Google rolled out their web browser today, Google Chrome, and I have to say that after trying it out for a little while I am completely surprised.Google Chrome is a very stripped down browser with the advantage of being about 2 million times faster than Internet Explorer or Firefox. After browsing for over an hour, I didn’t have to wait for a single page to load, at all! Not sure what Google does different from Firefox or IE, but the difference is amazing. I think that this could easily save me ten or twenty minutes a day from not waiting for web pages to load.As far as layout... Read More

One of the best ways (If done properly) to add additional revenue to your ecommerce sales is to sell non-core products (at cost or even at a loss) to gain additional core sales and new customers.A great example that I found this weekend, is B&H Photo. They sell a variety of non-photography related computer and technical products. What quickly caught my attention is that many these products are being sold well below any other online retailer’s price, even cheaper than anyone on eBay. I don’t have access to wholesale computer accessory costs, but I imagine that they... Read More

Some of the most simple mistakes will undoubtedly lose your website sales. What’s most unfortunate about these mistakes, is that you probably had a guaranteed sale until you irritated or scared your customer enough for them to find another store to shop at.Mistake 1 (Old dates and information):The internet is a very dynamic machine. When a visitor shows up on your website and sees your copyright date “Copyright © Anything < This Year” it instantly brings up... Read More

Using a simple obfuscating script on your website’s published email addresses can reduce the amount of email spam by 90% or more. Email spam primarily comes from email harvesting bots, similar to search engine bots, that scour the internet looking for email addresses to spam. There are several ways to obfuscate email addresses.Common methods to obfuscate email addresses:EncodingJavascriptFlashUsing an Image instead of textJavascript and Flash obfuscation basically create a text version of your email that cannot be read by all but the most complex email harvesting robots. These... Read More

Google released a beta service today called Google Checkout Shopping Cart. The cart is a very simple javascript based cart that integrates into websites and the Google Checkout payment service. The entire cart uses a new shopping cart API and only needs a few lines of code on a website.The checkout process uses the existing Google Checkout system.This cart looks to be an extremely easy way for... Read More

I needed to setup a content filtering firewall a few weeks ago for an office of about 50 people. The existing firewall was a Sonicwall Pro 4060 which is a very solid firewall and is more than adequate for 50 computers. Sonicwall also has a content filter application that installs on the Pro 4060. The drawback to using Sonicwall’s filter is the price. Their filter is billed on a recurring yearly subscription, and would cost about $2,000 per year to use. $2,000 per year was far beyond the budget for such a project, so I went to look for an open source or lower cost setup, hopefully... Read More

Promotional products are something that many businesses use, but few use effectively. I get bags full of pens at conferences, but rarely do these ever incline me to deal with that company ever again. Chances are most promotional product use, ends with similar results.There are a few key factors in making promotional products work.Give people something they want!Don’t skimp out!Design them properly!Quality targeting is more important than quantity!1.) Give people something that they want and need!When I go to trade-shows, I all to often come away with fifteen lanyards, hundreds of... Read More

Almost every website with any resemblance of professionalism uses stock photography. Although it is usually very high resolution, it is so often very low in realism.Do people actually respond to fake, photographs? Only your own testing can tell for sure, but one thing’s for certain, if the images on your site are actually unique and speak to your customers, you have an advantage over everyone else.Here’s my favorite examples of the too-stock photography that we see everywhere!The collaborationKeys to a personal (and professional)... Read More

I need a new belt, so I went to a few department store websites to find one. The first one I stopped at: Macy’s, gave me a glimpse at what I think could be the worst practice I have ever seen an ecommerce website use.Does Macy’s really think that they are so important that I will wait, just to see their website?They without question lost this sale, and if for some reason they think that this doesn’t reflect negatively on their retail presence as well, they can think again. I can understand a website... Read More

This is a little plugin that I came across today. Nothing new, but after using it, there’s no way I would setup a cpanel/whm server without it.ConfigServer Security & Firewall (csf)This is essentially an extension of iptables firewall that integrates with a nice GUI in the WHM interface. It makes configuring the server’s firewall a snap, and also suggests other security fixes based on how your server is setup. The installation took about 5 minutes to complete and another half hour to fully configure. You will need ssh or other shell access to install it on a server. This... Read More

When you run an affiliate program whether through a 3rd party affiliate marketplace, or with a self branded program, you will undoubtedly run into the problem of trying to figure out which sites to allow into your program. Putting active affiliate recruiting aside, there are two common approach methods to accepting affiliates. First, the shot gun approach (Let every or almost every applicant into your program) and second, the Sniper approach (Let only high quality, select affiliates into your program).Initially many website owners will go with the shot gun approach because they can get a... Read More

I’m not sure whether this can be attributed to poor coding, or something intentional but I stumbled on this little annoyance this week, and then confirmed it on 9 other computers running Firefox.Basically, when you click on a link one the MSN homepage, nothing happens. When you click a second time (Length of time to the second click is irrelevant) the link opens. Originally I thought that I was going crazy or just wasn’t able to perform the seemingly simple task of clicking on a link, to which I do for 12 - 14 hours a day. After spending time on several computers at my office... Read More

I’m not going to go whipping a dead horse here because optimizing a website’s speed has been covered so many times that it is pointless to re-post the same thing all over again.There is more to making a website faster than just the size of pages or html. Sometimes just changing where a script is called can make more of a difference in website loading time than reducing the overall page size by 50%. Here are a few tricks to speed up the actual loading time of a website without making major changes to the website itself. These are very effective and can be implemented on most... Read More

Tracking craigslist ads can be a little tricky because javascript, flash and other useful scripting languagaes are not allowed. It is possible however to track ads using a simple image tracking program. This is limited compared to full-featured javascript tracking script, but it will at least give some idea of the amount of views that your ad is getting.This should also work on myspace, and other networks that allow html, but do not allow javascript or flash.HTML-only tracking systems:HitsLogStatCounterThere's going to be a lot more tracking programs than these, but a lot of them are... Read More

The internet is abuzz with news of Google's new business custom search engine. Google is allowing business sites to have their own custom search engine for $100 per year ( Read More

I started this out with five and quickly went to eight and finally split into two five part categories, where I’ll stay. This is for the ecommerce businesses that have only one person or just one person that runs all of the online stuff, for webmasters, and for anyone that spends a lot of time developing online. From web design, to marketing, database programming, and shipping, these tips are to help you maximize your efficiency because there just isn’t enough time in the day to get everything done.Personal:Wear a suit to the office.Optimize your computer monitor... Read More

eBay formally launched the US version of Kijiji which is a free online classified advertising website, very similar to craigslist, reported PC World.Kijiji could become a major competitor for craigslist, as it is a free online classifieds website mirroring craigslist in many areas. After only a few seconds, I realized that the usability and features of Kijiji were far better than craigslist in many areas. It offers a cleaner look, and better categorization and the site itself is much faster that craigslist. Currently it is somewhat limited in the cities that ads can be placed in, but I... Read More

I love the idea of Wikipedia. A user generated encyclopedia, where people decide what information needs to be addressed under each topic. Theoretically, people who are well studied or professionals in a particular field can contribute to a topic and make it a great resource of information. However, I feel that the current Wikipedia is a complete failure. Wikipedia’s failure can be summed in a single word: ‘accountability‘.Because there is no accountability for what is written, people write about topics that they have no business writing about. Because there is no... Read More

When a visitor reaches a page on your website that doesn’t exist, by default they get a nasty, ugly document, that very well may end any future interaction with your company.It is extremely important to create a custom 404 error document for your website. More than any other error page, you must customize your 404 error page to hopefully route those lost visitors back to your mainland.404 error’s are for the most part unavoidable. I have never seen a website that doesn’t serve a 404 error every once in a while. Whether you mistyped a link, the visitors misspelled a page... Read More

Mitch at practical ecommerce posted an article about helpful gadgets for ecommerce owners.I decided to throw together my own list of programs, and hardware that I currently use that really makes developing and managing websites, and generally using a computer much more efficient. Many of these are not free however, they have all paid for themselves many times over in the time they have saved me.Ultramon - This is a great program that allows you to run an independent taskbar on all of your monitors when using a multiple monitor setup. They offer a free trial, and I can almost guarantee... Read More

When you check the auto-complete option in Windows internet explorer, you just opened yourself up to a mess of potential problems. Internet explorer stores all of the user names and passwords that you tell it to learn, in a single flat-file that is unencrypted and can be easily read by a variety of program. I was installing a password managing program this morning and during one step of the installation process, I unexpectedly saw that all of my user names and passwords popped up completely visible. What this means is that if someone gained access to your computer, they could have full... Read More

If you’ve seen the movie ‘The School of Rock’ this video should be pretty humorous to you.If you haven’t seen the movie, then this looks like some sort of suspense thriller movie about a deranged teacher, when it is actually a comedy.How does this apply to a website?The movie itself really has nothing to do with what is in the preview. However, all of the clips in the preview are directly from the movie itself. Essentially, how you design, layout, and style your website, will have a drastic effect on your visitor’s perception of you. You may run the most... Read More

Following a post from Matt Cutts, I have been collecting how to’s every time I come across one that I use. I have about 900 saved up now, in just about every area imaginable.There are so many how to guides that people need for running their ecommerce website’s. With that in mind, this is a list of very useful how to’s related to ecommerce. Hopefully this post will be a good resource for site owners, and those looking to get into ecommerce. Topics include everything from setting up a web server, marketing, to integrating a website with a payment gateway.Please send me... Read More

I went to login to my Google Checkout account today. For some reason instead of clicking on my bookmark, I did a search for Google Checkout and clicked on the link. Something really caught my eye with the Google Checkout listing in Google.Google doesn’t even have their own listing as the title for Google Checkout in the SERPS. They are advertising an auction company (hibidder.com) in the title of the Google Checkout listing. Andy Beal recently blogged about Google Checkout taking a dive after their $10... Read More

I was driving home from work a few days ago, and I saw one of those Best Buy geek squad cars. They are really noticeable as they are a VW beetle, and they are painted black and white, like an old police car (SEE PICTURE HERE).Now this may seem like a fairly effective practice. They are definitely noticeable, and they probably appeal to a fairly wide audience. The car itself is a representation of simplicity and clean lines something that Geek Squad would definitely want people to associate them with.Best Buy’s Poor Image?
The car that I saw happened to be flying down the road,... Read More

I have been searching for a domain for several hours now. I know that there are millions of website owners using billions of domain names, but the whole system is completely out of hand.I have searched for over a hundred names, not one with an actual dictionary word in it, and only one domain has been available so far. What bothers me more than the lack of available names, is that none of the takes names actually have useful content on them. Almost every one, has a parked page or a made for adsense page, with some generic ads on it and nothing else. It is completely ridiculous that... Read More

I along with thousands of website owners am always trying to improve my ecommerce sites. Hopefully that little font tweak that I make half asleep at midnight will lead to some huge increase in sales. Most likely not, but maybe…In truth, one of the best ways to get good ideas about what to change on your website, is by looking at other websites that have their crap together. Not every mega site does the right things, and you definitely don’t want to go start incorporating every bell and whistle that you can find, but these sites spend a lot of money on testing, so if they have... Read More

Intranet websites can be extremely beneficial for small and medium businesses, but they are often overlooked, or simply ignored. I think that any business who’s employees spend a lot of time on computers, and any business that has constantly updating news and information can greatly benefit from using an Intranet website.A few years ago we decided to create an intranet website for the company. We compiled a list of everything that we needed in order to have a successful intranet.Important factors of our Intranet:Simple publishing platform in a blog format (Reverse... Read More

I recently was referred to a website giving away free vector elements for websites.http://www.bittbox.com/There are some great buttons, glass shapes, backgrounds, headers and a lot more. The blog looks new, but the free stuff is super high quality. Check them out

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I purchased a security scan and audit for my main website this past week. The scan was done by a company called Acunetix. Basically, a security scan is scan done by another server that attempts to exploit known and malicious vulnerabilities in a website’s code and programming.If you run an ecommerce website, I highly recommend getting a scan like this, even if you already do a PCI / CISP scan on any regular basis. This was a complete eye opener for me.Why get a... Read More

I have been running, managing and setting up ecommerce an B2B websites for several years and every once in a while I come across an article or blog post that is exceptionally useful. One of the best articles I have ever found for business websites is on the entrepreneur.com website and was written July 2006. The article Hit the Sweet Spot, is a simple guide covering seven areas your marketing must address to successfully sell to business owners. I printed this article out and it still sits on my desk six months after is was published. It is easily applicable to both websites and any... Read More

The holiday season is the busiest time of year for many retail businesses and ecommerce websites in the US and other countries. Unfortunately for many B2B companies, the holiday season happens to be the dead zone for annual sales. My personal industry slows down about a week before thanksgiving, and with the exception of a few days in December, doesn’t pick back up until mid-January. Interestingly enough, I can spend the same on advertising during these dark hours and get a 70% less return on each dollar I burn.Read More

Taking a step away from my previous post critisizing the use of Ajax and other dynamic website features, Ajax does have uses in business and other website designs. Ajax has an ability to simplify a user’s experience on a website when used properly. It ‘can’ provide very user friendly interfaces that work smoothly, quickly, and better than traditional programming.However, Ajax creates a usability gap when a measurable percentage of visitors don’t have javascript enabled on their web browser. Coincidentally, business and ecommerce websites are a group that often has... Read More

I was looking over one of my websites a few weeks ago on a Sunday evening, and I started getting major errors on the site. I logged into my server, and after finding nothing obviously wrong, I gave the server the command to reboot.About 5 minutes later, after the site didn’t return, I realized that there was a real problem. I called my host and asked them to check my server out. They proceeded to reboot the server, several times, and again nothing. After several minutes of diagnostics, the cause was traced the the primary hard drive, which had failed, mechanically.Now, I backup my... Read More

I recently launched a service with my company and started a pay per click campaign for this particular campaign. I created my keywords and a similar ad for both AdWords and overture, set my cost per click, and added the new campaigns to each account. Now, the Pay per click campaign so far has been the most successful that I have done in the last three years, so I am very happy with the results thus far. However, I am not happy with AdWords. Overture has a running 12%+ conversion rate with this campaign, and has been getting well over 100 visitors per day. AdWords has a 0% conversion... Read More

At some point during the search for knowledge regarding search engine optimization and online marketing, most website owners will start searching through the SEO blogs. This is a good idea to do right from the start.SEO blogs often cover many more topics than just “SEO”. SEO blogs often reach into every aspect of online marketing, which is very fitting considering most SEO’s also play their hand on mediums of traffic on the internet other than organic search engine traffic.What makes a good SEO blog?The main ingredient is high quality, unique information. Interesting... Read More

The ecommerce times wrapped up it’s do it yourself ecommerce guide today.The guide cover some good information about getting into the business side of ecommerce. This guide is a good read for people that are already successful with their ecommerce ventures because several good services and resources are cited throughout the article.The ecommerce guide is broken into three parts:Part 1 - Now Bigger and Better (General introduction and ecommerce background)
Part 2 - Nuts and Bolts (Hosting, ecommerce platforms, SSL, general operation)
Part 3 - Taking Care of Business... Read More

In the world of web usability, one name comes to mind above all others: Jakob Neilson. His recent book in conjunction with Hoa Loranger is titled Prioritizing Web Usability.Jakob Neilson runs the website useit.com and holds a Ph.D. in user interface design/computer science from the Technical University of Denmark.Amazon.com Description:
In 2000, Jakob Nielsen, the world’s leading expert on Web usability, published a book that changed how people think about the Web—Designing Web Usability (New Riders). Many applauded. A few jeered. But everyone listened. The best-selling... Read More

There are several interesting articles that I have seen today.Seth blogs about a lack of organizations or individuals, that tweak existing websites. Not full re-designs, but people that work only on the small stuff.I have to agree that this could be a great Niche for a competent company to fill. I’m not sure how a company would effectively market themselves, but word of mouth seems to be an efficient way to market a company like this. I imagine that once you get going, the referrals could be huge.CakePHP is a Ruby on Rails equivalent for PHP. Oatmeal from seomoz reports on a... Read More

If you are moderately up to date in the world of SEO, you would know that there exists a lot of debate about the effectiveness of purchasing text links for a website. While buying links used to be a great way to get a website up in the rankings, it isn’t nearly as effective any more and can have negative effects on a website if the linking is considered spam. So taking the ‘bold’ assumption for this post that there can be no positive SEO benefit from paid links, can it still be worth it to purchase text link advertisements?My answer is absolutely… I have... Read More

Websites that lack trust are often plagued by low sales, and low conversion rates. If visitors don’t immediately trust a website they will leave, and not come back. New sites have a harder time gaining trust because they don’t yet have a reputation or any reason for a visitor to think they are trustworthy.Here are 3 ways to make your website more trustworthy:1. Create a clean, professional website from the start, or redesign today.... Read More

After a few weak opening posts, I am going to kick off the blog with something that I think is actually useful for ecommerce website owners: 10 Ways to ruin your visitor’s experience on your website.10: Use as much Flash, Javascript, Ajax, and Java as possible.
Corporate and Business sites seem to be worst at letting this one get out of hand. At some point their web designer or team either learned how to make flash, or they just simply discovered it. Now we have flash entry pages, flash navigation, flash banners, Ajax navigation, Java Navigation, Javascript warnings, and a... Read More

In one of the most thought provoking posts I have ever read, Seth Godin posts that businesses should compromise less and not compromise more.This advice can be applied to just about any objective to make it more successful. How many times do you visit a business, or a website and they passively force you down their narrow hallway of options.Do your customers a favor, make products and services based on what they want, not what you want.

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How many times have you emailed a website that you were planning on making a purchase from but didn’t receive a timely response?Occasionally, about half, most of the time, every time…The record that I have seen in a poor response time, is 92 days, set by an industrial printer company when I was inquiring about selling a large Xerox printer. I had completely forgot about and gave up on the whole situation two months before they contacted me. This is the absolute worst I have ever seen, but it doesn’t take 90 days to be a poor response time.How fast should a customer... Read More

Thanks for stopping by the recently launched ecommerce blog. The goal of this blog is to provide information for website owners, marketers and generally anyone interested in ecommerce.

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