E-Commerce Archives

In what began as an innocent question turned into a lively usability and web design debate for ecommerce site home page (or landing page) presentation. If you've ever struggled with how much information and/or how many product images a home page can handle before online customers become annoyed, this topic is for you.

Continued forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums - Number Of Products Per Page

Despite warnings in the news that E-commerce sales are slowing down, there remains a steady army of creative, new online businesses ready for customers. Not everyone has a huge company with staffs for marketing, programming, and design supporting the endeavor.

Going it alone is part of the experience for some site owners.

Two women, sole owners of two new sites with big dreams, provide a perfect example of the joys and fears of selling products and services online. One is from the USA, the other from the UK. Both women have put their hearts and souls into their sites and are in the "now what?" stage.

Pegog.com, owned by Christina Jones, has approached Cre8asiteforums for help. She writes,

It's amazing how you can feel on top of the world one minute, and then really low the next. You then start thinking whether you have made the right decision

She's described what so many people feel, but smartly went charging after advice and support. Better to repair problems now and get to the bottom of potential roadblocks to sales.

Another discussion on marketing opportunities caught my eye, in How To Best Market A Great Interview I Got?. This site owner already owns several web sites, but has launched a new one. She has to start all over again, and this time, she's blessed with an interview so soon after the site's debut. How do you capitalize on that?

These two Cre8asiteforums threads help illustrate the challenges for small businesses who wish to sell online. Visit them for comfort or better yet, ideas for yourself.

According to one site owner, within two days of launching and announcing an ecommerce website featuring high-end products, the hosting company lost it due to an employee error.

According to my host, the server company overrode the C drive for the 60+ websites, then finalized the loss by deleting the secondary drive where the website's backups were maintained.

So many things spring to mind here, and not only from the webmasters perspective. There are countless host re-sellers, who don't actually have the servers on-site or even live anywhere the servers. They are dependent on someone else for maintenance. How are they protected?

Web designers should have a local, backed up copy of their site. Do site owners have a legal leg to stand on if their site is "lost" through something they had no control over? How much responsibility belongs to the web site owner? Do all site owners really understand what happens when they launch a site?

This Cre8asiteforums thread, Legal Ramifications When Server Deletes Site Accidently, Now What? presents food for thought.

Yahoo! provides websites for people that wish to sell goods online, known as Yahoo! Stores. This templated website allows for the use of a unique website address to serve as the home page, but requires any product and sales pages to be hosted on the Yahoo! subdomain stores.yahoo.net. This can pose a legitimate problem if you are trying to rank in search engines for a popular product that your are selling on the website. Can search engine optimization do the trick?

A recent thread at Search Engine Watch Forums discusses this topic, when a member asks if he is “facing any problems when trying to optimize a Yahoo! Stores website. Marcia, a senior and much respected Moderator offers that although she has not had personal experience optimizing such site,

I do know that there have been issues in the past because of links in from Yahoo shopping. You might want to check out Yahoo's technical documentation for their stores, and in particular check into usage of relative and absolute linking in the navigation.

Another member adds that

The (Yahoo! Store) site was extremely difficult to optimize for natural SERPs because it was built in Yahoo's internal template system, which is great for a novice with very little HTML knowledge, but frustrating for somebody with experience

And the latest suggestions starts off with

If you want to preserve the simplicity of the web-based editing, you can learn a bit of RTML to get Y! Stores to output some pretty well optimized pages.

Have you had experience optimizing a Yahoo! Store? Worked with other templated ecommerce platforms successfully? Share your thoughts at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google has now re-branded Urchin to Google Analytics presenting users with better ways to “understand and influence visitor behavior and generate a higher ROI on marketing initiatives”. Yes folks! It’s offering a free hosted web analytics service, in hopes that advertisers, publishers and website owners will spend time understanding how people find their websites, navigate through them and convert on the goals of the site. With the free service, Google hopes it helps people spend money on their search marketing campaigns rather than on measurement. This is going to have a huge impact on both the search marketing and the web analytics industries. Draw your own conclusions.

But how much is really free? Google Analytics will allow you to track up to 5 million pageviews per month, no questions asked, no fees charged. So you have a BIG MONSTER website, then all they request is that you have at least one active Adwords account with an active campaign and spend $1 if you want, that’s all it takes. No more pageview caps. I’m sure they hope you spend much more than that when you see all the tracking benefits.

What’s more in this move, Google Analytics now allows integration with AdWords to better monitor “ROI metrics automatically without having to import cost data or tag keywords”, as well as tracking all of your other internet marketing initiatives as well. When you subscribe to it, you will see it as a new tab under your AdWords account. It now has executive, marketer, and webmaster dashboards for view quick summaries of “traffic, e-commerce, and conversion trends without hunting through reports.” Here is what else it offers:

• Reporting interface accessible directly from the google.com/analytics website if you don’t have an Adwords account


• Advanced visitor segmentation with over 80 web analytics reports


• Ability to track up to 50 websites within your account


• Site overlay


• Funnel visualization


• GeoTargeting with a cool map that shows where your traffic comes from
  
• It’s available in 16 languages: Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and English.


• And much more…

For those worried on privacy concerns, this is what they say, “Google takes the trust people place in us very seriously, and we are committed to safeguarding the privacy of your data. We understand that web analytics data is sensitive, so we accord it the ironclad protection it deserves. Google Analytics is subject to the same industry leading privacy policy as all Google services: http://www.google.com/privacypolicy.html”

On a personal note, I’m also very excited with the steps Google is making because my consulting firm, iHispanic Marketing Group, is proud to announce that Google Analytics has chosen us as one among other Client Service and Support Consultants to service the global Hispanic market. With this strategic alliance we are committed to delivering professional services for training, advanced support, and expert web analytics consulting to executives, marketing managers and webmasters in both Spanish and English. Our loyalty we’ve had to Urchin and to our clients have demonstrated great rewards. Google Analytics will be a fun ride moving forward to continue building leadership with the Hispanic market for search engine marketing and internet strategy.

For discussion on this topic, you’re welcome to share your thoughts in the SearchEngineWatch Forum’s thread: Urchin Now Google Analytics, Now Free.

Andrew Goodman wrote an article on the Black Hat, White Hat & Lots of Gray session at Search Engine Watch, the name of the article is Search Engine Showdown: Black Hats vs. White Hats at SES. That brought some new life to an old thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

In addition this prompted two articles by white hat panelist Alan Perkins named; SEO : Sleepwalking Ever Onwards? and Ethical Search Engine Optimization Explained.

SEOmike just started the a game called "Ethical, Who am I" in the thread.

Great, so your site is ranked number 1 and 2 for all the keywords you can imagine. In fact, you get 2,000 orders per day with huge margins. Hey, your sitting back and enjoying the good life, aren't you?

A problem, that is all too known by sites that rank well in search engines, is credit card fraud. It starts off small, a few orders here and there, small order values and then all of a sudden your reaping in the dough with large orders from all over the globe. Your sitting happy, right? Not when you receive your merchant statement with all the charge backs for goods you shipped out but never received payment for.

Credit card fraud is an issue and even with the best payment gateway solutions, you still need to use some common sense before shipping out an order. This was the topic at the new E-Commerce forum at SEO Chat, a thread named credit card fraud - how do you handle these?.

One member offered their advice based on four years of online retail experience. This member stopped shipping to countries outside the US and Canada. Why? Not only because of real scams, but as he explained "because they do not understand that they have to pay customs and sometimes don't want to pay the taxes that their governments want."

In addition, when the order seems a bit shady or is unusually large in value compared to the average order value of ones store he "would call the customer (if it's the wrong number we're pretty sure that it's a fraud and cancel the order) and ask for the bank phone number. And if it's a huge order, we would ask them to fax over their driver's license and credit card number over to us."

He also says, "99.9999999999% of the orders from Nigeria, Singapore, Indonesia, and some of eastern Europe are fraud."

Make sure to check out the thread for more tips.