Advancing eCommerce

We’re seeing the headlines everywhere it seems, just like at internet.com: ” Flailing Economy Finally Sours E-Commerce Sales“  But the story goes on to say that 12% growth is still expected for online sales this season (the ’sours’ part is that we had 20% growth in this period last year).  

All of us as businesspeople and especially online marketers must carefully balance convenience for our shoppers against record-keeping requirements and compliance issues.

Too much convenience for our shoppers can mean customer service problems later, making it difficult to match a sale with a customer or worse, creating compliance problems that could result in fines or even business restructuring.

We helped a merchant solve one problem this week with one blank that some shoppers seem to hate:  the ‘Your Name’ blank at the top of the cart checkout page.

But the information in the blank saved one merchant’s bacon this week with the credit card companies.

Every merchant hates to get the dreaded credit card charge dispute.  A successful chargeback can be a black mark against a merchant’s business practices and security record with the credit card companies.  This merchant did get a dispute and  looked up the order.  He noted that the name on the card and the person placing the order did not have the same name, but did have the same last name.  He communicated this fact back to the cardholder.

The cardholder then recalled that he had told his son to place the online order and canceled the charge dispute.  Needless to say, the credit card company did not hold this event against the merchant as an indication that the merchant might be engaging in unsavory business practices nor that the merchant might have a security problem.

This situation was ’saved’ by the fact that our cart requires the shopper to type in their own name, separate from the shipping address and ‘name on card’ when placing an order.  Yes, it’s a bit of defensive record keeping, and it does not always save the day, but it’s worth having should you need it – when you need it, you need it badly!

If you are an 800Cart customer and you get a chargeback, we’ll be glad to help you strategise and help you make the best use of the resources that are available to you to fight the chargeback – it’s all part of the service package you get when you subscribe to 800Cart.

The headlines in times of crisis can be more than misleading. Witness Richard Waters’ headline at the Financial Times: “eCommerce on the ropes“.

Stop there and you may feel your small business is doomed.

But as those of us in the center of the business already know, Waters is talking about the big boys like eBay who have run into serious trouble. Sales are actually expanding for many smaller online merchants. Waters goes on to say that shoppers are searching out smaller e-merchants (like you) for better deals. They are searching a little deeper on search engines like Google and clicking on Adwords ads and on natural search engine results. The same revenue that used to go to eBay and the other big boys is coming looking for you.

As businesspeople, we often forget that one of the co-meanings of the word ‘crisis’ is the idea of ‘opportunity’. Indeed the chinese ideogram for ‘crisis’ is composed of two symbols: the first, of course, danger, the second, oppportunity. There is wisdom in remebering this!

My dad always said that if it’s raining soup, you should take your soup bowl and go stand under the cloud.

Where is the cloud? Where should we go stand? Well, as noted above, shoppers are indeed digging a little deeper to find the deals – they are examining natural search results a little more closely and they are looking at adwords ads more closely – and they are clicking! This means they are coming to see you, if your link is there.

The pool of shopper funds available to you has not dimnished all that much, and the greatest news is that these funds have deserted the big guys and are coming looking for you!

Is your link there?

We have 2 strong suggestions for you to make sure it is! Suggestions that will make sure that you are standing under the cloud where it is raining soup. Actually, it’s a 1-2 knockout punch for web marketing and ensuring your online success during difficult times. And ensuring that you will prosper when the difficult times pass.

ONE: If you are not using Google Adwords, yet, then use it! Even if you set a low ad budget like $50/month, Google will honor your budget and will not go over the spending limit that you set. And you only pay for clicks to your web site, so every penny you pay for a click delivers a shopper to your web site. If you have never used Google’s Adwords before, now is the time to start – with any budget – no matter how small.

TWO: Start working to raise your natural page rank and search engine returns. If you are an 800Cart customer, you have one great tool available to you – one that you can set up in 10 minutes – that will do more to promote your page rank than any other single action you can take. This action will yield results better than anthing you can do with weeks of continuous effort! This is to set up SEO and Suggestive Sell on the ‘SEO/Suggestive Sell’ page of your cart control panel.

What challenges or tough decisions do you face in this 10 minute setup for SEO/Suggestive Sell in your cart control panel? We worked hard to make sure that the answer is NONE! Here’s why:

1. The SEO/Suggestive Sell page in your cart control panel allows you to turn images OFF in your WebShowCase, so even if you have not uploaded product images yet, your product information can display without broken image symbols.

2. You only need to provide the SKUs for 3 of your most popular or most profitable products which will always be offered to your customers when they are in their cart. This helps build sales for you and is one of the key aspects of the SEO strategy built-in to the 800cart.

3. The crucial part that makes all this work, a link from your web site to your WebShowcase, can be done as a tiny picture of a secure lock which is unlikely to be clicked – if it is clicked, it leads to the Security/Privacy page of your cart, reassuring your shopper that purchasing from you is not only secure, but is PCI compliant, safe and private. A win for you no matter what!

Is prospering during the crisis worth spending an extra 10 minutes in your cart control panel to set up SEO/Suggestive Sell? We think most 800Cart merchants will agree with us that it is.

Some merchant accounts and gateways are beginning to charge monthly PCI Security Compliance charges to merchants who do online business (most of us). Indeed, the cost of PCI compliance via scanning can be high, running up to several hundred dollars per year.

But some merchant accounts, such as First Data allow you to avoid the charge by filing a PCI DSS compliance report or certification.

Why pay the charge when you can simply email them the report and thus avoid the monthly charge?

When you are an 800Cart customer, you benefit from the PCI DSS Security that we provide for you. This not only makes your shoppers feel safer so they feel ok about buying from you, it also protects your sensitive information from attack and compromise. Lastly, since PCI DSS Security is a requirement imposed by the credit card companies, not an option, 800Cart’s provision of PCI security helps you comply with this expensive requirement.

If you receive an email or letter from your merchant account bank explaining that they need PCI Compliance certification from you to avoid a monthly assessment, you are in good hands with 800Cart!

Here are the steps we recommend you follow if you are given the chance to ‘opt out’ of this fee by filing a compliance report.

1. State in your email to your merchant account administrators that the only resource you use to handle sensitive shopper information is 800Cart and include a copy of the certificate you will find when you click ‘PCI Security’ in your cart control panel main menu and then click ‘View PCI Security Cert’ in the upper right (when you have the document in your browser, click the disk icon to save the document to your local hard drive so you can email it).

2. If your merchant account object object that they need a scan of YOUR web site, you can arrange a free scan of your web site at www.hackerguardian.com (click on ‘Free PCI Scan Now’) and email the results to your merchant account folks.

3. You can also invite your merchant account administrators to go to your web site and click to buy something, then click ‘Security/Privacy’ in the upper left of the cart, then click on the ‘Trusted Commerce’ image to see the PCI DSS Compliance Certificate that is available to each of your shoppers – they do not have to complete a purchase to see or examine the certificate.

While we cannot guarantee that the above steps will help you avoid a PCI Security Compliance charge from your merchant account provider, we do think that providing the above information to your merchant account provider will help you avoid the charge if your provider offer a method to ‘opt out’ of the charge by providing compliance certification.

And of course, if you run into trouble you should always contact us by typing your problem into ‘Quick Question’ in your cart control panel main menu (since ‘Quick Question’ certifies that you are the cart owner and we can safely discuss security issues with you).

I was answering an email from a professional colleague today when I idly clicked on a payment link in his email. I found myself on a unsecure page that produced an email for the payment. YIKES!

I immediately added to my reply to him… warning him about VISA/MC fines that could be assessed and the forensic audits that could come down, etc. I offered to set him up with our free trial and email him the code he would need to put into his invoice payment web page.

Thirty minutes later, we had his payment page secure and he was in compliance with his credit card company agreements and I’m sure his other clients feel a lot better about paying his invoices online now. We even had the cart adjusted to match the appearance of his web site in that 30 minutes.

There was one glitch that didn’t affect payment, but we fixed it by hitting the backspace key once.

We’ll be glad to do the same for you! Need your payment page fixed and secured fast? Just send us an email to support@cartsupport.com or just click ‘Sign Up’ on our web site at www.800cart.com

If you put us in your game, we just might be able to hit a home run for you, too.

I know – everyone gets a little nervous when they go into set their cart appearance – I’ve been doing this for 15 years, and it still gets to me sometimes!  But it’s very easy and very quick, and  if you don’t like what you did, you can always change it!

Here’s the important thing to remember:

When you look at you cart after changing your settings, be sure to click the ‘loaded in XX.XX seconds…’ link at the bottom of the cart.   For performance reasons (so the cart will run faster) the cart tried very hard not to look at the database once it has its setting for a shopper.  Clicking the ‘loaded in XX.XX seconds…’ link at the bottom of the cart forces the cart to get the newest settings from the database.

Some merchants and webmasters get alarmed when they look at their cart and think the changes ‘didn’t take’ but they did – you just need to ask the cart to show you the changes it has waiting for the next new shopper.

And here is the video – 3 minutes – itr would have been 1 minute if I hadn’t  talked so much – the work itself only takes a minute.

Patrick Thompson at Channel Intelligence:

In describing products, there is a natural tension between accuracy and exaggeration.

Certainly it pays to tell the truth about your products.  So how you do honestly convey the great features of your products without risking dishonesty?  

Idris has it right again in his: 100 tips to optimize a retail ecommerce website but Idris’ number 10 would be my number one: 10. Display top-selling and newly launched products on your home page.

There is nothing wrong with letting your customers assume that you are in business to sell, and you are willing to help them buy.

When we say that you can put your first product up for sale in less than 9 minutes, we aren’t kidding! The video is 3:45 in length and the job is completed in that time (except for actually filling out the sign-up form – that was done before the camera rolled) so add 2 minutes for filling out the form and call it 5:45 – well under our goal of 9 minutes!

This is a great how-to if you don’t know how easy it is to commerce-enable your web site!

Idris over at the RetaileCommerce Blog writing on high bounce rates has it right! Consider all the hard work you do on yur web site. Yet…

everything would be in vain if most of the visitors don’t bother to look or navigate to other pages in your site

Pages need to be designed not just to be found, but to draw the visitor in! Do you use too much art and not enough text?

Too much text and not enough white space? Do you use plentiful, short and powerful headlines (supplemented of course, with informative sub-heads)?

You don’t have to give shoppers the hard sell – that rarely works. But shoppers are on yur site because they are interested in what you do. Make it easy for them to buy, and let them know you are there to service the sale.

People frequently use large fonts when they want to try to draw attention to an idea… a better idea is to simply bold the normal size font, then put lots of white space around the statement – this draw attention to the statement without clobbering the visitor.

Are you doing something consistently, like menu bars, in the upper right and along the left side of the page (left/right is not important as long as the same choice elements are always there). Give your visitors a consistent place to look for navigation options on every page, no matter where they are.

Many 800Cart merchants don’t realize it, but their 800Cart contains an awesome, extremely powerful SEO optimization engine built right into your cart.  And it’s SEO automation that only takes 5-10 minutes – not hours.

Authority: starting 2 years ago, we started researching (and keeping up with) all the white papers, phD dissertations written by Google employees, and patent applications filed by Google.  What you read below makes used of what we learned.

You’re going to work hard today no matter what.  You’re going to be working hard today four months from now, no matter what.  So shouldn’t one of your 10 minute tasks in the next 4 months (sooner rather  than later) be to set up SEO/Suggestive Sell in your 800Cart?  You do this once, and you’re done.

When most web site owners think of SEO, they think of hours of painstaking work detailing different meta-tags for each page, and making alt and title tags for every one of their products.  Plus the most important search engine optimization task cannot be done on your web site: backlinks!  Backlinks are why so many folks write to you asking for reciprocal links between your site and theirs: nothing promotes your search engine page rank like backlinks pointing to your site from other web sites.

So what does this 10 minutes of work get for you in the way of SEO?  Lots!

• Backlinks: in 800Cart, every page on 4 different domains gives you four backlinks pointing back to your web site.  This is done from each of four different domains, so if you have 50 products you now have 200 backlinks from highly ranked sites (ours) pointing to your web site.  If you have those 50 products in 10 departments, then it’s now 2000 backlinks pointing to your web site.  If some of those 50 products are in 5 different aisles (we call ‘categories’ and ’sub-categories’ by the names ‘departments’ and ‘aisles’) you now have 10,000 backlinks to your web site.  It adds up fast! 10,000 backlinks to your web site with only 50 products!   Frequently, this is a lot more than you need to be #1 in Google – sometimes it’s enough to get you 7 of the first 10 search results.  Suggestive Sell just stirs another multiplier into this mix, so you have even more backlinks to your site.

• Meta-tags: you may put in painstaking work doing the meta-tags on your own web site, but you won’t have to in the cart: every product page in your cart generates meta-tags automatically from the product descriptions that you give us.  Google pays the least amount of attention to meta-tags (Google actually reads the whole page, but looks at the meta-tags only to decide if you are publishing misleading meta-tags so they can set you ‘honesty index’ – if your honesty index is not really high, you are penalized) because so many sites abuse meta-tags, but other search engines do pay some attention to meta-tags.

• Alt and Title tags: You see the results of Alt and Title tags when you hover over a picture and see text. Again, we put your product descriptions in images and links leading to your product pages, so even if Google does not follow the link to a given page, Google at least cataloged the full product description in the page before that linked to that product.
• Some Secret Stuff: our competitors pay attention to what we do too, so we won’t disclose all we do to raise your page rank and get more links and hits to your web site.  But what we do works!  

The most important consideration: don’t do anything ‘illegal’!    Most web site owners already know that Google will penalize you heavily if you publish misleading meta-tags or if you engage in other activities trying to ‘game’ the system into awarding you page rank that you don’t deserve.  800Cart, of course, keeps it all 100% legal at our end so you never risk a page rank penalty.

WatchCenter: New Blog at 800Cart.blogspot.com

This post was emailed, with the above picture, from a cell phone. Takes less than 1 minute and it’s a great way to keep customers updated regarding your activities and what you are doing to help deliver better products or services to them!

Since I wasn’t out negotiating a deal for 800Cart or anything like that, I just snapped a pic of the blog I’ve been working on.  No, I didn’t type all this text with my thumbs – what you do is post a very short title and the minimum text possible, (just a teaser to make visitors in the interim wonder and be interested in coming back later to find out more) then when you get back to your desk, you edit the post and fill in the details from your desktop computer.  

The idea is to stay in touch, make lots of blog entries and let folks know what you’re doing – especially if you are doing something interesting and relevant to your business.

By the way, if you click on ‘Links to the Post’ below, you will see that another blog has linked to this blog entry. Yes, many blogs can detect when another blog or web site links to a blog entry and help track how many links are pointing at your blog or site.  The more blogs (or other resources) that point to your web site and/or your blog, the better!  It gives you vast credibility in the marketplace, and the links help raise your page rank in the search engines.

Because today, social networking (the active use of blogs and other social networking tools and sites such as Myspace or Facebook) is essential to business growth.

How does a blog serve you as a businessperson or business owner?

• It lets you provide news about your company
• It allows you to present a human face for your company that might not be appropriate on your mainstream e-commerce site.
• More importantly, it lets you provide information about the products you want to sell.
• It allows you to discuss how your company does business – what you do to excel for your customers
• It allows you to present how you develop your company, its products and its people!
• It allows you to talk about the effort you put into your product development cycle
• It allows you to review your products!
• You can discuss new products you discovered (an presumably are selling) and how you discovered them.
• It gets you involved in communities that need the answers you have (even if you don’t know you have them yet) and promotes your business because of the expertise you posses and the contribution you make to the communities that can use what you know.

Click here to see my favorite: Bubba Wine in Bubba’s Test Drive Store

This blog post was created by a shopper (me) – right in the shopping cart while shopping here (look for the ‘Share This’ icon in the upper right when you follow the link which opens a new window). It was done easily with just 2 clicks from the ‘Share This’ icon in the 800Cart Shopping Cart. Here’s an example of the widget – please click on it and try it out. Any shopper who has a blog or a Facebook or MySpace account can do the same in your cart, too with just a couple of clicks.

Easy!

Why offer this widget right in your 800Cart or WebShowCase? Because it:

1. builds your sales … and ….

2. it builds your page rank on the search engines, making it easier for more new shoppers to find you.

Is that a good enough reason to help folks mention your products that they like? I think it is!

When you expose the ‘Share This’ icon in your cart, you make it easy for folks who like your products to post a link to your product in their blog, Face Book site, MySpace site -or- to email a page link to a friend pointing to your product page, or post a fast link on any of about 36 different social networking sites. Every link that points to you in this fashion raises your page rank and makes you easier to find, thus helping raise your sales!

Long post alert: there is more to this! If you go to www.sharethis.com you can create an account for yourself, and they give you tracking to go along with the little icon in yor web store. Paste that into your cart appearance template and you are good to go with tracking provided by the Share This icon. If you use the method below, you are using the 800Cart-owned icon and you lose the tracking feature – but it’s easier to deploy in your e-commerce solution.

If you have an 800Cart Shopping Cart for your web site, and you want to offer this icon in your shopping cart, log in to your cart control panel at www.cartsupport.com/admin and click ‘Cart Appearance’ – then just put the <!share.this> macro in your template anywhere you want it. We recommend the right template to add this nice Widget to your site. It will appear just like this below:

There. Wasn’t that easy?

Ron