David Risley dot com

Confessions of a Six Figure Professional Blogger

E-commerce

Experiment: Merging a Store With a Blog

Yesterday, I did some research into some business development strategies. One of the things that crossed my radar was the idea of merging an online store with a blog. My situation is this…

PCMech gets a lot of traffic. The online store, however, is linked in the top menu but is otherwise a completely separate system. Being that there is already so much going on on the main PCMech site, the store gets lost. While the main site sees thousands of people every day, the PCMech store sees only a few daily. That definitely affects sales.

So, the idea is to bring the store into PCMech itself. Into Wordpress. The traffic to the store would most definitely increase. Also, being inside a blog means I can use all the standard blog features for the store, including the flexibility that Wordpress allows. And trust me, Wordpress is infinitely more flexible than X-Cart (the store software I’m using).

Two store options that have gotten my attention are:

• 1ShoppingCart. Has a wide following and offers a nice, integrated package of store, affiliate management and email list. I would not move my mailing list into 1ShoppingCart, but it would be nice to have a better system of automated followup.
• E-Junkie. I cannot find any evidence of large mainstream blogs using E-Junkie, but the service looks pretty good. It is nowhere near as powerful as 1ShoppingCart, but their setup for integrating with another website (such as a blog) is much more automatic.

I will, then, probably set up a new category in Wordpress for the online store. Perhaps I will use static pages. It will be more manual labor at first, but since I’m not managing a large catalog, I think it would be fine.

So, that’s my ramble on what I have in mind. Blogs are powerful mediums. Hosting ads seems to be the de-facto way to make money with a blog, however there are MUCH better ways to do it. Integrating it with a store and shopping cart system is definitely one of those ways.

I will follow up as I proceed with this concept. Stay tuned.

Virtual Tradeshow for eCommerce Marketers

I just recently came across this virtual tradeshow called eComXpo. I have talked before about how it is important to get out there and network. It is usually with the help and knowledge of others that you can put yourself over the top. This is a really hard business in which to be a lone wolf.

Now, when I spoke about this, I was talking more about REAL tradeshows. The kind where you have to travel and you rub elbows with real people. But, I understand that that makes it harder to attend. I mean, I have a few shows I would like to hit by the end of the year, but I can’t because of other obligations (a baby on the way being a biggie). What makes eComXpo different is that it is virtual. You don’t have to GO anywhere. Sweet!

It is an online tradeshow for online marketers and those interested in affiliate programs and ecommerce. Sounds interesting. It is a 3 day tradeshow, running from October 9-11. It’s got all the makings of a normal conference: keynotes, booths, etc. But, in Second Life style, you are doing the whole thing virtually. Watch this video of how it works.

It is free and you don’t have to go anywhere. So, I thought it was worthy of bringing to your attention.

As a concept, these virtual expos are a really cool idea. It will never replace actually meeting with real people, but these kinds of shows definitely have a role.

Paypal Subscriptions are Currently Inoperable

Ouch! There are already those who are a little skeptical of using Paypal for business transactions. Now we have a little more fuel to the fire. Paypal is currently having problems with their subscription service and is not processing any transactions for subscriptions. A lot of users are reporting big time problems with it right now. Aparrently, the problem started on August 30th and will continue until September 5th or 6th. Paypal has acknowledged the problem and says all pending subscription payments will be processed despite the delay. Judging by the comments on the related post at Techcrunch, subscriptions are really spotty. Some say it is processing new subscriptions, just not renewals.

There are already those who question the use of Paypal for business. We used to hear of horror stories of frozen accounts. Personally, I have been using Paypal for some time now and have had no problem with them. Of course, just to be on the safe side, I also have my own merchant account and do process cards regularly through Authorize.Net. But, some people prefer Paypal when making online purchases and that’s fine with me. I’ll allow it. Money is money, right?

Anyway, first it was Skype. Now Paypal. I guess Ebay is having a bad couple weeks.

Post Affiliate Pro – Experience So Far

I have been working on setting up an affiliate program for the PC Mechanic store. The shopping cart I use, X-Cart, does have an affiliate program add-on which you can purchase for an additional fee. I bought it, but found that it was too basic for what I wanted to do. It was also cumbersome to use, but that’s typical of X-Cart. X-Cart is a good, solid online store solution, but some things in there are just cumbersome as hell. Anyway, I went ahead and picked up a license to Post Affiliate Pro, by QualityUnit. I picked up the software for $99 (pretty good deal) and was able to pay via Paypal (convenient). One of the reasons I chose this software is because it has plug-and-play support for integrating with X-Cart.

The software itself is pretty powerful, but I’m finding that, like X-Cart, it can be a bit cumbersome to use. Installation was easy – pretty typical for a web-based system. But, here is the annoying part:

• Set up after the fact is confusing. Settings are all over the damn place and there is really nothing walking you through it.
• Email and page templates are simplistic and contain multiple spelling/grammar errors
• As of this writing, their company server is frickin’ SLOW! I’m sure its temporary, but its pissing me off when I’m trying to write a blog post about them.
• After install, all emails coming from the system had blank headers. In fact, the email headers were IN the email body.

Despite the annoyances, don’t be hating! The software is still pretty good. Its pretty well documented and the support is definitely there. What’s good about it:

• Good support
• They offer some cool freebies in the members area when you buy a license
• Some helpful video tutorials of how to use the software
• Pretty capable software, once you iron out the annoyances

For today, I’m kind of at a stand-still because of the problem with out-going emails above. I’m running the most recent version of the software and the emails just don’t look right. I’ve brought it up with Support and they said they would try to get a patch up tomorrow. We’ll see what happens.

Is Your Site STOPPING Customers From Buying?

Shortly before my wedding, when I was still working, I attended a web conference put on by Marketing Experiments. They put on these conferences every few weeks and they are always pretty insightful. The subject of that particular conference was how technology can affect your online conversions. In other words, is your website getting in its own way of you making money? Interesting concept. Well, I took some notes as I went and I thought I would share them with you today.

• “Submit” is NOT a good marketing word, so having buttons on your site that simply say “Submit” can be highly ineffective.
• What they did to test this was to do a traditional A/B split test on an e-commerce site. One site was your typical database-enabled site and the other site was completely static. The two sites looked the same, however the second site simply collected the order information and the staff manually ran the orders in order to see how the site responded. What they found was that about 22% of customers could not buy due to some technology-related issue with the site. It was not a matter of programming bugs. Instead, it was problems with the built-in technical and business features that were part of the website. Therefore, the traditionally assumed business rules built into the technology were acting as friction to the buying process.
• The most common problems were (1) invalid credit card where the customer was not clearly presented a solution for getting around it, (2) Potential customer had previously registered for a free newsletter on the same site but could not remember their username and/or password, (3) Potential customer had taken a free trial already and was thus ineligible for the offer without any clear next step for them.
• One potential solution to lost orders is to simply call the customer and see if you can rescue the order through personal contact.

The top 7 solutions to making your site not drop your customers under it’s own weight are:

1. Place an order every now and then in your own store as if you were your own customer. Take note of any and all confusions.
2. Call your own customer service line (or have a “secret shopper” do it).
3. Make use of your “forgot your password” feature. Is it easy to use?
4. Post an 800 number to your store. This can be a rescue line when your customers run into problems with your store.
5. Monitor your conversion funnel and find where people are dropping out.
6. Monitor the credit card errors from your credit processor. Does your site clearly outline the next steps for customers whose cards are denied?
7. Temporarily remove form validation and credit card address verification. Does your conversion improve?

This overall motto here is that we can build in all kinds of great features into an ecommerce store, but sometimes it is those built-in features that can present barriers to your customers. And face it, most customers are not loyal enough to spend much of their time trying to get around any barrier. So, test your site and make any barriers provide clear solutions. Have people test your site (other than you) and you will find where your bottlenecks are.

Exporting USPS Orders From X-Cart to Endicia

I mentioned in the last edition of the WebbyOnline Newsletter that I was giving Endicia a try. Endicia is a service with an accompying program called Dazzle that allows quick usage of the United States Portal Service. It can be used for preparing your business mailings, but I am interested in using it to automate USPS orders placed on my ecommerce store over on PCMech. In the past, we used Stamps.com. Stamps.com is pretty good, but doesn’t offer as much for the money as Endicia. I had cancelled Stamps.com due to our switch to UPS, however we found before too long that the higher cost of UPS scared some customers off. So, now, we make USPS appear first as the shipping option but allow the customer to pay the extra cost of UPS if they want the tracking information. Now that our volume of USPS shipments has gone back up, we’re in need of an automated method of handling shipments.

So, having Dazzle installed on the local computer, we want a quick way to export USPS orders from X-Cart (the store software we use) and import them into Dazzle. Luckily, Dazzle supports printing postage labels directly from an XML file. You need to have the premium service with Endicia to use this service along with Dazzle Designer. You can find the PDF document here that describes the XML fields needed to make this work. With that as your reference, let me give you a big head start here on getting this done for your X-Cart store:

1. Here is the source PHP code for the export. Note that I had to make this code a little more generic than the one I am using because I use my own database abstraction layer, etc. However, this is the logic I am using.
2. In the source code, you may want to modify the $shipfromlocal variable. I used this because I have some products in my store which are not shipped from my office but are shipped from a supplier in California. I obviously don’t want to export those because we don’t ship them. If you ship everything in your store, then you can comment out that variable. If you do, make sure you modify the queries that use it otherwise you will get an SQL error.
3. Also in the source code, you can modify the $customdesc variable. These are the item descriptions used on US Customs forms. Since I did not want these to be the same as the actual product names, I used this array to define names which are more vague for the purposes of customs.
4. Finalize your PHP file and upload into your X-Cart admin directory.
5. Next, log into your X-Cart store and go to the orders.tpl template in the “main” folder of your active skin. In that template, you can add a button next to the order search buttons that will directly call this new PHP file. When you are done, you can click that button and you’ll get an XML export of any new USPS shipments.

This script essentially looks for any orders with USPS specified as the shipping method where the order is in “Processed” status. You may need to modify this to suit your needs, but I couldn’t find anything that did this. Hopefully this can give you a head start.

To use it in Dazzle, you would go to File > Print From > External File. Select the XML file. Dazzle will immediately import the XML file, verify all the addresses, and begin printing postage labels. You will, of course, want to make sure you have any templates set up before doing this. Dazzle just begins printing.

Increase Online Sales by Reducing Customer Anxiety – The Scientific Approach

This afternoon I attended the web seminar mentioned in the previous blog post. The seminar was put on by Marketing Experiments Journal, a very professional outfit that takes the science of online marketing to levels you would normally expect from a college course. The subject of the seminar was how to decrease customer anxiety levels and thus increase the conversion rate of a website. In other words, how do you alleviate any fears a customer might have and get them to click on the “Buy” button? Well, one of the things I am most impressed with from these guys is the degree of statistical analysis they put into these things. Most website owners simply guess at what will work on a website, usually from what THEY would want to see. The thing is that the science of raising website conversion is not a matter of guesswork, and it is certainly a matter of knowing your audience. Let’s get right to the 7 tips which formed the basis of this whole talk. And, for each, I will interject my own view and advice on the matter.

Use testimonials

More specifically, use testimonials which address specific points of customer anxiety. For example, if you know that speed of shipping is a concern, post a testimonial that talks about how fast your shipping was. If support is a concern, post a testimonial which talks about how great your after-sale support is. Really pay attention to the purpose of each testimonial rather than simply posting anything that says good things about you.

Use language and tone in your copy

Pay close attention to your audience and what their state of mind is. Use language on your website that specifically caters to your audience. For example, if your intended audience is a younger one, your typical corporate speak is probably not going to sell anything. The presenter of the seminar also alluded to the importance of matching the tone of the customer and said a future report of their journal would discuss how to make a site actually cater to the particular mood of the customer. Now that will be very interesting, if it is some kind of real-time thing.

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Introduction to Ecommerce

Many people new to websites and/or ecommerce are confused at the in and outs of ecommerce. Even many people who are fairly adept at scripting can set up a store using some popular package such as OSCommerce and then are left stumped by the idea of making it work with a payment gateway to actually collect money and put it into their account. In this article, I will give a brief overview of how the system is set up to collect your money. I will then discuss briefly what to look for in evaluating payment gateways. As usual, I will keep this basic and understandable just as I do with all of my articles.

The Basics – How Funds are Collected

Ecommerce simply refers to the practice of shopping online. From the site owner’s perspective, it entails collecting funds from sales transactions on their website and depositing that money into the bank. In order to collect funds, you need to have a merchant account and a payment gateway (discussed below). Basically, when a person enters their credit card number on a website, the card number and buyer information is sent to a payment gateway. This is done securely. The payment gateway will interface with a payment processor to check availability of funds as well as any other criteria set for accepting transactions. If the funds are available, the payment processor will then deduct the funds. The payment gateway will then report back a successful transaction to the merchant, at which point the merchant’s shopping cart system will respond by displaying a “Thank You” type message to the buyer. Funds will sit until the transaction is settled, which means the funds are collected and deposited to your bank account. Until a transaction is settled, the transaction will not post to your bank account and the corresponding debit will not post to the buyer’s credit card account.

Merchant Accounts

A Merchant Account is a special type of account specifically for online retailers. They are designed to allow non-POS (point of sale) transactions using credit cards, or transactions where you don’t have the person’s credit card in hand. In other words, you don’t have a card swiper. A merchant account is not the same as a bank account. It acts as a go-between between your payment gateway and your bank account, accepting funds from credit cards which are then deposited into your bank.

A merchant account is a relationship based on trust between you and the issuing bank. The bank takes funds from the buyer’s account and deposits into your account. A payment processor takes care of checking for availability of funds and debiting from the credit card account. The bank issuing the merchant account is trusting that you will fulfill your end of the transaction by providing the product or service that the buyer purchased. In case where this does not occur, the buyer can dispute the transaction. This puts the issuing bank on the line because they are then obligated to return the funds to the buyer’s card (a chargeback). Therefore, merchant providers are taking a risk in allowing a merchant to take credit cards under their name.

The organization providing your merchant account will do underwriting on the account when you apply to check your credit. If you have a history of too many chargebacks, you may be denied. In fact, too many chargebacks can result in you, as a merchant, being put on the Terminated Merchant File (also called The Match File). This is a blacklist which will effectively prevent you from ever receiving a merchant account again.

Payment Gateways

A payment gateway serves as the front end to your merchant account, allowing you to manage funds, transactions, and the like. It also serves as a connection between your website and your merchant account. It takes data submitted via your secure order forms and presents it to your processing bank. The processing bank then approves or declines the transaction and sends its response back to the payment gateway. The payment gateway then turns around and provides this data back to the merchant for appropriate handling of the transaction. A payment gateway, then, does not offer services such as merchant accounts or shopping carts, although some of the larger-known gateways do provide such options as value-added services.

Some of the better known payment gateway services are Authorize.Net, Verisign, 2CheckOut.com, Linkpoint, Paysystems.com, Worldpay.com, and MerchantCommerce. Some of the things to look for in a payment gateway are compliance with CISP, SDP and DISC (security initiatives put out by the major credit card companies), virtual terminal (to be able to accept transactions over the phone by typing in their data rather than only relying on your website), fraud prevention, recurring billing, methods of integration, cost and whether they can accept e-checks or not.

Fraud prevention is a big one because, as stated above, too many fraudulent transactions will result in chargebacks which could end up putting you on the Match List and your merchant account closed. Some of the common fraud detection mechanisms are Address Verification (AVS) which compares the customer’s address with that on file with the issuing bank, CVV2 which makes use of the 3-digit security code on the credit card (4-digit on American Express cards).

Most gateways will provide instructions on how to interface with their servers from your web store. Most gateways offer two methods of integration.

One method is to have your site POST a form to the gateway’s server which is pre-populated with your customer’s information. At that point, the customer will provide the customer with the payment form which allows them to type in their credit card number in a secure environment. After processing occurs, the customer is then routed back to your website along with the results of the transaction. Your site again takes over the process. This method is usually easier to set up for site owners and it also means the site owner does not need to purchase their own SSL certificate (allowing secure transactions on the site itself). The tradeoff is that you do need to send your customers off of your website for payment collection. Many gateways offer ways to make the payment form look like your website using customized headers and footers, but the fact remains that the visitors are leaving your website.

The second method is totally invisible to the customer. If the site owner has an SSL certificate, they can set up security on their own site. This means they can host the payment form themselves, totally customizing it to their website. When the customer submits payment, your site will securely and invisibly submit the information to the payment gateway. The payment gateway will do the usual processing and then invisibly send the response back to the merchant’s website, allowing it to respond properly. From the customer’s perspective, they never left your website. And they never did. This type of setup requires an SSL certificate as well as access to the CURL library.

Many gateway providers can get you set up with a merchant account at the same time as the gateway. So, in most cases, you do not need to sign up for them separately.

Conclusion

Hopefully this has given you a brief introduction to how credit card payments are processed on the internet.

Shopping for Shopping Carts

Over at PC Mechanic, I have been, for some time, running an online store which I programmed myself. That store was functional and it served well for some time. Being that I custom-coded the whole thing, I could also make everything work exactly how I wanted it. This was nice. However, the store had a lot of limitations that other pre-packaged solutions already took care of. I could expand the store to do all those things, but it would have taken me quite some time. I’m a busy guy and I don’t like re-inventing the wheel. So, I decided to take the plunge and switch store platforms, moving from my familiar but moody custom store solution to something pre-programmed and supported.

My criteria for the store was:

• Must be PHP/MySQL based
• Must have the features one would expect of a shopping cart platform
• Must be template based so that I can change the layout without modifying the source code

I played around with a few different titles that are on the market. Let me run through the ones I have worked with and give you my impression of them. Click Here To Continue Reading »

Merchant Account or Paypal?

Anybody looking to collect payments off their website finds themselves getting into the field of payment processors. Understand that I am referring to this in the general sense of simply processing credit cards; those who know how this process works know that the credit processor is only one stage of processing a credit card. One of the big considerations here that people end up considering is whether they should go with a more traditional merchant account or can they get away with a private payment system like Paypal.

The transaction fees charged end up being the most primary consideration many merchants consider, however there is a lot more to this decision than that. Merchants need to consider information security, dispute resolution and fraud protection. Not only that, merchants need to consider the overall reputation of their business. After all, some customers might balk at the idea of Paypal being the only payment method available. Click Here To Continue Reading »