Frequently Asked Questions

What exactly do i get?
You will receive an internet commerce website, fully setup and ready to do business. We will handle your internet credit card processing, the updating and maintenance of the product database including product availability and descriptions. We will also provide you with a secure way to track sales. We will manage your website and all the computer facilities required to run it including servers, databases, programming etc. You dont have to worry about any of the technical stuff!

Is is safe?
Your store will run on our computing infrastructure located in a secure data center in Florida. Access to the server is controlled by physical security. As for sensitive data, we encrypt all personal information to maximize its protection. Security on the Internet is a constantly evolving technology, as such we can not guarantee that our facilities will never be compromised, only that we take appropriate steps to minimize that risk.

How Much Does it Cost?
There is a monthly service fee of $74.98 for christian retail stores selling into the US market. An enrollment fee of $248 is also applicable.

If you do not have a domain name for your bookstore, we will assign you one in the format of http://yourshopname.deepershopping.com . If you want your own name, such as http://kringlebooks.com then you will be responsible for the domain registry fees associated with registering your domain name. For those wanting to register their own name, we recommend the services of godaddy.com, who can provide those services for around $10 per year.

How many products are on offer?
We currently offer over 130,000 instock products in the Christian Retail Stores, and 2,500,000 titles in our General Bookstore service.

Can I customize the service?
There are many ways the service can be customized. You can choose from a number of pre-defined templates to control the look and feel of your site. You can even create your own template for a truely one of a kind look. Please note, our service does not provide a "clicky clicky drag and drop" tool for customizing your templates/themes. You will need to be an experienced graphic designer or theme developer in order to customize your themes. If this is beyond your capabilities then you will need to hire someone to help you.

Beyond making changes to your theme or template, you can also easily upload your own logo, create your own store pages (such as your hot picks, your book reviews), and even make your own recommendations on the home page for titles you would like to feature. You can customize the discount level you sell products at, and you can tailor many other aspects of your store! Is everything customizable - No. Because this is a shared service with many retailers using the same infrastructure, there are limits on the amount and type of customization you can do. For example, you can not get the source code to the service and make changes to core functionality such as the shopping cart.

Is the service available?
Yes, the service is now available to bookstores across the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Launched at the beginning of 2006, the service has proven extremely successful. Experience our market leading feature set, cheapest enrollment and running fees, and our great administration tools by getting your bookstore online today! No other vendor in the Christian and secular book market offers its customers so much, for such a great price.

How many stores are using the deeperShopping platform?
With over 1000 stores online, you can be assured that the deeperShopping platform is the largest Christian based Internet Retail Network in the world. Period! No organization serves more Christian bookstores than the deeperShopping platform.

How Much Money will I Make?
To be honest, that really depends upon you. We have stores that make everything from nothing, to stores that are making over $3000 per month net profit. What you make will depend on several things. If you are expecting to just put up a website and get rich - then think again. The internet does not work like that anymore. You've got to get out there and work out how to attract visitors to your website. Sales are typically a straight percentage of visitors, normally between 0.5% and 1.5% of visitors - depending on the layout of your store and its attractiveness. So realistically you need a strategy for getting several thousand visitors to your website a day. You can hire an SEO marketing company to help you, you can blog on the various websites on the internet and post links back to your website, and you can also look at paid advertising. The more aggressively you work the store, the more it will return to your bottom line. We provide your store infrastructure, but we do not provide you with online marketing. If you need help with internet marketing, then we suggest you read some good books, Such As SEO Bible by Jerri L. Ledford. In a nutshell, if you do nothing, you will likely earn nothing.

Is the market for Christian or Secular Bookstores Saturated?
Nope. There are hundreds of thousands of people visiting online Christian and Secular Bookstores each day. The sites they visit do not "own" these customers. People are finding sites based on googling, yahoo, msn, blog postings and many other factors. You can be just as successfull as any of the major players in the market. Some of the larger Christian bookstore sites are getting 60,000 visitors a day. All you need to do is get some of that traffic sent your way. Thats what a good SEO marketing group can help you with. Or alternatively you can do it yourself if you do the research on how to drive traffic to your website.

What Technical Skills will i need?
You will need to know HTML. If you dont know it, you need to learn it. If you are running an online business, you need to know the tools necessary to help you succeed, and one of those tools is HTML. If you want to be able to create your own images of products, logos etc then we also suggest you learn Photoshop. You can get a copy of Photoshop Elements fairly inexpensively - around $69 to $99 depending on where you purchase it from. Not knowing HTML or Photoshop is going to be frustrating for you as you will lack the skills needed to customize your store. If you cant learn these skills, then we suggest you hire someone knowledgeable who can make the changes you need for you. Your store monthly service dues do not entitle you to use our technical support to teach you how to use HTML or Photoshop. An online resource you can use to learn HTML is www.tutorialized.com

Im not in the USA - can i open a store?
Yes - We have been working diligently to launch deeperShopping into the Canadian, European and UK markets, and the service is now avialable. For overseas bookstores, prices are shown in local Canadian dollars, Euros or UK Pounds Sterling. Overseas payment options currently include Paypal, Visa and Mastercard.

How can i take a sneak peak?
Everyone loves to take a sneak peak at upcoming releases. Well, releax, its easy to take the deeperShopping service for a spin. To access our preview edition, visit www.deepershopping.com or for something different, try www.deepershopping.co.uk !