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, the different fees are not always straightforward to calculate.

For example, some credit card processors charge you a registration fee, a monthly gateway fee, a statement fee as well as a percentage of your sales. Some merchants allow you to apply your monthly gateway fee towards your discount rate fees. Some merchants provide a tiered discount rate depending on how much you sell. There are many different ways to get charged depending on your sales volume and all of the numbers can get confusing depending on the scenario.

The reason I like Merchant Plus is because it is cheap and the fees are very straightforward to understand. For example, there are no complicated rules on how you get charged.

• There’s a monthly fee of $19.95
• There’s a 25 cent transaction fee per charge
• The discount rate is 2.15% for Visa and Mastercard

After researching many different credit card merchant account and gateways, the rates for Merchant Plus are very reasonable, the service is very dependable and they provide good support as well. Now let’s take a look at Paypal Website Payments Pro.

The fees for Paypal Website Payments Pro are fairly straightforward as well but the rates are more expensive and tiered depending on your sales volume.

• There’s a $30 monthly fee
• For a monthly sales volume of $0.00 USD – $3,000.00 USD, you get charged 2.9% + $0.30 USD
• For a monthly sales volume of $3,000.01 USD – $10,000.00 USD, you get charged 2.5% + $0.30 USD
• For a monthly sales volume >$10,000.01 USD, you get charged 2.2% + $0.30 USD

Overall, Merchant Plus is always going to be cheaper than Paypal Website Payments Pro.

Which One Is More Convenient?

Money is important but it’s not everything. When you sign up for Merchant Plus, you are more or less signing up for a vanilla merchant account and gateway. In other words, you’ll be able to process credit cards but that’s about it. What’s nice about Paypal is that they offer additional features that are very convenient.

For example, your online store is probably going to accept regular Paypal in addition to credit cards. Paypal Website Payments Pro allows you to accept both Paypal standard payments and credit cards all through the same account. This is really nice simply because you’ll have one less account to deal with. In other words, that’s one less account where you’ll have to transfer money out of and into your business checking every single month.

The other really nice thing about Paypal is that they offer an extremely convenient and easy to use one click shipping platform. Whenever someone makes a purchase from your shop, the address information can be sent directly to Paypal. Then, using their multi-order shipping interface, you can quickly and easily ship all of your packages and print shipping labels from Paypal’s website. The best part is that all of the shipping fees are automatically deducted from your Paypal account.

If you run a small online store, that you means you don’t have to sign up for a 3rd party shipping platform like Stamps.com. You don’t have to deal with downloading and uploading customer addresses to a separate shipping service. You can do everything without leaving Paypal’s website!

The Intangibles

Sounds pretty good right? But the one caveat with Paypal is that Paypal is not a true bank. With Authorize.net and your own merchant account and gateway, any money that you receive is automatically yours once it reaches your bank account and no one can easily take it away from you.

With Paypal however, they get to call the shots with your money and can place holds on your account whenever they feel like it. For example, let’s say that Paypal detects some abnormal charging patterns with your account. Without any warning, they can freeze your assets and prevent you from accessing your funds. A full on fraud investigation can last for several months and during this period you will not be able to withdraw your money from your account.

While this has never happened to me (knock on wood), there are many websites out there such as www.paypalsucks.com that are filled with stories and complaints from Paypal users who have had their money frozen for long periods of time.

Which Should I Choose?

If you don’t care about the integrated shipping that Paypal offers and you don’t mind having yet another bank account, going with Merchant Plus is a no brainer. In addition, readers of MyWifeQuitHerJob.com can take another 20% off of the monthly fee by using coupon code: MYWIFEQUIT upon signup.

However, if you hate maintaining a bunch of different accounts and want a nice, integrated way of shipping your orders, you should consider signing up for Paypal Website Payments Pro. While it starts out more expensive, once you reach a monthly sales volume of greater than $10000, the difference in discount rate is not that big of a deal.

The other major thing you have to consider is whether you are comfortable with Paypal having full control over your funds. If you are even remotely worried about having your assets frozen, then avoid Paypal altogether. Once again, this has never happened to me before but just be aware that it’s a possibility. Good luck with your decision!

What Do I Need To Begin?

In order to install an open source shopping cart and follow my tutorial, you’ll need to do the following.

• Register a domain name – You can grab a domain name from Go Daddy for a dollar a month.
• Sign up for a web host – I personally recommend Blue Host because I ran my online store for 2 years there and had a fantastic experience.
• Get SSH access to your server – You need to contact your web host and ask for this access which usually requires a faxed in a copy of your drivers license
• Install WinSCP or any FTP client to transfer files to and from your webserver
• Install PUTTY for SSH terminal access to your server
• Have your web browser ready
• Download Open Cart for free from www.opencart.com

Installing Your Open Source Shopping Cart

Once you’ve downloaded all of the necessary programs above and have your web host all set up, you are ready to go!

Quick Note: All of the instructions mentioned in the video below are actually not necessary if you sign up for a hosting account at Blue Host. The reason is because Blue Host offers a program called “Simple scripts” which allows you to install many programs at the click of a button.

In any case, the tutorial below will teach you how to install a shopping cart from complete scratch which applies to any web hosting account. Enjoy the video!

Help!! I need help!! Kyle pooped in the tub again!! Come quick!!!

Naturally, my wife stopped her shopping spree and helped me clean things up. Yuck!! By the time she got back to her computer a good 45 minutes had elapsed.

Much to her dismay, when she got back to the computer to resume shopping, her shopping cart was empty!!! All of that hard work and she had lost it all because the online store she was shopping at had timed out and emptied out her cart. I will now attempt to recreate our conversation afterwards.

Wife: S#$%! F#$&! What the hell! I lost everything ! I had so many cute outfits in my cart and it took me forever to find all that stuff.

Me: Yeah that sucks….How much was in your shopping cart?

Wife: I don’t know, 700 maybe?!? I hate this store. Never shopping here again

Me: WHAT!?!?!? 700 dollars?? My entire wardrobe doesn’t cost that much!!!! What the hell!!! Do you think we are made of money?!?!

Wife: Well don’t worry about it. I’m not buying anything from this store anymore. It’ll take forever to find the stuff again

Me: (Feeling a sigh of relief) Oh….darn…..I know how much you liked that stuff (feigning concern). I feel horrible…absolutely terrible…

Wife: Shut up. Just for that, I’m spending more at the next shop

Persistent Shopping Carts

The reality is that many shopping carts behave this way. If you close your browser session or if you wait too long, many online stores will empty the contents of the cart. As a result, if a customer returns after a long hiatus of shopping, they will lose what they’ve added.

In many cases, this can cost you a sale because not everyone shops and makes a purchase in a single sitting. Just as an experiment, I asked a bunch of my friends whether they shop this way. And surprisingly, many of them use an online store like a wishlist. They put what they want in their cart, think about it and then return later. And more often than not, they shut down their browser and let things sit a bit before making a purchase.

In fact, looking at our online store statistics, a good 25 percent of customers visit our store more than once before making a purchase. The best way to deal with these customers is to make sure that whatever they put in their shopping cart stays in their shopping cart until they return and are ready to make a purchase. This is what is called a persistent shopping cart.

Implementing A Persistent Shopping Cart

This feature has been on my list for a very long time but I’ve been dragging my feet because strangely enough, there’s no plugin that does this for my shopping cart. Now this feature is very important for our online store for one main reason, personalization. When people shop at our store, then often put up to 8-10 items in their carts at a time and many of these products involve personalization with a special message.

What also ends up happening is that customers take a long time to shop because they want to think about what they want to write and sometimes they have to confer with their significant other before deciding on a message. Can you imagine how frustrating it would be to lose everything you typed in just because you took an extended break?

So it was a no brainer, I had to spin my own solution. Here are 3 possible solutions that I came up with. I apologize in advance if this is next section is a bit more technical than usual.

Extend The Session Timeout Period

By default, the session length for my server is about 15 minutes long. What this means is that my server will hold the contents of a customer’s cart in system memory for 15 minutes of idle time before emptying everything out. So, a logical solution to this problem would be to simply extend this timeout period.

The problem with this solution is that it greatly increases the memory requirements for your online store. By increasing the timeout period for your shop, you essentially have to hold a customer’s shopping cart information in main memory for much longer periods of time which effectively increases the amount of main memory you need to run your website. This solution is clearly not scalable because main memory is a precious resource.

Not only that, but it also doesn’t solve the problem when a customer shuts down their browser or waits for 2 weeks before returning. Do you really want to keep their shopping cart lying around using up precious compute resources for 2 weeks? Probably not…

Store The Cart Contents In A Cookie

Another solution is to use cookies to store the contents of their cart on their computer. Cookies are little files that websites put on the client’s computer in order to store certain pieces of information so a website can recognize a customer when they return. By placing a cookie with the shopping cart contents on the client computer, you can effectively store their shopping cart for as long as you like!

The problem with this solution is that the cookie size is limited to 4K on most browsers. Therefore, if a customer’s shopping cart is large and exceeds this value, certain products in their shopping cart will be lost.

The Best Solution

The best solution and the way I ultimately decided to solve this problem was to use a combination of cookies and my shopping cart database. Here’s what I came up with.

Whenever a customer enters my store, I place a cookie on their computer that is set to expire whenever I feel like it. This cookie contains a secret id which I use to tag certain products in my database. Whenever a customer places an item in their shopping cart, I also store the product in my database and tag it with this secret id.

This way, I can keep track of everything that the customer is interested in based on this secret id which is stored on their computer in the form of a cookie. If they choose to leave for a long time and come back, I look for the presence of this cookie and restore the contents of their shopping cart based on my database which is present for as long as I want it to be.

The downside to this solution is that if a customer abandons their shopping cart, I will accumulate a lot of junk in my database which needs to be periodically cleaned up. So to solve that problem, I set up a CRON job or automated task to automatically clean up the database every single night and remove items that exceed a certain age threshold.

I’m still in the throes of testing my additions to my store and hope to be live with this new feature by the end of the week. The best part is that by storing your abandoned shopping carts, you can also better observe your customers shopping patterns as well.

• Levi’s jeans found that referral traffic increased 40X after implementing the Like button
• Giantnerd.com’s revenues increased over 100% after implementing the Like button
• American Eagle implemented Like and found that Facebook visitors spent 57% more money than non-Facebook referred visitors.
• Tea Collection has seen 10X daily revenues since implementing Like.
• ShoeDazzle has found that Facebook users are 50% more likely to make repeat purchases every month than average shoppers.

As you can see, these numbers are astounding! So, I spent my Father’s Day weekend working on my Facebook strategy and I want to share with you what I came up with. While I’m still not on the Twitter bandwagon, having a Facebook presence for your online store makes good sense.

For example, whenever a user becomes a fan, everything you post on your fan page instantly becomes a part of their Facebook news feed. This is huge! Imagine running promotions or writing interesting content and having it instantly broadcast to thousands of people interested in your products!

The Problem

The only wrinkle in this plan is that you have to convince users to want to “Like” your online store fan page. Unlike a blog or informational site, it’s more difficult to get people to “Like” an online store fan page because most stores don’t post interesting content.

So the best way to get more Facebook fans for your store is to entice them to “Like” your page with some sort of offer. Give customers a reward or prize in return for a “like” for your Facebook Fan page.

A Quick Example

For a quick example, head on over to the Bumblebee Linens Fan Page


The Bumblebee Linens Facebook Fan Page.

As you can see, I’ve written the verbiage such that a customer is enticed to click on the “Like” button in return for a coupon code. Now go ahead and click on the “Like” button. As soon as you click “Like”, the screen refreshes and a coupon code magically appears.

Showing different content on your page for fans versus non-fans is called a Facebook Reveal Tab (or Facebook Fan Gate) and I’m going to teach you how to do this today with your own fan page and supply you with all of the necessary source code to do so.

Please note that there are other instructions out on the web on how to do this but they use FBML which Facebook has deprecated and is no longer supporting. This solution uses PHP code hosted on your own server.

What You Need

To implement a Facebook reveal tab on your Facebook fanpage, you need to do the following before you can begin

• Go and create a Facebook fanpage. If you don’t know how to do this, Pat Flynn has an awesome tutorial that can be found here
• Go to the MyWifeQuitHerJob Facebook Fan Page and grab the source code files for the Facebook Reveal Tab
• Click on the “Like” button on my Facebook page and my daughter will give you a link to the files. If you are already a fan of my Facebook page, you can click on a link called “Facebook Tutorial” on the left hand column to grab the files.
• Watch the video below which will walk you step by step through the entire process

Watch The Video – Updated February 2012!

Incidentally, the video above is a small taste of the content I teach in my course on how to create a profitable online store. Please check it out when you get a chance.

Conclusion

By enticing your visitors with a coupon or offer, you’ll amass new Facebook fans in no time! I just implemented the Facebook Reveal Tab a few days ago and I’m already starting to see the Likes trickle in and I haven’t even added a link to my Facebook page on my online store yet! Once I’ve amassed a critical mass of Facebook fans, I’ll keep you posted on the effect it has on my online business.

A quick question for all of you small business owners out there. Have you jumped on the Twitter and Facebook bandwagon yet? Have you seen good results from your efforts?

Rule #1: Your Toddler And Your Customer Have Short Attention Spans

These days, it’s really tough to keep my daughter occupied for extended periods of time. And buying more and more toys is definitely not the answer. I would say that she can focus on a single activity for about 5 minutes at most before she moves on to something else.

These days, if my wife and I need to her to do anything, we have a very small window of time to get her attention before she wanders off to do something else. For example, we’ve been trying to teach her how to pick up after herself when she makes a mess with her toys. In the beginning, she would clean up for a short period of time and then quickly get distracted.

So, we turned cleaning up into a fun game complete with a cheesy song that we sing while picking things up (Remind me to sing this for you sometime). These days, she’s more likely to pick up after herself because she has fun in the process. We managed to grab her attention by turning the act of cleaning into a game.

Likewise with your online business, you only have a short amount of time to convince your customer to stay on your website and browse your product line. In fact, it only takes a few seconds for a potential customer to decide whether to stay or go so it’s imperative to use attention grabbing images and powerful content to grab hold of their attention. Is your website ugly? Are you creating the right mood for your customers? Are you enticing customers to stick around?

If the bounce rate for your online store is especially high (greater than 70%) or if your conversions rates are abysmal (less than 1%), there’s probably something wrong with your website design and your ability to maintain your customer’s attention. If this is the case, you should solicit a friend for their honest opinion about your site.

If your friends are too polite and can’t tell you the truth, you can get an unbiased opinion by using a service like EasyUsability.com. For as low as 15 bucks, you can create a survey and obtain feedback about your website from a large group of random testers.

Rule #2: Your Toddler And Your Customers Need Guidance

My daughter is currently at an age where she wants to be independent and make her own decisions. But the reality is that most 3 year olds are not mature enough to know what they want and need. So as a parent, you have to gently guide your toddler in the right direction while giving them the satisfaction that they acted all on their own.

Daughter: I don’t want to eat any vegetables. I hate vegetables! No vegetables! I don’t want it!
Me: Oh ok. You don’t have to eat anything that you don’t want to eat.
Daughter: Really Daddy?
Me: Of course, you’re old enough now to decide what you want to eat. Tell you what….Do you want to eat carrots or broccoli for dinner toinght?
Daughter: Hmmm….I’ll have broccoli please.
Me: Excellent choice!

Likewise, the customers that land on your website often have no idea where to go or what to do next. You have to guide them through your website towards where you want them to go by using effective calls to action. In fact, every single page on your website should have some sort of goal.

Do you want them to add a product to their shopping cart? Then use a bold color for your “Add To Shopping Cart” button to make it stand out. Do you want visitors to click on a product? Then use large, vibrant images and actionable text to convince them to “Click on your product now!”.

The most effective websites guide visitors on a set path or “funnel” that usually ends in a conversion that you define. Don’t let your customers aimlessly browse your site and have a clear goal in mind.

Rule #3: Your Toddler And Your Customers Can Be Easily Influenced

No matter what my daughter happens to want at any given point in time, she can usually be convinced to want something else at the drop of a dime. It’s all about the presentation and wow factor.

Daughter: I want to play with my teddy bear. It’s mine!
Me: Sorry dear, but your brother is playing with it right now and we need to take turns.
Daughter: I want my teddy bear now! It’s my teddy bear, not his.
Me: Come on now, we should all share our toys.
Daughter: Can I play with your iPad then?
Me: Uh….Err…Um…
Daughter: Please Daddy?
Me: Why would you want to play with a ratty teddy bear or this hunk of metal when you could be playing in your awesome new kitchen and cooking up some good food? In fact, Daddy is quite hungry right now. Can you cook me a delicious meal?
Daughter: You’re hungry Daddy? Ok, I’ll make you something to eat from my kitchen.

As the designer for your online store website, you have the power to influence your customers and present your products in the best way possible. And an easy way to do this is to use high res photos and attention grabbing product descriptions.

Sounds pretty straightforward but I can’t tell you how many online stores I’ve seen that don’t bother to write good product descriptions. For example, the other day I was shopping for a wooden train set and the description simply said “This is a wooden train set. Made of 100% wood and non-toxic”. Blah!

The product descriptions on your site are what sells your product so make sure you spend some time to write attention grabbing text! Even if you sell mundane products, you can often times convince a customer to buy just by presenting your product in a different light. If you don’t know what I mean, sign up for Groupon and read some of their emails!

Being An Effective Salesman Is A Constantly Evolving Process

While the many tactics that I described above currently work well with my daughter, they probably won’t be effective anymore in just a couple of months and I’ll need to come up with new ways to influence her. Likewise with any online business, the strategies and tactics that you use to attract customers will constantly evolve. So stay on your toes. I know my daughter will keep me on mine.

Photo By SpaceNinja

Yet in many ways, what instigated my wife and I to start our business and to potty train our daughter were very similar. Some external event forced us to take action and we came out of the experience more confident and more knowledgeable as a result.

As my wife and I taught our daughter how to use the toilet, I couldn’t help but notice some of the exact same parallels to running a successful business. Now you’re probably wondering what the heck potty training a child has to do with running a profitable online store. But the fact is, being successful in potty training and business is all about human psychology and influencing people to do what what you want them to do. Here are a few rules of running an online business that we directly applied to potty training.

Rule #1 Make The Potty (Or Your Website) An Attractive Place To Be

The potty in itself is not a fun place for your child to hang out. It’s not Chuck E Cheese. It’s a place where you do your business. It’s a place to take care of a not so pleasant smelling human bodily function. So how do you convince your fidgety, hyperactive little daughter to sit still on the potty? You present the potty to your daughter in a way that incentivizes her to stay on. It’s all about the presentation.

Now how effective do you think it would be if I told my daughter that the potty was a just a cesspool of human excrement and waste? It probably wouldn’t go too well. Instead, we made her potty an absolute pleasure palace of entertainment and fun. Whenever she sat on the potty…

• She got to read an endless amount of stories of her choice
• We sang her favorite songs together
• We let her watch her favorite television shows
• We danced around like fools and made her laugh

In my daughter’s eyes, the potty became the ultimate toddler hangout and as a result, we had no problems getting her to sit on it. The same goes for your business website. Are you providing reasons for your customers to stay once they’ve discovered your online store? Are you making your website a great place to hangout? Do you provide awesome content that convinces readers to stick around and purchase your goods?

A lot of business owners simply throw up a cookie cutter website and wonder why people simply come and go without even staying past the first page. In order to retain a customer’s attention, you have to take the time to produce a great looking web presence and to create content that catches their attention. The longer a customer stays on your site, the more likely they’ll poop or pee…or….make a purchase.

Rule #2: Know Thy Customer And Use Social Proof

My wife and I understand what my daughter likes and wants. And we know what buttons to press in order to convince her to take certain actions (for now anyways).

Me: Did you know that Cinderella uses the potty too?

Daughter: Really?

Me: C’mon. Of course! You don’t think that she wore a diaper out to the grand ball with the prince do you? Here’s a picture of Cinderella. Do you see her wearing a big poofy diaper?

Daughter: No

Me: Exactly. Cinderella uses the potty so she doesn’t have to wear diapers which don’t go with her pretty dress.

Daughter: Oooohh.

Me: You’re my little princess aren’t you? Princesses don’t wear diapers.

Daughter: Daddy? I don’t want to wear diapers anymore!

Before you can sell to your customer, you have to know their needs and wants. And in order to figure this out, you have to do your research. You can’t just put together a portfolio of products and sell them blind. If you can discover your customer’s pain points and relieve them, you can get them to buy anything.

Once you have a few customers under your belt, ask them for a testimonial in order to boost your social proof. Who knows? One of your customers may turn out to be a Cinderella that influences others to buy.

Rule 3: Convince Your Customer To Make A Purchase

Getting my daughter to sit on the potty was only half the battle. Sure, we had her where we wanted her to be but we still needed her to go tinkle and seal the deal. In the beginning, she would sit on the potty and let us read to her and pamper her, but eventually she would get bored and leave without doing the deed. This sort of shopping cart abandonment (or should it be called reverse shopping cart abandonment?) was unacceptable so my wife and I needed a way to convince her to checkout.

As a result, we picked up her favorite snacks and incentivized her to go to the bathroom. For every successful tinkle, she would receive 2 marshmallows. If she voluntarily sat on the potty and did her business by herself, she would receive 2 marshmallows and some ice cream. With these enticing incentives in place, we eventually converted her into a potty using machine.

A customer always needs a good reason to buy. Why should they shop at your store? What incentives do they have to buy from you? These incentives don’t always have to involve money. A customer might buy from you because you offer the best selection and the best quality. Perhaps the customer loves your content and feels compelled to support your business. Whatever the reason may be, you have to make your shop stand out. You have to provide compelling reasons for a customer to part with their hard earned money (or poop or whatever currency you may be using).

Rule 4: Make It Easy For Customers To Checkout

Getting my daughter to use the potty was easy when we took off her pants and put her on the toilet for her, but getting her to use the bathroom on her own proved much more difficult. In the beginning, we had this complicated setup where we put a step stool in front of the toilet so she could climb up by herself. But this proved too difficult and cumbersome for a little 3 year old. So we ended up buying her own special miniature potty that she could use all by herself. To make it extra special, we also let her decorate her potty with stickers and pretty pictures so she could call it her own.

Are you making it overly difficult for your customers to checkout? Is your website slow and take forever to load? Do you have a complicated checkout process? Since the checkout process is the most crucial step where you actually accept payment, you have to make it smooth. Fix all of your page loading problems by reducing the sizes of your photos, reducing the number of http calls, utilizing gzip compression and taking advantage of caching.

Each step of your checkout process should be clearly documented so a customer knows exactly how to proceed. Highlight the appropriate buttons and provide a status bar to let the customer know exactly where they are in the process. In addition, make sure you reduce customer anxiety by placing trust logos and testimonials on pages where they have to enter in sensitive information.

It’s An Iterative Process

We didn’t just come up with an effective potty training plan out of thin air. It was an iterative process that took a ton of trial and error and we had some big time accidents. But you know what? S!$@ happens. You just have to go with the flow and figure out what works best to convert your target customer.

But let me tell you this. There’s no greater feeling than when you finally reach you goal. Seeing my daughter use the potty by herself and look up at us all proud made me want to cry.

Photo By Nisha A.

Once a week (or whenever Google sends me email), I do a cursory scan of the wedding linens competitive landscape. While most of the new webpages that pop up are from Etsy or Ebay (which I ignore), this time out of the corner of my eye, I happened to notice some content that looked really familiar.

When I clicked on the email and read the verbiage, it was without a doubt my handwriting (I can recognize my writing style). Someone had completely and blatantly ripped off content from our online store.

When I clicked on the link to visit the site, I saw that a good portion of our product photos and our arts and crafts pages were copied word for word. The webmaster didn’t even bother to change any of the content. It was blatant stealing! In some cases, he didn’t even bother to copy the image and was hotlinking it straight off my site and stealing my bandwidth as well.

The Kicker

As I sat there in front of my computer screen fuming, I also noticed an email from the rogue webmaster asking me if I wanted to purchase his products wholesale for our online store!!! He had some nerve! Not only did he rip off all of our product photos and steal our arts and crafts content but he now expected us to add him on as a new supplier?!? No way in hell!

The crazy thing was that he pointed out in the email that the products he carried were identical to the ones that we sold in our store and told us to look at the photos carefully just to make sure. Well f#$%…those are our product photos so how can I trust you?

My First Reaction

At first, I was so pissed off that I didn’t know what to do. I went through the entire site and flagged all of the cases of duplicate content and listed them in an email. Then I wrote a terse but polite email to the webmaster.

To whom it may concern,

Steve

Three days passed and nothing happened, so I decided to escalate the situation a bit.

Filing A DMCA Complaint

The nice thing about monopolies is that you only have to go to a single source in order to file a complaint. Via an easy to use web form, Google allows you to report content that you believe warrants removal from Google’s services based on applicable laws. In my case, the violation was a blatant theft of content. I’ve listed the link below in case you ever have to file a complaint.

Click Here To File A DMCA Complaint

It’s not a lengthy process to file a complaint by any means, but I wanted to give the webmaster one last chance to remove the infringing content on his own volition so I sent another email.

To whom it may concern,

Steve

The DMCA threat did the trick and within a day, all of the content was removed.

Use Google Alerts

Google Alerts is not just useful for managing your online reputation. It also works well for keeping track of your competition and in this case, catching rogue webmasters who are stealing your content. I set up my Google Alerts to send me email on a weekly basis and I keep tabs of any mention of our store as well as new competitors which match our primary product keywords.

90% of the time, I don’t have to take any action at all. But Google Alerts allows me to keep track of new entrants into our niche and to address any negative press about our company online. Literally, it just takes a few minutes to setup and you are good to go.

Prevent Hotlinking Of Your Images

It’s one thing for someone to steal your content but it’s another matter if someone steals your bandwidth. I currently have bandwidth limits imposed on all of my websites. If I exceed this bandwidth allotment, I get charged a significant penalty.

In this case, I could have disabled hotlinking altogether on my server in order to prevent bandwidth theft. Here’s how to prevent hotlinking by adding a few lines to your .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mydomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|js|css)$ – [F]

Conclusion

Getting blatantly ripped off is probably not the end of the world but it sure is annoying. Realistically, Google should catch duplicate content and penalize it accordingly but why take the chance? You should use Google Alerts to keep track of your competition, your reputation and any rogue activity.

What’s The Main Goal?

The main goal of all of this testing is to make sure that your online store is fundamentally sound. In other words, this process should help you answer the following questions about your store.

• Are you carrying products that customers are actually interested in?
• Do your customers stick around and browse the products in your store? How relevant is your site to what they are looking for?
• Are there any kinks in your checkout process that are stopping customers from completing their purchase?
• Which products are attracting the most attention?

Please note that the analysis that my wife and I used can be done using Google Analytics pretty much out of the box. In other words, there are very few tweaks that you have to perform with Google Analytics other than inserting Google’s javascript snippet on every page of your store. In terms of cost, you will have to pay for Adwords advertisements but as a new store, it shouldn’t be too hard to find a free $100 coupon on the web to try out Adwords for free. For example, shopping carts like Big Commerce have arrangements with Google to provide free ad credits for new customers.

Why Adwords Is Awesome

The use of Adwords (or any pay per click advertising for that matter) is ideal for the early testing of your online store because you have complete control over your traffic. For example, if I want to test out a particular category of products in my store, I can tell Adwords to only drive relevant customers looking for those products to the landing page of my choice. This is extremely powerful.

So the first step of the process is to decide what part of your store you want to test. In general, I always suggest that you test out a very narrow selection of products, one category at a time. For example, if you sell sporting goods in your store, I would avoid simply lumping all of your sports equipment into a single generic sports category. Instead, I would focus my testing on one specific product group such as tennis racquets. In fact, the narrower the category the better because you will be able to gather much more targeted data.

Writing Your Adwords Campaign

The process of creating an Adwords campaign is beyond the scope of this article. In fact, there are many tutorials for generating an effective Adwords campaign that can be found on Google’s website, but the main point I want to emphasize here is that you should avoid using broad matching keyword terms for this analysis. Ideally, you want Adwords to drive extremely targeted customers that are looking for exactly what you offer in your online store.

The problem with using broad matching keywords is that you will have less control over the customers that visit your store which may taint your Google Analytics results and make your data analysis much more difficult. For example, let’s say I want to drive customers who are looking for “lace handkerchiefs” to our store. I know for a fact that we only sell white lace handkerchiefs so I would further refine our keywords to target customers who type in “white lace handkerchiefs”.

I would also use quotation marks around my keywords to enforce that these search terms are typed in the exact same order of the customer’s search query. In other words, the search “lace handkerchiefs with white bows” would not match. In general, when generating Adwords ads for your testing, you should always err on the side of being too specific as opposed to being too broad. If your search terms end up being too limiting, you can always relax your constraints later on. Being more specific will also save you money since you are paying for traffic by the click.

It’s also important that the landing page for your ad point to the specific category page of the products you are trying to test. Never write an ad and simply send the customer to your home page because this will artificially inflate your bounce rate.

Refining Your Adwords Ads

Before we delve into the analysis portion of the testing process, it’s absolutely essential to make sure that you are only driving extremely targeted customers to your store using Adwords. Once the traffic starts trickling in on your website, you need to make sure that these customers arrive on your site looking for the products that you intended.

For example with my “lace handkerchief” example above, even though I’m strictly targeting the keywords “white lace handkerchief” in quotation marks, someone searching for “white lace handkerchief curtains” would still be able to find my online store. Since I don’t sell handkerchief curtains, I need to prevent these people from clicking onto my website.

Refining your ads is an iterative process. I’ve already written an article on how to refine your Adwords campaigns which is worth a read if you are new to Adwords. Making sure you only receive targeted customers is an extremely important aspect of this testing and it’s critical to nail your traffic down before even thinking about looking at your Analytics reports.

Setting Up Google Analytics

Once you have verified that you are sending targeted customers to your desired product category (via the Google Analytics filters described in my article), it’s time to start analyzing the data. When looking at your analytics reports, there are several things that you want to pay attention to.

• The Bounce Rate – Are customers from Adwords leaving your site without clicking on anything?
• Shopping Cart Abandonment – Are customers leaving your store prematurely during the checkout process without completing their purchase?
• Popular Products – Which products are customers placing in their shopping carts?

The rest of this article will describe how to extract this information using Google Analytics.

The Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is the easiest metric to locate. Using the menu on the upper left corner, click on “Traffic Sources” and then on “google (cpc)”. On this screen, you should see a summary of the bounce rate for your Adwords campaigns.


If your bounce rate is above 50% and you are confident that Adwords is sending you the right type of visitors, then there is probably something fundamentally wrong with your store or landing page. Perhaps your website looks unprofessional. Perhaps you are carrying products that aren’t popular. Whatever it is, you should tweak your landing page until your bounce rate is lower than 50%. There is always a good amount of iteration involved in refining your landing pages. Have a friend or unbiased third party provide you with their honest opinion on what to change.

I’m not sure what the typical bounce rates are for other online stores but the Adwords bounce rates for our online store ranges from 20-30%.

Setting Up Your Checkout Funnel

For all online stores, the checkout process is probably the most crucial process to get right because this is how you get paid. Therefore, it is essential to analyze each and every step of your checkout process to make sure that there are no obstacles preventing customers from giving you their hard earned cash.

Gathering data for your store’s checkout sequence is simple thanks to Google Analytics’ goal analysis feature. To setup goal analysis for your store, click on the “Edit” link next to your website URL on the main Google Analytics page. Then, scroll down until you see the “Goals” category and click on “Add goal”.

On this page, you can then specify the type of goal you want to set. Most shopping carts direct customers to a specific web page following a successful purchase. For the purposes of this tutorial, your “goal” will be achieved once the customer reaches your “checkout success” page.

To set up your “success” page, follow these steps

• Give Your Goal A Name
• Set the Goal Type to URL Destination
• Under Goal Details, set Match Type to Head Match
• Enter in your Goal URL

Once your success page is setup, it’s time to specify your funnel sequence. A funnel is a series of pages leading up to your goal URL. For example, a typical funnel might consist of a shopping cart page, a login page, a shipping page, a payment page and a checkout confirmation page. In any case, it is important to let Google know all of the little steps of your checkout process that you want to track.

Under “Goal Funnel”, enter in all of the webpage URLs that make up your sales funnel. Once you have entered in all of this information, click on the “Save Goal” button.

Getting The Kinks Out Of Your Checkout Process

Once you have your goal funnels all setup, the fun begins. Essentially, you have instructed Google to track every aspect of your checkout process. For example, if you click on “Goals->Funnel Visualization” on your Analytics page, you will see something like this.


With your sales funnel visualized in this fashion, it’s easy to find out where the hot spots are for your store’s checkout process. Are you losing a large percentage of customers on your shipping page? Perhaps your shipping charges are way too high. Are you losing customers when they are trying to pay? Perhaps you are not accepting enough forms of payment or your payment page is too confusing. When my wife and I accepted Paypal as our only form of payment, we lost over 50% of our customers on our payment page. Are you losing customers on the login page? Perhaps you are not displaying your trust logos in the right place. In any case, it’s fairly easy to spot problem areas with your checkout process and then refine each step until your funnel becomes a well oiled machine.

Find Out What Products Are Popular

If you carry your own inventory and want to figure out what quantities to stock your products, you can use analytics to track what items customers are placing in their shopping carts.

To do this, you can simply setup another “Goal” that fires when a customer adds something to their shopping cart. Then, by clicking on the “reverse goal path” button, you can see what customers have placed in their shopping carts regardless of whether they make a purchase or not.

Setting up a “shopping cart” goal will also allow you to determine how well you have written your product copy and whether your products are enticing enough. For our online store, about 17% of our Adwords visitors place something in their shopping cart and one third of these visitors go on to make an actual purchase.

Conclusion

Analyzing your sales funnel and your bounce rate is something very fundamental that all stores should focus on before working on building traffic. Google Analytics is an extremely powerful tool that I’ve barely scratched the surface with the tutorial above. If you want, you can set up Analytics to track individual product sales, revenue, profit, visitor demographics etc… provided you feel comfortable giving Google all of your sales information.

Personally, I prefer to keep most of that information private and provide Google with just what I need to tweak my store. Once you’ve ironed out the kinks with your site, your store will become a conversion machine that will scale along with your traffic.

What Initially Attracted Me To MailChimp

Honestly, what attracted me initially to Mailchimp was that they offer a trial period in which their service is free for up to 500 subscribers. I know, I’m cheap. I can’t help it. The Asian in me always prevails. Even though all of the top bloggers use Aweber, I opted for Mailchimp because of the free startup cost. That and my buddy Sid Savara was also using MailChimp and highly recommended the company. Anyways, in using both email providers extensively and having learned the ins and outs of both services, I discovered the pros and cons of each which I’ll enumerate below.

Who Has The Better Form Design Tools?

If you are a half decent web designer, you’ll definitely prefer Mailchimp over Aweber in terms of form design. Mail Chimp let’s you either design your forms entirely from scratch or use their GUI to design a professional looking form. They have many templates to choose from, but if you want to do everything yourself, they also give you the raw code and you have full control over the look and feel of everything. I found that the design freedom that MailChimp provides was especially useful when designing popup forms.

Aweber on the other hand, seems to steer you towards using one of their pre-baked form templates. If you stray from their template, then you have to do a little bit of hacking to get things looking the way you want. For example, getting the popup signup form working on Aweber the exact way I wanted it to look took me several hours. I basically had to download the javascript from their site, figure out how their code was written and then tailor it to how I wanted it. Otherwise, I would have been limited to their templates which I didn’t really like. In addition, the Aweber popup code didn’t work properly across all web browsers and I had to fix this manually.

Mailchimp also offers a more flexible interface with which to design HTML emails and they’ll also host the images for you. Aweber does not offer an image hosting service as far as I can tell. Overall however, even though I like MailChimp’s interface better, their website is significantly slower than Aweber’s because of all of the graphical functionality baked into the UI.

Edge: MailChimp

Who Has Better Email Tracking?

When I first switched over from Mailchimp to Aweber, I immediately noticed how much better Aweber’s email tracking capabilities are compared to MailChimp. With Aweber, you can tell exactly who has opened your email and exactly which links that they have clicked on and when. With Mailchimp out of the box, you don’t have any of this information. Instead, MailChimp puts stars next to each of your subscribers which provides a vague metric with which to measure the quality and interest of your readers. In addition, MailChimp does not track users who sign up for your newsletter but don’t confirm their email.

Aweber is also better when it comes to tracking clicks within an email. Whenever you use a link in an email with click tracking enabled, Aweber displays the link using the exact same URL from your domain. Mailchimp on the other hand, uses a super long and obscure link which is then redirected over to your site. In general, readers are more hesitant to click on links with a super long and cryptic URL. With Aweber, the destination URL points straight to your domain and the click is still tracked. As a result, I’ve seen a dramatic increase in click throughs when I made the switch.

In addition to all of this, Aweber also provides conversion tracking if you sell products and you can also track how each reader traverses through your website from an email campaign. Overall, Aweber is much more powerful than MailChimp when it comes to tracking users.

Edge: Aweber

Who Has Better AutoResponders?

Both MailChimp and Aweber offer an easy way to set up a series of follow up emails. However, both have their pros and cons with the way their auto responders are implemented. What I like about Mailchimp is that you can setup autoresponders such that only a subset of your email list will receive your follow-up emails based on when they signed up for your newsletter. For example, if I only want recent subscribers from the last month to receive one of my autoresponders, I can simply specify this using MailChimp’s autoresponder interface.

With Aweber however, this is not that easy to do. With Aweber, each and every one of your subscribers is tagged with a message number which indicates which followup emails they have received already. To prevent a subscriber from receiving a specific followup email, you must set the subscriber’s message number to be higher than the email sequence number. For example, if a particular subscriber’s message number is 4, that means that that subscriber has already received follow-up emails 1,2 and 3. So if I have a 7 part follow up message sequence and I write a brand new followup email (message 8 in the sequence), there is no real way for me to prevent this subscriber from receiving message 8 unless I make his or her message number higher than 8. But if I do this, then that subscriber will never receive messages 4,5,6 or 7.

On the flip side, Aweber’s method of managing followup emails allows me to know exactly which subscriber has received which follow up emails and when. With MailChimp, I really have no clue who has or hasn’t received a particular email. Overall, I kind of prefer Aweber’s method of managing follow-ups but it is basically a wash depending on your preference.

Edge: Even

Who Has Better Support?

There is no contest here. Aweber has the better support hands down! Aweber offers both phone and email support during regular business hours. Mailchimp however, only offers email support. As a result, if you have a pressing issue or question, you will have to wait up to 24 hours to get a response from MailChimp. This is the #1 reason I made the switch from MailChimp to Aweber. Usually support doesn’t come into play unless something goes wrong. Here is my tale of woe.

One day, MailChimp decided to arbitrarily suspend my blog from using its service. I received a cryptic email out of the blue telling me that my email service had been suspended and they didn’t give me a reason. Since MailChimp doesn’t have phone support, I had to wait a day to receive a response. In fact, because I couldn’t get a human on the phone, it took me 2 days just to find out why I was suspended.

In the end, they told me that I had violated their terms of service because they classified my website as a get rich quick scheme. Long time readers of MyWifeQuitHerJob.com know that this blog is certainly not about getting rich quick. Plus, I don’t sell anything on my blog either so Mail Chimp’s reason for banning me was completely uncalled for.

In any case after a few emails back and forth, I found out that they basically didn’t like the title of my free ebook. Sure, I could have changed the title but I was not willing to make changes based on my email provider. As a result, I had to make a mad scramble to switch email providers right away. Thankfully, transitioning to Aweber was quick and easy.

Edge:Aweber

Conclusion

There are a few good things about MailChimp that I didn’t mention and should be considered as well even though most people probably won’t take advantage of these features. MailChimp has an interface that allows you to access your entire database of subscribers from an API. If you do a lot of coding or database manipulation, their API will allow you to easily manage your subscriber database in PHP or any popular scripting language. Overall, when it comes to design and programmability, Mailchimp is more powerful than Aweber.

However, once I switched over to Aweber, I realized how much more powerful their tracking and email management features were compared to Mailchimp. You only have to design your forms once but tracking is something you’ll be doing all the time. In addition, having phone support is priceless. That and getting suspended without warning by MailChimp left a really bad taste in my mouth. If they simply gave me an early heads up, it would have made my life much easier. Trust me. There’s nothing more frustrating than not being able to get someone on the phone when something goes wrong.

In any case, I highly recommend Aweber overall. If you do decide to go with Mailchimp however, I would read their terms of service extremely carefully before signing up. One particular thing I want to highlight is that if you do any sort of affiliate marketing on your site, then I would stay away from MailChimp. After all, affiliate marketing appears to be against their terms of service. Any violation and you could be suspended without warning. It’s just not worth the risk.

Click here to try Aweber for just a dollar for the first month

Photo By Better Than Bacon

But the funny thing is that most of the successful entrepreneurs I know are very conservative and don’t like taking risks at all. Ironically, my entrepreneur friends are some of most risk averse people I know! I happen to fall into this same camp as well. Sure, I would risk a good amount of money to start my own business but would I ever bet the entire bank or stake my livelihood on a business idea? Hell no!

Managing Risk

One of key aspects of entrepreneurship is knowing how to mitigate risk. The media portrays entrepreneurs as these daredevils who dropped out of college and risked everything to start their own companies when the real story was that many had safety nets in place in case things didn’t work out.

Bill Gates didn’t initially drop out of college, he took a leave of absence. Plus, he came from a wealthy family that would have supported him if Microsoft failed. Sergey Brin and Larry Page had their degrees and could have easily found a job if the whole Google thing didn’t work out.

The point is that entrepreneurship is not about gambling so much as it’s about investing intelligently. Here are some tips on how I would mitigate risk when starting an online store.

Keep A Nest Egg

First and foremost, don’t risk all of your money on a business venture ever! Make sure you keep a hidden stash lying around somewhere that can bail you out in case things don’t go as planned. Starting a business is difficult as it is and you don’t need the additional burden of worrying about not being able to pay your bills. This may sound like common sense to most of you, but you’d be surprised by how many people are willing to invest most of their entire net worth on a marginal idea.

Keep Your Full Time Job

If you can pull it off, keep the day job. This takes discipline and it can’t always be done depending on the nature of your business, but it is easily the best, no pressure way of starting a business. My wife and I worked on our wedding linens business on the side knowing that if anything ever went wrong, we were still banking two incomes. Don’t think you have the time? If you analyze your day, you’d be surprised at how much time you can salvage in a typical day.

Pick A Narrow Niche

The narrower your niche, the greater your chances are for success. This may seem counterintuitive at first and many entrepreneurs often fall into the same trap of tackling too much at once.

But when you pick a very specific niche to pursue, your business will be focused. Your business will stand out because you will be perceived as an expert in your field. Your search engine rankings will improve because Google can more effectively categorize your website under a specific topic. In fact, your online business should target no more than 2 or 3 topics or keywords. Any more and you risk diluting your search juice.

For example if you want to sell clothing, I would focus my store on a specific type of clothing first and then target no more than 2 or 3 different clothing types total. If you ever decide to expand beyond this, it might be better to start an entirely new website.

Screw Hope! Test The Market

Since I started this blog, I’ve been corresponding with many newbie shop owners. And one of the biggest mistakes I’ve noticed is that most new store owners have already decided what they want to sell without any testing at all.

“I want to sell widget A! People are going to love it”
“No one’s ever heard of widget B! They’ll sell like hotcakes!”

Every shop owner should have an idea of what they want to offer but leave it up to the market to decide what to actually sell. Test the demand for your products! Use Ebay to see if people will buy your product. Use keyword tools to find out how many people are searching for the products you want to sell. Do a competitive analysis of your niche. Are there any competitors? If not, there probably aren’t any buyers either. The ideal market to pursue is one in which there are only a handful of players.

I remember a long time ago when I heard Bill Gross speak about his company Cars Direct back when ecommerce was in its infancy. Turns out that he initially tested the online car buying market by trying to sell cars that he didn’t even have! He just threw up a website and whenever a car was sold, he had someone go out and buy the car from a local dealer. He didn’t invest much money at all until he discovered that selling cars online was a viable strategy. Make sure you assess the demand for your product before you decide to add it to your portfolio of products! In other words, make sure you have buyers before you decide to sell.

Don’t Buy In Bulk With Your First Order

Along the same lines of testing the market, don’t buy in bulk for your first order if you can help it. Take a loss if necessary but don’t risk a large outlay of cash for goods that you may never get rid of. One of the problems I see with most people is that they don’t want to lose any money even in the interests of experimentation. They’d rather buy a crapload of widget A with the potential of making a huge profit rather than buying a few and breaking even or taking a loss.

Don’t be one of these people and don’t be greedy! Most vendors will provide you with samples or will sell you small quantities at much higher prices. Try to sell in small quantities before you commit to a larger purchase. Don’t worry about losing money!

Find A Partner

It can be emotionally taxing to run a business on your own. Looking back, I could never have done it if I didn’t have my wife. There’s more at stake with your business than monetary risk. There’s also mental risk to consider. Having a partner will keep you motivated and will give you someone to bounce ideas off of. Plus, it will make things much more fun.

On choosing a partner, working with my wife has been fantastic but I’m not 100% sure that I would necessarily recommend working with your spouse on a business. Sure, the amount of mental risk is mitigated but the amount of marital risk drastically increases but that’s a topic for a different post:)

Sell High Mental Value Items

The ideal product to sell is one that evokes some sort of sentimental or emotional value outside of the item’s actual cost. And that is one of the main reasons why my wife and I decided to sell keepsakes as part of our product line. If you can get into your customer’s head, you can command higher prices.

If you sell commodity items, getting customers hooked mentally can still be accomplished through effective branding, but in general it is much easier if you start out with the right product. Avoid commodity items and focus on products that are unique or that you can add value to.

Sell Timeless Items

If you carry inventory, there’s always the risk that your products will sit on your shelves never to be sold. That is why it is important to carry timeless items or products that will rarely go obsolete.

That is why I always stress that it’s much more difficult to sell electronics or technology related products. Pick an industry that moves extremely slowly or avoid selling physical products altogether.

The ideal products to sell in my opinion are informational products because everything is virtual. If you have the means and knowledge to create a book or a course, then that is the way to go.

Keep Spending Low

My wife and I spent about 600 bucks to start our business. We used a beat up old desktop computer that we bought from Craigslist, an old digital camera and launched with a small selection of products. We spent pretty much zero on software, zero on furniture and ran everything out of our living room.

The best part of having an online store is that no one can see the backend of your store. All they get to see is the website storefront so why waste any money initially on your office? Keep spending to an absolute minimum and only buy stuff that is a must have.

One thing that my wife and I focused on was reducing the recurring costs associated with our business. We avoided signing up for too many monthly services unless absolutely necessary. If sales suddenly became slow for any reason, we could keep our online store up and running indefinitely. Even today, it only costs us about 100 bucks a month to maintain our website.

Don’t Buy Your Equipment. Lease Instead!

It is often a big misconception that buying your own equipment is cheaper than renting it. But what most business owners neglect to consider are the maintenance costs and the large initial cash outlay that is required to buy. Why risk the extra money when you have no idea whether your business is going to work out?

If your business requires expensive equipment to run, consider leasing your equipment for at least a few years prior to making the commitment to buy. Don’t feel as though you are throwing your money away with renting. After all, if things don’t work out, you don’t want to be stuck having to liquidate a bunch of heavy machinery that you no longer need.

Have A Backup Plan

The number one way of mitigating risk is to have an escape route or a backup plan. When running any business, it’s important to keep the stress level at an absolute minimum. You want to avoid making decisions under duress or making decisions based on avoiding a drastic outcome. Some entrepreneurship sites recommend going all out without a safety net to add an element of desperation to your startup. The idea is that by placing yourself in a sink or swim situation, you will be forced to learn how to swim.

I personally think that’s a bad idea and I would never intentionally place myself or recommend that you place yourself in any dire situation. That’s called gambling. If you have problems motivating yourself to succeed, then you’ve got other issues that you need to deal with.

Everyone needs a backup plan because things will probably not go as planned with your business. As a result, you will need sufficient runway to make the necessary changes. The obvious backup plan for my wife and I was that we would keep our full time jobs and hire a nanny. Make sure you have something in place and it will make running a successful business that much easier.