E-Commerce for All

Facebook Fan Pages

Many shop owners are really lagging behind on the social media angle. Let face it, time is short and so much to do. Fact is, so many things to promote your ecommerce business cost money, this one is free… Just a bit of you precious time to get free promotion for your online shop. There are some very good business reasons to spend a few hours creating your business’ Facebook fan page.

Did you know that someone else could steal away your business name for their own fan page?

We talk with shop owners about a great many things, one thing we advise on frequently is protecting your brand. Now I know you are not Coca Cola or Gieco, but your brand is the heart of your business. It may not seem important now, but what if I told you that if you do not act, when the importance of brand protection smacks you in the face it may be too late?

Yes, too late. There are some things you just MUST do to protect your brand, NOW…. Not later.

Register the alternate spellings, TLDs and versions of your domain. This might cost you $50 a year, but it’s probably one of the best investments you can make. What will you do if years from now, when hopefully you are knee deep in success, a competitor has a misspelling of your domain?

You will lose traffic is what you will do…. To your competitor at that. A great example is a client of our who registered a domain with a number in it. The number 4 instead of for. His competitor using the “for” domain, grabs a great deal of his traffic…. and sales, as they sell very similar products. Hell, he even gets phone calls for the other business…. Imagine how many of his customers are calling them.

Another recent situation involves a shop owner who has the .NET version of their domain only. Now this is a bad move to start with, but if you have the .COM as well, no worries as you can redirect them. Like we do PRO-Webs.com. This client has only the .NET and the .COM houses a VERY adult website. Many returning customers will not only be lost, but very likely offended as well.

Facebook and Twitter are important for the same reason. They both have vanity urls, like http://www.facebook.com/prowebs and http://twitter.com/prowebs. Once someone else registers YOUR business name, that’s it…. Gone.

So while I realize you are long on work and short on time, spending a few hows setting up your Facebook fan page… and your Twitter account as well, is a damn good investment. In the future we will see these social media profiles and pages become an active part of your business’ equity and domain worth. Not to mention, how awful to find that your customers are being stolen away by some look-alike business using your rightful Facebook url. Worse yet… Find out there is nothing you can do, because you failed to spend a few hours when it counted.

Interested? Let’s set up your Facebook fan page.

First thing is to get a fan (official) page here. Note that businesses have fan pages, not profiles. See this isn’t so tough. hey you are on a roll, get your Twitter page while you are at it, here.

You probably noticed that Twitter, unlike Facebook gives you a personalized url right off. Facebook requires an act of dedication on your part to get your personalized fan page url. There have been many numbers for the amount of fans it takes, but currently you need 25 fans before you can secure your own url. We’ll talk about getting those fans in a bit.

Here is a pretty easy video to make your fan page, no excuses here =-) For my readers, check this very good tutorial to create your fan page.

I have some additional tips to share with you, so you can maximize your time and effort.

While Facebook has a pretty standardized structure, they do have some cool aps to help you promote your page and build your followers. One in particular, profile HTML is a very handy ap which will allow you to add custom HTML to your profile or fan page.

Very important to add your RSS feeds for your store and/or blog to your fan page. This is really a snap to do an only take a few minutes… Then it will work automatically for you.

Adding RSS to Facebook

Facebook allows you to quickly and easily import an external blog from another website.

1. On your notes about me page, click the Import a blog link on the right side of the page. (hard to find in the new layout — But here’s a link)
2. Enter the URL (web address) of your blog into the text box, and check the box underneath that states that you agree to FB TOS. This is the whole URL, like http://pro-webs.net/blog/feed/
3. To complete the process, click on “Save Settings.” Once you do this, your previous posts will appear as notes and any new posts you make will automatically display.

See easy! I also highly recommend the Networked Blogs ap for Facebook.

Going through the settings and such are pretty logical, just read and fill them out. Believe it or not, your teenager is a great resource for this! You can spend a few minutes a week to post tips, coupons and other business related items in a snap.

Now for the important part…. Getting the fans required to get your personalized url.

• If you already have a Facebook profile page, send a note to all of your friends and ask them to click the “Become a Fan” link to your page.  <– Selfless promotion =-)
• Include your fan page link in the signature of all your emails
• Add the “Become a Fan” widget to your site and blog
• Offer additional savings or promotions specifically for your Facebook fans
• Beg…. LOL

Once you have the required number of fans (currently 25), you will see a link on your home page, but here’s a link to grab your personalized Facebook url and protect your brand!

This isn’t so hard, and even if you choose not to promote it actively… at least someone else won’t =-)

Melanie E-Commerce Marketing

Easy SEO, this is a term as similar as black and white.

Easy SEO?

More to the point, you saw this title and thought I was going to give you some easy trick to make your shop rank so you can be rich. Not so, this is rather a rant, some things that just need said. You can benefit from the content of this post if you are determined to succeed in your ecommerce business, and you have some common sense. If so, please read on…

First lets tackle something no one seems to know. What is SEO?

SEO is a very mechanical, analytical and hands on discipline. SEO is a part of marketing (SEM), but is not marketing, rather SEO is just as the acronym suggests… Search engine optimization.

SEO itself is a method/practice of making your website better accessible to the search engines, mechanically sound, optimizing page structure, content and elements, website architecture, flow and navigation and server side scripting as well.

Rank itself is the goal, but making both your content and website easily understood and navigated by the search engines is the process. The things we do are generally based on 3 things. Things we know. Things we see proper research to prove. And things we believe to be true and are testing.

None of these things we do is anything automated or really easy. This is definitely hard work. The hard work involved comes in a few forms. For example building great content regularly is hard work, building quality inbound links is hard work… But most of all, reading enough so that you have a clue and can participate in the decisions for your SEO campaign is also hard work.

So that leaves basically 2 sets of website owners… Those who do, and those who don’t.

Those who do seek to optimize their own websites are very vulnerable, for many reasons. They often set out and read on the internet about the SEO they need, implement it blindly as fact without support or merit and then fail to measure the results. These individuals then proceed to propagate this disease by sharing their ill founded and unsupported techniques with others just as vulnerable. For these folks I have some advise.

1. Know your sources. I could put up a website tomorrow offering a 5 minute solution to all of your SEO needs for $200 and sell these lies to the masses with ease. Just because I say something, does not make it true. I could get away with this because most have their heads wrapped around easy and fail to search out any supporting documentation or support for anything that looks to make SEO easy.
2. SEO cannot be automated. Even if every search algorithm factor was laid out for you in a to do list, you could not automate your SEO. Every website is different, the only way to properly succeed in your SEO campaign is to read, understand, test and measure the results. Anything less is just a reckless waste of time.
3. Common sense. If I tell you your website will rank if you make it all yellow, do you believe me? At the end of the day, your success will be determined on your ability to make good decisions. Now if you haven’t taken the time to seek out the reading and education you need for these decisions, then at least use common sense.

Those who do not, are equally at risk, just in a different manner. There are many reasons website owners seek out a professional to provide their SEO, unfortunately most of these reasons are what make them destined to fail. If you think that paying someone for SEO will answer all of your goals without you lifting a finger, you are mistaken. If you think you will require no knowledge of the techniques because you are paying someone, you are also mistaken.

Website owners blindly paying for SEO they do not understand are running around with a big bulls eye on their foreheads. You are not only vulnerable, but the cost can be both failure and cash! So I have some advise for those that do not as well…

1. Do not pay someone for SEO if you haven’t checked them out. Do they use a gmail email address? Do you think that is professional? Is their own site well constructed, easy to navigate and ranking? Can you call them on the phone and have a discussion?
2. Ask questions. If your paid SEO cannot/will not answer your questions regarding technique, services etc… Then they are likely jerking you around. Ask questions, do some reading and then ask better questions.
3. Why are you paying me? You may think this is in contrast to #2, but I assure you it is not. If your SEO tells you you need more content, you do some research and are still confused, then perhaps you should just do what they say. You are paying them for their professional services, correct?
4. Cost. If you are paying a low amount of money for an SEO who has said they will do everything and you need to do nothing, you are getting screwed. This type of service in my opinion is not only impossible, but would be very expensive (in the thousands of dollars a month). The reason this is veritably impossible is that this SEO person needs your input and niche specific expertise to create and execute a successful SEO campaign for you. No person, SEO or pretending professional can know every product, niche and service well enough to proceed without your involvement.
5. If they guarantee you rank, they are lying. SEOs do not work for Google, Bing or any other search engine. There is no way for any legitimate SEO to make you a guarantee of rank. It’s just frankly a snake oiled lie to get in your pockets.

Easy SEO Summary

• There is NO easy SEO.
• SEO cannot be automated.
• SEO is hard work.
• SEO requires common sense and research.
• There is no plugin, module or magic dust that will make you rank.
• If you make changes without analysis, you have failed.
• No one can provide comprehensive SEO services without your involvement.
• Rank guarantees are outright lies.
• Use your head, check people out.

So this means, those of you seeking out the quick get rich SEO trick are pissing up a rope… The very rope that will be used to hang your website out to dry.

Melanie E-Commerce SEO, Myths & Misconceptions

Prevent Credit Card Fraud

The new Advanced Fraud Detection Suite or AFDS for short is a set of very customizable, rule based filters and fraud detection tools that identify, manage and help prevent suspicious and potentially costly fraudulent transactions for your business. You can fully customize AFDS filters/rules and tools to suit your business’ needs and adeptly control how suspicious transactions are handled for your account, including the ability to approve, decline or hold transactions for manual review when filers are triggered.

U.S. merchants alone lost an estimated $4 billion to fraud in 2008. This is not matter to be taken lightly. Many merchant gateway accounts are just NOT designed for your card no present ecommerce business. I have worked with many shop owners who have switched to other gateways to lower fees, only to find themselves in a normal retail swiped card type application…. Resulting in more charge backs and fraudulent transactions, more than enough to eat up and bury any savings on fees. It is very important you have the proper tools designed for your ecommerce business. Would you go to WalMart for your office networking equipment– I certainly hope not!

So the new AFDS costs a few bucks ($9.95 a month), but the tools are cutting edge fraud preventing technology. There are a great many tools involved in the new suite, all of which are highly customizable for your business, but I am going to cover a few that most shop owners probably already wish they had!

1. Transaction Amount Filter – Set lower and upper transaction amount limits to restrict high risk transactions often used to test the validity of credit card numbers.
2. Hourly Transaction Velocity Filter – Limit the total number of transactions received per account,  per hour, preventing high volume attacks common with fraudulent transactions.
3. Transaction IP Velocity Filter – Identify suspicious activity from a single source by identifying excessive transactions sent from the same IP address.
4. Authorized AIM IP Addresses – Allows merchant submitting transactions through the Advanced Integration Method (AIM) to specify an absolute server IP addresses for websites permitted to submit transactions.
5. Enhanced AVS Handling Filter – The Address Verification Service (AVS) is a standard feature of the payment gateway that compares the address submitted with an transaction to the address on file with the shopper’s credit card issuing bank. Merchants can then choose to reject, flag or allow transactions based on the AVS response codes.
6. Shipping Address Verification Filter – Will verify that the provided shipping address received with an order is in fact a valid postal address. ((WOW))
7. IP Shipping Address Mismatch Filter – Compare the supplied shipping address to the IP address of where the shopper submitted the order from. This helps to determine whether or not the order is shipping to the same country from which it originated.
8. Regional IP Address Filter – Flag, filter, reject or allow orders coming from specific regions or countries. Filter actions are based on an entire geographic area, or single country by country.

So in essence, as far as I have been able to determine, this new suite brings Authorize.net to the top of the food chain for fraud prevention and supplied tools for ecommerce merchants. If you’ve never had a fraudulent transaction, that’s great… But the likelihood is you will. Credit card fraud on the web is growing at an alarming rate and if you haven’t the tools to fight back, you will likely suffer at the hands of a thief.

Check out the rate for processing your transactions with Authorize.net… You just might be surprised that the best tools in the industry are the best prices as well! make sure to also pay a visit to the fraud prevention center for tips and best practices to utilize in your online store and prevent fraudulant transactions.

Melanie E-Commerce SEO

Consumers fully understand that the money they have at their disposal is a commodity every bit as much as the goods you have in your online store. You have to earn their trust, provide exemplary customer service and provide the information they need in a well organized format, or they will keep looking for the website they feel is deserving of their business and hard earned dollars.

There was a time when homework and other questions were referred to the encyclopedia or even the public library. That process has come to pass why teenagers search for homework answers on the Internet and parents search for the things they need like recipes, product information and more.

We have more access to information than we ever have and to more knowledge than we ever thought we would even seek out. This is exactly why ecommerce stores should never shy away from informational content on their sites.

The growth of the Internet is driven in many ways by a unquenchable thirst for information. It’s very interesting that customers are initially less interested in where they find the information and instead focus on the quality of the information.

In actuality the useful information on your website and the search engines that find it will bring someone to your site initially and thus deliver you the opportunity to impress this potential customer. Fact is, this useful information is appreciated by surfers and they begin to trust you based on your information. Trust being the first step in any sale, then you are on to something.

Ecommerce follows in the footsteps of its brick and mortar predecessor and must cater to an on demand crowd to be successful. No one likes to wait and they want what they want when they want it. Got it?

This may all seem a little bit selfish on the part of the consumer, but the ecommerce business that insists on being centered on the needs of the customers will certainly garner the most business. Remember, they hold the commodity you seek $$$

Consumers very clearly understand that the money they have at their disposal is a commodity YOU must earn from them. You have to earn their trust, provide exemplary customer service and provide the useful information they need or they will move on.

Furthermore, because brand loyalty is diminished in the 21st century you have to continually earn the trust and support of your customer base. This is where marketing tools such as ezines, email marketing and ebooks can make a real difference for customers that want not just a product, but also seek knowledge they need to make the best use of that product…. Your product.

There are many ecommerce businesses that do not share this service orientated point of view. They insist on operating their online store in a way that fails to capitalize on something they have clearly failed to comprehend. The Internet opens the possibility to provide value added materials and information in a cost effective environment. Customers do not have to choose your store so make sure they have ample reason to place your site at the top of their list.

Melanie E-Commerce Marketing, E-Commerce SEO