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.

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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.

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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 …

For the past year, I’ve become accustomed to waking up early in the morning with several orders already waiting for me in my email inbox. Let me tell you. It’s nice knowing that money is being made during the night even though I’m asleep the entire time. A few days ago however, I got up and there was not a single order in my email even by 9am.

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Naturally I was suspicious, so I immediately went to our online store expecting to find something wrong. Nope! Everything seemed to be normal so I decided to wait it out a little longer. Several more hours passed and still not a single order came in. I was getting worried.
Finding The Culprit
Several things were going through my head. Do we have a new competitor that is stealing all of our business? Is no …

This is part 2 of a 7 part series on how to start a small business.

Most people who start an online business unknowingly neglect trademark issues when naming their business and products. Finding an open domain name is simple, but just because the domain that you want is not registered yet doesn’t necessarily mean that you can do business using that name. For example, just because the domain name MicrosoftHardware.com is available for registration doesn’t mean that you can legally sell computer hardware under that business name.

Don’t fall into the trap of not doing your homework ahead of time and make sure that your business and domain name do not conflict with any other established businesses. If you accidentally choose a business or product name that is too similar to a competitor, they can accuse of you of violating their trademark and force you to change your …

No matter what you do, at some point in time your website will go down. It’s inevitable. Perhaps your server will crash. Maybe your website will get hacked. Perhaps your database will get corrupted. Whatever it is, it is crucial that you be able to recover from these calamities as quickly as possible.

Our online store was recently hacked. While I’m still not 100% sure how they got in, I was able to recover from the attack in a very short period of time. Why? Because I was prepared.

Don’t kid yourself. Even if you are up to date with all of the security patches and you think your

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code is robust, someone someday will break into your website if they want to. There are far too many exploits and patches to keep track of that any experienced hacker can and …

Early on in the life of our online store, I used to wonder when the right time would be to transition our website from shared to dedicated hosting. And this past weekend, I received the answer shoved down my throat.

I discovered the hard way that I needed to switch because this past weekend our online store lost a significant amount of revenue due to a hosting related issue with our website.

So what happened exactly? Basically, our website went down for almost 2 entire days and it was not immediately obvious that anything was broken. It’s one thing to go down with a nice maintenance message, but our online store basically crashed with cryptic error messages that only surfaced while the customer was checking out.

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When considering whether or not you need to make the transition to dedicated hosting, you really need to consider a variety of …

You are probably wondering why I randomly chose to write about how to automate backups for your online store or business. After 2 years and 3 months of running like a champ, our online store database crashed a couple weeks ago.

It wasn’t one of those mini crashes where you can simply fix up a broken table or two. Instead, it was a complete crash in which the entire database got hosed.

How does one hose an entire database? Well that day, the server that our store was hosted on was on the fritz and kept going down. The last straw broke when a few of our customers were in the midst of checking out when the server went out for an extended period and corrupted our database.

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I’m An Idiot
This all happened while I was at my day job so I began …

The design of your website is one of the most fundamental aspects of your online store. You must consider what your customers will find appealing even though it may not necessarily match your tastes. In addition to the aesthetics, there are many structural guidelines that should be followed as well. As I look at online stores across the web, I still find that many people are making fundamental mistakes with their websites. Below are a few of the most common.
Busy Backgrounds or Flashing Text
There’s nothing more annoying that a busy, gaudy background. Even if what you are selling is ridiculously garish, you should always use a plain, even toned background.

Nothing says cheap or used car salesman more than flashing text either. Whenever I see flashing text, I generally hit the back button right away.
Music
I keep my speakers on at all times …

DMOZ, also known as the Open Directory Project or ODP for short, is essentially a web directory much like Yahoo’s except that it is maintained by a community of volunteer editors. What makes ODP special is that the search engines, especially Google, place a lot of weight on your website if you manage to make it onto the directory. In the case of Google, this usually results in a higher page rank and an immediate ticket out of the Google sandbox.

Of course, DMOZ wouldn’t carry so much weight if it was easy to get in. The problem with DMOZ is that because it’s run by volunteers, it can take forever to make it on the directory if the person in charge of your category doesn’t review sites often. The fact that it takes forever to get in coupled with the fact that you can’t really …

With Google being the number one search engine in the world, there’s always a lot of emphasis on optimizing your website or online store to rank high in the search results.  One of the metrics that Google uses is something they have coined as page rank.  Page rank is the way Google ranks pages based on the relative importance of a particular website. Your page rank is directly related to the quality of webpages that directly link to your site.

Because of this, many people are absolutely obsessed with page rank and go out of their way to establish a high number of links to their website.   Our online store routinely gets requests for reciprocal linking.  The question of the day is is this worth the effort?
Getting Random Reciprocal Linking Will Get You Nowhere
In the early days, it was just a matter of getting any links to your website.  Over …

Selecting a credit card merchant and gateway is not inherently a difficult thing to do. But if this is your first online store, the evaluation process can be a bit daunting due to the sheer multitude of options to choose from. To make things easier, you should always select a credit card merchant that is supported by your shopping cart out of the box.

For example, below is a list of merchants that are supported by OSCommerce out of the box

Authorize.net
iPayment
2Checkout
PsiGate
SecPay

Paypal Website Payments Pro is also a popular credit card processing vendor which is supported by a number of popular shopping carts as well.
Description of Potential Fees
The main reason it is hard to evaluate the various credit card vendors is due to the various fees that you have to sort through. I’ve tried to list the different kind of fees that you could encounter below along with …

The main focus of your store is to sell goods so why would you ever need to include any other information other than your product listings? To run a successful store, you need to let customers know that they can trust you. They need to feel absolutely comfortable and secure that you will deliver on your promises when they hit the submit button and pay you with their hard earned cash. Below are 5 pages that will help you with that goal.
About Me
I used to think that no one would ever look at the “About Me” page on our store. However, Google Analytics has proven me wrong. It turns out that a sizable portion of our customer base actually takes the time to read this page. Since we are not a large store, customers want to learn who we are and why we sell …

The eventual success of your online store will depend on several factors. Probably the single most important factor will be where and how you are indexed in the various search engines. I’ve compiled below a comprehensive list of items that your online store should focus on to obtain the best rankings possible. In my experience, most online stores do not follow all of the rules shown below. Implementing these 10 little SEO techniques on your own online store should give you an advantage over the competition.

Make Sure All of Your Internal Links Point to the Same Domain
By the same domain, I’m referring to whether you want your site to be known as

http://www.yourstore.com
or
http://yourstore.com

This is important because the search engines actually treat both urls as different sites. If you allow the search engines to index both versions of your site, you will be effectively diluting your page …

If your store is anything like ours, we have to go through hundreds and hundreds of product photos in selecting the best ones to use for our website. If you don’t have a good photo flow from your digital camera to your website, you could easily waste many hours fiddling with the product photos alone. I’ve put together some tips below that will hopefully make your picture flow more efficient.

Use a Good Photo Software Manager
While there are many good software packages available on the market, I have found Google’s Picasa to be an excellent solution for your photo sorting needs. Not only that, but its free too. We first started out using Adobe Photoshop to go through all of our photos and found that it was terribly inefficient. Google’s Picasa allows you to

See thumbnails of all of your photos in an intuitive interface
Allows you to …

Taking good product photos is essential to operating a successful online store. Even more important than taking good photos though is how they are displayed on your website. Any online store can have beautiful pictures, but many stores make critical mistakes in the organization and efficiency of their product displays. Below is a list of 4 things to avoid when displaying pictures on your online store.

Don’t Use High Resolution Photos
I’ve seen many online stores fall into this trap. They use an extremely high resolution photo for all of the product pictures on the site. As a result, the website loads extremely slowly and drives customers away. Unless you are actually selling photos on your online store, the resolution of your pictures don’t really need to be that high. You can also get away with turning the jpeg compression settings lower (higher compression) …

Once you’ve customized the look and feel of your store and have populated it with products, the next step is to make sure that customers can purchase products securely from your website. In general, customers will not buy anything from your store unless they see a padlock next to your URL when they are entering in sensitive information such as credit cards and passwords during checkout. They will not see the padlock on their browser unless you have an SSL certificate installed on your website.
What is SSL?
SSL stands for secure sockets layer and is responsible for encrypting and providing secure communications on the internet. Many people have the misconception that the information encrypted by SSL remains encrypted even after its been fully transmitted to the website. SSL only encrypts the data during transmission only!
What this means is that the website accepting these secure communications is …

So you’ve decided to host your own website and open up your online store. Where do you go from here? There are a multitude of shopping cart packages out there and it’s extremely difficult to compare them all. Hopefully, I can save you some time and tell you what to look for.

At the very basic level, there are 2 types of shopping cart packages, paid software packages and open source shopping carts, both of which have their advantages and disadvantages.
Paid Software Shopping Cart Packages
With paid software packages such as XCart, Miva Merchant etc…, you usually have to pay an upfront license fee and an additional monthly fee to use their shopping cart package. If you have the money, these packages appeal to those who are tech adverse and those who require an extreme amount of hand holding to get started. What you are paying …