Ecommerce

A key component to every web site is traffic analysis. When analyzing traffic, it is important to understand the difference between hits and visitors…and why both are important. Be One With The Log To analyze traffic to a site, you should be looking at your server logs. Server logs come in very raw data, but most hosting companies have interpreting programs that summarize the information into readable form. From these programs, you should be able to analyze who is sending you traffic, the number of hits and visitors among other information. Hits v. Visitors – The Game Is On… Many people, myself included, are lazy when it comes to discussing traffic results. We tend to use “hits” as a catch phrase for traffic hitting a web site. This isn’t entirely true. Traffic should always be analyzed in two categories, hits and visitors. A “visitor” is a click from someplace on the net to your site. In your server logs, a visitor will be credited with visiting the site one time...

In trying to comply with tax laws for your e-business, you may find yourself falling down the rabbit-hole, going through the looking glass, and attending a Mad Tea-Party. Common sense, logic, and fairness never did apply fully to the field of taxation but this is especially true of e-commerce transactions. 1. Canada Customs Welcomes You to Canada! Since I`m located in Canada, let`s start here. Canada has what you might call a national sales tax or a value added tax (VAT). This Goods and Services Tax (G.S.T.) of seven percent is applicable to many Canadian transactions. Not only is it critical to determine whether a taxable sale was made in Canada or not, but also where in Canada. If it was made (or deemed to be made) in any of the Harmonized Sales Tax (H.S.T.) provinces (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland and Labrador), a higher, fifteen percent H.S.T. rate applies. This is because those provinces have allowed Canada to collect their provincial sales tax...

When one thinks of acupuncture, what are some of the images that typically come to mind? Instantly, though, a picture of a black kettle pot with a bunch of concoctions and needles should come to mind. On the other hand, acupuncture therapy does not have to concoct such awful images in one's head. However, if you have ever thought about the possibility that acupuncture may be able to replace Western medicine you are sorely mistaken. On the other hand, there are some important distinctions between the two fundamental ideas of medicine, and in this article the idea of acupuncture will go head to head in an effort to compete against Western medicine. Science Versus Intuition The basic idea behind Western medicine is the knowledge and science behind every treatment that we can see. Acupuncture, though, is not considered one of those treatments. Consider for a moment all the monumental effects that taking one prescription medication can have on the body. Many advocates of Weste...

To have an online store, the easiest way is to find some open source ecommerce script. For example oscommerce or zen-cart shopping cart. Get these script setup on your web hosting. To accept payment online, its either customer pay through your website, or route customer to payment gateway website and make payment. Selecting which one, will depend on your needs and budget. Having third party merchant is easiest and lowest cost. You could sign up with 2checkout payment processing or paypal or verisign payment processing. And route customer to the link provided by them. Customer will make payment at those provider webpage, and once its done, customer will return back to your website. Be sure to pick only those famous third party merchant provider, don’t trust those that you found online and offering incredible low cost and no fees solution. Who knows, you will never get your money at the ends. Either you can find a web hosting provider that offers merchant account as wel...

If you are building an online shop, you will need to address the question of taking payments for orders. You can, of course, request that a check payment be sent to you in the mail. Most shopping basket software allows you to select this option when you are setting it up. If you already have an offline, bricks and mortar business, you may simply wish to accept credit card payments over the phone.  However, there are some basic problems with these solutions and it all comes down to the way people shop on the internet. Customers expect to be able to add items to their basket and proceed to the checkout to pay. If they then find they must telephone you or print out and send their order, they may simply abandon their order and hop over to another website. Shopping online is all about convenience and if you are unable to provide this, you may be losing customers without even being aware of it.  So, what are your options and what is it all going to cost? Well, the good new...

Every good Internet business understands the value of conversions versus hits received. Far too often, businesses become fixated on the hits they are receiving instead of monitoring their hit to sale conversion rate. This misguided focus is the road to ruin because it fails to take in the issue of abandonment. Abandonment “Abandonment” is one of those terms that has a unique meaning when applied to the Internet. The term refers to reasons why a user abandons a site before taking the action the site owner desires, typically purchasing a product or making an inquiry. There are a number of beautiful sites on the Internet with unique innovations. Unfortunately, these sites rarely turn a profit or unnecessarily limit their profit potential. Site owners must focus on only one thing when building a site – converting visitors to customers. To avoid abandonment issues, you should focus on the following: 1. The site should always load as quickly as possible to accommodate visit...

Ignoring the problem or getting bent out of shape over it isn’t going to make it go away. I am referring to the sad state of affairs of modern day popular culture and just how far from authenticity we have sunk in our search for meaning in life. Much of the world is entering what is being called the 'Bread and Circuses' phase of declining empire. A phase preoccupied with credit binging, fiat money and spectacle.  The Romans went through a similar period of decay, Nero fiddling while Rome burned.  Then as now, there are many narrowly focused people out there in the world with money to spend who only want to be entertained. They care not a hoot for dignity, synergy or edified social discourse. Reading, the News Hour, National Public Radio, debates...how boring. Glamour, glitter and action, that’s where it’s at. Seeking diversion in fun and games is a sign of the times, and noble or not, the astute marketer can realize that there is a lot of money to be made catering to the...

The World Wide Web has become an integral part of our lives. It has penetrated so deeply into our daily living that people now turn towards the World Wide Web for buying clothes, books, electronic equipment etc. For an online seller, then, it becomes imperative to find means to make an online transaction as easy and painless as possible. Since most people prefer to use their credit cards while shopping, webmasters need to integrate this service into their online shopping websites. An answer to your online payment needs can be a payment processing company.  Most online shopping sites enter into a business alliance with payment processing companies. However, you should diligently comb the market for the best deal before you sign up with a service. Make sure that they are not overcharging you. Also, check out their reputation in the market – are they known for their fair minded financial and business transactions? This kind of a company operates through two types of services – o...

Gaining success through the eBay selling business may not be as complicated as you think. You only have to know where to find free eBay secrets that count. Once you get hold of free eBay secrets, start applying them in order for you to put up a successful eBay selling business.  No need to look high and low for free eBay secrets, we’ve got them compiled here for you. You can use these free eBay secrets to create a booming business on eBay. Once you decide to become an eBay seller, choose the user ID you will have to use, carefully. Choose a User ID that represents your business or the items you sell. Your User ID automatically becomes your eBay identity to potential buyers.   Look up the “How to Sell” Tour and watch the eBay selling demonstration video. Then learn of free eBay secrets in starting up at the eBay Learning Center. Get your ID verified by using the ID Verify option when setting up a Seller's Account. This gives you an ID Verify icon in your ...

Gaining success through the eBay selling business may not be as complicated as you think. You only have to know where to find free eBay secrets that count. Once you get hold of free eBay secrets, start applying them in order for you to put up a successful eBay selling business. No need to look high and low for free eBay secrets, we’ve got them compiled here for you. You can use these free eBay secrets to create a booming business on eBay. Once you decide to become an eBay seller, choose the user ID you will have to use, carefully. Choose a User ID that represents your business or the items you sell. Your User ID automatically becomes your eBay identity to potential buyers. Look up the “How to Sell” Tour and watch the eBay selling demonstration video. Then learn of free eBay secrets in starting up at the eBay Learning Center. Get your ID verified by using the ID Verify option when setting up a Seller's Account. This gives you an ID Verify icon in your feedback prof...

Are you selling online? You are maybe looking for some solutions how to succeed in your business. There are several ways how to get more clients and earn more money. In this article I will introduce you some of them.  1. Affiliate marketing: Affiliate marketing consist in relationship between web site owners and merchant. Web site owners put merchants advertisement (usually text link or banner) on their page and merchant pays commission from each deal to the site owner. The advantage of this promotion method is the fact that you can never loose your money for inefficient advertising because you pay only in case you earn some money. If you want to start your own affiliate program you can buy one of many available scripts or use some of affiliate networks like Link Share or Commission Junction.  2. Search engine optimization (SEO): Search engine optimization is one of the most effective (and one of the hardest) ways how to get the large number of very good targeted...

Advice from an Auction Genius Renowned eBiz author Sydney Johnson created the now-famous Auction Genius courses (http://AuctionGenius.com) to aid people wanting to create their own e-businesses. She shares some important tips for anyone looking to learn the online retail industry: Tip 1—Start Small. Many of Johnson’s students are eager to dive in head first, ready to invest all their savings into overseas imports or shopping network returns. But Johnson discourages such risky moves for two reasons. • They haven’t considered all the costs—the enormous minimum quantities they’ll have to buy to get the discounted prices or the tremendous costs of shipping imports. • They have little experience and, therefore, no way of knowing all that these transactions entail. Says Johnson, “You’re going to make mistakes…The way to minimize any kind of horrible error is to go very small.” Don’t invest a lot to start with—learn with inexpensive items. Start with a minimum investme...

As more and more Internet users are coming online to generate passive income, they start to look into websites that could help them to create passive streams of income either through commissions, user clicks or page impressions. Internet Entrepreneurs are now starting to build or acquire potential sites and flip them over to the buyers for a nice profit. Although traffic is the key area when most people are considering when buying a website, other criteria are also important for the site to run and stay profitable in a long run. This article will help you to sell your site if you do not have much traffic flow. The first technique is to mention how easy it is to maintain and run the site after the ownership transfer. An ideal site would be able to update its content automatically and using unique and fresh content. Some Webmasters use RSS feeds to dynamically load their sites with fresh content so that search engine will index their sites more often. Most buyers will be more t...

The shoppers are on your site, they are interested in the product, but the design of your shopping cart is causing you to lose many if not most of your customers.  Sound familiar? It should. Recent research indicates that the average e-commerce site is losing near 75 percent of its shoppers during shopping cart phase of a transaction.  While that statistic is probably influenced upward by a few terrible websites, the fact remains that most sites are losing huge numbers of customers by not focusing on their shopping cart. Fortunately, by taking a few relatively minor steps, you can vastly decrease your shopping cart abandonment rate. Fewer Steps are Better This mantra is as old as e-commerce itself.  By forcing your customers to go through multiple pages you will assuredly see some attrition.  You should ask yourself, is all the information I am collecting absolutely necessary? Is there another configuration that would reduce the number of steps my custo...

Determining a profitable website is not easy especially if you are looking to flip it for higher profit within a short time frame. However, with the correct steps and procedures, it is possible even for a beginner to pick up a good site with great potential to start off. The first step to determine if a website is worth the investment is by the number of income streams it has. Most websites have more than one income channel such as Pay-Per-Click advertisement (Google Adsense etc), Pay-Per-Action programs (AzoogleAds, ClickBank etc) or selling of own products. Basically, this step is to analyze the current profitable channels and see if you can expand or add in other  sources of income. Never rely only on one income source for a website. The second step is to find out where are the traffic coming from. Most websites should have a healthy amount of constant traffic from the search engines followed by social bookmarking sites or regular visitors. If the majority of the traff...

When we look through hosting plan package, it will be very attractive. Offering features like unlimited domain hosting, unlimited subdomain, unlimited parked domain etc. And some hosting even offering unlimited storage space and unlimited bandwidth. But our discussion this time will focus on the unlimited domain and its current fact. After you sign up to a unlimited domain hosting, and when you login to cpanel, you will find out that the statistic on the left hand side will shows 999 addon domains. Plus your primary domain, you are given 1000 domains to be exact. Its in fact not unlimited, but is limited to 1000 domain name. And each time you adding a new domain name, you will have total less one… 998, 997, 996 and so on. The term unlimited is not so true, and there is limits to this. The same 1000 limit caps apply to unlimited subdomain and unlimited parked domain as well.  Since you can host 1000 domain/website in single shared hosting account, but should you do it?...

Article Body: More and more people are shopping on-line today than ever before, especially with the holidays just around the corner.  We’re looking for gifts for our kids, gifts for our family, and gifts for our friends.  But is shopping on-line safe?  Is our information secure?  Is it convenient?  For as many of those who are on-line shoppers (and I am a big on-line shopper myself), there are just as many, or more, who don’t or won’t shop on-line.  They cite various reasons for their reluctance.  Believe me, it can be scary to try new things.  So,  I  have considered the reasons for their fear and apathy and have come up with what I believe are great reasons you gotta love on-line shopping.    1.  Security Issues Many people are worried about putting their personal information out into “cyberspace”.  Personally, I feel safer on-line.  Identity theft actually occurs more in the malls and department ...

Have ever searched your favorite search engine for "expired domain", "domain names", and / or "deleted domains names"? Well, if you have recently been scouring the internet for good used domain names, then this idea may help. By following a few simple directions you will soon be on your way to domain  name reseller success. 1. Start a free <a href="http://www.general-website-directory.com">general website directory</a> in order to accept free link submissions manual or automated. You can get to free or open source website directory script at script directories such as Hotscripts.com, Needscripts.com, or ask members of Digitalpoint.com forums to help you find the best and most webmaster friendly directory script. 2. Be prepared to receive lots of junk sites new and old. The junk sites will soon be to your most advantage because the webmaster will soon give up on the site. 3. Every week or month run the validate featur...

Have you ever wondered why your perfectly fine classified ad fails to attract the attention you desire? There should be dozens—no, hundreds—of perspective buyers swamping your e-mail inbox with offers. After all, you are offering a mint baseball card, a vintage coat, pristine used car, those wholesale-priced sporting goods, and whatever other attractive items are in your inventory. Instead, you only have a slow trickle of questions, a handful of sales. What gives? More than likely, your sales are slow because you have not mastered the three techniques of writing a classic classified ad. Of course, give yourself credit for recognizing one important facet of today’s selling world. You decided to sell your stuff at an online classified site. As anybody in the business knows, online classified ads get you more privacy, a broader selection of buyers, and a wealth of tools to help you keep tabs on your transactions. When compared to a newspaper, cyberspace is also a wee bit more spacio...

Some naysayers way back in the 1990s predicted that online shopping wouldn’t last. Sure, and they said television was a passing fad, too! As we all know, just the opposite has occurred. There’s a television in every household, and more than likely, the homeowner bought their television online—along with his books, music CDs, clothes, and maybe even his home. Internet shopping is bigger than ever. You can find anything and everything for sale online. Many times, you can find it cheaper online than anywhere else. Internet shopping offers so much more than a discounted price tag, though. Imagine a shopping mall where there are no lines, where there are no jammed parking garages, and no pushy sales clerks. This is no land of make believe. It is the Internet, where you can discover unprecedented selection, convenience, and opportunities. Online shopping gives you the luxury of browsing hundreds of stores from your living room, while saving on time and frustration. It provides you ...

You finally realize that you need a good opt-in list. After reading countless articles and sought expert advices and have read many success stories of people creating a small fortune with opt-in lists you finally decide to have one of your own. Then it happens, you think you have known everything there is to know about opt-in lists and have followed their advices to the T and you still weren’t able to make a profit. In fact, you may be losing money. You maybe hiring writers to help you out, or there are some expenses incurred, even if you have a big list, but only a very small percentage actually buys from you, your still losing profit. You’ll realize that after a few months when you see your statistics and sales figures.  So what could have gone wrong? Why have others succeeded where you have failed? The most common mistake is that you dived straight right in. You chose a topic where you think could be quite popular and would earn you money. This just not the case. Just...

The following article lists some simple, informative tips that will help you have a better experience with solo ads.  People endorse other products for a many reasons. Sometimes to sell affiliate products for commissions, promote a joint ventured product or other times, for an advertising space they sold. Solo ad is a single advertisement in an email published by the owner of an ezine/newsletter to his lists of subscribers. Why does it work more effectively than the others? You can fully personalize your solo ad and it’ll be sent out in only one single email, which lets the readers focus only on the solo ad. This highly increases the response of the advertisement and gives you a high edge compared to other ads which are hardly noticed. Here we’re going to mention what kind of solo ads sell and what factors are important. The process of publishing a solo ad: 1. Choose a newsletter or e-zine to send out your solo ad 2. Write a solo ad 3. Create an effective or ...