E-Commerce

How many stores do you share a server with?

If you use a hosted shopping cart solution and don’t pay for a dedicated web server, then you’ll end up sharing space on a web server with other stores. This is fine and dandy as long as the server is balanced and there isn’t a resource hog sappy server resources away from your store. This happened to me years ago with a store I had on MonsterCommerce. My store ended up being moved 2-3 times and being issued a new IP w/ each shuffle. It was a pain in the neck to say the least.

As a online merchant, you should know how many stores are on your web server. Too many is a bad thing. How will you know if you’re sharing a server with either too many stores or resource hog? Things will get laggy and response time will plummet. This results in unhappy customers and a diminished sales conversion rates.

Volusion V5: Worth The Wait

Have you taken the time to upload your products into Google Base? If not, what are you waiting for? While http://www.google.com/products currently still points to Froogle, CNET reports that Google Product Search will soon replace Froogle.

Still not convinced? In a recent WebProNews video interview, Vanessa Fox of Google Webmaster Tools and Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz, briefly discuss Google Base (and much more):

SEO should be a primary focus of all online merchants. You really need to grasp the basics of optimizing your store so you can capitalize on increase traffic and exposure. SEO can be very complicated and people make it their life’s work. Merchants don’t have to be experts – just know enough to keep their stores in good search engine placement. What merchants need is a SEO blueprint for their store and a good SEO toolbox to draw upon.

In terms of blueprint, there are three tenants of SEO for the online merchant are:

1. Use a good shopping cart solution that IS search engine friendly.

Moving to a new cart can be a real pain in the neck. I’ve done it enough not to want to do it again. That said, if I were looking to move to a new solution - I’d make sure that the new carts has the importing tools to make the process as easy as possible.

I moved stores from MonsterCommerce to InstanteStore, Volusion and 3dCart. Of the three, 3dCart offered the easiest importing of my existing data. Volusion came in second but I had to reformat all my product images to get them to work with Volusion’s naming convention. Once that was done, everything else was a breeze.

3dCart was a walk in the park comparatively. The importing tool is powerful yet surprisingly easy to use. Order data was the hardest thing to move because of the different formatting of product data. 3dCart has since made this process a whole lot easier, especially when moving from MonsterCommerce. 3dCart can now import all your orders, customers, categories and products right from your dataport file right into a 3dCart store. This makes your move much easier and saves you hours of time.

Abandoned Shopping Carts and Sales Conversion

Tracking sales conversion and head problems off at the pass.

One of the key objectives when selling online is increasing and maintaining a high conversion rate. This is second only to driving traffic to your site. Why? Because once the traffic is there, you want to convert it to sales. This converting traffic to sales is called a conversion rate.

The average conversion rate for a store is 2%. This can vary greatly depending on your industry and cost points but it’s a good number for most online sellers. To get this rate, you take the number of sales over a certain period and divide it by the amount of site visitors over this same time period. The higher the percentage the better.

Hosted Cart Solutions vs. Do-It- Yourself (DIY) Shopping Carts

If you planning on launching an online store, you’ll need a shopping cart. When it comes to shopping cart solutions, you basically have two choices; a hosted shopping cart solution or using a do-it-yourself solution. How do you decide which type of solution to use for your online store? Here’s some pointers.

Hosted cart solutions provided you with everything you need to open an online store (minus a merchant account). This includes hosting, software, updated and security. Examples of hosted shopping carts include the following:

Word has it that Volusion will soon be releasing a new update. The date and feature included in update have not been disclosed. A Volusion admin on their support forum said, "we are planning to release very soon.”

We can only guess at what features will be included in the update. Considering that Volusion already has one of the most robust hosted shopping cart solutions, this update (and additional features) will only strengthen their position as one of the top carts out there.

We will update our Volusion Feature Chart as soon as the update information is made public.

Building Trust Online
Trust - Build it and they will buy. Lack it and they will leave.

Trust is one of the most important (and overlooked) components of building a successful online store. Customers are inherently weary of shopping online and its incumbent upon the merchant and their storefront to build a level trust with the shopper.

What is trust in terms of online shopping? Nielson (2001) defines this form of trust in the following manner:

Trust means the person’s willingness to invest time, money, and personal data in an e-commerce site in return for goods and services that meet certain expectations. The more a person trusts a website, the larger the risk he or she is willing to take when dealing with the website. If a shopper doesn’t trust a website, a “sale catastrophe” occurs. A sales catastrophe in an issue that is sufficiently important to either prevent a sale, or to discourage the person from returning to the site.

E-Commerce 101
Interested in entering the online business world? Here are some benefits of adding an E-Commerce sales channel to an existing business.

Small businesses can benefit from adding an ecommerce sales channel in following ways:

1. Allows small businesses to compete with other companies both locally and nationally (promotional tool);

2. Creates the possibility and opportunity for more diverse people to start a business;

3. Convenient and easy way of doing business transactions (not restricted to certain hours of operation, virtually open 24 hours a day, seven days a week);