This past week I read an article on TechCrunch about how retailers weren’t ready for iPad shoppers this past holiday weekend. Now I don’t know much about the author or her ecommerce background, but I strongly disagreed with the post.

The main premise was that most of the top online retailers missed out on a lot of sales because they neglected to have an iPad app or an iPad optimized site ready for holiday shopping.

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First of all when I go shopping on my iPad, the last thing I want to do is to have to download an app in order to shop efficiently. The iPad screen is large enough such that browsing full blown sites is comfortable for most online stores.

The only thing that would be a detriment to online shopping on an iPad would be if the site used flash, which most sites already …

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, …

Ever since I posted my article on Why Etsy Stores Are At A Disadvantage Compared To Online Stores That Own Their Domain, I’ve been meaning to show everyone how easy it is to install a free open source shopping cart.

These days, there are many open source shopping carts out there that are completely free and very feature rich.

You simply have to sign up for a web host, download and install the free shopping cart and you are almost ready to go.

So today, I thought that I’d give a mini tutorial on how to install Open Cart which is one of the open source shopping carts I recommend in my free 6 day mini course on how to create a niche online store.

Open Cart is an incredible shopping cart that is easy to use and has an elegant back end interface with which to manage your orders and products. Did …

Every year, my wife and I hire a professional photographer to take pictures of the kids and the family. While this is not cheap, it’s something we like to do because the kids are growing up so fast and we want to have photos for every stage of their development.

What’s funny is that hiring a photographer is only a small portion of the overall cost. Buying all new matching outfits for the kids and my wife is what tears a hole in my pocketbook and gives me heartburn.

For all of you who know me well, I’m pretty cheap and seeing the clothing costs for these photo shoots makes me want to faint. In fact, I don’t even bother checking the credit card bills during this time because I’m that terrified.

The other day, my wife was shopping online at a kids clothing “boutique” and probably spent a …

Even though we’ve been running our online store with the same basic layout for a few years now, I’m continually amazed by how often I find problems with our website and how often I have to make subtle tweaks to improve conversions. I’ve also come to the realization that I’m pretty lousy at predicting human behavior and anticipating how customers will interact with our user interface.

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In any case, the issues that I’m about to describe aren’t necessarily “bugs” per se but website usability issues that we discovered from talking to our customers directly.

9 times out of 10, a customer gets confused navigating through our online store because I’ve made certain assumptions about the way a user should interact with our site. I’ve made certain assumptions about how clear the instructions are written and how tech savvy the internet user is.

And you know what? I’ve found …

This past month, I’ve been asked to critique several online store websites (click here to read some of my past online store writeups). These days, I rarely have time to take a look at random reader’s websites simply because I’m swamped with other things and taking care of little people aged 3 and below. Also, since I run an ecommerce course, I reserve most of my non-family time for my students.

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But I felt compelled to respond to these review requests because all of them had the same or similar mistakes.

And when 4 consecutive websites have the same problem, I feel compelled to write about it. Here were the problems that I found with the stores I looked at this past month.
No Value Proposition
Whenever I land on an unknown store while surfing the web, especially a site where I might be spending some …

My daughter is now 3 years old and as she continues to grow and mature, it’s becoming much easier for the two of us to communicate with one other. Finally, she can put together simple sentences and convey what she wants and needs using words instead of grunting or crying.

The problem is that she’s also getting smarter and harder to negotiate with. Once she wants something, she’s tends to have a one track mind.

Daughter: Daddy, can I play with your phone?
Me: Not right now my love
Daughter: Can I see your phone? Can I see your phone? Can I see your phone?
Me: I said not right now
Daughter: I picked up my toys off the floor…
Me: Mommy made you do that so that doesn’t count
Daughter: Can I see your phone? Can I see your phone? Can I see your phone? Please Daddy?
Me: AHHH!!! …

Over this past weekend, I was chatting with a friend of mine about the many benefits of using Skype for video conferencing. And after talking with her at length, she seemed genuinely excited so I recommended a webcam for her to buy so she could chat online with her parents in India.

Now this friend of mine is not exactly the most tech savvy person in the world. In fact, she barely knows how to use a computer let alone shop online. So, I did most of the research for her, found a great deal on the Logitech Webcam Pro and forwarded the information to her on where to buy it. I even emailed her a direct link to the product page thinking that was good enough.

However, the next day I got another call from her because she couldn’t figure out how to make the purchase online. …

This past weekend, I was casually glancing at my Google Analytics numbers when I noticed a statistic that surprised me. Almost 3 percent of our revenues last month came from customers making purchases on their mobile devices. While 3 percent doesn’t sound like a huge percentage, this is pretty shocking to me on several fronts.

First of all, I never used to imagine anyone shopping or making purchases on such a tiny screen. Second, up until this point in time I hadn’t given mobile shopping a second thought because of my personal biases. Personally, I would never use my phone to buy anything online and I had assumed no one else would either given today’s technology.

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While mobile users only represent about 5% of the overall traffic to my store, this number is clearly trending higher. In fact at this exact same point …

This is a guest post by Michael Martine. Michael runs Remarkablogger.com, where he helps business owners increase sales through blog marketing. He also offers blog consulting and coaching so check out his website.

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You’ve no doubt heard the hype that a blog is the way to for marketing (along with its good friend social media). And it’s true that blogs are excellent marketing channels for many online businesses. But is that true for online stores? Are blogs worth it? Can they boost sales?

They can indeed. Here are five ways a blog can boost sales for your ecommerce store.
1. Search engine optimization to get found
Shopping carts have become much more savvy about SEO in recent years, but blog SEO is outstanding. If you’re using WordPress for your blog with a couple choice plugins and the right theme framework, your blog’s SEO will be killer.

In a product page, you …

I just wanted to thank everyone who emailed me last week to let me know that one of my articles was hacked. Thanks to all of you, I discovered the problem article and was able to take action immediately. While this wasn’t the first time that I’ve been hacked, this was the first time that the intrusion had nothing to do with my server at all.
What Happened Exactly?

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Shortly, after publishing my last article on How Our Online Business Needs To Be Improved, I received a flood of emails letting me know that my article was flagged as malware by Google. When I went to see the article myself, I was greeted by a sea of red with the words “This Is A Reported Phishing Website!!”.

At first I panicked, because I was worried that my online store had also been compromised. But luckily the …

Once upon a time, our online wedding linens store had a very fierce competitor. They received a ton of web traffic every month, ranked in the top 5 for the same or similar search terms that my wife and I were targeting for our own store and I’m fairly certain that they made a good amount of cash. In fact, they were so popular that I would often see brides and other patrons talk about their store in the wedding forums.

Photo By Ian Hamption

Their only weakness (that I could tell) was that their site wasn’t very attractive and that it was built on an antiquated shopping cart engine. But nonetheless, it served its purpose. Customers could easily find their store online and they sold quality product. (Early on, my wife and I made a few purchases from their store just to check out their offerings).

But something strange …

Early on when you first launch your online store, one thing is certain. You will not be receiving many visitors and customers will have a hard time finding your website. But rather than view the lack of traffic as a negative, this is the perfect time to do some targeted conversion testing using Google Adwords and Google Analytics. Why? Because you have so little web traffic, there is less data to interpret which makes sifting through your Google Analytics reports much easier without having to create complex filters out of the box.

Below I’m going to describe how my wife and I tweaked the conversion rate and diagnosed the early problems with our online store website using Adwords and Google’s free web analytics tool. Incidentally, if you have not signed up for Google Analytics, you should do so right now. It’s an extremely powerful tool …

A lot of online business owners focus so much on getting traffic from the search engines and optimizing for Google that they completely neglect the search functions for their own website! After running our online store for several years now, I’ve found that many customers who visit our store don’t browse the categories to find the item they want to buy. Instead, they jump straight to the search toolbar and look for exactly what they want. And guess what happens if they yield the big donut from the search results? Over 95% leave the store immediately. The frustrating thing is that it doesn’t matter if they can’t spell. It doesn’t matter if they enter in an incorrect search query. One bad search and a customer will leave. Period.

Photo By Bramus

The reality is that most out of the box …

One of the biggest mistakes that I see when I’m asked to evaluate or critique an online store website is that the shop owner has used the out of the box template for their store. Simply put, the out of the box design for any shopping cart is going to be ugly, non-functional and you aren’t going to sell much no matter how compelling your products are.

The main problem is that most people aren’t web designers. They want an attractive design but they either don’t have the funds or are too cheap to hire a dedicated developer. Admittedly, hiring a web designer can be pricey and while it’s easy for me to say that it’s worth every penny, most people don’t want to put down a lot of cold hard cash upfront if they are just testing the waters.

A Hybrid Solution
These days, all open …

Your website could be the most beautiful site in the world but it does you no good if it takes forever to load. Let’s face it. People are impatient and a slow website prevents potential customers from completing their purchase. When I go online shopping, I expect pages to load at worst within 5-10 seconds. Any longer than that and I get antsy or I leave the store altogether. Sure, some people may be more patient than I am but why take the chance? Play it safe and make your business website as fast as possible.

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Before you begin however, the first thing you need to determine is how fast is fast enough? This extent of your website optimizations largely depends on the analytics and demographics of your web visitors. For example, 3 years ago when my wife and I …

Lately, I’ve been receiving a number of emails from readers asking for the easiest and fastest way to open up a cookie cutter online store. I’ve also been asked to critique several newly launched online store websites and unfortunately, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend. People have this tendency to do the least amount of work possible while expecting the largest possible payoff. Lesson #1, doing little work for a large payout just doesn’t happen very often in this world.

Photo By Nevada Tumbleweed

First off, I hate it when people ask for a “cookie cutter” solution because it implies that the design is exactly the same as someone else’s and there is no originality involved. Some of the stores that I looked at didn’t even bother to change their look from the standard website template. So I wasn’t surprised at all when I heard that …

My wife and I try to make an effort to update our online store website with fresh content at least once a week. In addition, we constantly put up new products and take down old obsolete products as well. The upshot is that our website gets updated on a fairly regular basis.

It’s rare, but sometimes we also tweak the structure and html of the store to mix things up. And three weeks ago, I rearranged the way a few product categories were displayed which introduced a huge bug that went completely unnoticed. The funny thing is that orders continued to come in just fine and everything seemed completely normal.

Photo by azrainman

I wasn’t just being careless either. Being a paranoid person at heart, I always do a fair amount of testing every time I make even the most minor of changes. But I probably wouldn’t have …

I’ve only been writing this blog for a little over a year, but one thing is clear based on the types of questions that I receive. There are a number of people out there who are terrified of the technical aspects of starting an online business. Because they are not computer saavy, they are worried that throwing up a website is beyond their abilities.

But what if I were to tell you that you could receive 24/7 technical

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support from skilled programmers for free? Yes, you heard me right. You can get all of the help you need for absolutely no cost.

As Scott Clark of Buzz Maven pointed out in a comment on my post on How To Prevent Your Online Store From Becoming A Money Pit, most people don’t realize that there are many forums out there where technical people congregate to help you …

It has been quite awhile since I’ve looked at some of the available all-in-one eCommerce solutions. But lately, I’ve received several questions from readers who are finding themselves a bit hesitant about the whole website setup process and are looking at all inclusive eCommerce packages. This particular reader is considering using Yahoo Merchant Solutions and wanted to know my thoughts.

I wanted your opinion on the Yahoo merchant solutions. I know you said eBay stores are not the way to go. I completely understand why, especially after doing some research. But I was looking at the yahoo merchant solutions, and they charge a monthly fee to do all the hosting as well as charge a 1.5% of all gross sales. It seems like they offer a lot of services, including good customer support, for the price. I am pretty computer literate, but have never …