A dummy’s guide to ecommerce, #3: Tips for Success

Posted by on Aug 9, 2008 in Archive, Ecommerce, Web & Internet Marketing

Top tips for turning browsers into buyers Do your research and try to sell products that have a market and are in demand. Set your prices as low as you can. Market your business from the outset, don’t leave it until after your site has launched, and make sure you have a healthy marketing budget for at least the first year. Do show photos of your products, and make sure they are good quality. If you have to get them done for you then so be it, people want to see what they are buying. Use conventions. The Internet is beginning to establish ways of doing things that people are becoming...

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A dummy’s guide to ecommerce, #2: taking credit card payments

Posted by on Aug 6, 2008 in Archive, Ecommerce, Web & Internet Marketing

There are four main ways for your ecommerce business to take credit card payments. Secure capture & swipe This method is probably the most common, is the cheapest to you the retailer and works as follows: Firstly, your ecommerce system stores your customers’ card details securely online, usually in a database used by the system. I most highly recommend that you ensure that the details are strongly encrypted whilst they are stored, your ecommerce provider will be able to reassure you in this respect and if they can’t, maybe think about getting another provider who understands...

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A dummy’s guide to ecommerce, #1

Posted by on Aug 5, 2008 in Archive, Ecommerce, Web & Internet Marketing

This is an introduction to Ecommerce aimed at people who know nothing or very little about the subject. Which, judging from the number of people I get questions from, is a fair many of you. Firstly, learn the jargon: selling online, e-tailing (yuk), web and Internet stores – these are all the same thing, and are simply just different ways of saying “ecommerce”. Ecommerce is what you are doing when you sell something via the Internet, it’s that simple. Next, go and read all the articles on this website about web marketing. You need to look into that before you start...

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Actinic ecommerce primer

Posted by on May 15, 2008 in Archive, Ecommerce

Welcome to my attempt at a brief introduction to the Actinic ecommerce websites that we are currently recommending to small and medium-sized businesses. Some of these points are covered in other articles, but I thought it would be good to collect them here for your convenience, and so I have a single article to point to when people ask me about Actinic (which is often enough now for me to take the time to write this article). First off, this article isn’t a how-to or a manual, it is an overview of the main features offered by the Actinic ecommerce system, and some comparisons between it...

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The Google Top Ten

Posted by on May 5, 2008 in Archive, Ecommerce, Web & Internet Marketing

Although this article deals with the Google search engine, a real web marketing strategy will always aim for good spread across a considered (researched) list of other search engines. Afterall, Google may have a very dominant position serving 63% of all British web search enquiries3 (compared to 47% in the US), but that’s no reason to ignore the rest. How can I get my web site onto Google’s first page of results? I think I hear this question (or its variants) more often than any other, which maybe isn’t surprising as it seems widely...

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