Despite the economic downturn online sales for sellers on eBay and Amazon continue to rise as do the sales of other retailers as reported by various sources in the e-Commerce industry. Meanwhile as sellers prepare for Black Friday the rush to compete is on!  Free Shipping is permeating the web’s shopping sites as we speak, and life continues to roar as retailers compete for the supposedly last dollar available in the US as thousands man the OccupyWallStreet movement and things seem so depressing elsewhere. While stocks are plummeting at the mention of more financial problems for Greece, savvy sellers in the United States still appear to be somewhat unaffected by the slide.

You have a mobile device, like a smartphone or tablet, right?

Now that everybody and their brother has a smartphone, a tablet, or at least a laptop shopping for the 2011 season online is blooming all over.

Online sellers can prepare for the greatest month since last December by sprucing up their stores, checking their offerings and matching those other guys out in the forefront. Shopping feeds may be picking back up as  the use of bar code shopping on mobile devices is sure to make the competition fierce this year for sellers who have UPC coded products and free shipping offers.

The most important things to watch with your online store now is

1.  Get yourself into Google’s shopping feed

2. Offer Free Shipping wherever possible

3. Spruce up your store with at least one holiday message.

4. Make your site a mobile friendly website.

Its not too late to work for greater sales this holiday season.

The other day my son happened to mention that these days business start-ups are predicted more on how many iterations of the same business a person can do without running out of money.They say that the start-up is a science now. It’s not the person or the product/service, but the number of permutations you try before running out of money or quitting.

What this means is that with most start-ups, there is little money, yet you really need to find your niche and then try different things to succeed. Some find that once they do this they don’t like their new business at all and then decide to cancel that thought and move to the next thought.

Fitting in line with this thinking is the fact that if you run out of money before you find the right niche and business for yourself, then you’ll soon be going back to work for someone else. This is why it’s so important to be careful with your funds.

This leads to the question of the hour… What really is he lifespan of a start-up website?

We  see many new start ups invest money into websites, only to find out a year later that they are no longer in business.  For us this is frustrating. We develop a beautiful site, we put it in our portfolio and the link is broken in a year. (This is why we started making pictures of websites instead of links, because start-ups are sketchy. ) Entrepreneurs fail, they get bored, they want more.

For a normal business, out of the start-up phase, the lifespan is about 3 to 4 years, but for start-ups it’s an entirely different story.

I was asked recently what to do with a change in products on a domain name. Once your start-up becomes a different company basically you are looking at an entirely different website, and an entirely different investment. This is why it’s important to be careful with funds when you are starting your new business. If you invest thousands into the design of a website and a year later have to do it all over again, you are already spending precious start-up monies unnecessarily. Don’t get me wrong, most web design companies will love you for it, but as far as being successful in business, this just doesn’t count.

The easiest thing to do, knowing that this may be just a test, is to design a cost effective professional website and let it work  for a year. Does it move you? are you still interested? If so, improve that website and make it even better.  Of course, letting a website work for a year is a great idea, but remember that you have to work your website for a year. Contrary to popular belief successful websites that make money don’t just work themselves. You have to invest some serious time into promoting and marketing that website to make it beneficial and make it earn money for you.

Now you can blog from your android phone easily using the new wordpress app.  This applications can blog to multiple sites. With the new nexus phone you can also speak your new blog instead of typing every little word. Can life get any simpler then this!

We are still testing hundreds of clients sites to see what is going on with Twitter. Twitter made a decision to change their login methods for those using WordPress plugins. Therefore, if you are using a plugin to post to twitter, you will need to upgrade it or change it.

We are currently testing and feel confident with Twitter Tools for WordPress, while using the Facebook twitter application and RSS Graffitti. Why so many tools?

1. Twitter Tools posts from our blog to Twitter.

2. RSS Graffitti picks up the blog feed and puts it on Facebook, a little delayed but appears about every 30 minutes. It does not update status with images, so we opt out of the status update.

3. Facebook posts to Twitter, if it is a status update only, therefore the blog post going onto Twitter does not get posted twice.

I know, it’s complicated.

Recently we were informed that Twitter has changed their API connectivity which may cause some blog feeds from WordPress to go haywire. We are working on testing for some of the issues and will post results soon….

One of the most neglected parts of ecommerce is getting the word out. Time and time again new internet retailers just put up a site and then do nothing. These are the few that subscribe to the old adage “Build it and they will come.”

A few months or a year goes by and their next move is to call around and find someone to do SEO work because they have heard that Search Optimization will get them some free clicks and they need business. Those who do search optimization are in a great position, everyone knows that being on top of Google is king, and the money to be made by these professionals has hit the roof. As time ticks by not much happens. Sure you get some keywords to rank, but the majority of your promise is still sitting in your website unnoticed.

This is where the shopping feed comes in. Specifically Google Base which has been rolling along bringing great sales to many a smart retailer for free.

Sellers who don’t utilize a platform that does shopping feeds automatically need to get with it. There are many ecommerce shopping carts that do this, and one of the best to do it automatically is ProStores. Set it up, and wallah! Go! You’ve got business. Neglect it and guess what, you’ll be out there paying some programmer disguised as an SEO expert $2 grand to do not much of nothing that will reflect in internet sales.

Another cart that does this is Channeladvisor and Miva can do it using Template Data Feeds by Emporiumplus.com

Moreover you can subscribe to a number of feed services that will do all the updating for you.

So get with it people! Stop complaining about a lack of sales and increase your money making activities on the internet now…. For FREE!

Everyone wants a great looking eBay Store, but what some people don’t know is the limitations on stores and eBay Listings. (May 25, 2010) [updated Nov 2010

1. Live Chat on an eBay Listing or store: http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/reviewsandguides/links-reviews-guides.html Prohibited links include: Links or other connections to live chat systems. You can include a live chat link in your About Me page or custom Stores pages, but not in your Store home page.  You may include your chat user names in an item description, but not a link to chat. http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/listing-links.html See the eBay Policy
2. Audio or Video on eBay: http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/listing-links.html You can include a video in your listings as long as it can be played back within the listing. But you’re not allowed to link from your description to a video on another website. There are some exceptions, ie: YouTube video is okay. See the eBay Policy
3. Mailing Lists on eBay: Links or solicitations to subscribe to non-eBay newsletters or mailing lists are not allowed. See eBay Policy
4. Scripts on eBay: If you try to use scripts that we disable, you’ll get an error message that says “Disallowed JavaScript/HTML Syntax”. This means you won’t be able to list the item, or the script will be disabled at run-time.
5. Logos with .com on ebay: Anchor Store logos that are used on the Stores home page have to include the official Store name, and the name can’t include any of the variations of “.com” or other extensions like .net or .org
6. Phone numbers on eBay: Store logos and Anchor Store logos can’t include phone numbers, email addresses, or other contact information
7. Flash on eBay: Store logos and Anchor Store logos can’t flash, move, or be animated

There are virtually hundreds of rules for eBay Stores and eBay Auction Listings, but the above sampling are a few of the more common requests that we get. While we can design using any of these infractions we do not recommend it. It’s only a matter of time for any eBay seller until a competitive seller will bring your store or listing to the attention of the eBay policy enforcers and you are pulled down for this. I’ve seen sellers with thousands of auctions be pulled down in a heartbeat even though they have sold for years on eBay.

I will be out and about and traveling to Las Vegas for the Ecommerce Summit 2010 Tuesday April 13. eBay will once again be sending an army of executives from the various departments to the eCommerce Summit to spend quality face time with sellers about their issues, suggestions and concerns. In addition there will be a host of great speakers but more importantly great friends to network with on everything eCommerce.  If you’re in Vegas, look me up!

..Suzanne

With so many get rich quick schemes on the internet – it’s a wonder that more of these stories are not out and about.  Albert Gonzales will have seen most of his life go by before he is eligible to get out of prison. He will be 48 years old.

Gonzalez, who once called  his criminal enterprise “Operation Get Rich or Die Tryin’,” apparantly did not factor in the Get Rich or Go to Jail slogan that he should have used instead. He was involved with two other hackers who got into the credit card cookie jar causing damage of over $130 million to Heartland and Hannaford companies.

According to Wired.com the 28 year old hacker along with other accomplices got into JC Penny, 7/11 and others by using a mysql injection technique, which basically means he hacked the database that is holding all the credit card numbers.

the hackers installed back doors to provide them with continued access. They tested their malware against 20 different antivirus programs to make sure they wouldn’t be detected, and also programmed the malware to erase evidence from the hacked networks to avoid forensic detection.

Although they hacked in 2007, Heartland discovered the hackers on its network only in January 2009

This just goes to show people that Crime may pay in the beginning, but it certainly doesn’t pay overall.

After dealing with hundreds of clients, we noticed a phenomenun, part in partial with “Scope Creep” described in Wikipedia.

To eliminate Scope Creep, we suggest an “incubation” period. This will allow clients and designers a chance to review what is on the table and decide if it fits the needs. It’s much easier to change design at the beginning of a job than to try to go about making changes after development of the site has already begun.

The fact remains that along with Scope Creep comes the issue of later design changes. This type of activity can virtually cripple a web designers ability to serve lots of clients at the same time. It adds confusion to the mix and it adds costs to the ticket when it’s undertaken after a development period has begun.

The problem with design changes is that it usually creeps in after development has begun. In reality these types of changes affect more than just a simple change. Where there is one change, there is almost always another need either to conform the flow or because once we start the changing, the client see’s how it affects design overall.

Also, if you have enough clients and all of them take an hour of time each week until their site is completed, you’ll soon find out that you are way behind scheddule on all of them.. and nobody understands why.
The What If Scenario

In addition to straight out design changes, we always have the client who wants to “just see” what it would look like if we changed this or that element on the mockup. Fair enough. In the long run most of our clients return back to what we originally delivered. We know the design of web sites and our eye for placement, color and sizing is astute. Generally we make the changes of mockup and we end up with the prior result more times than not.

Incubate your web design

Now as to the incubation period it just makes sense. We do the mockup, and then we incubate. This give our client time to search over the internet and compare his soon to be baby to the other babies in the park. Short of an all out design change, he will add features and make some changes.   Subtle changes, like color and graphic images are certainly not an issue. Okay so we change a gradient, or a color, but overall it’s the same design, the same mockup .  The issue comes in most often when we do design changes that affect the layout and after we have already begun the development phase. Now you not only have an artist involved, but the entire cycle of integration on the team.

It  makes sense to do the incubation period and let things settle before beginning to install a website. We have learned over years of work that waiting a week will save two weeks in accomplishing the overall design of a website. Think about it!