My online shop has been open for several years now and even after all of this time, I continue to find problems in some of the most obvious places. Now you would think that since my store has achieved double or triple digit growth every year since launch that my website would be like a well oiled machine.

Photo By Taylor Sloan

But the truth is that I have a huge laundry list of things that need improvement. And the problem is that this list is quite large so I always have to prioritize my time especially since I have a day job and 2 kiddos to play with.

Also, keep in mind that my shop is live 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Therefore, every single change that I make no matter how small needs to be tested thoroughly. Any bugs that I introduce to my shopping …

Welcome to part 3 of a 3 part video series on how to create an online store and own your own website without any technical experience required.

Today, I’m going to teach you how to get a great looking website without having to hire a designer and without having to spend a lot of money. In an informal survey that I conducted among my readers a while back, the second biggest mental hurdle to starting an ecommerce website is the design aspect of the store.

Photo By Auswandem Malaysia

Let’s face it. Most of us aren’t web designers. Most of us aren’t very artistic and most of us are not well versed in the art of writing html or php.

The good news is that you don’t really have to be an expert in any of those things in order to put up a good looking online store.
The Beauty Of Open …

This post is part 2 of a 3 part series on how to create your own online store and own your own website without any technical experience required.

The main point of these articles and videos is to convince you that you don’t need to rely on the Ebays, the Etsys or the Amazons of the world to sell goods online. There’s no reason to pay hefty selling fees when you can own your own online shop and keep all of the profits for yourself.

In part 1, I showed you how to create your own fully featured online store website with just a few clicks of the mouse. Today, I’m going to show you how to make your website transactions secure with SSL and how to install credit card processing on your online shop.
No Technical Experience Necessary
In an informal poll that I conducted with my newsletter readers a …

Based on the emails that I’ve received during the past year, there are a lot of MyWifeQuitHerJob.com readers that sell on either Ebay, Etsy or Amazon and have a strong desire to open their own online store. In fact after conducting a short survey, I created a video tutorial a few months back on how to install an open source shopping cart from scratch for free.

Photo By SheeShoo

However, this video got mixed reviews from my audience because it was too technical. Several readers tried to follow the instructions but got stuck trying to figure out how to use some of the free tools I recommended.

Another set of readers were turned off by the amount of typing of “random” commands into their terminals.

The reason I created that video the way I did was to show you at a fundamental level what was needed behind the scenes to set up …

The other day a student in my Create A Profitable Online Store Class” asked me a pretty good question.
Right now while I’m developing my site it doesn’t really matter but how do I put my store under maintenance after I’ve launched without affecting my search engine rankings?
The great thing about this question is that it applies not only to ecommerce shop owners but to all webmasters in general.

If you improperly put your website under maintenance, you could potentially destroy your search engine rankings while driving away customers at the same time.

Especially if you plan on bringing down your website for an extended period, it’s essential that you do things the right way.
Common Mistakes
But before I discuss the proper way to put a website under maintenance and what I do with my online store, I thought that I would talk about some common mistakes that I’ve seen people make with their …

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.

Photo By Old Shoe Lady

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.

Photo By javYliz

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.

Photo By KateMonkey

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.

Photo By Generation X-Ray

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.

Photo by alamodestuff

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?

Photo By Wonderlane

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 …