The Pieces
Website

* Hosting (where the website is “located”, who “runs” the website)
* Domain name (e.g. mybusiness.com)
* Security Certificate/Encryption – needed to take credit cards (or take credit cards offsite)

Credit Card Orders

* Gateway – takes credit card information from your site
* Merchant Account – a bank account

Issues
Cost

* Website
* Hosting for e-commerce – starts at around $20/month
* Domain Names: around $15/year
* Web Design/Development
* SSL Security Certificate: around $100/year
* Gateway/Merchant Account vs. PayPal
Gateway / Merchant Account typically charge between 2.2-2.5% for Visa and Mastercard, which is less than PayPal’s standard 2.9% rate.
A merchant acct is typically about $20/month (often waived if enough transaction fees), plus setup.
Payment gateways usually run $20-30/mo., plus setup and are more convenient, as well as usually
being better integrated with your website.
* Remember selling online can increase your sales!

Legal Compliance

* Privacy
* California Law requires a Privacy Policy
* Sales Tax – Required for in-state transactions usually only on products (includes any state where you have a “physical presence”)
* Terms of Use
* Disclaimer (of Liability)
* Vary by Jurisdiction (e.g. promotional contests could be considered gambling)
* Enforceable Online Contracts – vary by jurisdiction also
* MCM Web Solutions, LLC does not provide legal services or advice (this document is not to be considered either)

Fraud

* The merchant is legally liable for fraudulent orders placed on their site. This means that if someone fradulently orders a product or service from your website, you will likely lose the money or time you spent on filling that fradulent order.
* Fraud is about 1% of all Internet orders, that means the other 99% are legitimate
* Prevention
What you can do -
Don’t ship to PO Boxes
Match billing and shipping addresses
Don’t take orders from outside of the “developed” world (stick to N. America and W. Europe)

Theft of Intellectual Property

* Give notice of copyrights, trademarks, etc. on your website
* Registering them also helps in the event of legal battles such as domain name “squatting” (e.g. someone else registers a domain name with your company’s name)

Account Freezes

* If using PayPal, consider getting a separate bank account solely for PayPal use or at least avoid linking your sole bank account to PayPal as PayPal accounts can be frozen when charge backs (e.g. a purchaser tries to get a refund from his/her credit card issuer) occur.

Other Options for Selling Online

* Yahoo Storefronts
Downside: commissions (1.5%), monthly fees, lock-in
* Amazon
Downsides: commissions (6% or higher), only products (no services), lock-in Upside: exposure (also for eBay)
* eBay
Downside: Only products (no services, though this may change in the future), transaction/listing fees, lock-in

Getting your e-commerce site to sell for you is going to be a lot of hard work, but you don’t have to learn lessons the hard way. In this article I’m going to talk about a few important pointers that will make your road to e-commerce success a lot smoother

1. Having Shoppers Find You

Search engine marketing and placement commonly referred to as search engine optimization is an import factor that should be considered hopefully before you build your next e-commerce site. The successful application of search engine marketing can lead to huge rewards in gained traffic, and hopefully shopping carts being checked out.

There are many things you can do to get your website well placed in the search engines. Many search engines a high value on the quantity and quality of links you have coming into your website. This will be important for your e-commerce site. You will want many links directly to your main category pages, and product pages.

Many shopping cart applications have web addresses with question marks and special characters which could potentially hinder your pages from being indexed properly. This is common for sites that use some type of dynamic programming language like php and asp. It’s important for site owners to stress to their web masters that they want static urls, with .html file extensions.

Adding in keywords and meta tags to your pages will only add emphasis to the search engines that these particular words are found on your site, and it should refer people to your site looking for this type of content. One thing that you can do to be sure your pages will be easily readable by any search engine is to make sure that it uses valid XHTML.

2. Making A Strong Presentation

Getting visitors to your site is only part one. They still need to take the action that you want them to, whether that is adding something to their shopping cart and checking out, or signing up for a newsletter you are offering. Whatever action you want them to take can be accomplished if you are presenting you website visitor with an eye pleasing website, that is clean and well laid out.

You will probably want to have a graphics artist work on your site, so that he or she can help you to materialize your great ideas into an eye-catching piece of web art. The professionalism of your site, and overall look can be the deciding factor on your web visitor turning into a satisfied shopper. Be sure that your visitors can find of the necessary trust factors that will put them at ease.

Trust factors can be things such as a visible SSL graphic, a link to your support or customer service department. Your site visitors will feel more comfortable if they know they can get help if they need it.

3. Having Just The Right Products

Many people only have a limited stock of items to sell. It’s important that you market your products well, and feature them in a way that adds value to the shopper. If you have hundreds or even thousands of products, then it’s important that you create categories and sub-categories for your products to be easily browsed through.

Having a search on your site will only enhance your potential web shopper’s experience. Helping them get to what they need quicker. Helping your visitor get their products into their carts faster can only translate into more checkouts, and a pleasurable shopping experience.

If you have an affiliate site, or are an Amazon Associate, you are in a great position to make a great product offering. Because Amazon offers everything you’d find in a Wal-mart, Home Depot, Bed Bath n Beyond and even more stores, chances are you will find the right mix of products to offer. Amazon make commissions on the products that they sell. For the entrepreneur, this can be like standing in a department store all day long making sales commissions, except that you do this from the comfort of your computer desk, and your site works for you 24 x 7.

For an example of a well done shopping site taking all of these recommendations into play, you should point your web browser over to www.livewebshop.com . This site is very search engine friendly having thousands of pages listed in Google. It makes a strong presentation for the visitor with nice graphic headers that actually change for each category. Lastly, this site would be considered a super mall offering everything that Amazon offers. It’s incredible the way the site is laid out. Visit the site for some pointers. I hope this article is helpful to everyone interested in setting up or improving their existing shopping sites.

I hope I’ve opened your eyes to some important considerations in e-commerce. Internet retail can be a rewarding and exciting venture. Be sure not to lose focus, and always make sure that you view your site in the eyes of your customer, the most important point of view.
Genesis Font is an experienced web developer with a passion for php development, web marketing and systems administration. Genesis begun his I.T. career back in 1996, when the web was still in it’s infancy.

Funny thing though: I found out that this approach doesn’t really work. Maybe the developers think their sites are somehow different, or that the basic rules of good online commerce don’t apply to them for some reason. Site after posted site, I see the same errors in judgment and design. The following 10 tips now represent my standard advice to every budding Website entrepreneur.

1. Use your Ecommerce Software’s Default Layout

Whatever shopping cart you use, the “stock” or default look is fine. After all, if it wasn’t the best layout of all time, why would they distribute it as “stock” in the first place? Never mind that your online store will look like every other lazy shop owner who decided that product presentation was overrated. Never mind that it has no flow, coherence, or style. And you might as well just ignore the fact that it makes you look like some high school kid in a basement trying to take their money and run.

You lack design talent? We understand. After all, if you could make nice Websites, you wouldn’t be trying to sell whatever it is you make online: you’d sell nice Websites instead. Sure, you could get a ready made, beautiful drop-in template from one of hundreds of sites that specialize in that sort of thing — some of them even custom-made for your cart platform — for less than $200.00. But hey, you picked a FREE cart, and darn it, this site is going to be free if it kills you (or your chances of success). Those people that say you have to spend money to make money are all full of garbage, right?

2. Don’t use Thumbnails

Why would you want to speed up load times for slow connections, or make your product shots look better? Good looking images are the sign of professionalism and class, and you surely don’t want your site to have either of those. Sure, successful shop owners say better images sell more products, but you don’t have to listen to those people. After all, what does a successful shop owner know that you don’t?

Forget the fact that every cart on the planet either has the ability to use thumbnail images built in, or a free and easy-to-install contribution that handles them beautifully. Keep posting 800k images to your site, and laugh at those people who talk about “site optimization” and “load times”.

3. Don’t optimize your Images in Photoshop

Optimizing your images in Photoshop or some other image editing program takes time — your valuable time. Leaving pictures at their original, huge dimensions and making the customer download 3MB of images for each page in your site takes time too — the pesky customers’ time. Everybody knows customers love to wait to buy your products. Play a game! See how big you can make your images, watch how your load time suffers, and then see how your conversion rates fare!

Challenge yourself to approach dialup speeds over your cable modem using your stellar layered, uncompressed image design. I’m sure your customers will love it!

4. Don’t smooth the Checkout Process

People love filling out 8 pages of forms before they can buy stuff. Better yet, add in a couple more pages to surprise the customer just when they think they’re finally through! You really do need the customer’s age, gender, and the name of his first-born son before you can sell him your hand-painted dishrags.

Whatever you do, make it as hard as you can for the customer to complete a sale and pay you money — that’s how you can tell if a customer is truly dedicated (or if they love pain).

5. Ignore the Market you’re “Targeting”

Sure, there are 50,000 computer stores online, but yours is going to be the best! Market research is for people who don’t know what they want to sell, right? You never researched for a term paper in high school and you passed. Why should an online business be any different? Don’t invest time or money in unique products or services, and don’t even think of developing some sort of unique selling proposition. Just bang out a site with the exact same products as your competition, only make yours more expensive, lesser known, and harder to deal with!

6. Don’t add an SSL Certificate

All that junk about customers “Caring about their privacy” and being “Worried about identity theft” is unfounded. Just ask my friend “John” from Indonesia. Hey, by the way, he has $30,000,000.00 he wants to send you. He just needs your credit card number along with your name and billing address.

Never mind that SSL certificates enable the 128bit encrypted tunnel between customers’ computers and your payment processor. All that stuff can just be sent plain text across the Internet. SSL certificates cost money, and you’re on a budget. Sure, the customer can sue you after your Website is found responsible for their identity theft, but that’s not very likely to happen. You treat your customers like they’re dumb and their personally identifiable information is worthless, so they probably don’t have the smarts to hire a lawyer to sue you all the way to the poor house. After all, $50 is a lot of money for security and peace of mind!

7. Don’t add Terms of Use, Privacy, or Conditions of Sale Statements

Some might say that customers like to know who they are dealing with, but those people are full of it. Customers don’t care about your return policies, what to do if they receive a broken product, or what to do if the size they ordered is wrong.

Likewise, they don’t care what you’re going to do with the personally identifiable information you collect. I know for a fact there are people who love SPAM mail: I received an email about it just the other day. Oddly enough, it had a link for cheap “V I AG RR A” in it too, whatever that is. Forget that mumbo jumbo about how providing privacy and terms of sale information is a legal requirement in most jurisdictions — like I said, your customers are hardly going to get a lawyer! Everybody knows that people don’t like to sue lazy, complacent companies for easy money, right?

8. Completely leave out Product Descriptions

All your customers need is a browser-resized, jagged picture of your product. They don’t need to know its features, limitations, or comparisons to other products. Hey, if they knew all that, they’d probably go buy your competitor’s widget right?

Don’t describe your product at all. Be sure to use your own arbitrary part number scheme too, so customers can’t search by the manufacturer’s part number to find the products they already know they want to buy. Oh, and use some random picture for the product with a note at the bottom that says, “Picture is a demo, actual product may vary” so the customer never really knows what they’re going to get.

9. Add Flash. Lots of it. Throw in some Java, too.

Flash intros rock. Add two of them, and make sure you don’t put one of those annoying “skip intro” links at the bottom. Heck, if you did that, nobody would get the chance to experience your Uncle Joe’s mediocre Flash skills. When you finally do let the three customers who are willing to sit through your tedious intros into your store, make sure you have a Flash product menu, a Flash header, and random Flash buttons all over the page. Page animations and moving text equate directly to quality and usability, and don’t you ever forget it!

Now, if all that Flash doesn’t slow your site down to a crawl, don’t worry: you can always add Java. Sure, most professional developers and customers refer to Java as “That Damn Dirty Java”, but your customers are different. Put random Java image switchers and scrollers on every page. Put that neat-o Java water ripple effect thingy on your homepage, because that wasn’t old and tired enough in 1993. And make sure you require users to have Java installed, along with Flash, Windows Media Player, QuickTime, Comet Cursor, and goodness knows what else, in order to use your site properly. Maybe throw in an ActiveX dialler installer for good measure — customers love to wait endlessly for compulsory ad-ware-laden downloads while trying to spend their money on your products!

10. Never post your Address or Phone Number

Customers never want to get a hold of you: that’s why they buy online! Plus, if they have a complaint, they have no way of getting in touch with you other than email, and we all know how easy to ignore that is. Just think — without them knowing who you are, where you are, or how to contact you, your customers can never send product returns, make complaints, or cause waves. It’s brilliant! You can claim customer satisfaction is 100%, because nobody will ever be able to contact you to tell you otherwise.

Sure, this might put off about 90% of your potential customers, but don’t let that stop you. That still leaves you 10% of the Internet, and trust me, the Internet sure is big. Make sure you ship your items from the shipping store or the post office so there is never a return address on the box. When the credit card company calls you about a chargeback, make sure you tell them the customer never called and complained, and you never received a return.

How Horrible is your Ecommerce Site?

While these “tips” were written in good humor, the above pointers cover serious advice that is not so much related to the technical nature of an ecommerce site as it is to product and company presentation.

Sometimes, the negative aspects of not taking certain actions have more impact than extolling the virtues of doing it right. This article is not designed to be a punch in the face to those diligent, passionate store owners who really care about the service they provide, but as more of a wake up call to future and existing shop owners and developers.