As part of my free mini course on how to start an online store, I recommend 2 different credit processing services, Paypal Website Payments Pro and Merchant Plus which is an Authorize.net provider.

But the problem with recommending more than one option is that you still have to make a choice. And making the right decision largely depends on the nature of your business and the volume of payments that your shop processes.

The reason I decided to recommend more than one option is because both services have their pros and cons which I’m going to talk about in this article today. I’ve used both credit card processing solutions before so I’ll give you my breakdown and let you make the call.
Which One Is Cheaper?
The first and foremost criteria that most people use to select a credit card processor is price. But when it comes to credit card processing, …

When I was a kid, one of my favorite fables was “The Tortoise and The Hare”. But even though I loved this story growing up, I never had any respect for the tortoise because the way he won the race just wasn’t that sexy. So what if he beat the hare this one time? As far as I was concerned, the tortoise’s win was just a big fluke. What do you think would happen if they came out with the sequel “The Hare Strikes Back”? Who do you think would win the second time around?

The problem with the tortoise is that no one wants to be known as the slow and steady guy. Human nature dictates it’s infinitely more appealing to be quick and speedy rather than slow and steady which is why most people are impatient and expect fast results when they …

This article is a followup to a previous post I wrote about how we use analytics tracking to improve our online store. Whereas the last article mainly dealt with the out of the box and default features of Google Analytics, I will now delve even deeper and discuss some of the more advanced metrics that we track.

Now when I say advanced, I’m referring to the features of Google Analytics that require a little bit of extra coding and are not implemented out of the box for most shopping carts.

Because every store is different, there’s always going to be certain aspects of your business that require custom tracking data that is completely unique to your situation.

For example, let’s say you want to track customer behavior after someone has signed up for your newsletter. This can’t be done out of the box with the standard analytics snippet …