FancyCMS team has been keeping silence for last month but as we know from very reliable sources they are working really hard on the back end of the flash cms application. As the front end part is 100% ready right now the guys are developing 2 versions of admin panel. The 1st version will work online and will be based on Flex application allowing to manage site structure and content. Another version is desktop windows application which can work both on line and off line and sync the data when the Internet connection is available. According to the information we have windows application will come with backup/restore plugin and special flash e commerce plugin allowing to track sales in real time, generate sales statistics and analysis reports. If all is true this is going to be the most promising flash cms we ever met 
Archive for the ‘Flash Ecommerce’ Category
FancyCMS Sneak Peaks.
Thursday, April 29th, 2010E-commerce Flash Websites. Market Overview, Software Demands.
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010This is the secont part of the post regarding the perspectives of e-commerce flash solutions. Here I am planning to give a short overview of market demands and some technical aspects.
Who may want flash shopping cart?
Before the development of flash shopping cart it would be a good point to make some sort of market research and find out who may want flash shopping cart and what are the major demands to the software. According to our internal company statistics the customers interested in flash ecommerce solutions may be the retailers of home appliance, cell phones, computers, clothes, food, beverages and all the range of things that can be easily delivered by post services Like FedEx of DHL or whatever. Also we should not forget about digital goods, online services and photographers. So as you see the number of potential customers is really huge. I would assume that online shops, delivery services and big stock shops all together will make the life of supermarkets really hard pretty soon.
Technical Demands to the final product.
Now let’s outline some technical, design and usability demands. As we aim at small and middle business we should realize that flash shopping cart must be very cost effective, easy to install-run-update, customizable and inexpensive solution. To avoid additional software expenses we recommend to use XML data feeds to store information about the products and shopping cart design settings. This allows not to involve qualified personnel with web design experience to install and customize flash shopping cart software. Also XML feeds allow to store relatively extensive arrays of information and to process them robust. To keep the cost of the product as low as possible we recommend to use ecommerce flash templates or even better ecommerce flash components which can be integrated into any existing flash based or css based website. Using flash components gives a chance to keep the initial expenses at the level of $30-70 which is more than affordable in comparison with custom solutions.
As a conclusion we may say that the most effective flash e-commerce solution is XML driven flash cart component that can be integrated into any existing website.
Possible Architecture.
At the moment we have several ideas regarding general architecture of ecommerce flash website. The 1st and less expensive variant will be so called “components based flash website” which consists of the main core that loads all pages together and defines general look and feel and the pages itself. These flash site pages will be usual components with dynamic content, 1 component per 1 page. Such flash websites will cost in the range of 30-50 USD, the admin panel won’t be included.
Another more expensive yet functional variant will include advanced flash CMS for content and sales management and complex structure based on XML data files. The prototype of such flash ecommerce solutions may be FancyCMS and ReadyPhotosite engine(in fact it was created for the photographers but can be easily reconfigured for other purposes).
General Conclusion. Our team believes that in the nearest future we will see lot’s of Flash E-commerce site engines and the competition will be really rough. Same events we predicted in our reviews of Flash CMS Websites and if you are following up the topic you can notice that 99% of our assumptions were correct.
E-commerce Flash Websites. Search Engine Optimization and Content Management Aspects.
Friday, January 29th, 2010More and more we have customers who want to create ecommerce flash website. Until now we had to refuse cause we find it outrageous to sell useless things. Here is the list of reasons we had:
- Flash was not SEO friendly enough which is vital for ecommerce site.
- There was no Flash CMS good enough to manage and update such websites.
- The development of custom ecommerce flash cart was too expensive and had all glitches I’ve already mentioned.
Since recently things have changed a lot, in this article I just want to share some of my thoughts regarding flash shopping cart advantages and drawbacks. This part tells about SEO, CMS, general advantages of Flash Technology.
The main advantage of Flash technology drawing all extra attention and bringing Adobe tons of cash is the interactivity. Flash websites bring unique opportunity to “show out” and have an advantage over the competitors. Being innovative is really important for any business. This is what makes our clients look for new solutions for the online shops. Yes, old good OsCommerce has all required features except one really important. They do not impress the customer any more. So if you are looking for the solution that makes the customer say WOW! then professional and interactive flash shopping cart is just what you need.
One of the biggest problems Flash had was poor search engines optimization ability. Since the 1st of July, 2008 Adobe states that swf files are searchable. This was really important step which will definitely change the web for good. In SWF Searchability FAQ you can read full text to find out why Adobe, Google and Yahoo work together now. Also since the deep linking is now available for Flash, the developers can now play with the URLs and the titles. This means that due to implementation of SWFaddress 2.4 every single page in flash document now can have it’s own URL and document title(displayed in the top of the browser and very important for search engines). All together these factors solve the issue of SE Optimization for ecommerce flash websites.
The problem of Flash CMS for e-commerce still exists. According to my casual observations none of the companies created full functional content management system for e-commerce flash solutions yet. To say the truth, many of flash developers are working in this direction, but the results are insignificant I would say.
Here is the list of the websites providing e-commerce flash templates, or sort of…
www.flashcart.com – boasts to provide full functional flash shopping cart with the support of Authorize.net and PayPal gateways and a full suite of tools required for online shop management. Unfortunately I was not able to find any of live examples or demos demonstration the cart, neither at the website nor on the Net.
www.myflashcart.com – according to the description the shopping cart is completely integrated with PayPal and can be customized to match the color scheme of your site. No information/demo were provided regarding the backend and integration with PayPal API.
www.flashmint.com – provides 2 types of e-commerce flash templates. The 1st type of templates comes without the admin panel and the second one which is called CMSv3 has very limited ecommerce features and can be barely called shopping cart. In fact you can purchase only 1 item at a time. Both of the products support PayPal payment gateway.
www.flashden.net offers one more simple yet pretty customizable ecommerce solution, Of course it won’t work for big website but if you are running small business maybe it’s just what you are looking for. Just like other shopping cart this one has the support of PayPal and you can play with the colors. Unfortunately CMS is not included, though I would not even expect it for $17 bucks.
www.fancycms.com is one of the most promising Flash CMS solutions so far. These guys are developing impressive flex based admin panel with premium class flash front end, and which is more important their websites are equipped with ecommerce features right out of the box. According to the release notes the website comes with full functional shopping cart and the admin panel allowing to track sales. Once again the cart works with PayPal only…and as usual there is no delivery calculator which is a big disadvantage in comparison with oscommerce or zencart for example.
http://www.xmlflashcart.com is the last decent flash cart I was able to find. Just like FabcyCMS it provides all required features (like item size, color and other options), it has nice intuitive interface and works with PayPal.
Flash ecommerce is on the way.
Monday, November 16th, 2009Hey everyone, hope all you guys are doing great 
Probably many of you remember that we promised to create nice and easy to use shopping cart for flash websites. We were planning to start the development in August, but due to some difficulties with another project( or I would rather say adding new features to FancyFlash project 
) we stopped all works on flash ecommerce component and were able to relaunch the development in October only. And we have really good news – it’s almost finished!
So what exactly flash ecommerce is and how to use it? Our flash shopping cart component is XML managed, easy customizable and user friendly flash component that can be integrated in any existing flash or HTML/CSS website. It can function as a part of your website and also as a standalone flash application.
XML structure of ecommerce flash component allows you to create the list of the products in your shop(export, import, add, edit,delete). You can also play with the colors to give your shopping cart general look and feel of your website. As we provide all source files the customer will have full access to all aspect of the ecommerce component. We hope that this nice tool will help the process of selling on-line much easier for many webmasters. The full list of features as well as the flash component itself will be published in a week or so. Hope you all love it
KeenBusiness Project is almost finished.
Monday, July 13th, 2009In this article I would like to tell you about our new CMS project named KeenBusiness. When we started the development our main goal was to create flash website with wide range of features including but not limited to multifunction product catalogs, rich formatted content pages, ecommerce functions, flash blogging features and much more. All this is supposed to be backed up by easy and intuitive CMS and strong Search Engine Optimization features. The project is oriented on small and medium business.
One of the main advantages of KeenBusiness engine is powerful customization tool. We supply graphics libraries of each element used in the site, so the customer or the developer can edit every banner, link, button, text block, background or menu item having at least basic knowledge of flash animation, no ActionScript knowledge is required.
Modular structure allows to create new components and integrate them easily into the project.
Deep linking gives the webmasters additional tools for SEO and website promotion
Flexible structure allows to create unlimited number of pages, image/audio/video galleris, text pages, ecommerce catalogs.
Built in flash blog module allows to create online communities, share your news and events.
Currently we define the following types of possible content:
1. Simple text page with integrated HTML formatted text
2. Newsletter page
3. Blog page
4. Contact form page
5. Gallery Page(images/videos/audio)
6. Slideshow/Presentation Page
7. Combinations of all pages listed above
Other useful features are dynamic vertical resizing(depending upon content block height), simplified ecommerce tools, advanced music player, image manipulation tools, multilingual support.
Below you can check the screen shots of beta version which is currently under construction.
The product catalog
And another version Proto2
