Beth Devine – Page 41

Free Shipping Closes Sale

June 22, 2009 Beth Devine

A couple of weeks ago, I received an e-mail Father’s Day reminder from a store where I’ve bought gifts from online before. Since I typically put off holiday gift buying to the last minute and end up paying extra for shipping, I was grateful for the reminder.

Lesson one to online merchants: EMAIL MARKETING WORKS!

With over a week before Father’s day I thought the ample lead time would save me some cash on shipping. I clicked through to the website and browsed to find some sweet treats for dad. I quickly found a nice gift of sweet snacks at a reasonable price and clicked through to the checkout page. Where I stopped. The shipping charges nearly doubled the price of the goodies. Call me cheap, but if there’s one thing I learned from my dad growing up on his farm in Minnesota it’s the value of the dollar.

That reasonably priced gift now seemed tremendously overpriced. If I was going to spend that kind of money – it had to be a better gift. So I abandoned my shopping cart and Googled “Free Shipping Father’s Day gifts”. Multiple stores came up and I quickly found a gift. It was much nicer than the original gift. I did end up spending the same as the other gift would have cost with it’s shipping charges, but I now felt like the gift I was sending was worth the money I was spending.

Lesson two to online merchants – FREE SHIPPING WORKS! Consider the value of your product. If shipping costs make your item seem extraordinarily overpriced you will lose sales.

Lesson three to online merchants. CLOSE THE SALE! If your e-mail marketing campaign is driving traffic to your site but you’re not seeing corresponding sales, make sure you look at the value you’re offering to your customers. It’s a shame when something like high shipping costs causes them abandon their shopping cart when you’ve successfully drawn them to your store with your e-mail marketing campaign.

Choosing a merchant account provider for your e-commerce website

June 15, 2009 Beth Devine

If you’re setting up an e-commerce shop and need to accept credit cards, what’s the best solution?

Merchant account/real-time gateway?
Paypal?
Google Checkout?

There are many factors to take into consideration. First, which method will make your customers feel most comfortable in making a purchase from your website? Recently, I took a poll on LinkedIn to gauge how people feel about various methods of payment.

Poll Question: When buying something online, which method of payment do you prefer?

Here are the results:
Take poll and see results

In addition to how your customers may feel about the process, you should understand how each process works and how it will tie into your website, to your accounting practices, to your budget and to your sales expectations.

Integrating payment processing into your website:
Most “off the shelf e-commerce shopping carts” will integrate easily with merchant accounts and real-time processors such as authorize.net, or with Paypal or Google Checkout. But check with your web developer to see which method they recommend for your particular application.

Accounting and costs:
Merchant account costs seem to be increasing substantially these days with the challenging economy. Plus providers are requiring merchants to undergo an annual PCI DSS compliance that adds another expense to the annual costs. PCI DSS compliance usually requires a subscription through a company like Trustwave. Trustwave measures your risk factors through a questionnaire about your practices and through security tests of your server.

With the merchant account/real-time gateway process, merchants can expect to pay a monthly fee for the account, a monthly fee for the gateway plus the transaction fees for any charges put through to your account. It can be about $40/month before you take an order. Add in the cost for PCI DSS compliance and it’s a substantial monthly fee for some business models. For small businesses–especially start-up businesses with low-budgets–Paypal or Google checkout might be a more cost-effective solution. Both solutions have no-monthly fee plans and both have competitive transaction rates. And they are both PCI DSS compliant. In my opinion, both are also well known brands that most customers will feel comfortable using for payment.

Based on my poll, Paypal seems to have a slightly greater acceptance factor than Google Checkout. I suspect Paypal is more familiar to more people than the relatively new Google Checkout.

Whichever method you choose, make sure your client’s credit card information is encrypted as it is transmitted and that you safeguard the information. One of the advantages to using a realtime gateway like Authorize.net, or an outside vendor like Paypal or Google Checkout is that the credit card is processed and you are never in possession of the credit card number. By limiting access to your customer’s credit card information, you are limiting your liability of being involved in any sort of identity theft scenario. Plus, the transaction is automatically processed and deposited into your bank account thereby minimizing your workload.

Choosing a merchant account provider

June 4, 2009 Beth Devine

With merchant account providers raising processing rates and charging annual fees for security (PCI DSS compliance) it makes sense for small business website owners to review merchant account providers carefully before choosing or changing a provider for online credit card processing.

I’ve had an account with the same merchant account provider for several years, but recently the rates have been creeping up, in many cases to over 4% per transaction. Add the monthly fees and the new annual PCI DSS compliance fees together and the account is costing about $500 a year before a sale is even made. That’s alot for a small business to pay in account fees. Combine the increasingly high rates with the surly customer service and it has become clear to me that it’s time to review other choices.

The criteria for my business may differ than other small businesses, but here is what I looked for when reviewing my options:

Monthly fees
Transaction fees (percentage and flat fee per transaction)
Contract commitment – avoid early termination fees
Compatibility with existing website and accounting systems
What are the company’s procedures for compliance with PCI DSS? What are the costs and the procedures?
What online method of payment is most desired by your website customers?

There are many merchant account providers to choose from, among the choices, Paypal and Google Checkout are becoming increasingly attractive to small business websites. They are PCI DSS compliant, their monthly costs are minimal or free and their transaction fees are competitive for small business transactions. A contract is usually not required and they are easily integrated into most shopping carts and websites.

I’ve set up many sites with Paypal but I had not tried Google checkout yet, so in the spirit of testing the product, I removed the encrypted client payment form that I used with my old merchant account on my website and replaced it with Google checkout. Set-up and installation was simple. Client approval is yet to be determined.

My perception of Google checkout vs. Paypal is that it’s a newer product and fewer people are familiar with it. Therefore, people may be less receptive to it or more receptive depending on their experiences with Paypal and with the Google brand. I’ve used it a few times when making purchases on websites and I found the purchasing process to be simple and user-friendly.

But that’s just my perception. I’m currently running a poll on LinkedIn to find out what other people prefer. Please take a minute to take the poll.

In addition to testing Google Checkout, I’m also testing the Intuit merchant services. Their rates were lower than my old account and their interface with QuickBooks makes processing transactions and accounting for them a breeze. I’m currently just using this account for offline payments as I haven’t set up a payment form on my website yet for use with this provider. But I expect if I’m happy with their product I will set up a payment form on my site to use with this account.

I’m interested in hearing about your experiences with merchant account providers — from a merchant point of view and customer point of view.

SEO is Important but Not Exclusive to Website Success

May 26, 2009 Beth Devine

It is important to optimize your site for search engines. That means it should employ the three tried and true search engine optimization (SEO) techniques: good titles, meta tags and most importantly well-written content.

Three Tried & True SEO Techniques

Title Tag
Title tags are within the head section of the html code and it is what appears in the blue bar at the very top of the browser screen. Titles tags should succinctly describe (using 6 -12 words or about 60 characters) the content on that page and they should be unique for each page.

Meta Tags
Meta description tags are also included withing the head tags of the html code. The meta description is often used as the text that the search engine displays below your link. So it is important that this text is keyword rich and accurately describes its page. Meta descriptions should also be unique for each page on your website and should be written in a way that would make a potential customer want to visit your website.

Use the meta keyword tag to focus on what’s important on the page. Again, make it unique to each page and don’t stuff it with every imaginable combination of keywords. Pick a few keywords that focus on the content of that particular page and list them. Search engines may or may not use the tag to list your site, but they won’t penalize you as long as you don’t stuff it with excessive versions of keywords.

The Heading tag and Content
The H1 tag is an html tag that identifies an important heading. There are actually 6 levels of heading tags within html with h1 having the most importance. Your content (that means the content that people read on the page) should use appropriate keywords and should be well-written and structured for easy reading. Use the H1 tag for important keyword rich headings and write content that clearly and quickly identifies the focus of the content and supports the heading. Use video and graphics to support your concepts too and remember to use descriptive alt tags for images.

What if SEO doesn’t work as well as you expected?
These search engine optimization (SEO) techniques have been around for at least a decade or more and while I highly recommend optimizing your website for search engines, you should be aware that SEO in itself will not make your website successful and may not provide your site with the desired search engine rank.

If you’re confident that your site has been optimized well but you’re not happy with your current search engine rank, it may be time to analyze the competition. Which websites consistently rank higher than your site in the search engine results? What differentiates the top-ranking sites from your site?

Typically, I find 2 or 3 obvious factors that seem to contribute to the higher search engine rank.
1.Their site has better content – it’s more in-depth, it’s better written, it appears to be the better resource.
2.The site has been established longer and has been managed consistently and kept up to date.
3.It has current information and uses current techniques for presenting information.

There are of course many other factors that can come into play. But given that your site is free of technical errors and is coded to be crawled easily by search engine bots, probably the most important thing a website owner can do to optimize their website for search engines is to optimize their site for their customers.

The search engines’ goal is to list the best resources – it should be your goal too.

1.Continue to add depth to your content. You might add a blog or a user forum that will encourage customer participation while building the depth of content on your website.
2.Reach out to your audience – participate in social networks and give freely in the areas of your expertise.
3.Ensure that your site makes your customers feel secure with appropriate security measures and easy to find contact information.
4.Set a schedule to review your site regularly and edit dated information with updated content.

Your website may not be an overnight success, but with continued diligence in managing your website it will continue to improve as a source of referrals for your business and will become more and more valuable over time.

Just stick your toe in the twitter water

May 8, 2009 Beth Devine

I took a little field trip a couple weeks ago and attended the Hartford Business Journal‘s E-Technology Summit in South Windsor. The hot topic of the day was, not surprisingly, social media. It’s hard for some business folks to wrap their heads around how “tweeting” and “friending” will help their business grow.

I kept hearing “How do I integrate it (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) into my business and how exactly can I use it to improve my business’ bottom line?”

I’m still a novice when it comes to integrating “social media” into my business but really Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn ( to name a few) are just communication tools. They are tools that expand the reach or your network.

Most of us know how to network. You listen. You talk. You find out what other people do. You tell people what you do. You see if there is a connection. You try to find people you can use as a resource. You see if you can be a resource to the people you meet. You make new friends. You tell your new friends about other friends who they might find interesting.

In the process of networking, you find business–via referrals, collaboration or strategic alliances. And you learn stuff–stuff that makes you more marketable. This all adds to your bottom line.

The new tools don’t change the concept of networking. But they do expand your network. Now instead of your business network being limited to Hartford, or to your region, you can make friends all over the world. Isn’t that a cool concept?

So, I made a new friend at the E-Technology Summit and she came by my office to have a chat yesterday. She’s a writer, I’m a web designer, so there’s opportunity for collaboration. We talked about the kind of clients we have and the kinds of things we’ve done and are doing.

I mentioned that with the popularity of blogging, there might be great opportunities for writers these days. I brought up the post one of my tweeple (a Twitter contact) made recently about a winery in California that was looking for a writer to blog about wine and food. They were offering a 6-month contract at $10,000 a month. That’s not bad green for eating, drinking and writing.

I saw the light go on in her head. But although she recognized that opportunities were out there in “twitterland” she was still kind of hesitant about the technology. She said she’s been to workshops about social media and they all tell you to “just jump in”. She pointed out that if she were the type of person to “just jump in” she probably wouldn’t be at the workshop.

Point well taken. I didn’t tell her to jump in.

But I did tell her what I did. As I said earlier, I’m a novice, so there are many people who are far more knowledgeable about this than I am. But for all you newbies out there who are afraid to “jump in” here’s how to stick your toe in the “twitter water”.

Sign up at twitter.com
You don’t have to answer the question “what are you doing now” (if everyone answered that question honestly there would be a lot of “I just signed up for Twitter and I’m wondering what to do now”)
Use twitter search to find posts about topics you’re interested in. I might have originally done a few searches, probably for SEO, web design, and Google Android.
Look through the search results and click on some interesting posts. See an interesting post? Click on the poster’s link – read their other posts. If they seem interesting, click the “Follow” button. Now all the posts that person makes will show up on your screen when you’re logged in.
The person you “Follow” will get a message and may decide to “Follow” you. You’ve now got your first “follower”.

That’s it. I’m going to stop there. That’s how to stick your toe in the “twitter water”.

Next week I’ll talk about some of my favorite Twitter tools such as TwitterFeed, Twirl, TweetDeck.

If You’re Going to Make a Change, Make it for the Better.

May 4, 2009 Beth Devine

There’s a website that I go to every couple of months for information and every time I do they’ve completely re-vamped the site. The problem is that every time they do, they make it harder and harder to find the information I’m searching for.

Now, I have no problem with ensuring a site is fresh, but in making changes you need to make certain that the navigation remains as clear as possible. Since we all have short attention spans, it only takes a few seconds to lose your viewer, so it’s all about providing the information needed in an easy-to-follow format.

Another thing to consider is the format that a user is accustomed to. I recently went to another site that was beautifully designed, but I couldn’t tell where to go from the home page. As a rule, people are used to left and to navigation bars. By adhering to this type of format, it makes it easier for the viewer to find what they need.

The bottom line is…you can make a site as creative and informative as possible, but if the viewer can’t find what they’re looking for, you’re going to lose them.

New website for local massage therapist

May 3, 2009 Beth Devine

Recently launched MyHandsYourHealth.com website for local massage therapist. Calm, quiet design.

Using .tel for digital branding

April 17, 2009 Beth Devine

There’s a new domain type in town and it’s different than the .com, .biz, .org and .nets domains that you probably know. The .tel domain is not attached to a website like all the others. This new top level domain (TLD) is an internet directory listing that gives you complete and easily managed control over your online contact information.

When you sign up for your .tel domain you’ll get a username and login. With that you can login to your account anytime and update your contact information, address, and business information. They are like an online real-time business card. It’s a low-cost way for a business to keep current information available online without having a business website or in addition to their website.

From the .tel website…

Join a global online directory that provides you instant worldwide exposure…
Integrate all your means of communication in a single place under your control…
Update and manage your contact information and keywords in real time…
Increase your search engine visibility through descriptive keywords…
Provide a fast way for your customers to connect with you in a single click from any mobile device…

Another take…

Top Ten Reasons to Buy Your .Tel domain

It’s a low-cost alternative or addition to a website and the new digital business card. Buy through your favorite domain seller – hopefully that’s cgwebhelp 😉

See a sample at cgwebhelp.tel

SSL certificates explained

April 10, 2009 Beth Devine

What SSL Certificates Do:

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology protect websites and make it easy for visitors to trust websites in three essential ways:

An SSL Certificate enables encryption of sensitive information during online transactions.
Each SSL Certificate contains unique, authenticated information about the certificate owner.
A Certificate Authority verifies the identity of the certificate owner when it is issued.

Who needs an SSL Certificate?

If you, or your customers fit into any of the following categories, then an SSL Certificate is a must:

Operate an online store or accept online orders and credit cards
Offer a login or sign in on your site
Process sensitive data such as address, birth date, license, or ID numbers
Require compliance with privacy and security requirements
Value privacy and expect others to trust you.

How SSL Encryption Works

Imagine sending mail through the postal system in a clear envelope. Anyone with access to it can see the data. If it looks valuable, they might take it or change it. An SSL Certificate establishes a private communication channel between the browser and web server enabling encryption of the data during transmission. Encryption scrambles the data, essentially creating an envelope for message privacy.

Each SSL Certificate consists of a public key and a private key. The public key is used to encrypt information and the private key is used to decipher it. When a Web browser points to a secured domain, a Secure Sockets Layer handshake authenticates the server (the website) and the client (the web browser). An encryption method is established with a unique session key and secure transmission can begin. True 128-bit SSL Certificates enable every site visitor to experience the strongest SSL encryption available to them.

How Authentication Works

Imagine receiving an envelope with no return address and a form asking for your bank account number. In the case of organization- or Extended-validation certificates, every SSL Certificate is created for a particular server in a specific domain for a verified business entity. The validation process for EV certificates is quite extensive and provides fuller information about the website owner than a standard certificate. When the SSL handshake occurs, the browser requires authentication information from the server. By clicking the closed padlock in the browser window or certain SSL trust marks (such as the VeriSign Secured Seal or GeoTrust True Site Seal), the website visitor sees the authenticated organization name. In high-security browsers (IE7/8, Firefox 3.0+, Safari 3.2+, Chrome and Opera 9.2+), the authenticated organization name is prominently displayed and the address bar turns green when an Extended Validation SSL Certificate is detected. If the information does not match or the certificate has expired, the browser displays an error message or warning.

A Matter of Trust

At the end of the day, SSL Certificates are all about trust. If you want to develop and instill a sense of trust with website visitors, an SSL Certificate is the way to do it. An SSL-protected site gives users the confidence to share personal information without having to worry about whether that data is safe as it travels around the Internet. And, the SSL Certificate provides further peace of mind to web users by offering verification that those in control of the web server are who the web surfer thinks they are.

If trust is important to the end users of your customers – and I’d venture a guess that it is – then they need to know that one of the best ways to build that trust is to secure their websites with an SSL Certificate along with a prominently displayed site seal that end users recognize and trust.

This information provided by OpenSRS. cgwebhelp, llc is a reseller for OpenSRS.

NotMyMothersWedding.com Launched

April 8, 2009 Beth Devine

I launched a new website for the authors of the book Not My Mother’s Wedding last week. The book, written by Maureen Chapdelaine and daughter Kate Chapdelaine Brennan, takes a comical look back on their different perceptions as they went about planning Kate’s wedding. The book will be available this May and can be ordered on the website.