As such, 2012 is certain to be an interesting year in terms of ecommerce trends. We’ll see further movement in some areas, and we’ll see new ground broken, too.

Here are some of the top emerging ecommerce trends for 2012:

• We’re going mobile. The past two years have seen some corporations break into the mobile arena, but it’s been somewhat slow-going. Unless you’re a national brand or a startup built around mobile ecommerce, chances are you’re still working on a mobile strategy. 2012 will be the year that the rest of us catch up and make a comprehensive mobile ecommerce strategy.
• Digital goods move to retail. The failure of Borders and the struggling state of Barnes & Noble presents a stark lesson to ecommerce professionals: digital goods can and will trump physical goods. Many brick-and-mortar businesses will not only begin to have ecommerce offerings via their websites, they’ll actually bring the ecommerce experience inside the physical store via terminal transactions.
• The customer experience becomes cross-channel. This means that the customer can interact with the ecommerce experience in whatever format she wants, and have it fully accessible each time. Ecommerce companies will play their part in the customer experience, but that part will be complemented by retail, mobile, and social media experiences.
• Wholesale vendors moving directly to retail. Ecommerce provides an interesting opportunity for wholesalers. It gives them a relatively reliable and efficient medium with which they can directly reach the consumer. This one will be tricky; wholesalers are going to have to take care with how they approach their branding, or they will risk alienating some of their current base of retail clients.
• Unified digital open-air marketplaces. We can already see this in some areas. In fact, eBay has been doing this for more than a decade. 2012 is shaping up to be the year that more and more suppliers jump into common boats, allowing customers the open-air marketplace experience via a single portal.
• Game on. We’re just beginning to scratch the power of games when it comes to ecommerce. Games – whether they’re for a mobile platform or a social media platform – create a unique opportunity. They allow you the opportunity for customer engagement, but also provide a way to build value. Brand education and name recognition will be boosted in 2012 as we see more and more companies put out memorable games to support their ecommerce platform.
• Retailers move farther toward the value add. This may be more fallout from ecommerce than strictly an ecommerce trend, but retailers will begin to recognize that location is no longer the most important factor in their business. They need to be able to provide a quality product and superior service, both in their offline and online offerings.
• It’s all about real-time relevance. 2012 will be the year that many ecommerce folks really start to put the “social-mobile-local” mantra to use. This means providing customers with the information they need no matter where they are and giving them a medium to share with their friends and family. Mobile integration, social networking, and local search strategies all play into this.
• Free worldwide shipping. In what may help to level the playing field between ecommerce companies across national borders, shipping rates are dropping. Accordingly, ecommerce sites will increasingly open up their physical goods to a worldwide market.

2012 is here. With it comes new challenges and new opportunities in the ecommerce marketplace. Making sure your business is ready for these changes and willing to put them to work empowering your business will, to a large degree, determine your success in the coming months.

See the below video released by dotndot which quickly shows few of the major ecommerce trends for 2012…

Another video Interview with James Vizor, Ecommerce expert – On 2012 trends:

image:sergiolat

• 2012 emerging ecommerce trends
• e-commerce trends
• ecommerce trends 2012
• ecommerce trends for 2012

The process of turning traffic into customers is called ‘conversion’ and it’s one of the hardest things you will ever have to do in the online world.

Knowledge is power here and knowing how to convert people is extremely important. These three steps are excellent if you want to have people go from ‘eh’ to ‘yeah!’ and start buying from you.

1. Show What You Have to Offer

Banner ads from huge stores and shops are created so that they are easy to read and easily identified by the viewer. They also take advantage of the fact that people on the internet are looking for a quick answer and so the banner ad provides that answer and acts as though it’s the only answer to your question. Banner ads should also be bright, cheerful, but non-intrusive and may or may not have little additions such as the ability to search for something through the advertisement without having to navigate elsewhere.

Should your offers follow the same sort of pattern? Of course! Your ads should be clear, simple and breathtakingly obvious.

Start with your product and then add in ‘extras’ and then a little bonus item at the end of it to make the consumer feel special. It’s all about bringing the customer in and making him or her feel as though they are exclusive and well liked.

You can always do a bit of research on large stores and how they do their ads to get an idea of how to design your flash banners. It takes some practice.

2. Build Trust and Rapport With Well Written Content

It’s easy to copy/paste from others (particularly the supplier of the goods you are selling), but like many so called short cuts, it is often more damaging than helpful. Readers will quickly see that you took no time out to actually talk about your product and so they will lose faith in it as well. Take the time out to write content that is informative, interesting, and not simply revisions of keywords over and over again.

• Interesting, relevant content is one of the major keys to conversion because it builds trust, a rapport, and makes people more likely to buy from you as opposed to someone else.

Remember, if you are truly passionate about what you are doing, others will pick up on it and will become passionate about what you are doing too. A copy/paste job will just drive people off.

• Studies have shown that business owners and website owners have, on average, seven seconds to get a user to decide whether or not to buy from a business. SEVEN SECONDS! And to business owners’ collective horror, that time is dropping.
• Some studies pin the attention span of a web browser at four seconds.

illustration showing conversion on-time

Sites which take longer than four seconds to load are often abandoned. Seven seconds, four seconds; no matter how you look at it, that’s not a lot of time and you don’t want to waste it. Your content should grab your reader from the first sentence and then carry them through to your final phrases; and with luck, to the Buy Now button!

On the other hand, once you have grabbed a viewer, they are far more likely to stay and read more about you which is good news for your business and makes good content even more important.

3. Have a Goal for Each Page

The main goal of any site and many of its pages is to get across your ‘call to action’.

The call to action refers to the final bit in your site where you lead your reader and your traffic to buy whatever it is you are selling. It is sometimes as simple as the link to your product at the bottom of an article to a line such as: If you are sick of blankety-blank, try XYZ.

Some businesses don’t want these on every page though and that’s ok. After all, you don’t want your site to become a walking advertisement; users will get annoyed and the search engines may drop you like a hot potato. Google in particular has been growing tougher on sites with only ‘fluffy’ content and no real benefits to users.

• Each page you put on your site should have a goal in mind, the overarching one being of turning traffic into consumers.
• You can do this by committing some pages to doing things like building trust and giving reliable information on something related to your product.
• A page can also be dedicated to things like getting followers for social media, a contact information page and a way for people to communicate.

The more goals you have in mind, the more likely it is that people will come and stay and thus meet one or more of your goals. In this way, your website will be come a success and you will see the maximum number of conversions.

Remember that converting people into consumers can be a complex process, involving the building of trust, rapport and loyalty, but these three steps will put you well on your way to doing all of those things.

image: dan

• convert traffic to buyers
• how to convert web traffic into consumers

The first is that you must have a means of driving traffic to your site and secondly, once that person has arrived at your site, you must be able to have the visitor make a purchase or book a service before leaving.

Get on top of these two necessities and you will undoubtedly be successful. The question, however, is; what do you have to do to make all this occur?

What you Need to do to Drive Traffic to Your Site

There are many thousands of sites online that get very little traffic, probably millions. Most of these sites are quite attractive and feature good products, but they are constantly being overlooked by prospective customers. They can probably be likened to a warehouse full of bargains but there is no road in to access them. You must create that roadway.

Following are some ways you can not only create that road, but also bituminise it and make it well signposted.

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO

The best way to look at SEO is to think of what you do yourself when you want to find a subject on the internet. You type in a word or phrase. When you do this the search engine you are using will bring up a list of sites that uses these very same words. You may visit more than one site that comes up, in order to make comparisons, but you will usually only peruse those that appear on the first page of the list.

This is why it is important that your usage of keywords on your site is sufficient to have you ranked on the first page. Efficient use of keywords in the content of your site will make your site SEO friendly. This gives you a greater chance of a higher listing.

Beware, however, that you don’t use too many keywords in your text, as if you do you could find it gets the opposite reaction from the search engine, resulting in it being blacklisted.

Blog Writing

It is becoming more and more popular to use a blog consisting of a currently interesting topic related to your website content, to grab the interest of certain people, and to have this blog linked to your site. In this way the blog is used as bait but for it to work it must be able to hold the interest of the reader, and be strong enough in its information to have the blog reader take the extra step of clicking on the link to be led to your particular site.

If your blog is well written and updated regularly the blog reader will be more inclined to keep coming back for more useful information. While he or she is coming back there is a growing chance that they will click on the link and visit your primary website.

The title of your blog is as important as the keywords used within its text, as these will also be picked up on by the search engine crawler resulting in you getting a higher search engine result. For this reason it is preferable for you to have at least one of your keywords included in the title as well as in the text that follows.

Concentrating on Your Conversion Rate

Once you have been successful in getting traffic to visit your site you have to keep them there long enough to make a purchase.

The first thing here is to make your landing page as attractive as you can.

It is a good idea to use the same background colours and fonts as you did in your blog as this will give the visitor a sub-conscious feeling of knowing you. Your main focus here will ultimately come down to a conversion rate. A conversion rate being the number of sales you make compared to the number of visitors you get.

In order to obtain a high conversion rate you should use the following tips:

• Confidence in Trading. Your visitor will gain in confidence in remaining on your site if they see something they are familiar with that can verify in their minds to tell them that your site must be credible and authentic. This can be achieved if you include logos such as ‘verified by Verisign,’ or state some fact such as being one of the fastest growing companies in your field.
• Write Visitor Friendly Copy. Don’t oversell yourself in the copy on your website. Your visitor will be interested to know who you are but don’t get into self promotion. You are focused on getting a conversion, therefore quickly get into selling the benefit your visitor could expect to receive if he or she purchased from your site rather than buy from elsewhere. Your site must, at all times, be customer focused and if you do this with customer friendly language you will achieve success.
• Keeping it Simple. The copy on your site should be capable of promoting the benefits to be derived from buying from your site, but it is also important to keep your message simple and easy to understand. Visitors to a website are not impressed with lengthy words they barely know the meaning of. They can see such a practice as talking down to them which could result in them being put off and leaving the page. Remember that most people are busy and don’t want to spend time deciphering the meaning of your words. Keep it simple and straight to the point at all times.
• Deal with Your Customers’ Needs. Always write your copy catering to your customers needs. Starting with your blog and continuing through to your website itself. Always keep in mind that you are in business to fill a need your customer has. By addressing your customers’ needs your website will be appreciated, and you will be more likely to make a conversion than you would by simply telling a customer what you have, with a ‘take it or leave it’ attitude.

This article was written by John from Life Insurance Finder. Visit Life Insurance Finder to compare life insurance quotes.

image: smoto

• attract visitor
• attract visitors for your amazon store
• attract visitors your blog
• how attract visitor to your site
• how to attract visitors to blog
• how to attract visitors to your blog

Most people think their work ends once the web site is up. In actual, the real work starts only after your site is up.

In the case of eCommerce based business, you have to work a lot right from the earlier stage of business. Because, it involves lot of entities like managing the customer, serving their needs and solving their issues. It is more tied to the customer and you have to dedicate your time, energy for customers. Basically, planning helps a lot in effectively managing such eCommerce businesses.

In this article, i will take you through the ways to promote a brand new eCommerce business web site. These strategies works well through out the life cycle of your business.

Release Discount Voucher Codes.

Once of the quickest method to drive sales to your eCommerce site: release voucher codes for every product your sell. These are discount codes which helps the buyer to quickly grab an offer or discount from your site before placing their order.

Your buyer gets excitement to see last minute discounts. However, you have to make sure you are providing the right percentage of discount to the buyer and the right percentage of commission to the referral person.

As a new eCommerce business web site, you could release voucher codes for almost all the products available for sale and people do prefer to buy from you taking discounts. This is one of the quickest method to attract buyers to your site because most of the people are looking for discount or cheaper products every time.

Setup A Blog With Your Store.

Many of the eCommerce web sites don’t have blogs and i would say, that’s a major mistake. Blogs are live journals which helps to keep your business active and to share everything with your customers.

For an eCommerce web site, customers are the back bone and it is really required to get in touch with them always. Having a blog helps you to give updates to your customers and also, you could share the latest happening in your eCommerce business.

It actually helps to bring the customers close to your business and they love to get in touch with you. Further, blogs are major source of live traffic from search engines and social media tools like Twitter, Facebook.

• A blog helps your business for the long run, you could go one-step further and give products updates through your blog.
• This way, you could drive visitors related to your products and redirect them to the sale page.

For a new web site, having a blog helps to easily bring quick visitors who could turn into a customer tomorrow.

SEO – Have Detailed Product Description.

Not only for eCommerce based business, for any online based business SEO is the key driver. The major advantage of SEO is that you could drive visitors free of cost and that too for the long term. All you need to optimize your pages for search engines and add more detailed information about the products.

Show images, product videos and add lot of content which explains the product. This helps the customers as well as attracts search engine traffic.

• The recent Google panda update had really affected lot of eCommerce web sites which have less or duplicate content. Have a look on the panda analysis report as well as importance of product description.

This clearly shows that you have to be serious with your product description. Having detailed content adds values to the visitor as well as it ranks well in search engines. If you don’t have enough content, go and add value – you should not miss search traffic because SEO has the power to generate lot of revenue and profits !

Run Targeted Ads on Adwords/Facebook.

Online advertisements are always meant for profits provided you are playing the right game. Yes, because you are investing money – you have to play wise in bringing the right people to your landing page and in converting them to sale.

Google Adwords, Facebook Ads are the two major source of Ad traffic in Internet and by refining the keywords (for Adwords), audience behavior (for facebook) you could easily bring targeted visitors who are willing to buy products from your site.

I would say, this is more dependent on your advertising budget. If you are ready to spend money on advertisements, may sure your ROI is good.

• As a tip, have separate landing pages for Ad visitors and test their behavior. There are lot of tools available for doing a/b split testing, make use of them so that you won’t loose your hard earned money on advertisements.

Capture Leads – Use it Wisely.

You implement SEO, drive search engine. You run Ads, drive targeted visitors. The profits are purely based on the conversion. However, apart from conversion/sale, you should learn to hold the visitors coming to your eCommerce site.

Yes, i am speaking about list building. Ask every user to register to your eCommerce web site or its newsletter and hold them in your record. Once you started capturing their email ids, you could ping them any time with updates.

Further, you could go one-step further and send updates based on the peoples interest.

This way, you could quickly increase your audience base and also, keep them into your circle. Make use of premium newsletter services…

Benefiting With Seasonal Deals.

When it comes to eCommerce based business, one of the most important thing is: seasonal deals. During shopping seasons, you could do the best to bring lot of sales.

• For example, Christmas holidays are meant for discount shopping. Utilize such seasonal time and work towards showing great discounts on every sale.

Also, consider giving gift vouchers or gift items to buyers so that they will be happy to come back to your web site. You could announce through your newsletter and tell every one that you have special offers during the shopping season.

Make use of these best seasons to show that you are in the market to help people with great products…

Show Related/Recent Products.

This is an idea to tweak your sale pages and to increase the chances of conversion. It is true that before placing an order, people do spend time in browsing through your web site.

• Showing related products on every page helps them to quickly find products which are related to their interest. This triggers the visitor to buy more than 1 product.
• For example, if you show the latest collection of Blu-Ray discs on the Blu-Ray disc player page, there are more chances that people will buy discs once they buy the player. Got it ?

Similar, have a separate section to list down the latest products or hot products on each categories which increases the chances of sale because people need products on latest configurations.

Always Monitor Your Competitors.

Every business has competition and when you are running an eCommerce web site, you will face lot of competition. Because now-a-days there are lot of tools available to build an eCommerce web site and hence there are many eCommerce sites in the market.

Unless you do something unique, you could not survey in the market. Spend time to see who are all the competitors and understand the competition – this way, you could tweak your strategies to stand out from the competition. Learn how to dominate and beat competition ?

• Always compete with reasonable competitors, for example: you could not compete with Amazon, eBay on a global market or the biggest retailers like Tesco, Argos, Debenhams in a geographically targeted market like UK.

Finally, there are lot of work required to promote your new eCommerce business and all you need to Set Goals, Make Plan, Follow and Tweak your strategies until your reach the goal. Learn to avoid eCommerce business mistakes at the earlier stage of your business.

Have Great Day !

image:mcorsaw, im

• best seasonal ecommerce sites
• ways to promote ecommerce business
• to promote a good ecommerce sites
• sales and promotion to launch ecommerce sites
• recent ecommerce sites
• promote e-commerce

Great as Alibaba is, though, it is not without its flaws.  In fact, as Alibaba grows in popularity it also becomes an easier, more vulnerable target for fraud and other scams.  With such a high traffic volume, there is extremely high risk.  In any venture, there will be those people who try to leach off your success and efforts, but in the online arena, it is just that much easier to cheat.

With that in mind, here is a list of precautions you should take when doing business on Alibaba:

1.  Use common sense.  This may seem obvious or even a bit condescending, but sometimes it can be very easy to abandon reason for a good deal.  The problem is, good deals are most often not what they seem.  When a seller is only charging $50 for an iPod, you should be suspicious, no matter how excited you are at the deal.  Conversely, sellers sometimes try to pass imitation products for the real deal and charge you full price.  And worse than outright ripping you off, you might get caught up in a copyright infringement lawsuit if you unknowingly purchase and then sell an imitation product.  If it looks too good to be true, it is.
2. Use trusted funds transfer methods.  Western Union is not secure, and scammers take advantage of this.  Almost invariably, if a seller asks you to transfer funds using Western Union, you are being had.  There are exceptions to this rule, but you really don’t want to take that chance.  Similarly, don’t send money to a seller’s personal bank account.  Professionals will have a business account with an established bank, e.g. Bank of China, and won’t try to scam you into sending them money for nothing.
3. Don’t take anything at face value.  Essentially, this means double- and triple-check everything about the buyer and the transaction information before it’s made.  Scammers will go to great lengths to get your money, so you have to be vigilant.  Don’t trust a sample image or even a sample product, because these can easily be manipulated—especially photos.  Have sellers take a photo of your item with a piece of paper that has your name (and theirs) written on it.  Sometimes you can’t even trust a company name; check to see if the business’ name is the same as the one on their bank account.
4. Be willing to visit your suppliers.  Even if it’s an international trip, verifying with your own eyes whether or not your supplier is who they say they are will actually save you a lot of time and energy in the long run.  Once you see the operation, you will be able to decide concretely whether you want to do business with that company or not.
5. Learn from others.  One of the best ways to avoid any kind of fraud or scam is to read, contribute to, and follow the Alibaba forum.  Users will post excellent, relevant tips to help guide you to the best vendors, protect you from the worst ones, and offer great business advice.  The great thing about Alibaba is that not everyone is out to get you, and if you seek the counsel of others, you will be surprised at how willing they are to help.

Any internet marketplace will have an inherent risk, just as any real marketplace has its own inherent risk.  Just because there are scammers on Alibaba is not a reason to abandon it altogether.  If you run a wise business and follow these tips, Alibaba can actually be a great income boost to your company.

image: dhl

• tips using alibaba

Ideally, targeted visitors are the source of business and volume of targeted visitor decides your success online. That’s why Internet marketers are advising to Fix your Target Audience first.

SEO – Source of Free Buyers.

SEO is the one of the long term process which pulls targeted visitors to your web site. Interestingly, you will get free traffic who are visitors seriously looking for information. Still today, search visitors are converting good – when compared to other sources of traffic.

SEO is like a game and a lot of uncertainty involved in it. Right from optimizing your web site to web crawlers and in gaining authority among search engines. There are numerous factors considered by search engines especially by Google in ranking a web page higher on the result page.

• Its not a 1 day work and you rank top next minute, SEO is a long term process and you have to keep on working for it. As i mentioned earlier, it is uncertain too because search engine algorithms are changing every day and it impacts much on your site.

It is important to understand that Keywords are the source of search engine traffic. When you are looking to bring in buyers to your site, you have to use keywords accordingly which attracts buyer traffic.

• A simple example is using the word ‘buy’ or ‘review’ in the title of your web page.

An article from SEO designs clearly explains the difference between buyer and browser, have a look here.

Social Media – Source of Repeat Buyers.

Social media tools are creating great exposure to your business similar to search engines. The whole world is living inside the social tools like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus. Hence it creates best opportunity to show your business to every one. Interestingly, you could well target the audience and simply, focus them – because social media has every audience available. Its our job to build a targeted network around it. Like SEO, it also takes time and when compared, you could easily bringing in buyers from social media tools than search engines.

• All you have to build huge targeted followers/fans around your social account and bring them to your site. There are handy tools available like Twitter feed, Facebook activity feed which directly pushes your sites URL into social tools which quickly grabs your followers attention.

The advantage of using social media tools – you could bring back the same people to your site and they will become repeat buyers (when they are satisfied with your service for the first time). All these happens even without investment or spending less money in building a network yourself.

Advertise It – Source of Paid Buyers.

It is well possible to bring buyers using SEO and Social media tools however, they are long term process. It takes time to pick up and you have to promote/work a lot. Further, the results are not predictable unless you have prior experience in using these marketing methods.

In that case, bringing paid buyer is the easiest alternative. You have to invest money and advertise your business. Interestingly, you could advertise on the social media tools as well as on search engines.

• For example, using Google Adwords you could run an advertisement targeting the people who are related to your site or business and using Facebook Ads to quickly bringing-in targeted people.

In this case, you have to well optimize your web page for conversion (the landing page) because you are paying for each visitor. And you have to earn that money (investment) back (i.e.,ROI – Return on Investment).

Apart from advertising on Search and Social media tools, you could advertise on other web sites which are related to your market. Find out such web sites which are opening ad space sale, contact them and advertise on it. Using paid advertisement quickly brings buyer to your web site however, you have to fix advertising budget considering the returns/profits into account.

An article from Wilson web on Effective Advertisement and landing page (an old article) explains more on this topic clearly.

Conclusion….

These are the common methods to bring in buyer to your site which works for both short and long term. In any case, you have to be clear on:

• What is the purpose of your site or business ?
• Who are all your target audience ?
• What do you want to gain from each visitor ?
• How do you convert visitor into customer ?
• How do you convert customer into repeat customer ?

If you are prepared already for all these questions, you could easily take your business site to the next level in driving more buyer traffic for the long term…

Read my another article on How To Get Buyer Traffic ? which gives you similar advice.

image:pfeiffer

• bringing a customer to a website
• how to bring return customers to online sites
• how to get buyers to your website
• how to source buyers online
• methods of bringing customer to your website

How can You Self-Market?

There are several ways to do this. By far one of the more popular choices is creating “fan pages” to self-market. Not only can these fan pages direct loyal customers to your main web site where they can make purchases, but it’s also a great SEO technique since Google indexes Facebook pages.

You can even add additional apps to your fan pages that allow you to promote special deals and offer coupons exclusively for your fans.

Filming and uploading video testimonials of your product or service to your fan page is another option.

• But if you are really looking for a way to increase your online sales then you need to diligently work to transition your “fans” to “buyer”.  An easy way to do this is to get Facebook Store.

What is a Facebook Store?

Before anything else it said, a Facebook store should not to be confused with other e-commerce apps which simply direct potential customers to third party web sites when ready to purchase.

A Facebook store actually allows users to purchase products directly from Facebook via credit card. There are quite a few services floating around on the web, but most charge you to “set up shop.”

• For example, one of the more popular ones is Social Mall. This service allows vendors to sale merchandise at a special “exclusive” rate for its customers as an incentive to draw in more costumers.

But if you would just like to test this kind of service out before you buy an online Facebook store with all the bells and whistles, then you can check out a similar services at no cost at all.

• By far the best free service to use to build a Facebook store is Shopping Mall.  This app, which is a byproduct of Payvment, allows small business owners to develop a functional retail store within a network of online business and works similar to a real-life-mall—customers can make multiple purchases at one time from different “stores.”
• Even if the customer has a variety of products from different vendors during check-out time, each individual vendor will get compensated accordingly.
• And no worries; the app will not take a cut from the total sale price.
• As a bonus, the costumer’s shopping bag will appear on their friend’s mini feed which means your store can reach an extremely large audience.
• Customers can also add comments and reviews to your products.

The best part? The app is free to use.  Granted there are some restrictions, due to Facebook policy, users are not allowed to sell “adult” merchandise, firearms, tobacco products, alcoholic beverages or any items that promote hate crimes.

How Can You Set up a Store?

So what do you need if you would like to use the app? You’ll need a PayPal account (both personal and business); you’ll then need to create an account with Shopping Mall. After you fill out the short questionnaire, all you need to do is add the app. Follow the directions on how to upload images and data content and viola. Your store is open for business. Setting up shouldn’t take longer than 15 to 20 minutes.

image: kellyseo

• do facebook shops make money
• can you set up an online store on facebook for alcholic brands
• facebook credit increase by website
• website monetization possibilities

1. Web Design

There are many variables that determine how much you will pay for Web design. If you use templates from a free hosting provider, you don’t have to pay anything. Unfortunately, you will also lose branding power, as these same templates are used by thousands of other webmasters. With that said, beginning webmasters should not completely dismiss the thought of hiring a professional designer.

In terms of the cost, this will depend on the following:

• Whether or not a Web designer charges per page or by the hour
• If original graphics are needed for the design
• The site’s complexity, especially in regard to programming and databases
• The designer’s level of expertise

On the low end, a 100-page site could be built for as little as $500. This is especially the case for those who turn to students or freelancers for the work. On the higher end, costs could exceed $50,000. At this range, webmasters would be working with well-established Web design firms.

2. Hosting

Like Web design, hosting has a range of prices. Fortunately, they are more affordable for the average budget. The most basic packages range from 0 to $5, while larger accounts usually cost between $10 and $50. For more expensive packages, you may have access to a plug-and-play template that takes care of the design issues.

Yahoo Small Business hosting is an example. While their templates still possess a cookie-cutter look, you are given more options for designing your site. You could change the colors or mix up the graphics. With free or cheap hosting accounts, you have very little say on how to design your template.

3. Merchant Accounts

Unless a webmaster is making money through affiliate marketing, they are going to need some type of merchant account to collect their customers’ money.

Google, Paypal and Clickbank offer these services for no upfront fees, but in exchange they charge a fee for each transaction. They also limit their accounts to online transactions. With other merchants you can collect credit card payments online or offline, with less expensive transaction fees. However, to do so you will have to pay a few hundred upfront and/or pay a nominal monthly fee of $10 or more.

4. Merchandising

Many webmasters overlook the issue of merchandising, but in reality it represents the heart of e-commerce. You cannot make money without selling something. Of course, you do not have to sell physical products. If you sell e-books or services, you will not have to pay any extra fees.

Things are different for those wanting to sell physical products. If they buy their products through a wholesaler, they will need to pay tens of thousands upfront. With a dropshipper, they pay monthly fees of $50 or more.

5. Bonus Tips

Now-a-days, building an ecommerce website is not really a tough job. There are many open source ecommerce solutions available in the market which you could simply drag-n-drop into your website.  You have to do the ground work first, i mean the business plan (considering its cost) to build up your ecommerce web site especially covering the various aspects as mentioned earlier like the design, hosting, payment transaction etc. Once you  have a business plan ready, you could easily forecast the business towards the growth direction. Also, when it comes to e-commerce business, you have to consider branding which is more important.

Branding Your Website. In general, every business needs a branding approach which shows that your are an expert in the industry and also, you are a professional in the market. People don’t buy products simply from any e-commerce web site, hence you have to show that you are an expert so that they gain TRUST on your business service. In short, consider spending time apart from money in making your web site into a branded one.

When you are able to gain that user TRUST, you could easily convert them into customers and again, they will become Repeat Customers. All these won’t happen in a day or two, it takes time and you have to constantly do experiments and plan it so that you could control the operational costs involved.

Hello my name is Nisha Sandhu I am 26 years old and I am an Editor at whoishostingthis.com, whom I have been working with for 2 years now. I love to write and give online business advice to new and growing businesses, come to our site to check out the latest Dream Host.com reviews.

image: juan

• cost involved in creating e commerce
• cost of creating a ecommerce site
• cost of creating an ecommerce website

The SBA notes that “rules and regulations for conducting eCommerce apply mainly to online retailers and other businesses that perform consumer transactions by collecting customer data”, and that includes data collected during credit card processing.

Being Compliant With Regulations.

It’s crucial to understand and follow the rules and regulations designed to protect customers from identity theft and other fraudulent uses of personal information. This is known as being PCI compliant, and it’s important because it protects both merchant and customer. The merchant service provider that administers your merchant account should be able to answer your compliance questions.

PCI compliance is shorthand for being compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), which lays down requirements to ensure that all merchants who process, store or transmit credit card information do so in a secure transaction environment. The standards are administered by an independent body called the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC), established by the five major payment card brands (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover and JCB International).

• PCI compliance is required of all merchants who accept and process credit, debit and/or prepaid cards branded with the logos of the above mentioned five participating companies.
• It’s important to note that merchants must ensure that they are PCI compliant even if they use a merchant services provider to process credit cards. PCI guidelines define a service provider as a third party that stores, processes or transmits cardholder data on behalf of another entity, such as a merchant.
• Using a service provider may help reduce a merchant’s risk of exposure to fraud, and it can make it easier to validate compliance; however, it does not exclude the merchant from his or her PCI compliance obligation.

Data Security on eCommerce Business.

Data security should always be a top priority for your eCommerce business, not only to keep cardholder and merchant information safe but also to avoid the numerous direct and indirect penalties associated with non-compliance.

• For example, issuing banks and credit card processors can be hit with fines of up to $500,000 for PCI compliance violations, and these fines typically get passed along to individual merchants through increased transaction fees.

Perhaps of even greater consequence, non-compliant merchants found at fault for a data security breach end up paying hefty fines and footing the bill for expensive forensic audits and credit card replacement costs. They can also lose their merchant account – and with it their ability to accept credit cards – which can result in major damage to their credibility, reputation and customer loyalty.

• Before setting up an eCommerce business, consult with your merchant services provider about establishing the right merchant account for credit card processing on the Internet – and ask for a full explanation of PCI compliance and its ramifications for your business.

image: debtcovered

• guest post ecommerce

Let’s face it, debt collection is a nasty, frustrating and a time consuming business. This is one area of your small business worth giving to someone else. The overall cost will probably be lower, not to mention the fact that you can spend more of your time on positive issues. By handing over debts to a professional organization to handle, you will also create a sense of professionalism towards those who are not paying you. Sometimes, larger companies will take advantage of you because you are a sole trader or operating a small business.

So how do you go about choosing? Here are some points you should be looking for in any professional agency.

Overwhelmed ???

• License. It is very important they have a license. You do not want to be held accountable for any of their actions. If you are accused of harassment, it could get very expensive for you. You will need to make sure they are licensed in your state, and other states of Australia. State laws will vary, and in a country like Australia, it is easy for a debtor to pack up and move on.
• Professional Association. If they are a part of some professional association you know they are not working alone, and they too have guidelines under which they operate. Spend a little time to investigate the association so you understand the validity. Some companies will put logos on their websites just to make themselves look more professional.
• Payment Terms. You want to know when you are getting your money once they have collected it. There would be nothing worse than not getting paid from a debt collection agency.
• Fees and Rates. Some companies will have a flat fee or retainer, but in more modern times, we are seeing more debt recovery services being offered on a ‘no collect, no fee’ basis. This is something you should be looking for. Check the proportion of your debt they will take, as their commission in this type of case, will normally be higher.
• Financial Situation. What will happen if the company you choose goes out of business? You want to make sure there are provisions for you still get the money they owe you. Some debt collection companies will be bonded and insured for this situation. Your money stays your money.
• Online Account Monitoring. This is something that will give you peace of mind, and a way to see what is going on for yourself. The better companies will have this and more. They may even have software to help you analyse and predict which of your debts will be easier to collect.
• Previous Customers. Look for customer testimonials. There is nothing better than hearing from their previous customers. Do some research into these testimonials and check for validity. Look online among forums to see what others are saying about them. Bad news travels fast.
• Experience in Your Industry. This is a factor that many will overlook. Debts are not all the same. The better the agency understands your industry, the better they can go about working on getting your money back.
• Representation. Remember, in effect, your debt collection services company will be representing you or your small business. You need to look at their philosophy and actual operations. You might be the one getting a bad reputation, and that could further damage your business.
• Additional Services. More than just collecting money, they should be able to provide you with ways to minimize this situation happening again, and point you in the right direction or provide legal assistance if a matter needs to go to court. Additional services is a good indication of their skills.

Operations. Finally, good debt collection services company will be working outside normal hours to recover your money, and you will have a way to contact them if something arises. Don’t overlook the level of dedication and service they provide you.

• how to become a debt collection agency
• being a successful collection agent
• debt collection companies business model
• licence to become a collection agency
• trader overwhelmed