One of the most common problems that trips up aspiring e-commerce store owners is the issue of shipping. When I’m helping a client plan their e-commerce project, one of the first questions I like to ask is: “How do you plan on getting your products into the hands of your customers?”

About half the time, I discover that they haven’t given the subject any thought at all. It doesn’t surprise me. There are so many things to consider and so many issues to address with the start-up of a new online store, that I can’t really blame folks for not going into too much detail in planning for something that may initially appear “automatic” to them.

The e-commerce engine that NetSource uses for the majority of our online storefronts is Early Impact’s ProductCart. It’s a very robust, full-featured system that includes integration capable of acquiring accurate, ‘live’ shipping cost quotes from the major carriers in North America (UPS, FedEx, US Postal Service and Canada Post).

The process of generating those live shipping quotes is an automated process — but in order to achieve that automation, some critical information has to be provided to the system by the store owner.

What’s the single, most critical piece of information the automated shipping modules require? Product weights. All of the shipping calculations are weight-based, with some modifications available for over-sized packages and for orders that require multiple packages in the same shipment. E-commerce owners who either don’t have, or cannot acquire, product weights simply can’t take advantage of the various automated shipping calculators.

In addition, the store owner will need to acquire a shippers’ account AND an online account with the shipping provider involved. Is the website an extension of a bricks-and-mortar business that already uses a standard carrier for shipping? That helps to an extent, but a specialized ‘online tools’ account generally still has to be established.

As developers, in order to integrate the shipping tools into your website, we’ll need your shipping account information from the carrier(s) you intend to use. If you plan on using either the US Postal Service or Canada Post, you’ll have to set up online shipping accounts with those services and forward the information to us.

And remember: The most important piece of information the shipping services need is the weight of all the products in the store. Without those product weights, automated shipping quotes won’t work.

E-commerce stores that either will use a drop-shipping service or will require freight shipping for heavier items are a bit more complicated and usually require some sort of custom shipping solution. That doesn’t necessarily mean the shipping setup will cost an arm and leg — but it does mean some detailed planning is required while the website project is still in its earliest stages.

Here are some questions to ask yourself in order to get started. If you’re not sure of the answers, that’s OK. Your project consultant can help you out.

• Do you currently ship products? If so, do you already have an online account with your shipping provider? You can use one or more carriers to ship products to your online customers, but your developers will need your shipping account information in order to automate shipping calculations.
• Do you have (or can you get) weight information for your products? Online shipping costs are typically calculated based on total weight.  In order to get an accurate cost from the USPS (or other carrier), and then pass that charge along to your customer, you’ll need accurate weights. Otherwise you’re likely to charge too much or too little for shipping costs.
• If you don’t plan to ship by weight, do you have a shipping table? For instance, some online retailers charge a flat rate for the first item and an additional flat rate for each additional item.  Or some retailers charge by total purchase so that shipping might be $6.95 for purchases up to $75, $7.95 for purchases between $75 and $100, and so on. This approach tends to work the best for retailers who sell products that are mostly the same size and weight.
• Does it make sense to offer free shipping? Many retailers encourage large orders by offering free shipping over a certain purchase amount like $100.
• Do you have over-sized products that will require special handling and charges?
• Do you have products that require multiple packages? For instance, perhaps you always package and mail fragile teacups separately, no matter what else a customer has ordered with it.
• Will your online shop be using drop-ship services? Will you be using more than one drop-ship location?
• Will you be shipping products that require freight shipping?

Testing your website pages, especially landing pages and sales pages, is one of the simplest things you can do to tweak your web site and attain higher conversions. In addition, you can learn more about content creation, as well as your customers’ interests, through testing than by any other method.

Back in the days of mail order marketing, testing sales letters and catalogs gathered more useful information about new ideas than most other methods of research. In the Internet era, testing has become an order of magnitude less expensive – and can deliver data that’s even more statistically reliable. Using a method called “split testing” or “A/B testing”, you can serve up different versions of a single page to segments of your website visitors to see on which page they spend more time,  fill out the form, click on the “more info” button, download a file, or more. And through the use of affordable testing software and statistics packages, you can get full reports and analyses.

What Should You Test…?
You can test whole-page concepts to find out what emotional triggers your market responds to. Simply test two or three versions of your sales page that each focus on a separate theme or idea about your product or service. Perhaps one focuses on price and value, while another emphasizes customer service and reliability.  The page that pulls the most conversions will give you the answers you are looking for.

What should you test? The simple answer is: Everything.  Everything on your pages and in your sales message contributes to your conversion rate. This includes your headline, opening paragraphs, body copy, your offer, post scripts, background color, font, font colors, images and every imaginable component of your page in between.

Volumes of information have been written about what to test and how to test your web pages. This work is extensive, so when you begin to test, I suggest you concentrate your first efforts on the three areas that have been shown to have the most impact on your sales pages: the headline, the first few opening paragraphs, and your offer. Today, I’ll focus on the easiest testing ’subject’: Your site’s headlines.

Website Headline Testing
Headlines can have the most impact on your conversion rate and response of these three above mentioned components. A number of user studies indicate that nearly three-quarters of your site visitors will never read past your headlines – unless you make those headlines appealing and relevant. It doesn’t matter how wonderfully you may have written the rest of your sales page – if the headline doesn’t do its job of getting people to read on, your entire website will be a failure.

In order for your headlines to be effective, you have to discover the biggest core desires within your market. The best headline tests are based around the different motivations that drive people to become interested in your products or services.

Testing different headlines around different concepts will tell you which one is more appealing to your target audience. Once you have the key concepts and motivations tested and you have discovered which one works best, you then go to work tweaking your headline in more persuasive ways.

Test as many headlines as you can think up for your web page. In fact, you should never stop testing different headlines on your page. A simple 10% increase in your conversions could result in hundreds or thousands of dollars more in business sales. Testing your headlines could bring an increase of 50%, 100%, or even 200% or more in the response to your online message.

If you have an online business, this article can help you kick-start the year with straightforward and affordable suggestions for getting your business, message and products out there in front of potential customers. I highly recommend it.

10 Things You Can Do to Make Your Online Business Money
by Susan L. Reid

After putting in place a well-developed marketing plan and generating traffic to your landing page or website, the next step is to turn your online prospects into customers. Improving your online conversion rate is a two-part process.

Improve targeted traffic

Before you make changes to the conversion tools on your website or landing page, it’s important to improve the quality and/or relevance of your in-bound traffic. Attracting the right people to your website is critical to increasing conversions at a lower cost. Begin by evaluating your lead sources and determine the alignment of your prospects with your product.

You can determine what traffic is best aligned with your products and services by carefully analyzing your Google Adwords campaigns. With the proper conversion tracking in place, it’s easy to determine which keywords are generating sales (as opposed to generating clicks alone). Focus on expanding your top converting keywords and driving truly interested prospects to your landing pages.

Take advantage of conversion tools

Once you’ve begun to attract the right prospects, you need to focus on converting them. The fastest way to improve conversion is through testing various landing pages. If you have the technology to rotate landing pages (a process we call “split testing”), then you can learn quickly what page has the highest conversion rate. If you are limited to testing one page at a time, run each landing page for a week and measure the results. Your data won’t be as accurate but it can certainly point you in the right direction.

Another method for improving on-site conversions is to use an automated touch program. With this technique, you can use an auto-responder that gives site visitors an opportunity to reconnect with your business.

One example would be an abandoned shopping cart campaign. If users begin the purchase process (and have given you their email) but fail to complete the process, an auto-responder can be used to send an email message within minutes or hours, inviting them back to complete the purchase – perhaps with a discount or other incentive. You can use email best practices to enhance conversion, and touch visitors numerous times to move them through the purchase decision process.

In addition to targeting visitors who have started a purchase, you can also use an auto-responder for visitors who sign up to receive valuable information from your website. Perhaps they sign up for your newsletter, free lessons, or a whitepaper. Once a person has registered, the auto responder goes to work, sending appropriate emails at set intervals. The result is a communications channel that was previously unavailable to you. Work on improving conversion of your automated touch program by testing both the content and the timing of messages.

By using the techniques of better targeting, improving landing page conversion rates, and using auto-responders you can significantly enhance the performance of your online marketing campaigns. Plan your programs carefully, measure performance and make appropriate adjustments. Over time, your results just might surprise you.

The folks at Country Meats had a problem.

The Ocala-based producer of smoked-meat snack sticks had recently added to their marketing reach by starting to take orders from their fund-raising customers through an online order form. Unfortunately, they were facing an issue commonly encountered by many businesses on their initial entry into the world of e-commerce: Accurate order fulfillment.

Their online order form also sometimes proved a challenge for site vistiors to use. Country Meats required orders to be placed in case quantities – but the online form didn’t have any method in place to verify quantity or to prevent the accidental placement of ‘odd lot’ orders.

On top of that, County Meat’s staff depended upon the order form’s output for order fulfillment – and the e-mails generated by the form were a bit of a disorganized jumble. Problems with deciphering e-mails generated by the form were causing lost time in processing orders and other difficulties with insuring each order was correctly packed.

“If the customer ordered a lot of items, the old order form created a lot of wasted space and could be very confusing,” Country Meats’ Jeremy Geatches says of the problem. “It took more time for our shipping department to figure it out and it was easier to make mistakes.”

So they turned to NetSource Technologies for help.

Fortunately, vexing problems don’t always require expensive solutions. NetSource’s experienced development team was able to correct the issue with only a few hours of coding work to create a custom e-mail form processor for County Meats’ order page.

The custom processor enforces a case-quantity business logic for all orders. Country Meats’ customers can now quickly mix-and-match the products for each case, and the online order form provides easily-understood prompts when an order doesn’t meet case-quantity requirements.

The form also provides a clear, HTML-formatted output that’s closely patterned after County Meats’ standard off-line order form – so their staff no longer wrestles with fulfillment details when they begin to pack each order.

“The new form has helped a lot with the accuracy of our orders,” Geatches says. “And the new form gives our customers more options. Now it’s easier for them to order more of what they want.”

When you launch a new E-commerce web site above all else there is one thing you need to be ready to face: Customers.

That might sound like a “Duh-uh” comment, but not every E-commerce operator is as prepared as they should be when their new store goes online and the first order (or ten or fifty orders) appears in their control panel. Turning those early orders into happy customers sometimes proves an unexpected challenge for even experienced retail business people.

Preparing a new online store for operation demands a lot of attention. If you’re not organized in advance, small details can be left undone. And it only takes a couple of small details to add up to a bigger problem.

Orders aren’t secrets

Does everyone in your organization who you plan to have ‘in the loop’ have the appropriate access to your store’s control panel? For single-person operations it’s not a big deal, but in a larger business all of the people involved need to be able to see their part of the puzzle. For general site security, it’s not a good idea to distribute the main administrative login credentials to everybody – so the people who will be responsible for processing and fulfilling orders (and any other store-related functions) need to have separate login accounts that allow them access only to the functions they need.

A quick note: If third-party sources like drop-shippers or fulfillment services are critical to your operation, DO NOT depend entirely upon store-generated e-mails to deliver order information to them. If possible, they should have their own console access to the information they need and a protocol in place for regular account service. If that can’t be arranged, you should at the very least follow up by phone call to check on a summary of all orders placed each day.

Plan for the best

Are the items you have for sale actually ready to be sold? Do you (or your fulfillment partner) have your products in stock and do you have procedures in place for shipping? You and your staff need to be prepared for orders, just like a retail business has to be ready when the first customer walks through the door.

Take a moment to think about what would happen if you got 100 orders on your first day online. You’re tempted to think “that would be a great problem to have” – but I’ll point out that it IS a problem if you’re not prepared. If you can’t process orders accurately and ship products quickly, customer enthusiasm (and orders) might drain away before you know it – and then you’ll have a long haul to regain their confidence.

Get coordinated

Ideally, your site’s E-commerce engine will have features designed to interact with the systems you use for inventory management and customer care. Very expensive solutions may have some of these systems built in, but that’s atypical. E-commerce programmers tend to concentrate on E-commerce, and build in the common data interfaces that you need to exchange information with ‘off line’ programs dedicated to inventory, bookkeeping and marketing.

If you run a retail business in addition to an E-commerce site, then coordinating customer information becomes a more critical process. Centralizing contact information and purchase histories can be very helpful in the development of successful online marketing campaigns.

I just learned about a great new website that recently launched but already has a wealth of collected expert knowledge – http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/.  Social Media Examiner is a free online magazine with articles and videos to help businesses take advantage of social media tools to generate sales and leads.

Enjoy! And feel free to comment below and add links to specific articles there that you find helpful.

Regardless of what your business does, what services you provide or what you want to sell through E-commerce, all business web sites have at least one common need: They all need to attract visitors in order to succeed.

Obviously, volumes upon volumes of information have been produced on various tips, tricks and tactics for building both search engine rankings and site traffic. Often overlooked in the middle of that huge data dump, however, are three simple things you can do to help build your site’s search recognition and drive more visitors to your site.

(A caveat: Don’t conflate ’simple’ with ‘easy’. Nothing below requires any sort of specialized technical knowledge, but they all require a bit of elbow grease on your part. Remember one of my main themes: For online business, there’s no such thing as an Easy Button.)

1. Links from directories. Most search engines place a fairly high value on links from directory sites, primarily because directories are generally edited and maintained by real, live humans. As a result, the categories and summary information concerning directory-listed sites are generally accurate and considered high-quality data.

Directory links, however, are frequently overlooked as a valuable component in search engine strategies – even by professional site developers. In a way, I suppose, that’s understandable. Generating directory listings can require either patience or money – sometimes both.

Submissions to directories like DMOZ.org are free, but they can take time because the directory listings are reviewed by volunteer editors who maintain the integrity of the category listings. Other popular directories like Yahoo! Directory and Business.com are paid directories, typically with an annual fee to maintain inclusion in the listings.

Are paid directories worth the expense? In moderation, probably. Some of the directories cater to specialized interests, which may be valuable to you if it’s a market your business targets. The better-known general directories are high page-ranks sites with heavy saturation in the search engines – both of which are elements that can help boost your site’s search score.

Directories are too numerous for me to list here, but a good place to start researching them can be found at Strongestlinks.com.

2. Online press releases. There are a number of sites that specialize in publishing press releases in various ‘feed’ formats. When you first take a close look at the process, it might not make much sense. How many people scroll through all of the posts on a press release site, looking for information about shopping sites or local businesses?

Fortunately, that’s not how they work. By publishing their press releases in easy-to-use web formats, these services help feed the press releases you write into the search engines. Some of them are picked up by so-called ‘content aggregators’, but the real point is to get press releases about their clients – you, in this case – stuffed into the search engines where they can be found.

You can find a number of press release ‘tutorials’ if you take the trouble to look. In a nutshell, in order to have maximum impact, your press releases need to be packed with text that uses the keyword phrases your potential customers will be searching for. And don’t forget to include links back to your website and your business’ contact information in each release.

3. The ‘blogsosphere’. This tip assumes that you have a blog somewhere on your web site. (You DO have a blog hosted on your domain, don’t you?) Your web site’s blog is just the starting point, though. A broader participation in the ‘blogosphere’ is what will start to boost your search rankings and bring more traffic to your site.

This involves finding other blogs that may reach your target market and actively partcipating on them by posting relevant comments, joining into discussions and linking to interesting posts on your own blog. This helps other bloggers – and other blog readers – find your blog (and the rest of your business web site that accompanies it). If you’re clever enough, or simply diligent enough, your blog can be a great tool for attracting qualified visitors to your web site.

Yep, that is my predicition.

In 2009, while our economy continues to slug along, those that do a good job of marketing themselves online stand to have a very good year. We’ve all probably heard stories of how a lot of people became rich during the Great Depression – because it is true. Those that keep their eye on the ball when everyone else is distracted will continue to hit home runs – it won’t be as easy as it was before, but it will still happen.

Markets are shifting right now. While mainstream for quite some time now, the internet is now starting to subplant other channels of distribution and marketing. Newspapers are struggling, some either are, or are planning to go to internet-only distribution. Video, which had the exclusivity of TV delivery, is now more popular than ever online (even traditional TV’s might be hooked up to a PC or Apple TV), Google searches are replacing Yellow Page look-ups, users are carrying around internet-enabled cell phones loaded with mobile apps that connect to their online accounts, businesses are advertising online with pay-per-click advertising. While lower than before, the spikes in gas prices over the last few years has more people getting used to the idea of staying at home where they can spend more time surfing the web. A new generation is growing up not knowing of a world prior to high-speed internet. Social networking is redefining public relations for major companies and public figures.

There is a fundamental shift that is taking place – while we thought we have already seen the impact of the internet on our lives, we are now realizing that the last 10 years was just a slightly advanced stage in it’s infancy. A major growth spurt is coming in 2009 and a lot of companies that thought they had a “web presence” are going to get left behind, while a lot of companies that are “plugged in” to the coming changes will reap great rewards.

So, what are the nutshell nuggets of knowledge to pull from all this?

First you can’t be just a “web presence”. You can’t be “static” online. You can’t think of a website as the beginning and end of your online efforts. Sure, it has worked in the past, and in many cases working still. But at some point it no longer will.

Second, change the way you think about the internet – almost consider it a parallel universe. 20 years ago, they called the concept “virtual reality”. It made a lot of buzz but died down as the real world realities of the internet’s limitations at the time softened our vision of this “cyber-space”. Now we are seeing virtual reality slowly coming about. Sure, it’s not a funny headset and Tron-like graphics, but the internet is becoming another place that we exist, or more importantly, where your customer’s exist. They are not just hopping online to do a quick search with a keyword phrase to find your product or service and then signing off, they are living much of their life there. So, you will need to be “plugged in” to where they are, what they’re doing and how to get their attention.

We are already seeing this shift in our business. We are not a website development firm anymore, despite my old-habits-die-hard habit of calling us that. We are actually an interactive agency now. Developing the site for your web presence is no longer the beginning and end of our involvement. Throughout 2009 we will be asked to build the “main” site, setup the blogs, create sub-sites, recommend lead tracking solutions, secure advertising, handle marketing campaigns, develop a social media strategy, manage company brands, oversee public relations, broadcast online call-in radio shows, produce video, write copy, record podcasts, program applications, create training materials, research keywords and provide consultation services.

By being prepared for changes in 2009 as the internet leaves behind it’s infancy, you can be a part of it’s growth spurt.

How important to the long-term success of your E-commerce site is your choice of hosting service? Pause for a moment and consider: Without reliable and secure web hosting, you don’t have an E-commerce site in the first place.

I touched briefly on the topic of web hosting in my previous post. Today I’ll take a bit deeper look at hosting and try to explain what makes your choice of hosting service such a mission-critical decision.

Uptime and much, much more

The standard talking points of uptime and cost aren’t entirely unimportant to your site’s hosting equation, obviously. Server uptime is a central consideration – but technology has progressed to the point that almost any service that manages to stay in business can claim impressive uptime statistics. Even more important to an E-commerce operation is the host’s error rate and error handling process. E-commerce stores seldom ‘crash’ these days – but if they’re improperly (or inattentively) hosted, they may throw critical errors that prevent your customers from completing their transactions. An experienced E-commerce host should have a very low error rate, and should also have a process in place for flagging errors when they do occur so that their technical staff can quickly run them down and correct them.

The simplest way to avoid a slew of technical issues is to select a service that has experience in hosting other stores that run the same E-commerce engine as yours. That insures that their hosting supports both your store’s chosen development language (such as ASP or PHP) and any specific server-side components that your E-commerce engine may require.

It’s a mistake that’s more common than you may think. I am frequently contacted by customers AFTER they have signed up for some sort of hosting account – and more often than not, it’s a hosting account that won’t support much in the way of E-commerce and doesn’t offer advanced security features. Essentially, they’ve wasted their money because the hosting they’ve paid for won’t work for their business.

Be careful out there

Security is an equally important concern. Ideally, your hosting company will be in compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard – a security protocol that establishes hosting requirements for network security mechanisms, data handling and storage and the handling of security certificates and encryption. All but the very smallest E-commerce stores should also be hosted in an environment that maintains store data on a separate database server that is isolated from the actual ‘web’ server that is open to traffic from the Internet. This arrangement makes it very difficult for any type of security intrusion to gain access to your customer information or any other sensitive business information that may reside in your store’s databases.

[A quick side note: You should NEVER maintain customer credit-card information or other sensitive personal data (like Social Security numbers) in your store's databases. Even in the most secure hosting environment this is an enormous financial liability for your business, and it's a business practice that needlessly exposes your customers to identity theft and/or financial fraud. In fact, hosting companies that strictly adhere to the requirements of the PCIDSS won't allow retention of such sensitive information on their servers.]

The personal touch

Finally, one of the biggest differences between ‘budget’ hosting and a full-service hosting company is the level of support that they provide. Your E-commerce site is a money-making operation, and you should select a host that treats your company’s bottom line as a priority. With a good hosting partner you shouldn’t need a lot of technical intervention, but when you do you should be able to contact a technician personally in order to get your questions resolved. A good E-commerce hosting partner will also have procedures in place to monitor your site for errors and correct them quickly when they occur.

More than anything else, when you pay for a ‘premium’ hosting partner most of what you’re paying for is that personal level of service. Since the difference in cost between budget and full-service hosting is frequently less than $60-$70 a month, that seems like sort of a business no-brainer to me.