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Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are effective marketing strategies to attract visitors to your site. PPC is known to deliver instantaneous results. SEO is not expected to land immediate results, but the results, in the long run, can be fantastic. The costs are huge but search engines need you to rise into the traffic of the organic rankings.

Many people approach SEO and PPC differently touting them as two different marketing strategies when they are not. They are basically two sides of the same coin related to online search. The efforts complement each other for search strategy. Read More

When many businesses think of online marketing, they first consider social media. It’s the best way to reach customers, since it has a measurable impact on customer purchases, especially for millennial.

However, the platform seems to be most effective in building brand awareness and driving local sales. E-commerce businesses have an ongoing challenge to drive traffic to their websites, where they turn visitors into paying customers. Read More

The mobile era has ushered in a slew of mobile-based transactions that have entailed a large number of commercial activities including payments, web browsing, apps usage and several other aspects of M-commerce.

Mobile is now being leveraged for almost all day-to-day activities including shopping, surfing, and entertainment with billions of devices accessing these services on a daily basis. Even payment gateway companies like PayPal, have witnessed a huge surge in payments, with more than 1.5 billion dollars coming through mobile alone.  Read More

An SEO strategy is touted to be effective when all tasks are geared to drastically improve website quality or a company’s web presence. With SEO evolving over time, expect 2018 to bask on new results.

Every business’ website needs a strategy of a UX overhaul or proper content to rank high on SERPs. The website’s SEO is highly important for the said company’s success. Hence it is essential to set goals for SEO and try to reach the top of the SERPs by implementing methods that work well in today’s business context.

It is also evident that one has to conduct SEO experiments to find the right approach for your website and business. Because every industry is different, SEO advice should be personalized to the domain and not as cookie cutter options. Experimenting is the way to go.

The Evolved SEO techniques for 2018:

With search engine algorithms changing on a periodic basis, SEO companies and experts have the hassle to keep updated on the relevant techniques and help businesses to land the front page results. By adhering to old techniques, sites might lose on website rankings. That’s why one should research on SEO tactics that work currently. Here are some techniques to uplift your SEO in 2018:

Starting and choosing a platform for an online store has always been a difficult task. There are plenty of eCommerce platforms available for setting up all kinds of online stores. Some provide high-end solutions while some provide limited services. Some platforms cater to small businesses while some are the best choices for large-scale businesses. However, it all depends on overall business demands and the need to deliver value to end customers.

When you think of setting up an online store, Shopify and Woocommerce emerge as two of the top choices. These are the most Popular eCommerce platforms, which are suitable for all kinds of online businesses.

Shopify

Shopify is a self-hosted eCommerce solution. It provides an end-to-end solution with features includes site hosting, installing content management system (CMS), payment gateways and setting up online stores.

Minimal technical knowledge is required for using this service. It is the best solution for building your online store from scratch. It also includes an inbuilt blogging facility and boasts of several pricing plans, varied features, add-ons, and apps. Shopify also offers a portable credit card reader for taking customer payments offline.

Whether you are just starting out or have a full-blown online business – you will find a suitable Shopify plan that will take care of your online store.

WooCommerce:

WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin. All you need for creating an online store using WooCommerce is a WordPress website.

You need a WordPress website for which you have to pay a hosting fee, install the WooCommerce plugin and then set up the store. If you already have an existing WordPress website, it is easier to set up WooCommerce.

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Comparison: Shopify vs Woocommerce:

Let us compare these two leading platforms on the basis of their features, pricing, customers, and services in depth.

Why Choose Shopify?

Why Choose WooCommerce?

Currently, web designing is taking a splash with the new JavaScript technologies. Every year, new technologies come in and old ones fade out. Programmers have to be adaptable to pick and choose relevant new technologies. Also, businesses have to be quick to try the new technologies in the town. Choosing the right framework is important for both. Angular 2 and React are the two torchbearers for front-end development in 2018.

Angular is a platform for building web applications by Google. While React is a JavaScript library for building creating UI by Facebook. Let us now quickly jump to the battle of React vs Angular 2.

1. Templates

Both React and Angular 2 are based on JavaScript.

Angular 2 is in TypeScript. The templating is done with the HTML files. It follows the object-based programming patterns. Due to this, Angular 2 has high-performance typing features. Angular 2 put JavaScript into HTML. It is HTML-centric.

Everything in React is in JavaScript XML(JSX). It has a JS syntax that enables HTML quotes. It promotes the building of machine-readable code. The templates and logic of React are written in JSX. The syntax of React is simple and clean. React puts HTML into JavaScript. Thus, it is JavaScript-centric.

2. Framework

Angular 2 is a full-fledged framework. This framework can run on any platform or browser. It has other advantages such as it is consistent, offers a lot of ready-made tools. Moreover, the ng components are quite mature and robust.

ReactJS is not a full-scale framework. Due to which the integration of the UI library into the common MVC framework becomes tricky. This requires a deeper programming knowledge. ReactJS is still fresh and not mature. Taking consideration of the limited ecosystem, it is still young.

3. Architecture

Angular 2 and React follow different architectures. Angular 2 follows a component-based architecture. The components have a strong and deep binding. As Angular 2 is an object-oriented programming, the elements are properly encapsulated. Every element in the component has its unique functionality. This makes the components reusable and properly testable.

While React does not follow any such architecture, it uses Flux which provides a structure and architecture. It gives a unidirectional data flow to the components. Flux is more of a pattern than a framework. Thus, using flux with React makes the coding easier and flexible.

4. DOM

DOM(Document Object Model) is one of the major difference to point out when using React or Angular 2.

Angular 2 manipulates the real DOM by extending HTML with its directives. This enhances the two-way-data binding. Thus, any changes to the view will reflect in the data and vice versa. This turns out to be an advantage for the developers, increasing the development time. And it enables the auto-sync between the model data and the view.

React on the other side uses the virtual DOM. The Virtual DOM is of great use while handling large databases. It comprises of the smart methods. With React, the view changes are applied to virtual DOM. This optimizes and accelerates the update process.

5. MVC

Angular 2 follows the MVC pattern. Thus it has a proper component-based architecture. It has a clean separation of the presentation, business and data entity model. This allows a proper testing of written code. This makes Angular 2 out-of-the-box programming language.

React does not follow the MVC pattern. It does not have patterns, templates or any MVC architecture. Instead, it has view layer only. Developers need to solve the Model and Controller on their own to design the app. They have to be familiar with the component’s life cycles and states.

6. Development Time

Developers are always fascinated with how the language works, how short is the learning curve and the overall development time.

Angular 2 is a complex component-based language. It has a quick installation and setup. But it has unnecessary syntax to do simple things. Thus, there is a drastic increase in development time. This puts Angular in a tougher position.

React takes comparatively longer to set up. And once done, you are ready to work on the app development. It should be relatively easy to add new features.

7. Learning Curve

Angular 2 has a steep learning curve. Though the Angular 2 community provides a complete documentation. But sometimes it becomes difficult to read the documentation. Angular 2 focuses more on the components. But it is comparatively difficult than React.

React has a short learning curve. It uses the least abstractions. However, it takes more time to learn the best practices. It has too many things to learn in depth.

8. Native Rendering

This is always the talk around the tables. All libraries are capable of native rendering. But there is always a performance competition among all the libraries.

Angular 2 is the stable version with the new addition of components. It comes with a native script. However, it still fails to beat the performance of react native.

React native comes with the native rendering. It does it better than the Angular 2.

9. Community

The community support plays a huge role in the success of these languages. Both have powerful communities.

The global community support of Angular 2 makes it one of the best Javascript frameworks. The developer team, designers, support team – actively work behind its success. They work with collaboration, contributing to the community. Angular 2 has hence boasted of huge reliability and credibility.

Facebook and Instagram both support react. The experts and developers work constantly to make this technology worth. Users can find active participation in online forums such as Stack Overflow, GitHub, Reactiflux Chart and many others.

10. Global Usage and Popularity

Thousands of companies worldwide have chosen the rich JavaScript frameworks. They use it for their sites, apps and internal projects. Angular 2 is popular among many leading sites. Google, the main force behind it also encourages its use. It powers The Guardian, PayPal, Lego, Netflix and other leading sites.

Many Fortune companies and startups have chosen React native for their app development. Instagram, Facebook, Dropbox, Tesla, Khan Academy and more such leading brands use this. React is very popular among many startups as well.

There is no doubt that both are advanced and high demand technologies in 2018. However, the developer’s choice depends on the requirements and the system constraints.

In 2018, there will be a rise in the creation of native apps. With Angular 4, there are possibilities in this area of huge improvement. 2018 will reveal whether Angular 4 will break through the domination of React or not.

Contact us to know more about our comprehensive Angular and React development services today!

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With multiple platforms available for e-commerce site development, it becomes tricky to choose the ideal one for your needs. If one needs to initiate an online store and choose the best platform, it is essential that it ticks the right boxes. In that case, we feel that Shopify fits the bill of being one of the best effective e-commerce platforms today.

Top 11 Reasons to Choose Shopify as your Ecommerce Platform:

1. Easy to Setup

Shopify is focused on keeping tools simple and effective while offering wide functionality for merchants required for eCommerce store management. Its ease of use is what convinces merchants who are not tech geeks to opt for the platform since it includes necessary tools and documentation for easy store setup by anyone.

2. Reasonable Price

Shopify is priced for the long term which is useful for every growing storefront. All Shopify costs are spread out for every month and priced nearly $29. A transaction fee is levied for small stores but it is waived off as it becomes bigger. The pricing is systematic in its structure such that there is never a huge one-time investment and no contracts, and one can invest in inventory instead.

3. Simple Backend System

Shopify also has a simple backend system, which is incredibly easy, for a store owner since one can put in the time to sort backend in locating things, with diverse product additions, and customer service.The entire settings, analytics fields and setup checklists are synchronized to the tee.

4. Good Professional Support

Shopify supports techies, designers and developers with incentives. The platform encourages specialists to work with Shopify platform and makes it accessible to the public at large with the custom design. Unlike other open-source shopping carts that often rely on community, Shopify now has a dedicated team for support.

5. Loads of built-in Apps

Whether you need a blog, some coupon codes, upsells, analytics, inventory setup – Shopify has a full array of apps in one place. Additionally, the developers build applications that can customize your Shopify store. One can get the desired functionality with all types of inbuilt and custom applications.

6. Reliable Hosted Solution

Shopify hosting is part of the monthly subscription and includes automated backups and updates. Also, the stores cope well even when there are huge web traffic spikes and deliver minimal downtime too.

7. Friendly Cash flow Structure

As mentioned above, Shopify charges a transaction fee on smallest stores which are waived off when the store becomes big. The cash flow structure goes from month to month with no upfront investment too.

8. Point of Sale Integration

For online retailers, who also have a physical shop location, Shopify provides an efficient point-of-sale system that syncs with the online store. The small online retailer that might not be able to afford a full-service solution can take benefit from this feature. The inventory can be handled seamlessly on both mediums, which relieves one of the biggest hassles.

9. Complete Design Control

Most hosted eCommerce platforms offer the ability for store owners to edit their template designs but also set constraints of a template. Shopify, on the other hand, has a theme templating engine that gives enough flexibility for all sorts of interface improvements. Shopify’s templating engine offers designers and developers a plethora of options over hosted eCommerce platforms.

10. Free Security Option

Shopify provides secure hosting features including an SSL certificate and a secured shopping cart for online transactions. Merchants can use any payment gateway, although it offers Stripe as the preferred payment gateway. Stripe provides flexible tools for e-commerce and Shopify makes it easy for all merchants with stringent security options.

11. Easy SEO

An SEO Shopify expert can help manage transitions between e-commerce sites to keep the existing robust rankings. Shopify has an SEO-friendly setup that leverages each of the product categories and helps in its promotions.

Shopify has all the ideal e-commerce features that you would need. It is a nearly perfect e-commerce platform that aids all small business stores along with the large marketplaces.

First and foremost, every eCommerce platform allows for a strong shopping experience with virtual storefronts that attract, entice and enable consumers to buy products or services as they desire.

Online merchants host their websites and even manage their offerings, prices, promotions etc. But when higher volumes are considered, the e-commerce strategy does depend on the solidity of the platform.

Every eCommerce platform aspires to deliver a strong shopping experience with the help of virtual stores that enable consumers to buy products as they desire.

Online merchants host their websites and even manage their offerings, prices, promotions etc. But when higher volumes are considered, the e-commerce strategy does depend on the solidity of the platform.

Shopify Gold and Magento Enterprise are two of the best eCommerce platforms in the present scenario. And to help to choose the best, a representative from a veteran e-commerce solutions provider can help you out!

With 8+ years of eCommerce business, Zestard Technologies Pvt. Ltd includes a team of certified Shopify Specialists and Magento Developers, who have also garnered repute in the field.  The company has deployed 200+ successful online stores that boast of an impressive ROI. Although we are platform agnostic, we partner with clients to choose an ideal one based on their requirements.

Shopify Gold

Shopify recently released Shopify Gold for Indian merchants in July 2017 and has a simple navigation. It provides fully supported service, although it holds a bit less market share than Magento the growth has been stupendous and faster compared to any e-commerce platform.

Magento Enterprise

Magento Enterprise offers integrated cloud hosting and impeccable infrastructure, featuring pre-integrated tools, good management to handle traffic spikes and boost operational efficiency.

Shopify Gold vs Magento Enterprise

There are some differences and similarities with specific advantages and disadvantages to both platforms. Our research and comparison criteria are done objectively to choose the ideal one for your business.

1. Scalability & Reliability

Shopify Gold features 200 TB Storage, along with Unlimited Bandwidth, 8000+ Orders/ Min. processing time, and 99.99% Server Uptime.

Shopify Gold offers a fully hosted SaaS solution perfect to handle high-volume merchants for business. The infrastructure rests on 500,000 Shopify merchants, ensuring all sorts of flash sales, Black Friday audience etc. is handled efficiently.

Magento on the hand relies on Content Delivery Network (CDN) and DDoS protection. It also offers generous bandwidth allowances and even offers New Relic APM Pro for thorough Performance Monitoring and Blackfire.io Enterprise for the purpose of Performance Testing without any restrictions.

Magento 2.0 is scalable but priced accordingly for on-premise deployments that require solution architects to accommodate highest peaks in traffic, even though for a single day every year. But every change to the system impacts the scalability of the architecture.

2. 24*7 Support

Shopify Gold gives access to launch manager along with a dedicated account manager who can guide you with immediate assistance.

Magento also provides 24×7 monitoring of your system and renders email support for application and cloud infrastructure. The support is inclusive in the USD $3399/ month plan only.

3. Cost Effective

Shopify Gold has priced at 0.4% of monthly sales or a fixed price amount of Rs. 65000/ month, whichever is the higher amount, to a maximum levied a charge of Rs.130,000/ month covering all licensing & support costs involved.

Magento Commerce Starter licenses start from $1999/ month or about Rs. 130000 while Magento Commerce Pro is priced at nearly Rs. 2,20,935 per month. Shopify hence is priced at nearly half the price of Magento making it a very cost-effective platform.

4. Easy to Start Platform

Shopify Gold allows users to deploy their store within weeks and without much technical knowledge. Shopify’s templating language is quite intuitive and hence does not require development experience. It also allows for private app development and even quick and easy cart scripting for complex customizations.

Magento, on the other hand, is accessible and can be deployed by technical users only since the system can be deployed by someone who knows programming. Implementation times for Magento 2 usually takes up 4 to 8 months and also require technical resources including, developers, deployment specialists, QA and testing professionals, etc.

5. Better Reporting

Shopify Gold has a strong reporting dashboard for adding different elements including revenue, orders etc.

Magento uses third-party tools for reporting purposes.  Shopify Gold is the stronger option of the two as they have dedicated app for merchants for the purpose of reporting and order processing along with a robust SDK for mobile applications. But in terms of reporting, both platforms have third-party apps that attend to the need of custom reports. As mentioned earlier, Magento 2 needs comprehensive technical knowledge too.

6. Marketing Friendliness

Most marketers do not have a technical background so if the platform needs to be leveraged for creating product descriptions, and even to edit website copy, one needs a platform that is easy to use for the average marketer.

Shopify Gold definitely offers a marketer-friendly option, better than Magento EE, giving access to key functions from the admin panel, and create conversion pixels for tracking of relevant social media campaigns, discount code generator, and other extensions.

Magento EE has no default functionalities and features need to be created, causing the marketer to rely on developers to get their work sorted. Shopify Gold though as per research is still the easiest platform for the marketing team.

7. Performance

Shopify-hosted websites have faster loading speed than Magento. According to selfstartr.com, Shopify boasts a 1.98 seconds loading time while Magento sites take an average of 5.05 secs to load.

In terms of Google page loading times, Shopify achieves a rating of 63 while Magento achieves 51. In terms of mobile friendliness, Shopify scores again with 94 points to Magento’s score of 81. Needless to say, Shopify outscores Magento on performance.

8. POS Integration

Shopify Gold has powerful POS integration capabilities and is seamless enough to sell on multiple platforms including social channels and sites, mobile avenues, and other marketplaces. Magento, on the other hand, has decent capabilities for POS integration but Shopify outscores the platform by a large margin.

Additionally, Shopify boasts of PCI Level 1 Compliance security along with better SEO capabilities than Magento making it one of the most useful e-commerce platforms. One can preferably opt for Shopify because it is one ideal e-commerce platform that is cost-effective, has scores of apps that can be deployed by non-techies and even features easy customizations that can be used for specific businesses.

AngularJS is a JavaScript framework introduced by the giant Google. It is an open source framework that uses HTML as a backbone. It excels at building single page web applications and the dynamic ones.

The newer version i.e. AngularJS 2.0 is a big change when compared to the previous version. The developers can see a notably major change in components, directives, injections and a lot more. The more functionalities, the more you can achieve with this version.

Over the years, AngularJS has emerged the strongest in the single page apps world. It is used by over 9000 websites. It powers the top sites such as Intel, Virgin America, NBC, HBO, Google and many more.

Why Choose AngularJS?

Developers find this framework completely worth it. This framework is highly convenient, affordable, scalable and delivers good performance. There are so many notable reasons to use this popular JavaScript framework. Some are:

• It has huge community and experts including development, testing and support team
• It is a multifunctional framework following the MVC pattern
• It can create big applications, once used with a right approach
• It uses MVC architecture – simple to use and understand
• It is the best solution for creating the single page applications
• It can allow combining modules for creating applications
• It has a declarative user interface
• It is easy to learn and implement if you know JavaScript already
• It makes testing simple

Now, that you know the benefits of using this framework. Let us find out what all can you do with AngularJS. Here are the seven wonders you can do with AngularJS:

1. Single Page Applications
AngularJS and single page apps are like a match made in heaven. You can develop a large scale application with a single page. It has a set of built-in validators and directives to create such apps. You can also define your own validators if needed. You can create a single page form application easily with its use. The controls and error handling are perfectly handled by this framework.

2. Mobile Apps
With the rise of the digital and mobile era, mobile apps are widely used. With AngularS, you can create mobile and web apps. All you need to do is install MongoDB and NodeJs on your system. Using a set of modules and REST services, you can create your mobile app. You can also bind AngularJS with the mobile framework LungoJS. And you are ready to create the awesome mobile applications.

3. Animations
AngularJS has a good set of directives. You can create animations and give styling to it with ng-style. You can use the ng-app, ng-animate and ng-style directives to create wonderful animations. Along with CSS3 transforms and these directives, you can perform cool animations.

4. Google Chrome Extensions
Normally, a Chrome extension generator creates the chrome extensions. But AngularJs also plays a part in it. The directive ng-CSP helps to create these extensions along with ng-app. You can add content scripts and background pages and bind the APIs. With all these, your desired extension is ready.

5. Firebase Powered Apps
Mobile development platforms have reached a new level with Firebase. The blend of AngularJS and Firebase gave rise to a real-time backend service – AngularFire. This service supports two-way binding on both client and server side. You can efficiently create real-time web apps and mobile apps with these two latest technologies. You can develop a real-time chat application and chatbots. Today millions of users use such apps and services.

6. Simple Web Application
You can also create a web app using Firebase and AngularJS. You can create a simple web application easily with AngularJS directives, components, resources, and services. With a sample data, you can perform the CRUD operations as well. Thus a simple and easy to use web app is ready from scratch. You can also create a web application using Firebase and AngularJS.

7. JS Apps
Like we all know already, AngularJS is easily testable. It is fully powered by the test scripts and suites. Karma and Jasmine are used for testing the AngularJS applications. They run and execute the unit tests for your developed applications.