Articles on ECommerce Matters:

Capitalising on the ECommerce Revolution

Most small business owners think they understand the importance of having a quality web site. Unfortunately, many home-based entrepreneurs think of their web site as nothing more than an online brochure. While informing the public about the products and services you provide is important, using the internet to make those products and services more easily available is the real name of the game. If you are not taking advantage of the opportunities presented by the ecommerce revolution, then you are missing out on millions in potential sales.

Establishing Credibility for Your Ecommerce Web Site
Years ago, credibility was a major barrier for entrepreneurs wishing to conduct business on the internet. Luckily, times have changed and people have become more comfortable with ecommerce. However, you still need to make sure that your business has a professional web presence. Whether consciously or subconsciously, people feel a "contact us" page lends credibility to a web-based business. A toll-free number is even better. Testimonials from previous customers can allay fears, especially if your references are willing to post their email addresses for verification.

An overall, professional look for your web site is important, as well. Make sure you have consistent navigability and a crisp, concise design. Avoid cheesy flash gimmicks and other fancy ploys. Take a look at the most popular ecommerce sites on the web - they all have professional yet simple layouts and designs. Don't be afraid to model your look after Amazon, eBay, or other ecommerce leaders.

The Essential Tools of Ecommerce
In order to accept credit cards online, you need shopping cart software, a payment gateway, and a merchant account. There are some all-in-one ecommerce solutions, but they tend to be less customizable and are intended for businesses with smaller sales volumes. It's okay to start with PayPal or Google Checkout, but you should also be aware of what professional ecommerce solutions have to offer, because if you're successful, you will need to upgrade.

There are hundreds of shopping cart software packages available - just do an internet search and comparison shop for the solution that best meets your needs. Payment gateways typically come with merchant accounts (for an additional fee of $30 or so per month), so long as you use a third-party provider. The other option is to use a bank for your merchant account, which normally costs less in terms of fees. However, banks are often reticent to grant merchant accounts to online businesses.

Applying for a Merchant Account
You have to fill out an application in order to get a merchant account. Merchant account providers evaluate your suitability in terms of risk. Their fear is that you will either fraudulently misuse your merchant account, or people will be unhappy with your products or services and file what is called a "chargeback" against you - refusing to pay their credit card bills. Since most merchant accounts deposit funds into your bank account within 48 hours of a charge, the merchant account provider is worried that your chargebacks will exceed your ability (or willingness) to pay for them. Thus, not only your personal credit, but also your business model, will be considered during the evaluation process.

The good news is that even if you're initially denied, there are hundreds of options out there for accepting online payments. Nontraditional merchant account providers may charge higher fees, but when the alternative is to not have ecommerce access at all, the fees are negligible. The typical fee for a $40 transaction is around $0.99; whereas a high-risk accountholder may be charged $2.10. Sure, that's more than double, but if your pre-transaction fee profit margin is $12, the extra $1.11 in transaction fees is more than worth it.

Some Final Tips
Kevin Costner's character in Field of Dreams was haunted by the saying, "If you build it, they will come." Unfortunately, this isn't the case with ecommerce web sites. A better mantra would be, "If you market it, they will come." The good news is that it's never been easier to market yourself on the web. Consider buying some pay-per-click (PPC) ads through the popular search engines, or advertising directly on a couple of blogs that are related to your business. Better yet, you can use internet auction sites, not only for direct sales, but also as a marketing tool to bring people to your web site. Finally, the age of social networking makes it easier than ever to find customers - enlist the help of your online friends to spread the word.

When your business is ecommerce-enabled, you have a full-time sales agent working around the clock, often for less than $1 per day. If you're not taking advantage of ecommerce, there's no telling how much money you're throwing away.

Anthony Samuel
04 Jan 2007

Anthony Samuel is a successful entrepreneur with 10 years experience in the home based business industry. He reviews home business opportunities and shares his industry views at http://www.find-a-home-based-business-opportunity.com

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The Basics of Ecommerce Website Design

Ecommerce web site design is similar to traditional web design, but requires a few more bells and whistles to handle financial transactions. This doesn't mean that you should be intimidated by the process and not build web sites that are capable of ecommerce transactions; it simply means that you may need to study this aspect of site development before getting started.

To begin, it is a good idea to read up on ecommerce web site design. This will help you understand how ecommerce site development differs from regular web site development, and will also help you to build web sites that accomplish their desired purpose.

Ecommerce Security
One of the most important aspects of ecommerce web site design is security. You need to make sure that your visitors can safely and securely input their most sensitive information into your payment system. To build web sites that are secure, you will need to protect pages with the encryption of SSL or Secure Socket Layer. Your web site host should be able to help you with this portion of site development and will most likely be able to sell you a digital certificate.

Visual Appeal
Visual appeal is another important aspect of ecommerce web site design. Competition is fierce on the Internet. If you want to build web sites that stand out from the crowd, they must be visually appealing. An attractive site will be more likely to draw customers, and is much more likely to encourage repeat business than a site that has been poorly developed. To get an idea of what looks good and what doesn't, you should visit competing and non-competing ecommerce sites around the web. You can also look into purchasing a book or another product that focuses on the visual aspect of ecommerce web site design.

Payment Processors
To build web sites that accept online payments, you will need to incorporate payment processors into your ecommerce web site design. You can choose to accept various credit cards, and other online payment methods like PayPal. This is something that should be arranged early in the site development process so that you can begin doing business immediately once your site has launched.

Software and Applications
There are many different software products and ecommerce applications that can be purchased to help you with your ecommerce web site design project. Some of these products will be helpful when you build web sites, and others will be helpful when you have launched the site and want to track orders, monitor your internal database, or enable features like email notification.

Professional Ecommerce Web Site Design Services
If you want to build websites that are ecommerce ready, but don't have the ecommerce web site design experience needed to accomplish the task, you can hire an ecommerce web site design professional to help you with the trickier portions of site development. With a minimal amount of help from you, a professional designer can build web sites that are visually appealing and then incorporate the features you need to complete ecommerce transactions.

Cliff Posey
27 May 2007

Cliff Posey, owner of CRP Marketing, owns and operates http://webbusinesstoolsonline.com Cliff Posey has also operated several other successful web businesses including Love Song Cards and Radio Career Consultants. The content in this article was developed from his experience in these businesses and his continual research into further business improvements.

5 Best Revenue Models In E-Commerce History

There was a time, back in the 20th century, when everyone wanted to have their own online shopping cart system. By 1997, Amazon.com had served their millionth customer and was really starting to impress regular folks. The internet looked like a realistic way to do business, maybe even for small businesses.

So soon everyone wanted a shopping cart, got one ready to go, and… nothing. They didn’t get any traffic. Then came the website submission hounds with programs like SubmitWolf. It worked for a time, though some submitters turned into spammers and thus began the game of cat and mouse between spammers and search engines.

As the number of websites grew, and around 2000 when Google, who had partnered with RedHat and Yahoo, began to become a real force, it was no longer enough to have a website and submit it… at least not for small businesses online. Sure, about $66 billion dollars in in goods was sold online in1999, but mostly by big players who already had bricks and mortar momentum. If the new guy on the block wanted a piece of the action, he had to get smart and stay smart.

Cue the SEO experts, a growing herd of geeks with a profusion of theories about the directories and search engines. Some search engine optimizers were ethical and followed the rules set by search engines. Others practiced “black hat” SEO. The search engines guarded closely how they rank pages but some SEO devotees put all their energy into trying to reverse engineer those algorithms, to discover the magic formula, and find holes, however temporary, to exploit.

By the dawn of the 21st century, some basic “white hat” SEO principles had solidified, and the fad had shifted from shopping carts to informational websites. You can’t optimize something that doesn’t have information, and the more you have the better. Also, a lot of internet junkies prefer the purely digital and neither had, nor wanted to have, any physical products to sell.

But digital purists need money too, so various revenue sources have been explored – from running advertisements (clunky old banners and the dynamic AdSense variety), to helping others sell their goods through affiliate programs, to developing their own digital goods, like ebooks, special reports, even programs and web utilities. These paths have already been trailblazed, but you still must to choose the best one for you. If you have a product, you’ll want to use the internet to sell it. If you don’t have one, you could develop one. If you don’t want to, sell other people’s. If you don’t want to do that, just run ads.

Let’s forget, for the moment, that these all depend on incoming web traffic, and just focus on the pros and cons of each revenue source:

1. Selling physical goods requires warehousing, shipping, returns, and heavy customer service. It’s a significant investment of time and/or money, but this has the highest revenue potential.

2. Just running ads is much less work, especially with if you don’t have to deal directly with the advertisers. However, the earnings per click are quite low, so you need a lot more traffic to make good money. And not all informational topics are profitable. For example, searchers for entertainment and sports information don’t tend to click on ads or buy anything.

3. When you promote other people’s goods as an affiliate, you sit between the last two options- it can pay better than ads and be less hassle than hard goods. But you still have to provide content on profitable topics, and you need to be a comfortable and effective salesperson for the products that pay your bills.

4. Developing and selling your own digital products is at least as much work as selling hard goods, but requires much less overhead. You can write an ebook, turn it into a pdf, and get it onto a website with very little money.

5. And we shouldn’t end without mentioning that you can also sell your services online. If you write about what you do, whether you’re a web designer, lawyer, doctor, psychologist, carpenter, whatever, you can get web visits from prospects in your local area and turn those people into customers.

Brian Carter

Since 1999, Brian B. Carter has reached 2 million readers, received 5 calls per week from prospects, and sold his first book. His new ebook is “How I Made $78,024.44 in Six Months Online”. For more, see his SEO/PPC Website.