Ecommerce Introduction and Overview

Monday, August 6, 2007

Top 7 Favorite Ecommerce Tools

When you make your living on the Internet, you sometimes forget that the resources you use every day (and take for granted) might rate an incredible discovery to anyone who doesn't already know they exist.

Whether they help you make money, save time, save money, or avoid frustration, these ecommerce tools and services rate my highest recommendation for anyone who conducts any form of ecommerce online.

ClickBank.com -
If you sell a downloadable product such as an ebook, report, or software, you can't beat ClickBank for processing credit card payments. Not only do they take the payments and send you a check twice a month, they also plug your product into an existing network with tens-of-thousands of affiliates who can sell it for you. Also, unlike a traditional merchant credit card processing account, ClickBank assumes all the fraud risk and prevents many of the "horror" stories you hear in connection with online credit card processing.

MySiteSales.com -
Since ClickBank only allows the sale of downloadable products, MySiteSales.com comes to the rescue for anyone selling a physical product or service. Offering a suite of integrated product catalogs, follow up autoresponders, advertising tracking, a secure server, and even limited-time coupon offers, this tool rates a "must have" for setting up and integrating a professional ecommerce solution on virtually any size website.

Aweber.com -
If you need an unlimited number of follow up autoresponders and the ability to send an email "broadcast" to all your contacts at one time, Aweber offers an excellent managed solution. Specializing in helping small to medium-sized Web businesses implement an effective email follow-up strategy without complicated software, Aweber gets our highest marks for service and dependability.

GoDaddy.com -
Cheap, reliable, easy-to-use domain name registrar that only charges $8.95 per year for each domain name you register. Godaddy rates cheaper and just as, if not more, reliable than any other domain registrar. They also offer a "private registration" option that allows you to keep your identity as the domain owner a secret from unscrupulous people who exploit domain name records to compile mailing lists, spam databases or worse.

FrontierPowerHosting.com -
Any successful ecommerce endeavor begins with a solid website hosting service. Nothing shuts you down faster than an unreliable web host because, the second they go offline, your business goes offline. I host one of my servers at FrontierPowerHosting.com because of great customer service and guaranteed up-time.

ClipArt.com -
Ever pulled your hair out searching for that perfect image, photo, or piece of clipart for your website? Once you exhaust the Microsoft collection on your computer, the next stop (if you want to find something fast) is Clipart.com. With thousands of images searchable by keyword, you can always find the perfect image in less time and without the worries of copyright infringement if you just pull something off the Web.

Google.com/Adsense/ -
Website got traffic but no making much money? Open a free account with Google AdSense and earn a commission any time someone clicks on any of the targeted ads. An excellent way to earn extra cash on virtually any website.

Jim Edwards is a syndicated newspaper columnist and the creator of an amazing course that will teach you step-by-step and click-by-click how to finally create your own money-making mini-sites... Get a FREE Copy of The "Mini-Site Secrets" Audio Right Now Click Here => http://www.minisitecreator.com/

Friday, August 3, 2007

Cost Effective Ecommerce Solutions

Ecommerce use to be about spending thousands of dollars on setting up your shop and hundreds of dollars on getting a merchant. My, how things have changed over the years. Now anyone with a few hundred of dollars in their pocket(or less if you have the time to learn it yourself) can have a great working ecommerce system up and running in the matter of days. This also includes the full ability to accept payments from Credit Cards, manage customers, create invoices and more.

The most cost effective ecommerce solution on the market today is Oscommerce.com . Why is it so cost effective, well because it is free. All you need to do is learn it yourself or get someone who works in the web world(a web designer or programmer) to set it up for you. This can run you anywhere’s from $500-$900, give or take a bit depending on the features you want and if you want it integrated into a custom built design. In a all in one solution you can set up products to sell, have a visitor sign up and pay via the osc(oscommerce) payment section, create an invoice for that client as well as deliver the product(if it can be transferred via email) or create a packing slip to be mailed out. These are just some of the features located in oscommerce.

Another great feature about oscommerce is that you can integrate it to fit right into your site design. If you view my site at www.Logo2D.com and click one of the links at the top(such as logo templates) you can see that it fits snugly into the design. You can customize any part of oscommerce including the buttons for the shopping cart. It is a really great program to use.

One of the hassle before with ecommerce was getting something that would process payment. Payment was a

big issue as before it was very costly to get a merchant account, which usually cost around $400USD. Also you had to pay a % of every sale you made, which can really add up.

Today there are two great forms of payment that can be added to Oscommerce as your payment modules, they are Paypal.com and 2Checkout.com . These two options are a great way to go. Paypal.com is free to sign up, has over 78 Million accounts, only charges a small % of each sale/payment, can be funded by your credit card or bank account if you want to purchase something online and any sales you get you can take straight down into your bank account. Though the user does have to have a paypal account to pay you, but with 78 Million Accounts, you can see that is no problem.

2Checkout.com doesn't offer as many features in the way as you being able to purchase products offline, but it is great if someone is purchasing products off of you. It allows you to take payments via credit card and the customer doesn't even have to have a 2checkout.com account. It only takes a small % off when you take money down into your account. The only down side to 2checkout.com is that there is a one time fee of $49 to purchase a membership and they only send payment out twice a month(the middle of the month and the end of the month). So really not much of a downside at all.

So combine these three options and you can have a fully functional ecommerce website up for only a few hundreds of dollar!

About the Author
Anthony Jewell has over 6 Years experience in the Web & Graphics World. You can visit my business at http://www.logo2d.com

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Meeting the UK Ecommerce Regulations

Many UK small businesses with ecommerce web sites are failing to meet the legal requirements of the following acts and directives:

Ecommerce Directive 2002

Data Protection Act 1998

Distance Selling Act 2000

This is often due to misunderstanding their responsibilities or simply lack of resources. However, failing to comply with these legal requirements may seriously damage your web site and your business.

By promoting compliance with these legal obligations, your web site will gain more credibility and increase customer's confidence.

Useful Resources

The following links provide essential information related to the UK ecommerce regulations.

The Data Protection Act 1998 - http://www.dataprotection.gov.uk/

The Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 - http://www.dti.gov.uk/ccp/topics1/pdf1/bus_guide.pdf

The Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002 - http://www2.dti.gov.uk/industry_files/pdf/smallbusinessguidance.pdf

Data Protection

(a) You must register under the Data Protection Act if you collect information about people (for example, employees, customers and visitors). This information can include names, addresses, telephone numbers and email addresses.

(b) You must state what you do with your subject's data and not deviate from that statement.

(d) You must not export the personal data outside the EC (European Community) without permission from the people you are collecting data on.

(e) You must ensure that all information is held securely and must be revealed or deleted upon request from the subjects of the information.

(f) You must only record pertinent data to your prime business needs.

Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations

The Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 apply to many ecommerce sites. However, they are not applicable to ‘business-to-business’ transactions.

(a) You must provide clear information about your products and services before purchase.

(b) You must be clear about postage and packing costs and whether VAT is included in the prices shown on your website.

(d) You must allow a "cooling off" period of 7 working days for most goods. Certain exclusions do apply and include perishable and digital goods.

(e) You must inform your customers of their right to cancel their order with no loss other than return postage and packing.

Ecommerce Directive

(a) You must display the name of your business, the company registration number (or proprietor's name), geographical address (not PO Box number), contact information e.g., telephone number and email address, VAT registration number (if registered).

(b) You may refer to trade or professional schemes if applicable.

(d) You must clearly display your site’s Terms and Conditions.

(e) You must acknowledge all orders.

(f) In commercial communication with your customers, you must clearly identify any electronic communication designed to promote your goods or services.

(g) You must clearly identify the sender of all electronic communication.

(h) You must clearly define any promotional offers and the qualifying conditions regarding these offers.

(i) If you send unsolicited emails, you must clearly identify them as unsolicited.

Other means of increasing Ecommerce Credibility In addition to ensuring that you satisfy the ecommerce regulations, you can gain extra credibility by:

(a) Including verifiable testimonials.
(b) Allowing payment via other means than online, e.g. via telephone or mail order.
(c) Ensuring that all transactions that involve the transfer of personal and payment details are secure (via SSL).
(d) Ensuring that your shopping cart does not make the following common mistakes:

Call a shopping cart something else!
Use a ‘Buy Now’ button instead of a ‘Add to Cart’ button
Give no feedback that an item has been added to the cart
Force the user to view the cart after each added item
Make the user register before adding items to a cart
Not provide a ‘Remove Item’ button

About the Author
James Saunders is the Managing Director of Site-Report.com Limited (http://www.site-report.com/), a UK internet consultancy offering holistic advice to UK SMEs on all aspects of website development and promotion including usability, accessibility, ecommerce regulations, internet marketing and search engine optimisation.

The Rumors of Ecommerce Death

As Nasdaq sputters along in dot com shame, a few million few dogged Internet consumers have ignored the crash. They continue to happily buy away. The good-news story is not popular with business writers, but Web retailing continues to grow seemingly unaware that the online mall is crashing down around them as they choose garden tools, sell sports cards and order vacation
packages. Things aren't perfect. There has been somewhat of a dip since Christmas, but I think most Net retailers can live with a post-holiday. Retailers have weathered after-Santa blues since the English switched from wassailing to kids toys in the mid-1800s.

We decided to take a look at recent reports on Internet retail sales just to see if the Net stock gloom was blunting the steady expansion of online commerce. We found some softening in the rate of growth, but we certainly didn't find any contraction in consumer behavior. The shrinking effect right now seems limited to the number of dot coms rather then the number of consumers. In fact, if you subtract the bizarrely heightened expectations for the Internet, its growth is coming along just fine. By any standards other than the Net-boom mentality, Internet expansion continues to be fairly spectacular.

Net buyers hit ten quarters of continuous buying

Greenfield Online reported that for 10 consecutive quarters, 60 percent of U.S. Online consumers have made at least one purchase on the Web within a 90-day period. And 28 percent of these shoppers have clicked on Internet ads while shopping. Not surprisingly, those with an annual income of $50,000 and above are more likely to purchase goods (81 percent) than those whose income is below $50,000 (64 percent). Women on the Net buy at a slightly higher rate
(74 percent) than men (71 percent). The top categories of goods continues to be books and CDs, followed by clothing, toys and computer software.

Rich buyers seek service basics online

Forrester Research looked at the shopping habits of rich consumers, those with investable assets on $1 million or more, and found that these shoppers are more interested in strong basic serve than they are in virtual exclusivity, extravagance and entertainment. Affluent shoppers have been buying linger, feel more comfortable buying, buy more frequently and, of course, spend more money," said Ekaterina O. Walsh, a senior analyst at Forrester. "They buy online for the same reasons for the same reasons that all online buyers do and care about price and positive experiences with Web stores." Forrester recommends that sellers of luxury goods should concentrate on purchasing ease and a convenience return process.

Visitor traffic dips

PC Data Online found that traffic to leading ecommerce sites declined about 4 percent in February following an 18 percent seasonal drop in January. Goldman Sachs analysts cited port-holiday seasonality, a slowdown in the rate on new consumer adopting ecommerce and slower overall consumer spending as the factors in the slower month-by-month growth of Internet retailing. However, this year's figures are up 63 percent over last year. Hey. Did anybody see
that? I'll say it again. We're up 63 percent over last year! Some blues.

Features that will keep your sales growing

Consulting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers released a survey that identified the site features that are most likely to capture sales. The research found that with the exception of search capabilities and close-up product views, most Website features are never used by the majority of Internet shoppers. The search function is overwhelmingly the top feature used by consumers, with 77 percent saying they have used search functions while shopping.

Other site features such as wish-lists and personalization were found to be less important to shoppers. As a side note, we found a study by the International eRetail Association that listed wish-lists as a tool that works well for building loyalty, so go easy on making assumptions based on Internet studies.

The take-away on all of the recent information about Internet retailing is that it continues to grow rapidly in spite of the gloom that fills the business media. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of the death of retail ecommerce have been greatly exagerated.

About the Author
Rob Spiegel is the author of Net Strategy (Dearborn) and The Shoestring
Entrepreneur's Guide to the Best Home-Based Businesses (St. Martin's Press).
You can reach Rob at spiegelrob@aol.com .

The Ecommerce Business Plan

Simply put, business plans can make or break your business. Starting a Drop Ship business online is no different from starting a traditional non-online business. With the strong emphasis individuals place on writing business plans for starting up non-internet-based companies, it is equally crucial to prepare a business plan for your online business.

A business plan serves many important purposes for the online business. First, because the business plan has a detailed list of the tasks to undertake, it is a call to action for you to promote your business actively and not procrastinate on your marketing efforts. Second, it provides a blueprint that describes your company effectively: the market, the products and the steps you need for effective marketing. This serves to guide your business through the months ahead.

Business plans normally comprise of five sections:

1) The Objectives. This section will describe the objectives for the venture, and the mission statement that defines the online business. It states both the financial and strategic objectives and is normally about one page long. There should be a concise description of the Drop Ship business at the start. A brief example:

‘Magical Stores Online is an internet company that provides quality tools and resources for magic tricks. We aim to consistently provide magicians with reliable tools for conducting magic tricks, and also accurate information and guides on how to properly perform the magic tricks with our tools. In our first year online, our target is to have U.S. $400,000 in revenues and $100,000 in profits. This can be achieved by attracting an average of about 5000 visitors to our website every month through effective internet marketing. Our strategy is to attract recurring traffic to our website by continually updating the useful resources and information on our website. Magicians will constantly return for more useful tips on magic tricks. This cuts our marketing costs drastically and adds to our profit margin.’

2) The Executive summary. The executive summary should contain a few important details. It should outline the basic model of the company, how the business functions, the market environment, and also the business opportunity in the market. A continuation from the previous example:

‘Magical Stores Online is a retailer of magic products on the internet. We specialize in card and coin tricks and stage magic, and classify our products according to age group, skill level, features, and the occasion they are used for. Magicians can browse the product catalogue on our website and buy their products with a shopping cart software. They can choose to pay either by credit cards or by checks. We use a third party credit card merchant to process our payments, hence eliminating the need to have a merchant account ourselves. A profit is realized whenever a sale is made, because we obtain our products at a wholesale price and we sell them at a retail price. Since our supplier, Company XYZ, drop ships the products directly to the customers’ address, we do not need to hold any inventory. Our market comprises of magicians of any age group who specialize in card and coin tricks and stage magic. The opportunity lies in the internet as a marketing medium for magic products. Since the rise of the internet in the mid 1990s, we find that the major magic product retailers do not use the internet effectively to market their products. With effective internet marketing skills, we believe that we can reach a wider audience than the other major players, thus claiming a large market share.’

*Note that in a real business plan, the business owner should aim to provide a more detailed version than the examples given above. The examples here only serve to illustrate an overview of what the basic business plan should encompass.

3) Marketing Strategies. In this section, you will describe the steps you intend to take in order to market your business effectively on the internet. There are a few basic marketing methods available on the internet. Mentioned below are three of the most popular methods.

- Email Marketing. Ezines and newsletters are powerful tools. It is simply the most cost-effective form of marketing on the internet. Sending out email promotions or newsletters to your subscriber base costs virtually nothing, except for the time you spend on writing your newsletter. With the web form on your website, you can capture the names and email addresses of the customers who subscribed to

your newsletter. I do not recommend that you send your subscribers with product promotions regularly, but you should continually provide them with useful tips and information. In this way, you establish your credibility as an expert and maintain a strong relationship with your customers, instead of appearing as someone just out to make money. Promotions for your products should only be sent out about once or twice a month.

- Search engine optimization. Optimizing your website for high search engine results on google, yahoo and msn, is a powerful way of getting large volumes of traffic at low cost. However, you have to put in a lot of effort for a long period of time, as top rankings do not appear overnight. There are two factors for search engine optimization: On-page or Off-page optimization. On-page optimization involves tweaking the page title, header and meta tags to include the website keywords. It also involves scattering the keywords throughout the page to improve the site relevancy. Off-page optimization, on the other hand, is much more important than on-page. It involves soliciting links from relevant websites. The more the websites that link to your site, and the higher the importance/relevance of the website linking to yours, the higher your website will be ranked on the search engines. Google places a very strong emphasis on this.

- Pay-per-click (PPC) Search Engines. This requires you to pay a sum of money for every visitor that clicks through the search engine to your website. The higher the amount you pay, the higher your website will be ranked on the PPC search engine. The basis for profiting with this marketing tool is by bidding less than the amount that each visitor to your website is worth. Overture is definitely the market leader for pay-per-click search engines.

4) Competitive Analysis. In this section, you have to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, and the factors that will differentiate your products or services from your competitors. You have to analyze your competitors and record what makes them so successful, and also the weaknesses you can capitalize on to get an edge in the market. For example, competitors may not be using email marketing effectively to promote the products to customers. You can capitalize on this by using newsletters more intensively, establishing your credibility as an industry expert. To differentiate an online Drop Ship business, it is more viable to provide a reliable service from your website. This usually means providing a wealth of tips, articles and information for your visitors. This will attract them to continuously return to your website for the latest tips and resources that will benefit them. Fast response to their email queries and also fast shipping are also good services you can provide.

5) The financial projection section. In this section you can project the profit-loss statements and the cash flow statements for your business. The profit-loss statement records the monthly profit/loss realized over the months, while the cash flow statement records the difference between revenue and expenditure over the months. The costs for an online Drop Ship business will include:

- One-time costs for software like shopping cart software, email marketing software, and also search engine optimization software.

- Recurring costs for the wholesale price of the products, web hosting fees, a proportion of revenue paid to your third party credit card merchant to process your payments, and also internet marketing costs.

This section will be useful for you to gauge how your Drop Ship business performs according to your expectations.

In conclusion, business plans do not only apply to real-world businesses, but are equally critical to online businesses as well. They serve as blueprints of the companies and also as strong calls to action for the aspiring internet entrepreneurs to achieve their success in ecommerce.

*You are welcome to reprint this article as long as you include the Author’s resource box with the article and the entire article remains unchanged.

About the Author
About the Author: Ray Yee is the founder and president of Dropshipperscentral, a website which provides a wealth of informative articles, tips and resources on everything you’ll ever need to know about setting up a Drop Ship Business and marketing it. Click here for the Wholesale Drop Ship Directory from http://www.dropshipperscentral.com

Microsoft Great Plains eCommerce - know your options and alternatives

As eCommerce designer you should be aware of several options and customization tools in your disposition, when you utilize Microsoft Great Plains 8.5 (June 2005), 8.0, 7.5, Great Plains Dynamics/eEnterprise 7.0, 6.0, 5.5 or 5.0 Great Plains Dynamics C/S+.

Since Version 8.0 Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains & Great Plains Standard are available on Microsoft SQL Server and MSDE (which is in fact MS SQL with database size limit of 2GB). When you have old versions (7.5 and prior) we assume that you are on MS SQL Server 2000/7.0, because if you are on Ctree or Pervasive SQL/Btrieve – you should use ODBC / RDO connection tools, such as MS Access and its queries or use MS SQL Server Linked Server technique with OPENROWSET statements. So, lets assume that you are on MS SQL Server. You have basically two options eConnect (you should pay for the reg key/license and this is SDK) and custom stored procedures. We’ll only consider custom stored procedures way here:

Stored Procs. The first question is – are we allowed to create stored proc in Great Plains DYNAMICS and companies databases. The answer is Yes – opposite to such products as Microsoft CRM (where you are banned to create any custom object in MS CRM database, and instead you create your own custom database and place all your procedures and views there) – you are encouraged to create your stored procedures and place them in both DYNAMICS and Company databases. You need to know the anatomy of Great Plains tables structure

Tables Structure. If you launch Great Plains workstation and follow this way: Tools->Resource Descriptions->Tables – then you are in tables descriptor, sorting by tables Physical, Logical or Tables Group Technical names. This is all Great Plains Dexterity architecture realm and it is relatively complex and not “developer-friendly” – but if you create sample transactions in Great Plains – you can figure out where data should be populated

Sales Order Processing. Or SOP module. This is usually the core of eCommerce development – transactions should go into SOP tables (with SOP prefix): SOP10100, SOP10200 and others. If you are selling to your existing customers, then customers are in Receivables Management module (AR) with AR prefixes: RM00101 – is Customer Master, RM00102 – customer address master, etc.

Sales Order/Invoice Allocation dilemma. Great Plains SOP module is working in concert with Inventory control, making allocation of inventoried items in IV. So, this is very challenging to replicate allocation logic. We recommend do not allocate in Orders and Invoices and do allocation by operator, who processes the internet orders batch

Sales Order transfer dilemma. If you are using eConnect – this is kind of issue, so you have to appeal to GP internal architecture and do it with the stored procs approach.

Good luck with implementation, customization and integration and if you have issues or concerns – we are here to help! If you want us to do the job - give us a call 1-630-961-5918 or 1-866-528-0577! help@albaspectrum.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew is Great Plains specialist in Alba Spectrum Technologies ( http://www.albaspectrum.com/ ) – USA nationwide Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization company, serving clients in Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, Phoenix, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Miami, New Orleans, Toronto, Montreal and having locations in multiple states and internationally

Microsoft Ecommerce Web-development: Great Plains Econnect .net Approach – Highlights For Programmer

In our small article we’ll consider Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains Sales Order Processing module as eCommerce backend. Plus we’ll cover what is possible and impossible in eConnect and why.

Microsoft Great Plains is one of the most popular ERP in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Middle East, Latin America, UK and South Africa. Due to the MBS strategy – Great Plains Dynamics was pulled from other markets, such as continental Europe (Germany, France, Russia) – where Navision and Axapta are the promoted and recommended solutions. If you have Navision or Axapta – please read our publications on these products on Alba Spectrum Technologies publication site.

• Great Plains Platform – Great Plains Software Dynamics is written on GPS proprietary platform in Dexterity program language. Dexterity is based on very shrewd application development philosophy – ERP application will stay decades if it is independent from the graphical computer environment and database platform. Back in 1992 C programming language was believed to be the rescuer and be cross-platform.

• Great Plains Architecture. Here we need to give you highlights on Great Plains Dynamics initial design. General Ledger (GL) was intended as core module, then you see modules, posting directly to GL: Receivables Management (RM), Payables Management (PM), Payroll, Inventory Control. The next level – modules, posting to GL through other modules: Sales Order Processing (through Accounts Receivable), Purchase Order Processing (through Accounts Payables), etc. The second principle – Great Plains would never allow you to post the batch of transactions behind the scene – only via the user interface – checked and approved by the user.

• eOrder – this IIS ASP application was initially available for all the platforms: MS SQL Server, Ctree and Btrieve (later on Pervasive SQL

2000), in 1998 Great Plains Software made it available for MS SQL server only. eOrder was predecessor of modern eCommerce sites and all the attempts to customize eOrder were dubious in the version upgrade.

• .Net paradigm. Instead of inventing and making you use standard eCommerce solution - .Net gives you the choice to select from variety of products available on the market. This means that no more eOrders – you just need the connector which will allow you to address Great Plains objects from your eCommerce application. As usual you are free to use your language of choice: VB or C#

• eConnect. Yes – exactly – it was initially developed for eCommerce programmers. Later on eConnect was extended on the majority of Great Plains modules, including distributions

• Restrictions. As you see above – Great Plains allows you to address work tables only – this means that you can not post transactions using eConnect. Other reported issues were related to Sales Order transfer to Invoice/Backorder

• Custom Stored Procedures. Right – you have to use these custom SQL scripts to post transactions, created with eConnect.

If you want us to do the job - give us a call 1-630-961-5918 or 1-866-528-0577! help@albaspectrum.com

About the Author: Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies – USA nationwide Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization company, serving Chicago, California, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Georgia, New York, Australia, UK, Canada, Continental Europe, Russia and having locations in multiple states ( http://www.albaspectrum.com/ )

Microsoft Ecommerce Web-development: Great Plains Econnect .net Approach – Highlights For Programmer

Microsoft Great Plains eCommerce–stored procedures approach

Since Version 8.0 Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains & Great Plains Standard are available on Microsoft SQL Server and MSDE (which is in fact MS SQL with database size limit of 2GB). As eCommerce designer you should be aware of several options and customization tools in your disposition, when you utilize Microsoft Great Plains 8.5 (June 2005), 8.0, 7.5, Great Plains Dynamics/eEnterprise 7.0, 6.0, 5.5 or 5.0 Great Plains Dynamics C/S+. When you have old versions (7.5 and prior) we assume that you are on MS SQL Server 2000/7.0, because if you are on Ctree or Pervasive SQL/Btrieve – you should use ODBC / RDO connection tools, such as MS Access and its queries or use MS SQL Server Linked Server technique with OPENROWSET statements. So, lets assume that you are on MS SQL Server. You have basically two options eConnect (you should pay for the reg key/license and this is SDK) and custom stored procedures. We’ll only consider custom stored procedures way here:

Stored Procs. The first question is – are we allowed to create stored proc in Great Plains DYNAMICS and companies databases. The answer is Yes – opposite to such products as Microsoft CRM (where you are banned to create any custom object in MS CRM database, and instead you create your own custom database and place all your procedures and views there) – you are encouraged to create your stored procedures and place them in both DYNAMICS and Company databases. You need to know the anatomy of Great Plains tables structure
Tables Structure. If you launch Great Plains workstation and follow this way: Tools->Resource Descriptions->Tables – then you are in tables descriptor, sorting by tables Physical, Logical or Tables Group Technical names. This is all Great Plains Dexterity architecture realm and it is relatively complex and not

“developer-friendly” – but if you create sample transactions in Great Plains – you can figure out where data should be populated
Sales Order Processing. Or SOP module. This is usually the core of eCommerce development – transactions should go into SOP tables (with SOP prefix): SOP10100, SOP10200 and others. If you are selling to your existing customers, then customers are in Receivables Management module (AR) with AR prefixes: RM00101 – is Customer Master, RM00102 – customer address master, etc.
Sales Order/Invoice Allocation dilemma. Great Plains SOP module is working in concert with Inventory control, making allocation of inventoried items in IV. So, this is very challenging to replicate allocation logic. We recommend do not allocate in Orders and Invoices and do allocation by operator, who processes the internet orders batch
Sales Order transfer dilemma. If you are using eConnect – this is kind of issue, so you have to appeal to GP internal architecture and do it with the stored procs approach.

About The Author
Andrew is Great Plains specialist in Alba Spectrum Technologies ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ) – USA nationwide Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization company, serving clients in Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, Phoenix, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Miami, New Orleans, Toronto, Montreal and having locations in multiple states and internationally
Help@albaspectrum.com

Microsoft Small Business Manager eCommerce–overview

Microsoft Business Solutions Small Business Manager is scaled down Great Plains Dexterity based version of Microsoft Great Plains or former Great Plains Dynamics/eEnterprise. Small Business Manager first release 7.0 and all the following version was available on MSDE (MS SQL Server 2000 with limited usage and database size – 2GB maximum).

It is nice situation on the market in eCommerce niche – we see huge number of customers, who have purchased and implemented SBM for their small and mid-size businesses and then realized that customization options for Small Business Manager are very limited: in comparison to Great Plains SBM doesn’t have VBA/Modifier, it has very restricted version of Integration Manager. These restrictions lead you, eCommerce developer to direct SQL programming. Again – being scaled down version of Microsoft Great Plains – Small Business Manager has a legacy of relatively complex tables structure.

Tom stored procedures way here:

Tables Structure. Small Business Manager has similar to Great Plains structure and similar System DYNAMICS database and the company. As you could see tables structure in Resource description in Great Plains – so you do in SBM

Stored Procs. Yes – we can go ahead and create stored proc in DYNAMICS and companies databases or Small Business Manager. Now – there is one issue. Technically Small Business Manager comes with MSDE and MSDE doesn’t have lovely tool SQL Server Enterprise Manager with Query Analyzer, etc. So somehow you should deal with this. If you have consulting programmer – she or he can connect to your MSDE installation, using MS SQL Server Enterprise Manager, installed on consultant’s laptop

Visual Studio.Net. This is the development tools to use – because you will need a lot of web-debugging, considering complicated tables structure and records workflow. Some developers might suggest to use VS.Net data designer to link to Great Plains
tables – this idea is rather very difficult to realize, because of the simultaneous population of multiple tables, while creating internet orders: Order Header, Order Lines, Order Comments, Customer Master, Customer Address Master to name a few. So we would recommend sticking to stored proc.

SOP. Sales Order Processing. Usually eCommerce solution works around Sales Order Processing tables. The reason is – it works with Inventoried items and typical eCommerce is ordering specific items off the internet. Look at SOP10100, SOP10200 and other tables with SOP prefix. Also you should know that SOP1XXX – are so called working tables and you populate mostly these, when orders are transformed to invoices, order record goes to SOP3XXX tables – these are called historical

RM. Receivables Management Module – When Sales Order Processing Invoices are posted – they create record in Accounts Receivables or Receivables Management Module. RM has RMXXXX tables and the ones you are interested to know are RM00101 – customer master and RM00102 – customer address master

Batch Processing. We recommend you consider just order creation via web interface. Then these orders should be processed by operator in Small Business Manager

Microsoft Great Plains eCommerce: overview for developer

Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains was designed back in the earlier 1990th as first graphical ERP/accounting system for mid-size businesses. The architects of Great Plains Dexterity – this is the internal mid-shell, all Great Plains was written on, designed it to be easily transferable between graphical operating systems (MAC, Windows, Solaris – potentially) and database platforms – initially Great Plains was available on Ctree (both Mac and PC) and Btrieve, a bit later high end version Dynamics C/S+ was available on Microsoft SQL Server 6.5. But the idea was to catch or switch winning/losing database platform – nobody could predict if MS SQL Server, Oracle or DB 2 become a dominant DB platform, like Windows among OS. All these trade-ins for being potentially cross-platform application make the life of nowadays eCommerce developer difficult.

eCommerce developers were using Microsoft IIS and ASP-based Great Plains eCommerce around 4 years ago. Today, with the move to .Net and ASPX platform, server based scripts are replaced with .Net code behind approach and Great Plains eCommerce should be rewritten.
Microsoft Great Plains subdivision released SDK – eConnect which was targeted to eCommerce developers to manipulate Great Plains objects, such as Customer, SOP Order, Invoice, Quote, etc. What is a bit unpleasant – eConnect requires license key and is quite expensive for small internet eCommerce sites.
Custom Stored

Procedures. Companies, like Alba Spectrum Technologies have implemented multiple diversified eCommerce projects with Great Plains at the back end. So, these custom stored procedures are available on the market, but they are not packaged as eConnect and could be purchased on the individual agreement base with Microsoft Great Plains partner.
Some Great Plains tables structure logic is required. You usually need consultant help, however you could try to make maximum work done at home. Tool->Resource Desciption->Tables, re-sort by Table Group technical name, then make test transactions in Great Plains (SOP module) and see where records go. This is how you design and test your queries

Good luck with implementation, customization and integration and if you have issues or concerns – we are here to help! If you want us to do the job - give us a call 866-528-0577 or 630-961-5918! help@albaspectrum.com

About The Author
Andrew is Great Plains specialist in Alba Spectrum Technologies ( http://www.albaspectrum.com/ ) – Microsoft Great Plains, Navision, Microsoft CRM Partner, serving clients in California, Minnesota, Illinois, Washington, Florida, Arizona, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Canada, UK, Australia, Brazil, Germany, Russia
help@albaspectrum.com

Microsoft Dynamics GP 9.0: Ecommerce Web Development – Overview For Programmer

Microsoft “Project Green” phase one is reflected in Microsoft Great Plains/Dynamics GP 9.0 realization. It is exposed to .Net developer currently through eConnect and as time goes – more and more eConnect object will have XML web service interfaces. In this small article we will be touching the set of object, deployed in eCommerce application, using Microsoft Dynamics GP as a backend.

• Sales Order Processing (SOP). In the light eCommerce case – you push data into SOP10100 – SOP Header table and SOP10200 – SOP Line table. If you do create Sales Orders Only, do not accept deposits against sales order – then you do not care about SOP Distribution table: SOP10102. All these tasks could be realized through eConnect.

• Inventory Tables. If you sell from your inventory (not just services), then you use Inventory module tables: IV00101 – Item master, IV00102 – Item QTY master, the last one shows you quantity at the specific location and in general

• Receivable Management Tables. RM00101 – Customer master – in case if you create and register new customer or update existing customer info in Great Plains.

• eConnect extensions. Obviously eConnect will be repeating the logic of former Great Plains Dexterity objects. In Great Plains you typically create work documents: Quotes, Orders, Invoices and then you post them individually or in the batch – posting process is functionally assigned to the operator, this is why you will have hard time to program it via eConnect (which allows you to create work documents). You will need eConnect extensions or simply stored procedures, which post work records in Sales Order Processing and potentially Receivable Management modules – it is not recommended to create ones from scratch – posting and order transferring logic is very complicated.

• Stored Procedures approach. We see more and more cases when eCommerce is built around Microsoft Small Business Financials, former Microsoft Small Business Manager – in such a situation eConnect might be too expensive and too complex – you may need just several SOP oriented stored procedures to create SOP orders and invoices at the back end in SOP SQL tables. The advice to the developer in the case of Small Business Financials – ask SBF user to create sample transaction – Sales Order and watch how did it distribute across SOP tables – you will get the idea and replication pattern for your SQL coding

• Development Tools. Microsoft Visual Studio.Net is becoming the tool of choice (over now legacy Microsoft Dexterity or Great Plains Software Dexterity). However if you are eCommerce developer – you will have to use SQL scripting. Usually the first question is – where do I get Great Plains table structure description: Tools->Resource Description->Tables. Sometimes developers ask about Great Plains Integration Manager. This tool is in process of being rewritten with eConnect panidea. Integration Manager up to version 8.0 was relatively slow in its technical ability to integrate bulk number of records – it used legacy OLE Server technology – Great Plains was OLE Server and IM used GP screens to validate integration records. New integration manager should be more powerful and it is in the process of the creation as we write these lines.

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM web front. In some cases we see this scenario. Microsoft Great Plains – MS CRM integration is in process of being rewritten on eConnect – currently it uses BizTalk server (and does a nice job, however sometimes you have to programmatically tune the BizTalk integration). In CRM you can create Account or Contact that will be integrated to Great Plains Customer, then Order when submitted can be integrated to Great Plains if needed. Sometimes developers complain, that they have to force credit limit for the CRM Account to be non-zero – in order for the invoice to come through.

About the Author: Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer at Alba Spectrum Technologies ( http://www.albaspectrum.com/ http://www.greatplains.com.mx/ http://www.enterlogix.com.br/ ) - Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains, Navision, Axapta MS CRM, Oracle Financials and IBM Lotus Domino Partner. Please do not hesitate to call or email us: USA 1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918 help@albaspectrum.com

Network Monitoring for Serious eCommerce

In the real world, businesses come in every size, from self-employed entrepreneurs like me to mega malls like Wal-Mart.

On the Internet, companies come in every size, too, from a stand-alone ebook sales page with webmaster and owner all in one, to 300 pound gorilla like Amazon, with over a million pages requiring the entire population of a small country to serve as webmaster.

If your site is a single page, it is its own network. But if your site is any bigger, and you have plans to grow, it is a network or is fast becoming one. You need network monitoring.

Most ecommerce webmasters are at least somewhat familiar with website monitoring. Many use a website monitoring service or software to keep track of "uptime" and "downtime".

At your local shopping mall, serious business requires more than just knowing when the front doors are open and when they are closed. Serious ecommerce needs to know more than just when the site is accessible. That is what network monitoring is all about.

Chances are, your e-business owns one of the following, or uses one of the following remotely:

DNS servers: These are used to translate your site name, like http://www.mycompany.com/, to the numbers called "IP addresses" that computers understand. If DNS servers are not working properly, end-users will not be able to find your site and will get an error. Usually only an external or remote monitoring service will detect such a problem.

An FTP server: File Transfer Protocol servers are used to help you exchange files with remote users. If you use FTP, a monitoring service can make sure it is always up and running.

POP3 and SMTP servers: These are used for exchanging emails. If you are using email, chances are you are using SMTP and POP3. If your SMTP server is down, everyone who sends you email will receive an error, stating that your mail server is down and cannot accept incoming email. To say that the impression this leaves your customers is bad would be an understatement. If your POP3 server is down, you will be unable to retrieve email from your mailbox. Once again, only external monitoring will prevent such a problem.

Firewalls: Many businesses use firewalls to protect their internal network from un-authorized traffic, such as spyware, viruses and sabotage by competitors. Furthermore, a firewall is your first line of

defense. If your firewall goes down, your whole network may actually become inaccessible from outside. In other words, if you host your own web site and mail servers, those will become inaccessible to the outside world if your firewall goes down. Once again, remote network monitoring is required to detect that a problem exists and quickly get it repaired.

Internet connections: Users come to your network from multiple backbones, depending on the company they use to connect to the Internet and their location. It is important to ensure that your connection performs well for each user. A remote monitoring service can ping your networks from multiple locations around the world, thus testing most major routes to your web server or network. Before hiring a network monitoring service, check to see that they have both your customer geography and the Internet backbone layout covered.
Very few websites of any size and functionality are anything less than a complete network, and many networks rely on servers in different parts of the world.
A good network monitoring service can ensure, as a base, that all servers are properly functioning, that data can be sent to and received from each server, and that each function sharing the server responds as required. An advanced network monitoring service can even remotely monitor the temperature of your servers.

What you need to monitor depends on how extensive your network is. A network monitoring expert can help you determine what needs monitoring. If you own the servers, or are remotely hosted on dedicated servers, you most likely need everything monitored. If your site is hosted on shared servers, you might need fewer functions monitored.

David Leonhardt is a freelance writer and SEO consultant. Contact him at
http://www.seo-writer.net/

He wrote this article for Dotcom-Monitor:
http://www.dotcom-monitor.com/

Read more on network monitoring:
http://www.dotcom-monitor.com/network-monitoring.asp

Read more on website monitoring:
http://www.dotcom-monitor.com/website-monitoring.asp

david@seo-writer.net

Eyes on your eCommerce Website

In a recent article I talked about Google AdSense placement based on eye-tracking research. However, research by The Poynter Institute, Eyetools and the Estlow Center for Journalism and New Media has a lot to say about more than where to put an AdSense block.

Designing an eCommerce site is more than making it pretty. You have certain desired actions you're looking for from your visitors. You have specific things you want to be sure they see and hopefully act on. Now, there's some research that can guide your design. Certainly you want your site to look professional, but you want it to do its job as effectively as possible too.

People are surprisingly alike in some of their basic visual behavior. It's been argued that our evolution as hunter-gatherers has shaped much of our ingrained visual patterns. Whether you buy that particular argument or not there are still important commonalities.

Typical behavior on initially viewing a site is to do a fast scan of the entire visible screen with short focusing periods around the areas that attract attention. First pass tends to include headlines, the page logo, photo captions, subheads, links and menu items. And the big hot spot is the upper left corner of the screen. I haven't seen any definitive research on whether these patterns also hold for users with native languages that read any way except left to right, but I'm assuming most of you are building sites for left-to-right readers.

The clear message is that your most important real estate is in that upper left area and that the lower right (particularly if it's below the fold) is the least likely to receive much attention.

How you use your words in a headline, paragraph or link can make a huge difference in your success at capturing a visitor's attention. The concept is called frontloading. Wherever you can make sure your critical terms appear at the very beginning of headlines, links and other text. It's still got to make sense, but the first few words are far more likely to be at least scanned then the middle or end of a headline or link or the inside of a paragraph.

The exact same words can have drastically different capture rates depending on their order. You want to maximize the probability that the visitor will read a whole headline or link and then act on it. So put the most significant, enticing words first - the ones that are the best grabbers and convey the subject immediately.

You don't have a lot of time to mess about. It's been reported that a typical surfer may be off your page in well under 14 seconds unless something grabs his or

her attention fast. Remember the upper-left? You want to do an especially good job with headlines, link and text in that area.

Dropcaps (where the first capitalized letter in a line is in a different, often unusual, font and extends below the normal text base-line), bolding, font changes and color changes can also serve as strong eye-attractors. If you try these techniques you need to be careful that you don't overuse them (your page will look like a mess), and it's extremely important that you test whether or not they're actually doing what you want. Annoying as it may be, running tests is the only way to make sure it's an improvement.

Do you use lists? Have you made sure that they're in-line and as close to the left margin as possible? Don't ever use an outline format with multiple indents. People scan down, not across and they tend to scan close to the left margin. Indent too much and it might as well be invisible.

An interesting testing result that I read somewhere said that somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of site visitors don't even see centered headlines. Sure they look nice and a lot of sites use them, but if they're totally missed by even 3 percent of your visitors, you're paying a major price to look good. Suggestion? Put those headlines up against your left margin.

This also applies to links. Put those links up against the left margin, not inside a paragraph, centered or off to the right. And if you want any clicks on a link, never put it in that nearly unseen lower right area. Might as well just leave it off your page.

How about indented paragraphs? Now there's a great way to start an argument. Some argue that it attracts the eye, it's different, few sites use it so you stand out. Others insist that you're far better off staying left justified and frontloading each paragraph. There's only one way to resolve it for yourself, yeah, run some tests and see what works with your visitors on your site.

The bottom line is that once you get beyond the basics of placement, frontloading, and left-justified links and headlines, you need to test if you want to fully maximize the effectiveness of your website design. I wish there were a simpler answer too, but in the end only testing will tell you what works best for your site.

About the Author
Richard writes, teaches, trains and consults on business and professional presentations and eCommerce related matters. Visit http://www.building-ecommerce-websites.com for more information on eCommerce sites and eCommerce site building - and http://www.building-ecommerce-websites.com/articles for more eCommerce articles.

How exactly does Ecommerce work?

This has to be the most-frequently asked question I receive from newbie clients. They know people are buying online and they know they have to accept credit cards if they want to stand a chance in all the net-based competition, but beyond that realization, most are clueless as to how it all works.

I can't blame them, really. It's a confusing online world out there and a lot of people who are trying to tell them how it works are really just trying to sell them their own solution. It's kinda hard to trust the validity of what they say when profit is a huge motivating force behind their
persuasive suggestions.

And to be sure, there is profit in this Ecommerce game! Money is to be made at many steps along the Ecommerce path. With that in mind, let's take a walk along the path to Ecommerce, and take a look at the signs--or components--that are necessary to take part in the Ecommerce excitement and potential profits.

1. The Merchant Account:
This really is your first step towards Ecommerce, unless you have chosen to go through a payment facility and are willing to give up a rather large portion of your sales in fees. The up-front costs of a merchant account can be hefty for a small business, but the long-term savings can be substantial.

This is especially true if you are selling big ticket items. For instance, on the sale of a $300 product/service through a payment facility you could pay between $20-$45 dollars or more in fees. With your own merchant account it will probably cost you about $9. With the typical fees and equipment for a merchant account startup costing about $1,500, you can recoup that cost rather quickly.

A merchant account comes with a merchant identification number. That is about all it gets you. In order to process transactions you need either a terminal (the little box that you swipe your credit card through at retail outlets) or software that runs on your PC and will dial up the merchant via your modem, and then process the transaction and deposit the money into your bank account.

2. The Shopping Cart:
If you are selling just one or two items on your site you won't have much need for a shopping cart. A site with a variety of products should use the shopping cart system because it's the easiest way for your customers to shop. The easier it is to shop, the more they will spend, which is exactly the psychology supermarkets use, and exactly how shoppers are similar whether in a supermarket or scanning through your website. And the nice thing about electronic shopping carts is that the wheels never go square, and you don't have to send a clerk out after the store closes to round up all the carts that have been left scattered around the neighborhood. So shopping carts are good. But how will they work with your merchant account and the all-important ordering process?

If the orders placed on your site are to be processed with the customer's credit card as a sale through your PC or swipe erminal, then there doesn't have to be any compatibility between your cart and your merchant account. The two will work completely independently, each doing their part of the job.

If, on the other hand, you would like all of your incoming orders to be automatically processed for you as the customer hits the submit button, you will need what is called "real time processing."

3. Real-Time Processing

Almost every website company I talk to would like to have their orders processed for them
(the vision of the owner of a website company turning on the PC and then stretching out in a hammock, watching the orders get processed on the screen, comes to mind). However, most
web company people, upon learning the cost involved, take my advice to wait until they have a steady flow of orders coming in before they use real-time processing. If you're on a tight budget the extra fees involved in real-time processing might be better used to aggressively advertise
and drive customer traffic to your site. Processing a few orders per day doesn't take very long and until you find it to be more time-consuming to process the orders yourself than you like, you are probably better off processing such orders manually.

If you are starting with a healthy budget and an aggressive promotion plan you will probably be better off implementing real-time processing right from the start. Changing order-processing methods can sometimes result in system hiccups and you don't want anything to slow down your momentum once you've started. You'll also save money, not having to set up your ordering system twice.

4. Web Hosting

The web host who is hosting your site can sometimes make a difference in how compatible your entire site and ordering system are with each other. I say "sometimes" because for those of us not using real-time processing, it doesn't matter who your host is or where your merchant account is located. They are independent of each other. Orders arrive and you process them. No interaction between the two is needed.

Problems can arise when you bring a shopping cart AND real-time processing into the picture. A shopping cart alone won't cause problems but the cart you choose to use must be compatible with your web host. Some carts are designed to run on certain types of servers, so when choosing one be cautious to make absolutely sure you can use it with your current host. Otherwise you had better be prepared to find a new one.

If you want a shopping cart AND real-time processing the three (cart, processing, and host) must work together well. Your shopping cart must be compatible with your host and the cart must be compatible with your payment processor. With all the different shopping carts, hosts and payment facilities out there, putting together the right team can be a real challenge. This is especially true for the newbie who doesn't understand how it all works and how it all has to work together, or understands imperfectly but thinks he or she has it all under control when the decisions are finally made.

One Stop Shops -
The easiest way to find a compatible solution is to choose a provider who offers all you need under one roof. This is what I have done by partnering with Virtualis Systems. I am able to offer a great hosting solution along with a compatible shopping cart that works with almost any real
time processor. I have even taken this a step further by partnering with a rock-solid merchant account provider, E-Commerce Exchange. Now I don't want to force MY "solution of choice" on you in this article so I have set up an autoresponder with details on the Ecommerce solution I
recommend to all my clients. Please email our autoresponder at ecommerce@lrsmarketing.com for details.

Your Website Designer:
Asking your website designer to recommend a compatible solution is also a good idea. Most likely, he or she has successfully set up shopping carts and payment systems that have worked together for other clients and with that experience can confidently recommend one that will be right for your specific needs. There is also the added benefit that your designer is comfortable and familiar with the cart and payment processing configuration. This will result in less time spent setting up your site, thus saving you money in design costs.

Who to Choose?
Choosing the right person for this task is perhaps the most important decision you can make (in Ecommerce, that is. Choosing a dentist, a pet, and which TV show to watch also rank high in importance). Nobody is an expert in all areas of Ecommerce because there are so many variables, depending on which configurations of hosts, carts, and merchants you choose. Find someone with whom you can talk to and who will listen to YOUR needs with understanding. A web designer who has created sites selling one product through mail order is NOT the best person to go to for Ecommerce advice. Just like a web designer trying to create a site that will sell and not just look good, with no marketing experience, a designer who doesn't know Ecommerce is going to be hard-pressed to juggle all the components that must fit together seamlessly and attractively to construct a truly effective Ecommerce site.

The Most Common Mistakes?
I've had clients come to me who have been provided a shopping cart by their web host but who then have purchased another cart, not realizing they already have one. They've set themselves up with real time processing and then purchased a terminal even though they will never swipe one card. They've had SSL enabled on their web host server even though it's provided at their payment gateway. I have been on the sympathetic end of many, many more sad tales from earnest folks who have told me their own personal accounts of throwing hard-earned money away on these kinds of mistakes.

Why? Cutting through all the technical jargon, it's all because they simply didn't understand how each component can, should, and must work in conjunction with one another.

Ecommerce can appear simple (well, almost) once you understand how all the components work together. A merchant account allows you to accept credit cards, your web host shows your website to the world, your shopping cart helps your customers order easily and real-time processing processes the orders in real-time and approved transactions are credited to your merchant account. All are independent components but they all function together to make Ecommerce work. Find a designer or webmaster who can bring all these elements together on your site & watch Ecommerce work for you.

About the Author
Lisa Schmeckpeper of LRS Marketing
and published in their free newsletter, Website Success
Monthly. To receive a free copy of this informative e-zine
just send email to subscribe@websitesuccessmonthly.com
or visit their website at www.lrsmarketing.com .
Copyright © 2000 [LRS Marketing].

Divesify With Ecommerce

Since 1972 Amsoil Inc. has progressively expanded its line of products. It began with one that proved to be the first of its catagory, an engine oil that had not been seen in the market place. Not too many years later, more need for superior synthetic automotive lubricants came into Amsoil Inc. awareness. Examples are the Food Grade Grease, racing applications and racing applications.

By the mid eighties Amsoil Inc. had more products available. These products where not the property of other contracted companies but Amsoil Inc. was the marketing and manufacturing origin of a widening divesification of product lines.

Opportunity to take advantage of these products in a variety of environments also proved successful. All types of automotive and commercial retailers where taking advantage of the technical support and leadership available. Racing has grown in atleast three areanas, no pun

intended. Motorcross, Marine and Snomobile have made huge strides in the field of spectator sports as well as participants. Dealers have the opportunity to sponsor a rider or team in the field of their choice. This environment is an excellent fit for promoting Amsoil.

This an exciting business to be in because of its diversity of opportunites. The passion that keeps the engine of productivity moving is easy to refuel from a company that has the integrity at its foundation. The confidence that it will continue comes from the experience of the history and people behind Amsoil Inc.
For more information, see www.lubedealer.com/hiebert

About the Author
Rudy Hiebert is an Amsoil Inc. dealer since 1989. The application of the Internet has increased his Amsoil activity ten fold. As a Certified Dealer, his downline of accounts and customers has stretched the continent with the use of the Internet.

eCommerce - A Plan

Planning an ecommerce website is like building a house - architecture and budget need to be agreed before the decoration.

AN AGREED REQUIREMENTS SPECIFICATION MUST BE DRAWN UP AS THE FIRST STAGE BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE IS DONE - ANY OTHER APPROACH WILL ONLY LEAD TO CONFUSION AND WORSE.

Once an AGREED REQUIREMENTS SPECIFICATION has been agreed then solutions need to be evaluated and costed against that specification are:

- Project management - Hardware - Web design and software - Site marketing - Project management:

All aspects of the project need to be managed. Decide who is going to do it and properly plan the requirements, activities, outcomes, milestones and timings.

Hardware:
Your choices here are a managed service or your own server. The security and disaster recovery aspect that is achieved by hosting with a major provider is very important. Only go with your own server if you have the experience and facilities.

Design and Software:

Site design
Develop site templates and test them with real people. They have to be easy to use and navigate. Don't let "design" drive the site; let ease of use and sales drive the "design". Think how
the customer thinks.

Software
At least 5 solutions need to be considered.

- Updating - Shopping cart - Forum - Email - Statistics

Updating
There are 2 realistic routes here. Either an online or an offline, PC based content management system (CMS). The online CMS can be either an Open Source CMS (Open Source means any
application that has been made available, generally free, to developers to view and modify freely. Examples of Open Source applications are MySQL and PHP) or commercial.

There are pros and cons to both routes. An online system is available to anyone with relevant security clearance anywhere any time. A PC based system is, obviously, limited to the PCs
running the licenses. An example of a PC based system is Macromedia Contribute which integrates with Dreamweaver. There are a whole range of online Commercial and Open Source options such as SuiteWise™, Drupal, Joomla, and Website Baker etc. However, even this is complicated by the fact that some of the shopping cart solutions also contain CMS that may be sufficient for many companies' requirements.

Shopping cart and CRM
There are also 2 realistic routes for the shopping cart - Open Source or commercial.

There are excellent Open Source shopping carts such as OSCommerce and Zen, but also excellent commercial solutions such as Actinic and Customer Focus Quick Order Portal (which comes with a complete CMS).

There are other factors to consider with the shopping cart:
- Does it have its own or does it easily integrate with your exiting stock control systems?
- Does it integrate easily with
accounting systems (e.g. Sage, QuickBooks)?
- Does it have or integrate easily with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems that may be proposed in future?

Forum
Many CMS have good integrated forums but if they do not our recommendation would be to use a good Open Source package such as PunBB or phpBB. They are free, robust and easy to integrate and customise into any site.

Email
Most CMS, shopping carts and forums have email solutions. However, some solutions are very basic. If the chosen shopping cart solution that best meets the ecommerce and other requirements does not have an effective integrated email solution and if the same be true of the CMS and forum solutions then stand alone Open Source applications such as PHPlist are
one alternative solution and the other is an online solution such as Constant Contact or many others.

Statistics
This is arguably the most important part of the package. If you do not know how visitors to your website and in the shop are behaving, what turns them on and what turns them off then it is far, far harder to improve sales and site profitability. Commercial applications such as WebTrends and ClickTracks need to be evaluated for best fit.

SITE MARKETING
There are 4 major areas to consider here.

- Offline marketing - e.g. in-store. What works most cost effectively to drive traffic and orders via the web from non-web activities.
- Site optimisation - how to make sure technical structure, copy, content, back-links and a range of other factors are initially and remain optimised so that as many high search engine placements on relevant searches are obtained.
- Pay per click and other online marketing - how to get traffic from advertising against key words and phrases used in search engines and from adverts on other sites.
- Email - how to grow the email list and use it to grow profitable sales.

In summary:
- Manage the project - Think how the customer thinks - Get excellent software to make finding product and price easy

- Make terms clear and payment simple - Ensure you are in stock and and have achievable delivery timescales - Make sure you have a good CRM system and clear communications - mail, phone, emai - Market the site appropriately - Know what's going on - use your stats to test, track and try
Cost ............ well how long is a pice of string, but you could be up and running for far less than the cost of new premises!!!

About the author:
Richard Hill is a director of E-CRM Solutions and has spent many years in senior direct and interactive marketing roles. E-CRM - http://www.e-crm.co.uk/ - helps you to grow by getting you more customers that stay with you longer. We provide practical solutions that pay for themselves. We help you to make sure that your marketing works.

Quick Ecommerce Tutorial

When choosing to create an ecommerce store, there are 3 important questions to ask yourself.

1) Do I need ecommerce? This is important. Generally speaking, consumers are comfortable making purchases online for under $250. If your product or service costs more than that, then you may be better served creating a "Lead Generation" web site and an eSales team who are comfortable working with internet based leads.

2) How much time do I have? Setting up an ecommerce store is relatively easy for any experienced web designer and can be done and out to market in a couple days, assuming you have a limited number back end products in place and ready to be shipped. But, if you are a newbie, then you face a substantial learning curve. We encourage everyone to learn HTML, and to be entrepreneurial in their endeavors, but it does take a large time commitment to learn enough to succeed. Also, keep in mind, that the learning is never done. There are always new technologies effecting the Internet and the way people buy and sell online and you need to keep up to date with them to succeed. Another thing to keep in mind is internet marketing. If you plan on acquiring sales through the search engines, then you need an seo strategy that works. For starters read Serr.biz

3) What is your budget? Everyday you hear of people making millions online by just having an ecommerce enabled web site that they got for free. We would like to dispel this myth. It's simply not true. There are technology costs associated with operating

an ecommerce site, not to mention the cost of products, fulfillment, standard overhead costs, and marketing. The old idiom of "It cost money to make money." is 100% true. However, starting an ecommerce store is generally less expensive than a traditional brick and mortar, especially if you have a successful brick and mortar business already. However, the bare bones start up costs associated with an ecommerce store is the cost of your computer and ISP. This is possible, but not very probable. In truth, you should expect to spend somewhere in the range of $50-$1000 a month in technology costs alone. That does not account for variables listed above.

If you have thought about the questions above and still want to proceed, here is a quick check list of things you recommend you have.

1) Product or service to sell.
2) Web site and hosting company with email.
3) Shopping cart with a secure check out.
4) Merchant account so you can accept credit cards.
5) Back end technology and order fulfillment in place.

For more details about starting an ecommerce store visit this link:
1-2-1 merchant account

About the Author
Michael Zittel most recently worked as the VP of Internet Marketing for Payright.com. Prior to that he's held similar positions for various other companies. Cumulatively he has over 5 years of internet marketing and ecommerce experience. Currently he runs his own ecommerce businesses, namely www.121merchantaccount.com and www.Serr.biz

Monday, July 30, 2007

The Ecommerce Myth

Ecommerce is growing rapidly. Besides the big players such as Amazon.com and Buy.com, small businesses realize that they can also increase their sales revenues by using the Internet. With this realization, more and more online stores are opened by the small business segment.

The goal of this article is to increase the ecommerce myth awareness and to show you how to deal with the myth. The definition of the ecommerce myth is: Open you online store and customers will automatically come.

Demystifying the Myth
Using an online store to sell your products and services has great potential. Through the website of your online store, the entire world can purchase products and services from you. They no longer have to physically come to your store for purchases.

With the growing popularity of the Internet, the number of websites has increased exponentially. Unfortunately, this means that the chances of potential buyers finding your website have decreased and that competition is fierce. Visitors can stop by your competitor and perform price comparisons in a manner of minutes and from the comfort of their home.

Consider this and become aware of the ecommerce myth. Opening your online store is not enough for making it a success. A key factor to the success of your ecommerce ventures is to generate traffic to your website; you need web site visitors in order to make sales through your online store.

You can take several steps to create website traffic. The following list contains a summary of popular methods to increase

Website Traffic.

Online directories. List your site at online directories such as yahoo.com and business.com. Internet users use these to find companies. If you are not listed, they will not find you.
Link exchange. Exchange links with your partners and with sites containing content relevant to your business. Hint: You can find out who links to your competitors by performing a search on Google.com for link:http://www.yourcompetitor.com .
Keyword optimization. Find your niche keywords used by your visitors to find your online store using the search engines. Once identified, make sure they can be found on your webpage. Add them to your website's title, meta tags, and heading tags. You can use online tools such as Wordtracker.com to find your niche keywords.
Pay-Per-Click advertisements. Sign up for pay-per-click advertisements and optimize these advertisements using your niche keywords. Google.com offers an Adwords program that is popular and easy to use.

Conclusion
Be aware of the ecommerce myth and take appropriate action to increase the success chances of your online store. Start monitoring your website traffic. Be patient and work on all the methods mentioned in this article on a regular basis.

About the Author
Frank Voorburg is an ecommerce consultant and owner of Feaser LLC.
Feaser LLC offers affordable ecommerce and webdesign services.

Ecommerce - Boost Your Business ROI

Did you know that over 90% of all online orders are processed by credit cards and that web sites that offer customers the ability to pay with credit cards can achieve up to 300% more sales than those that do not?

It's a fact. Not only do more customers buy, statistics prove that customers actually buy more when given the option to pay with their credit card. Here are some recent trends that will reinforce the need to sell your product or service on the internet- if your business is not yet doing so:

-At the end of 2000, over 400 million people worldwide had Internet access. That number is expected to reach over 1 billion by the end of 2005!

-Almost 100 million people in the U.S. are now making a purchase after using the internet to conduct their research.

-U.S. Consumers spent a record $13.7 billion in online purchases during the 2003 holiday season. A follow-up study conducted jointly by Goldman Sachs, Harris Interactive and Nielsen/Net Ratings pegged sales during the 2004 holiday season at $23.2 billion, up 25% from the previous year. This comes at a time when traditional retail sales are growing in the low single digits.

-Forrester projects that total e-commerce sales in the U.S. will increase by approximately 20% per year, growing to $229 billion in 2008, making online retail transactions 10% of total U.S. retail sales by 2008.

In addition, in a survey conducted among more than 500 small business owners, the overwhelming majority indicated that they were either very satisfied or at least somewhat satisfied with their company's e-commerce return on investment

(ROI).

It's no wonder- when compared to traditional forms of direct marketing such as mail order catalogs, the cost of establishing and maintaining an e-commerce website is minimal. Additionally, new affordable, user-friendly storefront applications simplify the task of establishing and maintaining a professional e-commerce website. It is now affordable and doable- even for the novice small business owner- to convert their brick-and-mortar operation into a click-and-mortar operation and triple their revenues in a very short period of time!

What’s more, if your company sells products to consumers or businesses and you don't have a fully automated e-commerce website, your business is simply not operating at its full potential and you're sending customers to your competition!

It is no longer a luxury for the small to mid-sized retailer to have an e-commerce enabled site-but a necessity to stay competitive in the marketplace.

About the author:
Rick Caraballo is the author of this article and the CEO of Avance Web Marketing- a South Florida Web Marketing firm that provides state-of-the-art web hosting, web design, e-commerce and marketing consulting services- including Hispanic Marketing. E-Commerce services include merchant services, as well as, the Excerpo® Shopping Cart- a state-of-the-art e-business storefront application.

7 Tips To Increase Sales With Your Ecommerce Web Site

Ecommerce is just exploding right now on the Net. More and more people are doing their shopping online. Some Internet retailers are even beating out their offline counterparts. So what does this mean to you? It’s important that you are taking full advantage of your web site to get your share of the billions of dollars spent online every year. In this article we are going to cover 7 tips that you can put into practice immediately to increase your sales and revenue with your ecommerce web site.

1: Introduction
Make sure to have a brief introduction on the homepage of your web site. Your introduction should be concise and clearly identify the benefits of your visitors shopping at your site.

2: Navigation
Make sure that your site has clear and easy navigation, such as a visible search box on the top part of your web site, clear categories to browse through, a FAQ page that clearly explains your shipping and return policy, and etc.

3: Gift Certificates
People love getting gifts at certain times of the year, so make sure that you have gift certificates that your visitors can purchase right on your web site.

4: Customer Loyalty
Instead of just focusing on getting new customers why not take advantage of repeat business? Why not give your customers an incentive to come back and do business with you again? You can easily do this by offering coupons and special discounts to ones who have already purchased something from you. This is a lot easier than acquiring new customers since they already know you and feel comfortable shopping at your site. You can also add more value to your customers by adding live

customer support to your site.

5: Special Offers
Make sure to have a section on the top part of your home page devoted to featuring your current special offers and sales items. In fact if you happen to have a lot of special offers you can just feature the most popular ones and then make a separate web page that shows all of your sales items.

6: Shopping Carts
People want the checkout process to go as quickly and smoothly as possible, so make sure that your visitors are always just one click away to checkout. Try to reduce the checkout process to as few steps as possible. Make sure to offer multiple payment options such as credit cards, Paypal, online checks, mail orders, and such. When you no longer have a product in stock make sure to either remove it from your site or clearly mark it as “out of stock”. There is nothing more irritating for a customer to go through the whole checkout process only to find out that you no longer carry the item they ordered.

7: Affiliate Program
Do you have your own affiliate program? The most successful web sites have one and you should too. By starting your own affiliate program you will develop an increasing online sales force where you only pay them when a sale is made. There is really no risk and it is one of the best low cost effective advertising methods that you can use.

If you put these tips into practice you will notice a drastic increase in your sales and web site revenue.

About the Author
Jordan Williams is the Owner of WebCashLink.com which gives you the resources, tools, and software to succeed with an online business. http://www.webcashlink.com/

Advertising Your eCommerce Web Site

8 Tips for Increasing Your Online Sales

Once you’ve launched your eCommerce web site, you’ll need to show it off to the online world. Whether you’re paying someone to submit your site to all the major and minor search engines and directories, it’s still up to you to continually advertise your eCommerce site in order to keep attracting business.

Many online business owners will tell you that within six to nine months of your launch date you’ll start seeing increased orders for your products. However here are 8 things you can do to lure people to your site now!

1.Advertise on http://www.craigslist.org/ . This entry will only last for 10 days and you must submit to one city and category at a time. You can include photos and/or advanced HTML in your ad.

2.Write a press release and send out for free to the following sites: http://www.prweb.com/ [this one has been around for several years]; http://www.prfree.com/ and http://www.openpress.com/ Paid submissions will get you more views, quicker listings in the search engines, and the ability to post photos and keep track of your statistics.

3.Submit your site[s] to http://www.isedb.com/html/Web_Directories [You’ll discover loads of directories here, from the highly specialized to the mainstream. Many of the sites have ratings; indicate whether they’re accepting new submissions, and if there’s a fee for submitting].

4.Search engine positioning. When advertising your eCommerce site, always have the following information on hand: A. Your Web site title. This should be approximately 7-12 words. B. Description. Have 3 different descriptions of varying lengths. 15 words, 25 words, 100 words. Have them summarize the essence of your site. C. Keywords. 10 – 50 of your most important keywords arranged in order of importance. Again, some online directories will allow you to contribute more keywords than others.

5.Write articles about your products/service. Be an online expert. What makes your site so unique from the thousands of others in your chosen category? Is it your customized service? Your low prices? Your high quality? Don’t over promote your product, but concentrate on what will help others. It’s highly recommended you include at least two or three testimonials.

6.Exchange links with other sites that have quality information and are related to your field in some way. For example, I sell a lot of soap so I link with mostly gift basket, crafting and candle sites.

7.Free classifieds. These can sometimes get you listed in the search engines, but don’t expect too much response from them.

8.Offer a freebie. For example, if you have an eBook for sale, you won’t give the entire book away, but having a chapter or two online will increase interest – and sales. If you make or sell a product, offer a free sample with a paid order. Or free shipping on sales over a certain amount.

Follow one or more of these helpful tips and watch your online business bloom!

About the Author

Lisa Maliga, writer & owner of Everything Shea Aromatic Creations [http://www.everythingshea.com/] offers a fragrant selection of designer shea butter glycerin soaps, exclusive Whipped Shea Butter, & unique SoapCakes to personalize for gifts or promotions.

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