Looking For An Affordable e-Commerce Application?

2/25/2013

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You are an ambitious retail store owner who wants to go beyond a particular area and reach out to customers over a larger geographical spread. Or probably you would like to set up your own retail store but do not have the necessary know-how to find the right location, rent a retail space, build up an inventory, select and hire skilled sales staff and appropriately market your products besides dealing with the legal aspects of setting up a brick and mortar store. In such a case, setting up an online store is the perfect solution to meet your needs , it also requires a lot less money, time and efforts from you allowing you to reach out to a larger customer base by selling your products on a global scale over the internet.

If you are sufficiently convinced about taking your store online, you will then need to have an e-commerce solution. And obviously, in order to save on cost and at the same time not compromise with the quality you would be looking for an affordable and effective e-commerce application that aptly meets your needs without costing you much. Needless to say, choosing the right e-commerce solution is a crucial decision to keep your business going great. Apart from bespoke e-Commerce apps, there are a number of languages with a number of e-Commerce platforms supported by them. However, you will mostly be advised to go along with a PHP based e-commerce application because most of the PHP based e-commerce applications are open source software which is free and customizable as per your specific requirements. Again, there are a lot of PHP based e-commerce application frameworks that are quite popular among the rest. Some of the favored names in the industry are Magento, Opencart, PrestaShop, Drupal, osCommerce and Zen Cart.

Magento E-Commerce development shows promises of a great future and has become the most favored ecommerce application most popularly used by Ebay . OpenCart which has a flexible codebase is used to rapidly get an ecommerce site online. PrestaShop which measures up well with Magento and OpenCart is viewed as a capable ecommerce platform using the Smarty templating engine that gives it an edge over its peers. While Drupal is not necessarily an ecommerce platform and mostly a CMS, yet owing to its large community and a vast library of downloadable extensions, it finds mention among the top six PHP based ecommerce platforms. osCommerce is the oldest ecommerce platform which is back by strong community support and Zen Cart is a fully customizable PHP based ecommerce platform that is easy to setup and runs from your own web server thus offering you full control of its features and capabilities.

Armed with this knowledge your next step is obviously to find the right software development partner to customize any given ecommerce platform to perfectly suite your needs. If you have been searching for a partner who has considerable custom PHP development knowledge especially in the ecommerce area, then your search ends here.

Mindfire Solutions is your ideal ecommerce software development partner who will help you leverage on the software aspect of an ecommerce platform and customize the ecommerce application to fit your needs. To know more about Magento development India and the expertise, please contact us on sales[@]mindfiresolutions.com or call 1-248-686-1424.
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Jasper Reports - What Differentiates Them?

2/17/2013

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Custom Jasper development is done by a lot of companies these days owing to the increased use of Jasper reports by end users. The more the number of companies opting for Jasper reports the more the number of vendors or companies which provide the development service. India is no exception either; there are a substantial number of companies in India who offer custom Jasper development services as well.

Let’s delve a little deeper and try to understand what makes Jasper reports so useful and relevant to business users. Some of the advantages it has over other similar tools, like Crystal reports, is that in Jasper user (developer) can easily plug-in custom java code for processing business logic of the returned data using Scriptlets. Takes less time to implement changes and provides the ability to generate reports on the fly. Like this the list is endless. To know more about the different services that are available check Mindfire Solutions, a company based in India which provides custom Jasper development services, some sample projects done by them in Jasper.

Coming back to our earlier discussion about companies who provide custom development services for Jasper, we know by now that it is gradually picking up momentum and a large number of software companies have started developing expertise to deliver projects in Jasper. Whereas this is good news for the community (increasing of developer base) it has a flip side to it as well. Amateur developers are also making tall claims about being good and experts in Offshore Jasper development and in the process taking up projects from end users. Mostly the businesses who are not so technically sound tend to get carried away by the glib talk and end up spending money and getting a bad application built. This is one thing which the community should keep an eye on as well, since in the past there have been technologies which died, not because they were not good but because too many bad developers started building applications using it. What happens then is you have a lot of business houses which are not satisfied with the work/technology.

The reason for mentioning about this is to alarm the reader on the pitfalls of blindly giving work to companies, especially in case of outsourcing, without ensuring whether they are actually so good technically or not. Few things to look out for are:


Ask for client references – preferably someone from your country/area.

Check for work details or case studies. Based on the samples given check whether anything comes close to your requirement. And then ask for a demo of that application – this would give you a clear picture of what you need vis-à-vis what can be delivered.

Of course there would be companies which might not have good client references but would have good developers – so in those cases you can talk to the actual developer who would be working in your project. Have someone with sound technical knowledge lead the discussion so that you have a fair idea on the expertise of the person who is going to work.

To know more about our Custom Jasper development company and to Hire Jasper developers, please contact us at sales[@]mindfiresolutions[.]com or call 1-248-686-1424. We will be glad to help you.
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