the “new” e-commerce packages from UK2:
- Full FTP access
Those of you running our “old” cart might have been struggling a bit using the build-in file manager, I know my wife did. So, this new product comes with full FTP access so you can upload files as you would to any other website. - A lot of source code available
We have included 90% of all source code for you, and you are more than welcome to edit it any way you wish. It’s a very well written PHP setup commented and easy to work with. You can write and add your own modules, templates and customizations with just a basic knowledge of PHP – obviuosly, the shop works out of the box, so this is only if you want to add some custum features - Dedicated IP and a Comodo SSL cert included
We have decided to give all our clients their own dedicated IP and a SSL cert of your own as well. This is not a shared SSL cert, and it will be yours for free as long as your cart is with us. That’s a saving of ยฃ39 ๐ - Website + e-commerce
Our new e-commerce product is actually setup as an addon to our normal business web hosting package. So, on top of your shopping cart you will get a full featured web hosting account, with cpanel, Fantastico etc. - 100% CSS design
Personally I think this is the strongest feature of our new setup. It is 100% compliant and comes with fully CSS based template setup. This is honestly the only way to build a website these days and this means that your site will be running much better on mobiles/Iphones/etc. It will leave a more professional impression and make life easier for your designer ๐
Now, on top of that it comes with loads of new features, payment gateways and templates – we feel that this is the best package on the market and it will be the perfect start of any new online business. Start your own shop by going here, remember we have 30 days full no-questions-asked refund and to sweeten the deal we actually give you a success-guarantee: We’re so confident that you’ll love this package we’re not only offering 6 months for free if you don’t sell anything in the first 6 months!
Thats it for me – let me know how you like the new shopping cart and send us examples of your shops!
UPDATE: We have added a demo of the admin area there.
http://kopenhagen.co.uk/demo/admin/
Login using:
user: demo
pass: demo
And you can change the templates here: http://kopenhagen.co.uk/demo/templatechooser.pl (same user/pass)
๐
Ditlev