Category — ecommerce

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.

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!

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.

When I first met Dale Miller of CanvasesbeGone.com she needed a nice ecommerce website. It turns out that Dale is a terrific woman who is both  industrious and generous as she endeavored to make just the right website for her customers.  When I got the flu about halfway through the job, Dale sent yummy soup from one of the online sellers of comfort food. What a thoughtful gift!

I thought that this gift of wonder couldn’t be topped, it was both delicious and beautiful, and oh so convenient for someone who didn’t have the energy to get up and make dinner, or lunch for that matter.

But Dale has done it again..This afternoon Dale so kindly sent a care package of my favorite things… Chocolate! specifically Chocolate Covered Strawberries and Cookies dipped in Chocolate.

It’s rare to find a client so easy to work with, not to mention one so generous and thoughtful as Dale Miller. Check out her needlepoint canvases at her website. Thanks so much Dale for your kindness and generosity, you make the world a nicer place!  …. Suzanne

When you start a campaign for Google Adwords, you might want to consider excluding certain types of networks. For example, if you are selling an ecommerce product, you’ll want to exclude places where people don’t normally travel to purchase goods. For example sites about crime and war. We used to tell our clients to simply use Search only, but in some cases you’ll want to get on networks. Some of the sponsored links on buying sites can be very important for some products.

Therefore, you may want to exclude things like Parked domains, error pages, crime sites, death and tragedy etc. To do this you should click on “Exclusions” and use the list under Campaign Level to exclude those places. This will get you into content areas and yet get you out of money wasters that can reak havoc on your advertising budget.

One of the most important aspect of successful e-commerce selling is a goal list. Believe it or not, retailers need to make a list and stick with it. Some of our most successful sellers abide by it. Sit down and plan, make a list and go about methodically taking the time to put it into practice in 2010.

Here is a basic ecommerce plan for new sellers and small shops with limited budgets, that will set you going on your Goal list.

Increase e-commerce sales by 50% this year:

Go through design and evaluate user-friendliness, make adjustments

• Focus on one or two products and make them shine, pick your most popular products
• As a customer, navigate your site in dumbed down mode, what do you see? Does your customer find the information they need to purchase your products?
• What are the benefits of those who shop with you? Put them right in front of the customer. ie: Fast Shipping, Easy Return Policy, etc.

Learn about SEO and make changes to Product Names, pages and improve content on pages.

• Don’t try to bite off more than you can chew. Start with products and label them with proper keywords, then proper content. Subtle changes like this can really make a site noticeable to search engines.
• Get the word out. You should at the very least have your items in Googlebase, which is free. Do one feed at a time and do another one next month.

Set up at least one Pay-Per-Click Channel, give it a budget of at least 1% of expected revenues.

• If you don’t have a few dollars to advertise, you should completely re-evaluate your plan here. This is a business. It requires getting the word out or going viral. If you are not a guru marketeer, then pay for some basic advertising in targeted places.

Set up and maintain an email list, and send out those emails once a month!

• Probably the biggest mistake the new site owners make is to fail to collect emails of interested parties. Our most successful clients use an email list religiously.
• aSending has a great, and inexpensive tool for gathering emails and shooting out marketing materials to your prospective customers about offerings, sales and new products. Use it!

Good Luck on a Great and Prosperous New Year!

Some people who plan to earn affiliate revenue online never think about formulas to determine how to do it. It’s really an essential to know what you are up against, what you need to do to earn revenues.

If you are an ecommerce site planning to add this to your ecom, think twice. Here are some figures to estimate whether or not it’s worth it.

Let’s say you can get about 3000 unique visitors a month. And let’s say your average Click Rate is about 3% (which is nice and high). It equates to about $50 dollars in Google Adsense revenue, and if you have really good content for your direct visitor, you might be able to get them to view more and more pages, resulting in let’s say 25K in pageviews. Of those page views you could be earning let’s say .50 cents per click on 3% so you might even end up with 375. a month.

Doing some affiliate products that earn more than just a few dollars each, with just the unique visitor count and that click through rate, you might earn say 20. per item you send them to, making it something like $1800 a month.

But let me make something very clear, these numbers are very optimistic. I would rather estimate a 1% click rate on the unique visitors at a mere 4. per clicker to get $360, and keep working to improve my traffic, then to estimate that all my visitors are great big spenders who will want the single widget that I have and read all the content on my website.

If you are running an ecommerce site, most likely you’ll want to forgo this type of advertising, unless you do a blog on your site. Earning affiliate revenues of a few hundred a month, or selling products for many more hundreds (or thousands a month) on a small site is a no-brainer. You don’t want to send your visitor to your ecommerce site off to another site where you may or may not get revenue.

Now that Paypal has grown up, they are the only bank in the world that doesn’t export or web connect to financial software. Many small business owners use Quickbooks or Quicken and need an import.

If you are looking for something to use to get those transactions into one of the financial software programs take a look at Big Red Consulting who has both a Excel to QIF converter and a Paypal to Quickbooks converter. Either of these will send you happily on your way exporting and reconcilling your bank accounts.

If you have a Zen Cart and have been agonizing about SEO options, take a look at Ultimate SEO. This one works well and despite seeing all the disclaimers, we did not find any issues with making our Zen install Search Engine Friendly and safe from wierdness.

Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Zen Cart made easy.

The other day one of our larger sites had what they thought was a security breech and jumped out of their seats rushing to conclusions about site security. Their first conclusion went public and set off a bad series of events that could lead to legal ramifications. Now site owners should know that before you rush to judgment about what is going on in your forum, your first step is to stop and investigate. As this larger site may have learned, tossing out allegations of site breach and hacking are not a good idea without contacting a professional to find out what is really going on.

Since we do lots of forums for larger groups, we thought it would be a good idea to set out some guidelines for site owners. Now let’ say you are sitting in your private forum and suddenly you see another member in there that is not allowed. Oh my God, what to do. Well first of all don’t jump to conclusions about your security system, feeling you’re being hacked or worry that there is anything amiss. The best thing to do in any business is to first, take a breath, investigate and then proceed. Hopefully you have all your wits about you, and are not too stressed, sleep deprived or overly paranoid before you go jumping around concluding things that may not be true. You don’t want to start harassing site visitors and announcing that they are hackers when this might all be just a misunderstanding on your part, and geez, worse yet – don’t tell anyone you are going to file criminal charges for something they had nothing to do with. In the legal world I’m not sure how the courts will view this, but likely they will feel that you did not do your due diligence before making the accusations and this could lead to a big legal action against you. You don’t want that now, do you?

Most professionals have two sets of IT eyes on things to ensure they are not making rash decisions when it comes to forum security. It’s likely part of your obligation as a provider of services and you might consider it an important aspect of business especially if you are a large company with possible legal exposure.

Now, Can people access a private forum? A little googling will answer that for you. Not really but yes they can “appear” to be there. Anyone who is wandering around with time on their hands can put your url into the browser and start switching around numbers to see what is out there. A hidden forum or a private forum might appear, but likely they will only see a login or an error message. While you, sitting in the forum will see them browsing simply because the call to show who is browsing is higher on the list than the error message or login form. Fear not. You are safe. All those wild thoughts about hackers and site violators can be put to rest. Nothing is amiss except the subtle reminder that you need a qualified professional to explain to you what is going on, and possibly a lawyer if you’ve already banned members and jumped to conclusions, pointed fingers and made wild accusations about someone trying to find out what you’ve been thinking or worse yet, accused anyone of trying to take down your website. If you’ve already gone that far my advise now is put a nice apology in writing and last but not least get a lawyer.

If things haven’t deteriorated to this point and you need more help and don’t have a Phpbb forum site admin or web designer, check out our services or ask your host for more help.

Any questions?