november 2007

I'm not a cubicle worker, but I've always enjoyed reading the Dilbert comic in the newspaper. Scott Adams, Dilbert's creator, has been maintaining a blog for the past couple of years where in he discusses moral dilemmas, holds contests, and generally just presents interesting topics from political and social goings-on.

He's been posting almost daily this whole time, and in his recent blog post he elucidates his goals for his blog as the following 4 things, I'm assuming in order of importance to him:

1. Advertising dollars
2. Compiling the best posts into a book.
3. Growing the audience for Dilbert
4. Artistic satisfaction

He goes on to say that since most people are reading his blog through RSS he's not making any money from the ads so blogging is no longer a valuable use of his time. He also appears genuinely dismayed by having received a few negative comments. To be fair, he isn't going to stop blogging, just cut back. He says, "It’s hard to tell the family I can’t spend time with them because I need to create free content on the Internet that will lower our income."

Hmmm...I feel my respect for Mr. Adams shrinking. Last time I checked, starting a blog just for the hopes of making some ad bucks was a bad idea, like getting married just because the other person is rich. That's probably gonna result in one of you being disappointed. Blogging is about sparking discussion, engaging readers in thoughtful conversation, creating relationships between yourselves and your fans. Not advertising revenue. (I know lots of blogs do these things and earn decent ad revenue, but that's different.)

Many of you blog, including myself. I love blogging, even though I can't say that's it's brought us any new clients and I certainly haven't made any money from it. That's not the goal, and it's too bad that's the majority of what Mr. Adams hoped for. I'll still read Dilbert because it's a great comic, but I'll always think somewhere in the back of my mind that it's not really about us the reader enjoying his artistic efforts but Scott Adams who wanted more money and didn't get it.

This post is from from my other blog here

Following Black Friday we have Cyber Monday, a day online retailers hope will help push them into the black for the year. Industry analysts spend their lives trying to figure out what consumers will do, and we’re told 46 percent of Americans in the workforce were expected to shop online today while at work. (Source: PBS Nightly Business Report)

Since you are the workforce and are probably online all the time, I’m curious about how you shop. If you’re reading this and you’re an online merchant, do you shop online or do you hustle around looking for the best deals from your local shopping centers? . . . Tell me, did you buy anything online today?

Tags: online, shopping, ecommerce

Hello all Gooruze,

I have written what I think is a pretty comprehensive guide to launching a business blog. There are many articles already on Gooruze about why and how to blog, but this one is a little bit different, being written for the person who is unfamiliar with blogging. I would be very interested in your comments on this article. Let me know if I forgot something important or if you think it covers the basics. Read my Beginner's Guide to Starting A Business Blog and please let me know what you think. Thank you!

This post is from from my other blog here

A couple of days ago I mentioned that I wanted to share our new sites with you. We get to work on a lot of sites at MightyMerchant, and these great sites deserve a little exposure (and link love!) when they’re just getting started. This one, IsleOfSkyeBagpipes.com, went live on November 5.

The challenge for this site was to provide the many options that Isle Of Skye needed their customers to be able to select. MightyMerchant has a feature called “shared options,” which allows add-on choices. For Isle Of Skye, the options are a little more complicated, as some of them affect the price of the product and some do not. This is an important feature that many ecommerce merchants really need! In this example, in the drop down selection boxes you can see that some choices add on to the cost:

Shared options goes one step further so that the customer could create groups of options that he will use over and over. For instance, if all of the bagpipes share the same Mouth Piece and Tuning Slide options, he can just select to use that Shared option group, rather than having to enter those choices for each product individually.

The couple who started Isle Of Sky Bagpipes, Mike and Sarah, are passionate about sharing their love of bagpipes and offering quality bagpipe merchandise. Mike has been the Director of Piping at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota since 1999. It’s great to have you aboard, Mike and Sarah!

Tags: website, design

This post is from from my other blog here

Yesterday’s newspaper was three times the size it normally is, thanks to an inch and a half of advertisements plugging their five-alarm fabulous Friday sales. I’m not the type of person to get up at 4 am to get to a 6 am, 4-hour only sale, and if I could subscribe to a version of the newspaper without these shopping bonanza ads, I probably would.

As MightyMerchant’s marketing specialist, I’m always trying to balance the notion of how to utilize marketing effectively with my personal desire to not be indiscriminately marketed to. I know I’m not alone, so when I found this Firefox add-on that blocks ads from appearing, I wanted to talk about it.

Adblock, a free Firefox browser plug-in which blocks website ads, is one of Firefox’s most popular plug-ins. Adblock uses simple and regular expression filtering to block content. A simple filter is a string of text with one or more wildcards (*). Regular expressions are more complex ways to add filters. The Mozdev website provides some sample filters.

Once Adblock is installed, go to the Firefox add-ons menu, and select Adblock preferences. Add these expressions, or others of your choice, to the ‘add new filter’ field– to block all images: .gif; to block all DoubleClick content: doubleclick.net; to block the contents of an ad-directory: http://example.com/ads/

The Wikipedia entry for Adblock provides more examples of filters, including how to block the “donate to Wikipedia” banner!– wikipedia.org#DIV(id=siteNotice

Read further down this entry, however, and you get to some meaty controversy involving use of this add-on. Understandably, web masters who serve ads do not support the use of this blocker, and some criticism has gone far enough to conclude that this blocker could kill the online revenue model. Some site owners feel that Firefox developers Mozilla should be responsible for an inestimable loss of click-through income, and have retaliated by blocking the Firefox browser from accessing their site at all. One site that advocates for a boycott of Adblock, whyfirefoxisblocked.com, provides a Firefox user with the headline, “You’ve reached this page because the site you were trying to visit now blocks the Firefox browser,” and calls Adblock “internet theft.”

So far, most large search and ad companies like Google and MSN have ignored the phenomena of ad blocking, presumably because the service isn’t hugely popular yet. But with growing numbers of people installing Adblock, Adblock Plus, and related content blockers, it’s destines to be on the radar screen of small and large companies alike before too long.

Let me know where you stand on this. Perhaps this service isn’t widespread enough yet to concern you. Do you use Adblock? Would you use Adblock? Would it make a difference to you if you served ads which you knew were being blocked by this tool?

Tags: Adblock

This post is from from my other blog here

At MightyMerchant, we have an amazing array of clients that are successful in many areas of ecommerce. Not all of our clients engage in online commerce–our system is flexible enough to be used for most any type of content management–but most do.

If you’re looking to have a cheesecake delivered anywhere in the country, one of our clients, TheDessertCafe.com, can do it! Want to book a photographer for your Oregon wedding? Try another one of our clients, Oregon wedding photographer Bruce Berg. Bruce has been photographing Oregon weddings for over twenty years now, and he’s won more awards than any other Oregon photographer.

Our clients can book you an expedition, and provide you with fishing lures for the trip. Need a baby sling or other kids clothes? I was browsing through our Client Gallery recently, amazed by the entrepreneurial spirit I found there. (I’m realizing how easy it would be to buy all of my holiday presents this year from only MightyMerchant customers!)

I wanted to do something to highlight the great looking, fun, and functional sites we get to work on here at MightyMerchant, and I thought you might enjoy taking a peek, too. To that end, I want to use a little bit of blog space to welcome our new clients when their sites go live, and share a bit of the excitement with you.This site, BodyJaz.com, went live on November 1. They sell massage products, aromatherapy items, candles, fitness supplies, and all kinds of bath and body products. You can even design your own fragrances for oils and lotions.

The BodyJaz site features Customer Accounts, which allows customers to save their log-in info, an online registration form for classes, a newsletter sign-up feature, and an organization that allows customers to shop by brand or product.

I hope you’ll take a moment to check out some of the other great websites our clients have. SiteBeat, the monthly MightyMerchant newsletter, features a Client Profile in each issue (the December newsletter will feature JewcyWrap.com, a site dedicated to fun and funky Jewish themed gift wrap-an appropriate site for the month of December *smile). We have some awesome customers, and I’m glad to be able to share them with you!

Tags: MightyMerchant, web, design

This post is from from my other blog here

Two examples of promotions that were oh so close to hitting the mark crossed my path recently. One was a one-page insert in my local newspaper for a grand opening of a store in our area. It was really more of a grand re-opening as they had closed for a while to make some improvements to the building and add new products, but that’s not the point. The ad declared that they were offering $1 espressos, door prizes, popcorn, and other such niceties to celebrate the occasion. The one thing they neglected to include in the ad was any store information. There was no address, no phone number, and no store hours!

Now, this store is targeting people who live in our area and they are no doubt assuming that everyone already knows where the store is. I say, however, that you should never assume potential customers know anything about your business. I want that $1 espresso, and I’d be happy to visit the place and check out their new stuff, but because I don’t regularly shop there I don’t know if they open at 8 am, 9 am or 9:30 am, and there’s no phone number for me to call and find out. I’m not going to drive over there if there’s a chance it might be closed, so guess what? I’m not going. My ever-practical husband says that I can simply look up the market in the phone book. But that’s an extra step that your customers shouldn’t have to take when your ad is in their hands.

The other example came in the form of an email promotion offering me a free sample of a dog chew:

Where do I click to get the free sample? Clicking on the link to Greenies.com does take you to the form to get the sample, but this email is missing a key ingredient-the “call to action.” It should say something like, “Click here for your free Greenies Lite sample,” or “Request your free sample here.” It won’t be clear to everyone receiving this email that to get the sample you have to click where it says, “You are receiving this email because you opted in for future communications at Greenies.com.” The purpose of this email is to get people on the site so they can see the products and try one for free, right? So, make it easy and not a guessing game by providing a clear link to whatever action you want to be taken.

It doesn’t take an advanced marketing degree to compose an effective ad or promotion. Just make sure to include the basics and you’ll be off to a great start!

Tags: email, marketing

This post is from from my other blog here

Google Analytics is a free and powerful way to track the performance of your website. If you’re not already using Google Analytics, let me give you 5 reasons to do so:

Discover how customers find you. From the left navigation menu under Dashboard, click on Traffic Sources>Search Engines. This report tells you the traffic that all of the search engines have sent you, from the big cheese Google to tiny crumb Netscape. On the left side is a search box with a pull down menu with choices ‘containing’ and ‘excluding.’ You can exclude Google from the results this way, and get a feel for how many people come to your site from other search engines. Another nifty feature is the Segment box at the top of the page. You can segment these remaining results by keyword. This segment button also sorts by city, browser, operating system, and many other parameters to help you in an ad campaign.

Discover how your customers search. In Traffic Sources>Keywords select the ‘unpaid’ link to the left of the segment box. This view tells you the keywords customers use to find you that you are not paying for. Optmizing for these keywords would give your sales a boost without ads.

Discover where people leave your site. Go to Content>Top Exit Pages. If the majority of visitors leave your site from the homepage, you’ve got some work to do. Ask yourself some serious questions about your homepage layout and what you could do to make it more appealing and usable.

Discover your top referring sites. Referring sites are those sites that have linked to you and send you traffic. You may sort through these referring sites by both paid and non-paid links. Click on Traffic Sources>Referring Sites, then choose the Goal Conversion. If you have configured goals, this will tell you which of those referring links results in successfully meeting a goal. Usually goals are sales, but they can also be downloads or sign-ups. Which of the referring sites are successful for you? Don’t throw money at the sites that aren’t bringing you anything.

Monitor your email success. The links in your emails can be connected to Google Analytics so that you can tell which emails are effective at converting to sales. It’s easy to configure most email programs. Try this resource for coding emails, ROI Revolution. Once your email is coded, return to Traffic Sources>All Traffic Sources. Under the graph, click Show>Medium and choose ‘email’ as your medium. (This medium will be whatever word you chose when you coded the email. You could pick any word, but ‘email’ is the obvious choice. It could also be ‘newsletter’ or whatever word makes sense to you.) Within this medium you can track your conversions by email, region, or other factor.

This is but a handful of the ways Google Analytics can help the ecommerce webmaster. MightyMerchan’s article on using Google Analytics has more information on useful and easy-to-access reports. If you crave even more information than what ...

This post is from from my other blog here

Looking for a quick and easy way to get some holiday traffic to your website? Email cards have measurable results, they don’t take as much time to read as a newsletter, and get your name on your customers’ radar as they prepare their holiday shopping lists.

Email promotions are easy anytime, but are especially welcome this time of year as people are faced with holiday gift buying. People are looking for deals, unique items they can’t get in their local stores, and ways to save time. You can offer them all three things! Customizing a seasonal themed email card or promotion is easy to do with Constant Contact’s themes, and they can be customized to suit your needs and desires.

Here are some sample themes:

Using one of these templates, you can offer a discount code for customers buying Thanksgiving themed-items, or free shipping up to a certain date in December, for instance. These email promotions shouldn’t be too “hard sell,” just customize a short, tasteful e-card and watch your traffic increase as customers return to your website to see what you have to offer.

Hopefully, you’ve read MightyMerchant’s article on optimizing your site for the holidays. The article suggests restructuring your site with gift shopping in mind, such as moving popular gift items to the front page to make them easy to find, or tweaking your product descriptions so they reflect gift-giving. When a recipient of your holiday offer clicks your e-promotion to visit your website, greet them with a website that looks like it’s ready for the holidays. Combining site optimization tactics like this with a targeted holiday email card is a great way to boost your sales this time of year.

Here are some more of Constant Contact’s holiday themed email templates:

Now is the time to get started on holiday marketing. Even if customers don’t return to your website right away, the email from you will be in their inbox, and they’ll turn to it when they’re ready.

Tags: email, marketing, seasonal, promotion

This post is from from my other blog here

There are lots of things in this world that we use everyday and don’t know how they work…televisions, cell phones, microwave ovens, search engines, URLs, speaking for myself, of course. If you’re involved in online business (and if you’re reading this you no doubt are) having a working knowledge of a URL is an important tidbit of knowledge. If you’re a programmer you might just want to skip back to another post and catch up on your reading, but for those of you who may not know all the parts of a standard URL, please keep reading!

First of all, a URL is a “uniform resource locator,” and it is a way of identifying and locating items on the web such as files or pages.

Let’s look at this example URL:

http://www.blog.example.com/faq/link-policy/index.html

The http is the protocol, or method of accessing the file and stands for “hypertext transfer protocol.” Other protocols are https (secure hypertext transfer protocol) ftp (file transfer protocol), sftp (secure file transfer protocol). The portion following the protocol, www.blog.example.com, is the host, the subdomain is blog and the domain name is example.co and www indicates is an acronym for World Wide Web.

Items in the slashes, /, are directories or folders where the files you are looking for are found. /faq/ is the directory, /link-policy/ is the subdirectory, and “index.html” is the “resource ID.” This is the name of the file for the page which is stored on the specified server. /index.html is the file name for the specific page. The file name ends with a three or four letter designation of the file type like .rtf, .pdf, .jpeg or others.

If a website has a URL like this example:

http://podcast.example.co.au:80/podcastplay?id=1073682064&

the “au” is a country code and is also the “top level domain,” meaning the website originates from Australia. The second-level domain is “.co.au.” “:80″ is the default web server port. Ports may be identified in other ways but if it is 80 it is most often left out. The path is /podcastplay which is where the folder is, like in the previous example. The characters within the ? and & are a parameter. The parameter has the name id and the value 1073682064. A URL can have many parameters and they are always set off by ? and &.

A static URL is a document that can be returned by the server without the server having to do any computation. A dynamic URL, on the other hand, does require the server to perform some computation to return it. If the URL contains a question mark, it’s usually considered dynamic while no question mark in the URL usually means its static. The contents of a static URL don’t change whereas a dynamic URL is basically a template in which to display changing content, which makes updating a site much easier; Instead of changing information in the static HTML code, the content is changed in a database.

For a non-programmer, how did I do? If I missed something, join the discussion and let me know!

Tags: url

This post is from from my other blog here

There are lots of things in this world that we use everyday and don’t know how they work…televisions, cell phones, microwave ovens, search engines, URLs, speaking for myself, of course. If you’re involved in online business (and if you’re reading this you no doubt are) having a working knowledge of a URL is an important tidbit of knowledge. If you’re a programmer you might just want to skip back to another post and catch up on your reading, but for those of you who may not know all the parts of a standard URL, please keep reading!

First of all, a URL is a “uniform resource locator,” and it is a way of identifying and locating items on the web such as files or pages.

Let’s look at this example URL:

http://www.blog.example.com/faq/link-policy/index.html

The http is the protocol, or method of accessing the file and stands for “hypertext transfer protocol.” Other protocols are https (secure hypertext transfer protocol) ftp (file transfer protocol), sftp (secure file transfer protocol). The portion following the protocol, www.blog.example.com, is the host, the subdomain is blog and the domain name is example.co and www indicates is an acronym for World Wide Web.

Items in the slashes, /, are directories or folders where the files you are looking for are found. /faq/ is the directory, /link-policy/ is the subdirectory, and “index.html” is the “resource ID.” This is the name of the file for the page which is stored on the specified server. /index.html is the file name for the specific page. The file name ends with a three or four letter designation of the file type like .rtf, .pdf, .jpeg or others.

If a website has a URL like this example:

http://podcast.example.co.au:80/podcastplay?id=1073682064&

the “au” is a country code and is also the “top level domain,” meaning the website originates from Australia. The second-level domain is “.co.au.” “:80″ is the default web server port. Ports may be identified in other ways but if it is 80 it is most often left out. The path is /podcastplay which is where the folder is, like in the previous example. The characters within the ? and & are a parameter. The parameter has the name id and the value 1073682064. A URL can have many parameters and they are always set off by ? and &.

A static URL is a document that can be returned by the server without the server having to do any computation. A dynamic URL, on the other hand, does require the server to perform some computation to return it. If the URL contains a question mark, it’s usually considered dynamic while no question mark in the URL usually means its static. The contents of a static URL don’t change whereas a dynamic URL is basically a template in which to display changing content, which makes updating a site much easier; Instead of changing information in the static HTML code, the content is changed in a database.

For a non-programmer, how did I do? If I missed something, join the discussion and let me know!

This post is from from my other blog here

It’s mid-November already, and online merchants are gearing up for what promises to be the biggest online shopping season ever. As increasing numbers of people shop online, merchants must be ever-more vigilant about preventing and detecting order fraud. Fraudsters are sophisticated, and the number of fraudulent orders rises every year. Going over-limit on credit card chargebacks and refunds can destroy a merchant’s ability to accept credit cards, which can be the death of an otherwise honest business. Fraud costs you not only money but time, so it pays to protect yourself. You probably can’t eliminate all fraud, but these steps can put a dent in it.

The first line of defense is identifying suspicious orders before you fill them:

• the order contains multiple requests for the same high-ticket item or is for many of the same item that is easy to resell • foreign shipping address but U.S. billing address • the IP address doesn’t match the billing address • ZIP code and address don’t match (an AVS, Address Verification System, can determine this) • the order is much larger than your typical order • the order is missing information

If just one of these problems is present, there may be no concern, but if more than one of these red flags present, take some additional action. For instance, a large order for many of the same expensive items, from a foreign address, with overnight shipping would be a big red flag.

What you can do:

If you have the full credit card number, call the bank and verify that the card number matches the billing address. If you have a phone number for the order, call it just to make sure it isn’t a disconnected number. Assuming you did reach an actual person, a fraudster is not going to admit to being a fraudster! However, you can call suspicious orders and verify details by phone. Ask the customer if they really intended to buy 100 Swarovski crystal-encrusted napkin rings or whatever it is. Most legitimate customers will be thrilled you’re taking the extra step as a security measure. This protects them from unauthorized charges as well as yourself.

You can Google the name, address, or phone number that you received with the order and see what you can find out. Keep in mind that people move, and online records may be out of date. Call the credit card company and verify that the billing address, name on card, and CVV number are correct.

If none of these steps reassures you that the order is legitimate, you may simply cancel it. If you can, send the customer an email saying that you were unable to verify their credit card. Legitimate customers will almost always follow through to see what the problem is while a scammer won’t.

If you aren’t currently using an Address Verification Service (AVS) and Card Code Verification (CVV/CVC2/CID), begin using it. These tools detect irregularities in a cardholder’s information that can give you a heads up that this order needs more attention.

Scammers know ...

This post is from from my other blog here

It’s mid-November already, and online merchants are gearing up for what promises to be the biggest online shopping season ever. As increasing numbers of people shop online, merchants must be ever-more vigilant about preventing and detecting order fraud. Fraudsters are sophisticated, and the number of fraudulent orders rises every year. Going over-limit on credit card chargebacks and refunds can destroy a merchant’s ability to accept credit cards, which can be the death of an otherwise honest business. Fraud costs you not only money but time, so it pays to protect yourself. You probably can’t eliminate all fraud, but these steps can put a dent in it.

The first line of defense is identifying suspicious orders before you fill them:

• the order contains multiple requests for the same high-ticket item or is for many of the same item that is easy to resell • foreign shipping address but U.S. billing address • the IP address doesn’t match the billing address • ZIP code and address don’t match (an AVS, Address Verification System, can determine this) • the order is much larger than your typical order • the order is missing information

If just one of these problems is present, there may be no concern, but if more than one of these red flags present, take some additional action. For instance, a large order for many of the same expensive items, from a foreign address, with overnight shipping would be a big red flag.

What you can do:

If you have the full credit card number, call the bank and verify that the card number matches the billing address. If you have a phone number for the order, call it just to make sure it isn’t a disconnected number. Assuming you did reach an actual person, a fraudster is not going to admit to being a fraudster! However, you can call suspicious orders and verify details by phone. Ask the customer if they really intended to buy 100 Swarovski crystal-encrusted napkin rings or whatever it is. Most legitimate customers will be thrilled you’re taking the extra step as a security measure. This protects them from unauthorized charges as well as yourself.

You can Google the name, address, or phone number that you received with the order and see what you can find out. Keep in mind that people move, and online records may be out of date. Call the credit card company and verify that the billing address, name on card, and CVV number are correct.

If none of these steps reassures you that the order is legitimate, you may simply cancel it. If you can, send the customer an email saying that you were unable to verify their credit card. Legitimate customers will almost always follow through to see what the problem is while a scammer won’t.

If you aren’t currently using an Address Verification Service (AVS) and Card Code Verification (CVV/CVC2/CID), begin using it. These tools detect irregularities in a cardholder’s information that can give you a heads up that this order needs more attention.

Scammers know ...

This post is from from my other blog here

On Friday, November 2, I listed MightyMerchant with SuperPages.com, which is like an online Yellow Pages for finding local businesses. With SuperPages you can also review businesses and read reviews other people have left. It’s free for local listings, and I wanted to be able to recommend this service based on my own experience, so I signed up for a business listing.

Well, I’m only partially happy with it, but I’m still recommending it. The set up process was relatively painless, and today my listing is there for anyone who searches on our company name, MightyMerchant eCommerce Hosted Shopping Cart. Searching for “ecommerce” is less effective-you have to click on the related category of “electronic commerce” to find MightyMerchant appearing on the second page of results. But, searching for “ecommerce” and clicking on the related category of “web site design” doesn’t bring up the MightyMerchant listing, even though that is an integral part of the services we offer, and it says so in our business description.

I easily updated our profile to add MightyMerchant to the “web site design” and “web site development” categories, as well as “Internet Marketing Services” category, only to discover that I was limited to 5 categories. I can live with that.

Part of my dissatisfaction comes with how much they charge for enhancements. To add red, italics, or bold to your ad is $20 a month. Highlights are $25 a month. For “preferred placement,” as they say, to “move your listing closer to the top of the search results,” they charge $101 a month. There is no explanation of how they determine placement beyond that. What happens if everyone in your category is paying for preferred placement? Someone still has to be last. To have my listing appear in the directory of my town is free, a listing covering my county is $45 a month, my city’s metro area is $85 a month, and a listing covering all of Oregon is $235 a month. As if that’s not enough extra charges, to add a company logo and promotional message is $23 a month. That’s $292 a month for an Oregon listing with red and bold, a logo and promo text. Sorry SuperPages, I think that’s way too much! But, they know that local search is probably the next big thing in search technology, as both brick-and-mortar businesses, and small online business strive to tailor their results to an increasing desire to find locally available products and services.

On the bright side, even with a free account you can see the number of impressions, which is people who viewed the page your results appear on, and the number of clicks, which is people who clicked on your entry.

Here is a screenshot of our free listing:

There are a few outlets for free listings for local business searches, such as Google Maps, and YellowPages.com. It definitely can’t hurt to have your business in as many of these free local listings as possible. Whether a red listing is ...

This post is from from my other blog here

On Friday, November 2, I listed MightyMerchant with SuperPages.com, which is like an online Yellow Pages for finding local businesses. With SuperPages you can also review businesses and read reviews other people have left. It’s free for local listings, and I wanted to be able to recommend this service based on my own experience, so I signed up for a business listing.

Well, I’m only partially happy with it, but I’m still recommending it. The set up process was relatively painless, and today my listing is there for anyone who searches on our company name, MightyMerchant eCommerce Hosted Shopping Cart. Searching for “ecommerce” is less effective-you have to click on the related category of “electronic commerce” to find MightyMerchant appearing on the second page of results. But, searching for “ecommerce” and clicking on the related category of “web site design” doesn’t bring up the MightyMerchant listing, even though that is an integral part of the services we offer, and it says so in our business description.

I easily updated our profile to add MightyMerchant to the “web site design” and “web site development” categories, as well as “Internet Marketing Services” category, only to discover that I was limited to 5 categories. I can live with that.

Part of my dissatisfaction comes with how much they charge for enhancements. To add red, italics, or bold to your ad is $20 a month. Highlights are $25 a month. For “preferred placement,” as they say, to “move your listing closer to the top of the search results,” they charge $101 a month. There is no explanation of how they determine placement beyond that. What happens if everyone in your category is paying for preferred placement? Someone still has to be last. To have my listing appear in the directory of my town is free, a listing covering my county is $45 a month, my city’s metro area is $85 a month, and a listing covering all of Oregon is $235 a month. As if that’s not enough extra charges, to add a company logo and promotional message is $23 a month. That’s $292 a month for an Oregon listing with red and bold, a logo and promo text. Sorry SuperPages, I think that’s way too much! But, they know that local search is probably the next big thing in search technology, as both brick-and-mortar businesses, and small online business strive to tailor their results to an increasing desire to find locally available products and services.

On the bright side, even with a free account you can see the number of impressions, which is people who viewed the page your results appear on, and the number of clicks, which is people who clicked on your entry.

Here is a screenshot of our free listing:

There are a few outlets for free listings for local business searches, such as Google Maps, and YellowPages.com. It definitely can’t hurt to have your business in as many of these free local listings as possible. Whether a red listing is ...

This post is from from my other blog here

Just yesterday I sent out MightyMerchant’s November newsletter with an announcement about Google’s new Business Search and MightyMerchant’s own custom search features (site-wide search or cross-category search) that can be added to your website. Then, today I read an Internet Retailer report about an announcement from Republic of Tea that visitors who shop for tea on RepublicOfTea.com using their on-site search tool spend an average of 50% more than shoppers who don’t use the feature. A Republic Of Tea executive reports that “the site receives more dollars on average per order from shoppers using the new search tool than from sales off any other area of the site – and that includes sales to shoppers who arrive on a product page via a web search.”

Why are on-site search tools so effective? When shoppers use a search tool, they usually enter in search terms that are very specific to what they’re looking for. The targeted results provided by the search tool take them to just what they want, with fewer frustrations of fruitless searching. Combine the highly relevant results with the targeted suggestions for similar products from a related products up-sell or cross-sell feature from MightyMerchant, and people will frequently leave your store with more in their shopping cart.

For our clients who have yet to take MightyMerchant’s customer survey, we’re offering a $25 discount on implementing any advanced feature to your site, including cross-sell and up-sell or custom search, upon completion of the survey. Simply take the brief, 10-question survey. At the end you will receive a code. After checking out the features MightyMerchant can add for you, use the code on our feature request page and receive the discount. The survey will remain open through November 10!

This post is from from my other blog here

Just yesterday I sent out MightyMerchant’s November newsletter with an announcement about Google’s new Business Search and MightyMerchant’s own custom search features (site-wide search or cross-category search) that can be added to your website. Then, today I read an Internet Retailer report about an announcement from Republic of Tea that visitors who shop for tea on RepublicOfTea.com using their on-site search tool spend an average of 50% more than shoppers who don’t use the feature. A Republic Of Tea executive reports that “the site receives more dollars on average per order from shoppers using the new search tool than from sales off any other area of the site – and that includes sales to shoppers who arrive on a product page via a web search.”

Why are on-site search tools so effective? When shoppers use a search tool, they usually enter in search terms that are very specific to what they’re looking for. The targeted results provided by the search tool take them to just what they want, with fewer frustrations of fruitless searching. Combine the highly relevant results with the targeted suggestions for similar products from a related products up-sell or cross-sell feature from MightyMerchant, and people will frequently leave your store with more in their shopping cart.

For our clients who have yet to take MightyMerchant’s customer survey, we’re offering a $25 discount on implementing any advanced feature to your site, including cross-sell and up-sell or custom search, upon completion of the survey. Simply take the brief, 10-question survey. At the end you will receive a code. After checking out the features MightyMerchant can add for you, use the code on our feature request page and receive the discount. The survey will remain open through November 10!

This post is from from my other blog here

OK, that title is a little misleading, because I don’t advocate writing copy strictly with the intention of it being search-engine friendly. Any decent SEO (search engine optimization) expert worth her salt would tell you, rightly so, to write for your customers. If you write fresh, keyword-rich, engaging advertising copy or product descriptions, the search engines will find it as relevant as your customers will.

But, there is an art to writing copy with key phrases in the form in which people actually search for them, and a somewhat scientific approach to writing copy based on the knowledge of how search engines handle things like punctuation.

Pick three keywords related to your site, such as “soccer, teams, jerseys.” Go to Google and type in these keywords separated by a space. Next, type in the keywords separated by a comma and space. Try it with exclamation points or any other punctuation. The fact that these searches return identical results tells you that search engines ignore punctuation (for the most part). You can use that knowledge to your advantage when writing copy and product descriptions for your website by writing in such a way as to include phrases that would be awkward if written in a sentence.

As an example consider the fact that when searching, people tend to first enter the item they want followed by the location they are looking for, even though in everyday speech it is much more common to say the location first: “Portland soccer teams” rather than “soccer teams Portland”

Writing “We sell customized jerseys for soccer teams Portland” would be nonsense, but writing “We sell customized jerseys for soccer teams. Portland has several teams with colorful jerseys…

Period ignored, awkward search phrase returned! As you do keyword research, (see MightyMerchant’s comparison of free and subscription keyword research tools) keep in mind the fact that search engines ignore punctuation. You just might be able to creatively work in some phrases you previously thought were too unnatural.

This post is from from my other blog here

OK, that title is a little misleading, because I don’t advocate writing copy strictly with the intention of it being search-engine friendly. Any decent SEO (search engine optimization) expert worth her salt would tell you, rightly so, to write for your customers. If you write fresh, keyword-rich, engaging advertising copy or product descriptions, the search engines will find it as relevant as your customers will.

But, there is an art to writing copy with key phrases in the form in which people actually search for them, and a somewhat scientific approach to writing copy based on the knowledge of how search engines handle things like punctuation.

Pick three keywords related to your site, such as “soccer, teams, jerseys.” Go to Google and type in these keywords separated by a space. Next, type in the keywords separated by a comma and space. Try it with exclamation points or any other punctuation. The fact that these searches return identical results tells you that search engines ignore punctuation (for the most part). You can use that knowledge to your advantage when writing copy and product descriptions for your website by writing in such a way as to include phrases that would be awkward if written in a sentence.

As an example consider the fact that when searching, people tend to first enter the item they want followed by the location they are looking for, even though in everyday speech it is much more common to say the location first: “Portland soccer teams” rather than “soccer teams Portland”

Writing “We sell customized jerseys for soccer teams Portland” would be nonsense, but writing “We sell customized jerseys for soccer teams. Portland has several teams with colorful jerseys…

Period ignored, awkward search phrase returned! As you do keyword research, (see MightyMerchant’s comparison of free and subscription keyword research tools) keep in mind the fact that search engines ignore punctuation. You just might be able to creatively work in some phrases you previously thought were too unnatural.

This post is from from my other blog here

An email claiming to be from the “Fraud Department” at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) appears to originate from the email address “fraudde