A few months ago, I posted an article about Paypal Website Payments Pro Vs Authorize.Net where I provided a detailed comparison of two different credit card processing solutions. And almost immediately after posting it, I started receiving an abnormally large amount of email feedback from Paypal haters. In fact, I’ve never encountered such strong anti-feelings for any service before.

Having used both services in the past with no problems whatsoever, I was very surprised to hear the overwhelming negative feedback towards Paypal.
I will never use Paypal again. After being a loyal customer for over 3 years, one day they decided to place a 6 month hold on my money for no reason. I couldn’t access over 20k in my account which I needed to pay my bills!
The above quote was just one of many emails I received in the past few months since …

It’s rare for my wife to hold a grudge against anyone or anything. So the conversation below took me completely by surprise the other day when she and I decided to do some Christmas shopping online together.

Photo By nffcnnr

Me: Let’s go pick up everyone’s gifts at “The Big Convenient SuperStore” (Not the real name).

Wife: I will never shop at that store again.

Me: Huh? Why not? It’s so convenient and cheap. We can get all of our shopping done at one place.

Wife: I ordered there a few years ago and had a bad experience. Can’t remember the full story but I didn’t get my order on time.

Me: Is that all? Was it their fault?

Wife: No, they shipped it out the same day, but it got lost in the mail.

Me: So what’s the big deal? That’s not the store’s fault. It’s the shipping carrier’s …

These last few weeks haven’t exactly been the smoothest in small business land for my wife and I. For starters, our business computer died a horrible death which caused all sorts of mayhem. Ironically, I wasn’t that upset about the computer itself. After all, we bought it a good 4 years ago for a few hundred bucks off of Craigslist and it had served us well.

The big pain was in reinstalling all of the software that was on the old computer. Now with regular programs like Windows and Microsoft Office, reinstalling the software is not that big of a deal because I keep all of my original install CDs.

Most programs don’t require you to jump through hoops during installation. But our business relies on several “sewing” programs that are sold by companies who are terrified of piracy.

So I get it. These sewing programs …

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

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

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

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

Recently, I was featured in an article published on AllAnalytics.com discussing how analytics has improved our online business. While the article was well received, I ended up getting a good amount of questions asking for more specifics on exactly how and what we track for our web store. So, the purpose of this blog post is to point out a few important metrics that we analyze and look at on a regular basis.

First off, I just want to emphasize that analytics is more than just looking at the number of visits or the number of pageviews that your website gets.

Don’t get me wrong, checking your traffic levels is both fun and rewarding but ultimately Analytics is about tracking specific metrics that will allow you to improve both the engagement and conversion rate of your website.
Make Sure You Set Up Ecommerce Tracking
Google Analytics has many ecommerce specific features which …

When I first started my online store, I had a master search engine optimization plan that I believed was fundamentally sound. The plan was to buy my search engine traffic using Google Adwords for my main keyword terms while simultaneously improving my organic search rankings through link building.

Then, once I managed to organically rank on the front page of search, I would gradually cut back on my Adwords spend and eventually rely solely on organic search to bring customers in the door. Not a bad strategy right?

While my plan sounded great on paper, when I looked at my Google Analytics statistics coupled with my search results, I knew this strategy wasn’t going to cut it if I wanted to maximize the profits of my online store. Please allow me to explain.

The photo below is a search for a keyword term that my store currently ranks …

The other day, a friend and I were chatting about our wedding linens business and the topic of Groupon came up in our conversation. For all of you who are not familiar with Groupon, Groupon is a service that offers a really great deal for a product or service once per day. They have an email list of over ten million people and if you contact Groupon to be included on their “deal-of-the-day”, you can get the word out about your business to millions of people you would otherwise never be able to reach.

There are usually huge discounts involved (50% or more) to incentivize buyers and the general idea is that by offering a big discount on your products or services, people will try out your offerings and keep coming back for more. On the surface, it sounds like a great way to market your business …

I really hate getting nickel and dimed, especially when I believe that two items should come packaged together at no additional cost. For example, every time I go to McDonalds and order Chicken McNuggets, I get really annoyed. Back in the old days, McDonalds used to offer as many packets of sauce as you wanted for free whenever you ordered their Chicken McNuggets. But sometime within the last several years or so, they started charging you for extra sauce that exceeded their recommended quota.

Photo By Fr1zz

Now if you order 20 nuggets, you are only allocated 3 packages of sauce. For a 10 piece, you get 2 and for a 6 piece, you only get 1. For me when I order a 20 piece nuggets, I need at least 5 packets of sauce. No doubt someone at McDonalds calculated the sauce usage for the average …

With just about any business these days, how well you handle customers is crucial in defining your reputation and how fast your business spreads via word of mouth. One of the early problems that my wife and I faced with our online store was how to deal with incoming calls from customers. After all, it was just the two of us and we weren’t equipped to handle large volumes of calls nor did we have an easy way to manage the calls that we did receive.

Photo By Dan Brady

Especially if you have small customer support team or even just a single person manning the phone lines, it is important to have some sort of virtual phone system in place. By handling your phone calls via the web or through a computer virtually, you can make it appear as though you have a large customer support team even …

Every now and then, an angry or dissatisfied customer will call us on our customer support line and it’s not a pleasant situation to deal with. No matter how good your products are or how good your quality control is, inevitably some customer won’t be happy with some part of your business. And the worst part is that the customer may not always be reasonable. No business is immune to this. If you run your business long enough, getting an angry or unreasonable customer will eventually happen. It’s inevitable.

Don’t Let Customers Leave Angry

Photo By Josh Janssen

Due to the rise of social media, blogging, twitter and other lightning fast means of communication, it’s crucial that you pacify angry customers quickly and efficiently. All it takes is just one tweet, blog post or facebook entry and your reputation could be permanently marred. The …

How many of you check your Google Analytics stats religiously at least once a day? How many of you check your stats live using Woopra or some other real time stat tracking software? If you run an online store or sell goods online, do you actually go to your website as a customer on a regular basis to look around?

Photo By Gerlos

Informally, I asked a handful of my webmaster friends these exact questions and most of them said “yes” to the first two questions and “no” to the last. In fact, the webmasters I spoke to rarely visit their site at all unless they need to make a change. They rely mostly on analytics data to observe the health of their website.
There’s Just Too Much Data
Have you looked at your analytics data recently? Of course you have. The fact is, there’s just too …

I received a question from a reader the other day in regards to whether product liability insurance is necessary for a business even if one is protected by limited liability via an LLC or corporation. Specifically, he wanted to know whether it was worth paying for insurance for a pass through entity like an LLC or S Corp which carries no profits within the business. Whenever someone asks me this question, I always say yes no matter the nature of the business but it largely depends on your risk tolerance.

Photo By IXQUICK

Especially if you are running a business in the United States, the chances of getting sued are higher than you think and it really doesn’t take much for someone to take you to court.

There’s also a common misconception when it comes to limited liability with an LLC or corporation that most people may not be aware of. …

Marketing your online business and attracting customers to your ecommerce store or sales page is much harder than marketing a blog or any other type of website. Why? It’s because no one really cares about your business. Nobody really wants to know what you have to sell and no one likes being led to a sales page. Even if you think you’re offering the most magnificent products ever, by default people are going to ignore you unless they know who you are.

Photo by RBarney.com

People Hate Sales Pages On Social Media
Marketing your business on social media is all the rage right now but simply posting your online store URL on Twitter or Facebook is not going to get you customers. For one thing, most people are extremely suspicious of any type of sales page they encounter. Anything that even resembles a …

This is a guest post by Alban who is a personal finance writer. He offers information on how to effectively use a credit card and helps people to compare credit cards online.

Owning a small business is a big responsibility as you have to take care of your clients, provide them with the best service and manage your business success for the sake of your employees as well. However, having a small business credit card is an even bigger responsibility because business credit card spending can quickly get out of control, and instead of making your bookkeeping easier to manage, your business credit card could turn your business dream into a nightmare.

Instead, maximize the use of your small business credit card by understanding when and when not to use it, and follow these top three tips for small business owners using credit cards in their business.
How to use …

This is part 2 of a guest post by Xurxo Vidal. Xurxo is a co-founder and search marketing strategist at Bloom Search Marketing – an agency specialized in paid search campaigns, SEO, Google Analytics and conversion improvement. We are lucky to have him here today to talk about optimizing Adwords campaigns. You can find more of Xurxo’s writings on his company’s blog.

This article is part 2 of a 2 part article on adwords reports that can increase conversions and save you money. If you haven’t done so already, please check out part 1 here

In part 1 , we covered the keyword performance report, the ad performance report and the geographic performance report.

The remaining reports I’ll cover in this post are:

Search Query Performance Report
Placement Performance Report

Search Query Report
The search query report can be your best friend in finding those pesky unrelated keywords that you’re paying for – especially if …

This is a guest post by Xurxo Vidal. Xurxo is a co-founder and search marketing strategist at Bloom Search Marketing – an agency specialized in paid search campaigns, SEO, Google Analytics and conversion improvement. We are lucky to have him here today to talk about optimizing Adwords campaigns. You can find more of Xurxo’s writings on his company’s blog.

This is part 1 of a 2 part post on adwords reports that can increase conversions and save you money. When you are ready, you can find find part 2 here

You’re spending your hard earned cash to advertise your products and services on Google, so finding out how well your campaigns are working is critical to your success with AdWords. Today I’m going to cover some of the key reports available to you to track your campaign’s performance and identify problems and opportunities so you can maximize your ROI. You’ll …

It’s rare for me to get the exact same question in the same week but I had 2 people email me last week about how I deal with credit card chargebacks with our online business.

Photo By Squeaky Marmot

Before I begin, I just want to explain what a chargeback is. As you know, whenever you buy anything with a credit card, the credit card company protects you from any sort of fraud that a merchant might commit.

This includes incorrect amounts charged to your card, failure to deliver the goods as promised or shipping faulty or damaged products. When any of these things happen, you can call your credit card company and they will issue you a refund if certain conditions are met. This protection is one of the primary reasons why I always use my credit card to make any large purchase.

However as with everything in life, credit …

This is a short follow up post to my article on Are Coupon Code Searches Costing Our Online Store Money?. I got a lot of good responses and just wanted to summarize some of the main points. Ultimately, I decided to make a small change to our store based on one particular reader’s input and I wanted to talk about the effect this change had after just 2 days of operation. Usually, two days of testing means absolutely nothing but in this case, it firmly cemented in my head what I needed to do.

From the comments, pretty much everyone agreed that as a customer, seeing a coupon code field and not actually having a coupon code carries a negative psychological effect on the whole shopping experience.

For one thing, most of you that responded stated that seeing an empty coupon field is an instant signal to go off …

Every couple of months, I take an in depth look at the search keywords that people use to arrive at our online store. In addition, I also use keyword tools to see whether people are doing searches for our business directly.

Photo By MissMessie

Much to my surprise, I found that some amount of searches were for the term “Bumblebee Linens coupons” or “hanky coupons bumblebee” etc… I guess it’s only natural that shoppers search for coupons.

But the truth is that we rarely give out coupons yet we prominently display a coupon code field during checkout. The fact that customers are looking for coupons makes me wonder whether they are prematurely exiting the checkout process in search for nonexistant discounts.
Why We Don’t Issue Coupons Very Often
There are different schools of thought when it comes to coupons. Some companies always have coupon codes outstanding as a way to entice customers …

Adwords, like any tool, is a double edged sword. If used improperly, it can flush your money down the drain. But used correctly, it can be a very powerful driver of sales to your online store. The main problem however, is that most new users fall into the money wasting category.

One of the biggest mistakes that newbie Adwords users make is to misuse broad matching keywords with their campaigns. To illustrate my point, I’d like to tell you about some of the boneheaded mistakes that I made early on with our Adwords campaigns.

As I mentioned in some of my previous articles on How To Use Adwords The Right Way With Your Online Store and The Realities Of Using Adwords Effectively, finding the right keywords to use is an iterative process that requires patience and the right tools. And the only way to refine your campaigns properly …