Advancing eCommerce

The author hits on may excellent topics and every point she raises is important!

Building an Ecommerce Site with SEO in Mind

One thing she does not mention is how an off-site shopping cart like 800Cart can legitimately generate 10’s of thousands of honest backlinks to the primary site.

And while her article was not intended to address security, an PCI off-site cart will address security issues that you cannot reasonably address (at least for reasonable cost) with a hosted or dedicated server ecommerce site.

800Cart will soon release changes and improvements to the Paypal function of your cart.

Once the changes are released shoppers will find it easier and less confusing to check out and pay.

Paypal, not 800Cart, will send you the email on such orders, and your order will appear in your Paypal Control Panel, not 800Cart’s.

This arrangement allows you to take advantage of available savings at Paypal and helps qualify you (if you otherwise qualify) for Paypal’s Merchant Protection Program — and can actually reduce the number of chargebacks you have to process.

Example: Imagine that a customer purchases a product from you, and pays with Paypal. Two months later, they see the charge on their statement and can’t remember what it was for, so they call Paypal and dispute the charge. But since you have the entire order record at Paypal, the Paypal rep can tell your customer exactly what they purchased and where it was shipped.

In addition, if you ‘purchase your postage’ for these orders in your Paypal Control Panel, the Paypal rep can tell the customer how it was shipperd, the tracking number, the date of delivery and who signed.

Because it’s all part of the Paypal records that we conveyed for 800Cart to Paypal for you!

Needless to say, after such a conversation, it’s very unlikey that your customer will continue to insist on disputing the charge.

Many Americans are rightly expecting taxes to go up soon.  What else could happen with a $1.8 trillion annual deficit so far for 2009 and US tax revenues down over 18% for 2009(the largest revenue decline since the Great Depression)?

“Gibbs: No way, no how, no chance are we raising taxes on the middle class.”   Update: 54% think tax hikes hurt the economy.  And here. Only the extremely credulous would accept that statement at face value.

And they would be correct: tax hikes will hurt an economy already hurting from record unemployment.

So it’s obvious: tax increases are coming, and they’re coming soon. But as recent news about the economy being twice as bad as originally reported, so are the prospects of unemployment.

So unless you have a huge bank balance to tide you through unemployment, what is the best strategy to prepare for possible unemployment? Opinions differ, but many pundits recommend starting a small business now in order to provide some level of income if unemployment strikes your household; and to provide tax breaks now in order to shelter your income from taxes.  Whether at current tax rates or from increased tax rates in the future.

You might say, “But it’s expensive to start a business!” I have to get a business license, incorporate, and upgrade my wardrobe so I can go seek some venture capital!

It turns out that this does not have to be the case at all. Can you afford $20 per month to be in business? If that’s too high, how about $13 per month? And a one time cost of $17 to publish a DBA notice in the local paper (at least that is the case here in California where government regulation is the least friendly of the 50 states)?  You can leave the much more expensive incorporation and fundraising  for much later when you are making some money.  Besides, it’s much easier to raise funds or borrow later if you can point to an operation (your web site or blog) that already has some sales traction.

Of course, we are going to talk about an online business because you can create one now and genuinely, literally be in business before you go to bed tonight.

All it takes to ‘be in business’ is to put something like this on your web site or blog:

Buy My Video:

try it, you can really purchase from the above control, but of course it goes to a demo shopping cart.
You can have your own secure, advanced shopping cart that does the same thing as above in only 9 minutes.

Then to expand your new business, all you have to do is add more products or services at your earliest opportunity (like tomorrow).

Another idea with small business potential: drop shipping – where you never inventory or store the products you sell, but have the products shipped to your customer directly from the warehouse.