XO Web Hosting Helps Missouri Travel Magazine get into Ecommerce Show-Me Missouri is the only magazine that focuses exclusively on Missouri travel destinations, featuring brilliant photography and in-depth articles. In 2000, there were lots of small companies discovering the tremendous potential of being on the World Wide Web. While the Internet offers a tremendous amount of marketing potential for any company, it also poses unique problems for publishing businesses. Today's Web site visitor expects to have access to unlimited amounts of information. For a travel magazine like Show-Me Missouri, a happy medium between providing information to readers and convincing them to subscribe to the magazine is a must. The ultimate goal of the Web site is to sell magazines. Information about the magazine must be presented without offering the magazine free online. A magazine Web site must provide a reason for visitors to stay, but leave them with a reason to want more. Then it must be able to answer that desire by making it possible for the visitor to act immediately. The Challenge: It was imperative that Show-Me Missouri be able to sell magazine subscriptions online, which meant offering ecommerce capabilities to their customers by allowing them to use credit cards to make their purchase. The Solution: XO Web Site Hosting offered a selection of ecommerce solutions as part of its Web services. In addition, the integrated nature of XO’s products made the move into ecommerce much more fluid. “Adding ecommerce to our Web site was a completely foreign concept to us six years ago, but it forced us to do something that we should have already been doing...accept credit cards online. So many small or new businesses are intimidated by the Internet, but XO was one of the first companies that simplified the World Wide Web for small businesses,” said publisher, Gary Figgins. “The company continues to offer new products or services that allow companies of all sizes to expand their online business.” XO Web Site Hosting has made building an ecommerce-enabled Web site much easier over the years and offers a variety of solutions to meet large and small business ecommerce needs. For those who want to do it themselves, XO offers a variety of solutions including PayPal for online payments, Microsoft® bCentral™ Commerce Manager shopping cart and order management system, osCommerce open source shopping cart and inventory product management system, and complete merchant processing services for online retail stores. And for those who would rather have someone do it for them, XO’s partner Web Image specializes in designing ecommerce
functionality within a business’ Web site, offering full service, ecommerce solutions.
©Copyright 2006 XO. All rights reserved. XO and the XO design logo are trademarks of XO Communications, Inc.