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How To Select The Right Shopping Cart For Your Online Business Store

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What Works for the Buyer

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Keeping an online shop is taking your business to a completely new level. Until you had your online store, your clients were walking up to you to buy your products or services. But now, with an online facility, you are offering them a totally different experience. You are stepping forward and taking the river to the thirsty child! It’s important that the quality be worth it.

There are two things that come into play here:

  1. Your existing clients buy online.
  2. New people come across your site and buy.

In both cases, the user experience has to be great.

Once again, there are two important factors here:

  1. You – the seller
  2. Your shopping cart – for the buyer

Both the factors need to appeal to your buyer. So, your website needs to look and feel authentic – in a way, that your buyer doesn’t feel he’s going to be rugged! And your shopping cart has to be user friendly, comfortable and convenient – to make the buying experience a pleasure!

Here’s how you make it happen by selecting the right shopping cart for your online business:

1. The Look

Your shopping cart should match your website layout, ideally. It should look like your cart, for your buyer! And it should be easy to use. Don’t have complicated tabs; settings features that make the buyer suspect your intensions!

2. The Display

It is important for the cart ot display all the information relevant and important to the user. Along with the products selected, the cart should show the exact price clearly. If you are offering discounts, they should be visible to encourage your user to buy.

3. The Compatibility

Server issues are the last thing you want on your online store. The user can not afford a transaction error or a compatibility problem. If you are launching on the virtual space, you need to take care of technical issues. There’s no cashier sitting on the web page giving out the change! Your server and your cart, hence, need to roll together.

4. The Payment

The above discussion brings us to payment and processing questions. The payment processor on your shop online – cart should support credit and debit card transactions. Checking whether the gateways are working right for you is almost mandatory.

5. The Support

There’s always going to be something that goes wrong! God forbid, but some unforeseen circumstances can lead to problems or concerns. How are you equipped to deal with it? This is an important question that should be answered before you plunge into the virtual shopping scenario. Plus, in case there is a problem, how soon can you resolve it? Support is, hence, something that influences the strength on your online store.

There are various open source shopping cart downloads available for you to select from and install on your website. One of the key features to note here is that the premade software you are planning to use should be easy to edit or should have a template format to suit your requirements. The look and feel should go with the perception that your website creates. So, take time out to evaluate the shopping carts and find the one that suits you the best. After all, turning your e-commerce business into a profitable one could be a matter of only a few ‘right’ choices – for you and for your buyer.

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Author’s Bio: Divya Rawat writes about e-commerce and Website Development at SEO Company inetzeal.com. Divya also writes ezinearticles and other resources.

Thank you, Divya!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

6 Tips to Consider When Choosing a Payment Processor

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The Right Tools and the Right Partners

If you want your online business to be successful, you need to choose the right tools for the job and the right partners for your situation. For example, one of the decisions you’re going to need to make early on is how you want to process payments. Unless you’re going to set up a fully-functional merchant account, that means a payment processor.

Payment processors are ideal when you’re first getting started. They give you the flexibility to accept credit card payments without jumping through the technical and financial hoops a merchant account requires. However, if you don’t choose the right payment processor, you’ll wind up with just as many technical hurdles and probably a higher cost, too.

Here are some of the most important things to consider when choosing a payment processor:

1. Start with security.

If you’re going to build a reliable online business over the long haul, you need a secure payment processor. Today’s web customers are security savvy. They’ve been bombarded for years with horror stories of online transactions gone wrong.

There are two areas in which your payment processor needs to address these security needs:

Poor security on the part of your payment processor means more unhappy customers and more charge-backs.

2. Find payment processors that are compatible with your existing system.

Payment processor choice almost always comes at a later stage of development than shopping cart choice. What this means is that you’re limited from the get-go to choosing a payment processor who offers compatible service with your shopping cart.

While payment processor support isn’t usually a consideration when choosing your shopping cart software, it probably should be. Your choice of payment processor directly affects your bottom line. While it shouldn’t be the sole determining factor in cart choice, it should be in the mix.

3. Look at all of the fees.

Different payment processors charge different fees. It’s easy to get caught up in the per-transaction fee, but you need to look at the big picture. A company with a low set-up fee might seem ideal, but after a couple thousand transactions you’re going to have paid way too much in transaction fees.

Try to build a reasonable sales model, and plug in all of the associated costs of each payment processor over the first six months you’re in business in order to get an accurate comparison.

4. Understand support for multiple cards and currencies.

If the vast majority of your website customers are going to be located in the U.S., you don’t need to worry too much about multi-currency support. On the other hand, if you’re promoting a global product or service, you don’t want currency to be a barrier to entry for your customers. Some payment processors are only able to accept U.S. payments, so find out ahead of time what restrictions exist.

The same holds true for different types of credit cards. If you’re dealing in a high-end product or service, you want to make sure that your processor can handle American Express and probably Discover, as well as MasterCard and Visa.

5. Identify special billing needs.

Depending on your business model, you might have some special billing needs. For example, you might be offering a subscription-based service, and so you’ll need to make sure that your payment processor supports Automated Recurring Billing (ARB).
Alternatively, you might want or need the ability to process customer transactions manually via a virtual terminal. This is useful, for example, if you take telephone orders.

6. Don’t get hung up on pay out details.

Sometimes, you’re anxious to get things up and running and get revenue flowing in. More than one online business has rushed into a contract with an online payment processor because they believed they’d get paid quicker.

Over the long haul, this shouldn’t be a concern. Don’t choose a payment processor just because they make weekly (as opposed to monthly) payouts. If your business is running that close to the edge in terms of cash flow, find other ways to keep things moving, such as increasing investment capital.

Your online business is only as strong as the tools you use. Choose a payment processor that creates a smooth, secure transaction for your customers, opens up your products or services to the largest possible market, and lets you maximize profits.

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Image Credit: Some rights reserved by 2Tales
Author’s Bio:
Sara Schoonover is Vice President of Ticket Kick , a California company that helps drivers get red light tickets and other traffic tickets dismissed by helping drivers through the trial by written declaration process.

Thank you, Sara!

Love learning this stuff!

Be irresistible!
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

Klout, My Story & Why Opting Out Was My Only Choice

Filed Under Branding, Successful Blog, Tools | 131 Comments

It’s My Story

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When I was growing up, what we knew about each other wasn’t called data. It was called interaction, stories, and information. It came in the form of experience and shared events, gossip and oral history, and reports and report cards. Not every story told about us was unbiased, accurate, or even true.

In my youngest years, my dad taught me three guiding principles about such stories:

  1. Don’t believe anything you hear and only half of what you see.
  2. Consider the reliability of the source and what the source’s purpose might be.
  3. People can see what you do, not why you did it. Stick to your values and your actions will prove them true.

This Saturday those three guiding principles loudly came back to me. And they came with advice I give every day, “Own your own story. Never give power to tell your story to someone you don’t trust.”

Why Opting Out Was My Only Choice

I had high hopes for Klout when it started, though I thought they were taking something close to impossible in trying to quantify influence. I was interested to see how they would approach it, hoping they might identify something useful toward sorting the gamers and spambots from the people who were making the social web work. Did I think they would identify true influence? Not really. But I thought they might find a stone of solid respect around engagement activity that was worth looking at. It seemed a big quest, but possible.

As months passed, I grew leery. The algorithm that seemed to make sense, started changing violently. The first change rated inactive accounts higher and people I respected lost ground. The second or third major change came with an explanation using the word transparency, but what it transparently said was “We’re changing this to something better and we’re not telling what that is.”

People who had started using their measure, who had trusted it enough to include it in their client work, woke up one morning to find Klout had changed the algorithm without notice and with abandon.

It was at best a naive decision to move without thought to the people who were building on what Klout offered. Those people who were putting Klout scores in their marketing plans and on their resumes were building Klout’s credibility.

Still I stuck with them, because who hasn’t made a bad decision, especially when starting something new? But I watched with new interest in what they would do.

I became more aware that my data, your data, our stories are their product and they seemed to become less aware of the responsibility that might come with a offering product like that.

The Klout perks I was offered — especially the invitation to audition for the X-Factor — were all about my number not me. The additional unannounced tweaks to the algorithm that made it unpredictable and unstable did more damage to a sense of credibility.

Over the past few months, as changes have occurred, I’ve worked with folks at Klout via email, sending screenshots and describing problems that included:

The service response was that of begrudgingly tolerant, but helpful people who lost interest when they couldn’t find a fast fix to their problem — which they saw as my problem. And in each case, the problem was never resolved and my last screenshot went into the ether, even though they had asked me to send it to them.

Saturday’s algorithm change brought this all back to me.
All this, my dad’s guiding principles, and my own words were staring me in the face.

Why I Opted Out of Klout – Three Guiding Principles

Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy to align my goals and share my data with people who share my values and care for my story. I see the value in marketing data to brands who want more information and to brands who want to identify appropriate outreach partners. But when I considered a partnership with Klout and my dad’s three principles this is what I realized.

  1. Principle 1: In the last month, I played with Klout giving out +Ks like they were candy. I didn’t broadcast them. I was checking how the tool worked.
    • I compared my list of people I influence and people under my profile pix to the people who actually gave me +K — thereby saying that I’d influenced them — only 1 person was on both lists. I have never exchanged conversation with the people on the Klout list.
    • I received several achievements for “Raining Klout.” My last badge was for Raining 800 +K.
    • The more +K I gave and the more profiles I visited, the more +K I got for “doing something awesome.” One day I couldn’t get the amount of +K I had to give down to zero for over an hour.
    • As I looked to give only 1 +K to each person, I found that many of the people I admire had already opted out. The puppy on the 404 page and I became good friends. I also found that about half of the profiles I visited who still have a Klout presence have few to no +Ks on them.

    Even at their best, numbers flatten the data. They tell the what but not the why. In Klout’s case, we don’t even know the what and the what keeps changing.
    As my dad said, “Don’t believe anything you hear and believe only half of what you see.”

  2. Principle 2: The business model seems to be collecting data, identifying influencers in topical areas, and selling access to them via Klout perks. That model is like selling real estate where you and I are the houses. In their model, we aren’t the customers because we “get” the product for free. The people who pay the bills are the brands who read our profiles and “buy our stories” based on what they see. To make the model work well and be profitable, Klout needs “influencers” across verticals (real or make believe) that attract brands who want to reach them.

    When I looked at the story that my profile was telling, I found this.

    • Like most of us, my topic list included things I only mentioned once
    • My topic list didn’t include the name of my own event — SOBCon — though I tweet about it often and had it as a Klout list, a Twitter list, and admin a Facebook page by that name.
    • Others are considered experts about SOBCon, but my partner and I who founded the event are not.
    • All but one of the people listed as those I influence have never exchanged a word with me.
    • The latest label they gave me was Broadcaster.

    It sure seems the concern was not about telling a reliably true story. Consider the reliability of the source and what the source’s purpose might be.

  3. Principle 3: My values are these:
    • Loyalty — an honor for trust relationships with all of the people who help our businesses growth. Trust means that I can believe that you hold my best interests high.
    • Brilliant decisiveness — the ability to see a solid business decision and to understand how decision we make impact the people who help our businesses thrive.
    • Generosity of Spirit — the humanity to find solutions that serve all of the people who help us thrive as well as our own business growth.
    • A Playfully Responsible Sense of Humor — the room for fun and meaning in aligning our goals to build something bigger than ourselves.
    • Creativity — the expansive approach that allows everyone who helps our businesses thrive to have a “Wow! I wish I’d thought of that!” idea.

    All of my work has these values. All of the people I work with — employees, customers, partners, vendors, clients, and sponsors are the outstanding examples of the same values in business and in life. As a friend who works for an international PR firm said recently, “Klout has become the outreach for lazy companies — those who don’t want to build relationships.”
    I’ve always been about relationships.
    People can see what you do but not why you did it. Stick to your values and your actions will prove them true.

In the process of opting out, I was faced with a list of options that asked why. I was looking for one that said “Changes in the algorithm” or “Too many changes.” I found it telling that the only choice I found that might describe my reason was “I don’t like my Klout Score.” That, of course, implies something that could be all about my ego and not in the least about their product.

The disclaimers went on to tell me that it might take a few days to totally remove my data and to be sure I should go to every network and revoke access myself. They also said should I decide to opt back in I needed to know it would 90 days for me to get my influence back.

I suppose the lawyers wrote those, but they read like softly worded threats. … which sealed the deal for me.
I don’t recall seeing a statement of regret … something that said, “we’re sorry to see you opt out.”

Never give power to tell your story to someone you don’t trust.
If I listen to my dad, my values, and my own advice, opting out was my only choice.

I hope Klout becomes what they want to be and if, one future day, our values align, I’ll be back.

Be irresistible … to yourself first.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

Cool Tool Review: Buffer – Get More Done on Twitter with 1 Simple App

Filed Under Successful Blog, Tools | 5 Comments

A Guest Post by Leo Widrich

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While writing this headline, I was a bit worried. Getting things “done” on Twitter can easily be misunderstood. After all Twitter is a place to build connections and meet with great new people. Optimizing things on Twitter has to be done with particular care I think.

Let me therefore introduce you to Buffer – a new Twitter App I have been using a lot recently which does two very important things for me:

How does Buffer work?

The core functionality of Buffer (http://bufferapp.com) is super simple. All you do is you throw a few tweets in your Buffer and the App then schedules these Tweets for you throughout the day. That’s it.

How will I get more done?

The great thing about Buffer is that you can add lots of tweets in at one point without fiddling with individual scheduling. Also you won’t ever overwhelm your followers with too many tweets in a row.

The way I use it is like this. As Buffer comes with a browser extension (Chrome, Safari, Firefox), you can add tweets to your Buffer from any page you are on.

On top of this you can even add tweets from inside Google Reader, which is a big winner for me. Whenever I like an article I hit the Buffer icon and add it to my Buffer. Here is how this looks with one of Liz’s posts:

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Add tweets from anywhere on the web.

Make your Tweets truly unique

Now, there is even one more functionality I want to mention here, which allows you to make your tweets really stand out from the rest.

Whenever you read an article and find a good line, just highlight the text and then hit the Buffer icon, here is what happens:

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Make your tweets unique

Timing of your Tweets

By default Buffer will send out your tweets well spaced out over the day, so you will never have too many tweets sent in a row, flooding your followers with tweets.

Of course you can always go back to your home account, click “settings” and adjust the timing to your needs. You can add more daily tweeting time slots or decrease them. Oh and as of recently there is also a “Tweet Now” function.

Add tweets to your Buffer from your mobile

What also comes in very handy is the option to add Tweets to your Buffer from your mobile. Whilst browsing an article you can simply hit the “mail link to page” or similar button.

Then you add in add@to.bufferapp.com and voila you have one more tweet scheduled where the link is automatically shortened and the title is in the page:

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Caption: Add to Buffer from your Mobile

Wrap Up

Even though Buffer is such a simple tool, it helps me a great deal to stay on top of Twitter. I can add tweets from anywhere with just one click and will make sure to add all the great articles I am coming across each and every day.

I have also started to use the mobile function whilst waiting in a queue or whilst sitting on the Bus and it is a great time filler, which actually gives me some results

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I hope you give Buffer a go. Would love to hear your views about it below.

Leo Widrich writes Tips for Twitter on his blog. You can visit his website, Bufferapp, or find him on Twitter as @leowid.

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Thanks, Leo, for checking out bufferapp.com for us!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

Cool Tool Review: Proxlet – Your Rescue for Twitterchats

Filed Under Business Life, Content, Guest Writer, Successful Blog, Tools, Trends | 1 Comment

A Guest Post by Leo Widrich

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Last Sunday was my first time to participate in #blogchat a weekly held Twitterchat and boy was it an amazing experience conversing with @lizstrauss and @mackcollier. It boasts great personalities each week helping you to answer any Social Media and blogging related questions.

For long I was quite reluctant to join in Twitterchats as I felt I would overwhelm my followers for the time the chat was going on with my tweets.

Fortunately I finally found a solution I can offer, since staying away from this massive amount of great insights at #blogchat is definitely not an option.

It is a nifty Twitter App called Proxlet.

proxlet

What does Proxlet do?

Facebook has a very useful “Hide this post” option integrated. Proxlet gives you this exact same thing, only for Twitter.

Using proxlet, you can temporarily hide certain things on Twitter which clutter your timeline or aren’t currently the core thing of your interest.

How to best use it?

Proxlet fortunately takes the “hide this” feature a step further and allows you to explain in a very detailed manner which area of tweets you want to block.

What is the best part of Proxlet?

The best part of proxlet is that it works not only at twitter.com, but can also be used for your favourite Twitter clients such as Twitter for Iphone, Tweetdeck and others.

Someone approached me that he couldn’t take the load of my #blogchat tweets and Proxlet turned out to be a superb solution for both of us. He could continue following me, yet was freed of those unwanted tweets in a short space of time.

What are your thoughts on Proxlet (http://proxlet.com) ? Have you had a similar problem yourself before too? Please let me know below.

Leo Widrich writes Tips for Twitter on his blog. You can visit his website, Bufferapp, or find him on Twitter as @leowid.

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Thanks, Leo, for checking out proxlet for us!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.
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