The Holiday Season is fast approaching. It is time to turn our thoughts toward the ones we love and search for that perfect gift. 2Checkout Suppliers have a variety of gift ideas that that will be perfect for your gift-giving needs. Here is a brief list of suppliers from around the world ready to help you spread some Holiday Cheer!
By Karon Thackston © 2009, All Rights Reserved
A recent article found in Internet Retailer revealed that 85% of consumers plan to shop online this holiday season. Sixty-nine percent plan to make holiday purchases online. The survey goes on to say that 57% of shoppers are planning to use the Internet to “compare different retailers to find the best price.”
This comes as no surprise during a time of economic upheaval. But is your ecommerce site ready to convert these shoppers? What if you offer the same price as many other retailers? Or even a higher price? Are dollar signs the only card consumers are willing to play this holiday season? No.
During an economic challenge, the focus isn’t necessarily just on price alone. What shoppers want is value. Sure, it’s an old-school term, but it still holds just as true today as it did in the ‘70s and even the ‘30s.
Smashing Magazine has an article that shows common website usability problems and ways to avoid or fix them.
“The goal of user interface design is to make a website easier for visitors to use. For online stores, fixing problems brings in more visitors who browse more products for a longer period of time. Even simple fixes, like not requiring registration for purchases, can have a huge effect on your bottom line. Keep these common problems in mind the next time you design an online store. Your customers will thank you for it.”
Having visited a large number of sites in my time on the Internet, I have to agree with the observations as well as the remedies.
I don’t mean to get carried away with the title of this post, but since reading John Maxwell’s book, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, I’m convinced that one of the key success factors to being a successful business owner is becoming a better leader.
Here’s the good news – becoming a better leader is a learned behavior, just like most other skills we learn.
So, what exactly is this thing we call leadership? What does it look like?
According to John Maxwell “leadership is influence – nothing more, nothing less”. Leadership may come in all shapes and sizes, but it only comes from influence and that can’t be mandated by a title, position or knowledge. It must be earned. The only thing a title can buy is a little time – either to increase your level of influence with others or to undermine it.
Last week I wrote an article detailing how to comply with the first two PCI DSS Standards. In this article, I will show what is involved in complying with the two requirements in the “Protect Cardholder Data” standard.
Requirement 3: Protect stored cardholder data
Requirement 4: Encrypt transmission of cardholder data across open, public networks
We have provided a secure network to collect and store our customer’s information. Now, we need to turn our attention to the data itself. To fulfill requirement 3, we need to come up with a policy detailing how we will store card holder data. This sounds easy enough, just make a few decisions and stick with them. However, this is actually a bit more complicated as the PCI-DSS FAQ explains. There are 20 different criteria to meet. While I suggest reading the linked FAQ some highlights are:
2Checkout’s development staff has been dilligently working to create a back office application programming interface (API). This API will help vendors automate both the account and order management process through either their own custom development or through third party software that supports the API.
When used in conjunction with our Instant Notification System and CGI purchase parameters, the API will enable the creation of sophisticated and powerful order management systems.
We are currently conducting a private beta for the first 10 API calls. If you are a 2Checkout vendor or a software developer who would like to participate in this beta program, please send an email to techsupport@2co.com that includes the following information:
If you are a third party software developer, we would like to know the name, and anything else you would like to tell us about, of the product you develop.
After confirming the submitted account information, we will begin contacting those selected to participate, in the coming weeks.
The past few months we have made improvements, fixed a few bugs, and added some new features. Below are some of the projects our Development Team has been busy working on. I want to take a moment to thank our developers for all the hard work they do every day.
New Features:
Resolved issues:
We will have more features added in the coming months, more fixes, and more and better opportunities to manage your accounts and make sales. Keep checking back for further updates.
This is the first is a twelve-part series detailing what is involved with PCI compliance. Earlier, Warner gave a very good overview of PCI DSS compliance.
“PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) is a security standard that applies to companies handling credit card numbers. The PCI level of enforcement differs based on the volume of transactions that a company handles.”
My purpose with this series is to provide the details involved in each requirement. I want to look at this from the point of view of a very small home-based business with a website selling tangible products.
Fraud happens, and new ways to commit fraud are always being developed. This is an unfortunate reality for all business. Because of this, fraud prevention has become a tricky and specialized field. Fraudsters targeting webhosts use different methods than they would for a florist, for example. 2Checkout has expert fraud analysts who are experienced at detecting these different methods and figuring out how to dissuade fraudsters in the first place. By assessing your business, your account’s history, and your own needs we can offer reliable, tested, effective strategies to assist you.
One aspect of 2Checkout’s fraud prevention that we’ve mentioned – but not discussed in depth, is our ability to tailor our fraud protections to suit your individual needs. While our normal fraud procedures provide sufficient protection for the majority of our vendors, from time to time a more tailored approach is helpful. Do you ever feel that we are flagging too many valid orders as fraud? Do you ever feel that your product attracts more fraudulent consumers than you expected? We are happy to work with you and offer suggestions to help reduce fraud and allow good sales.
These strategies may be as simple as changing how we review orders for your product or service. It may also be suggesting simple wording changes in your product explanations on your website. We have been doing fraud prevention for nearly 10 years; let us work with you and show you how effective we are.
Years ago, as a financial advisor (CLU, ChFC) I learned firsthand that most people spend more time planning how they’ll spend a one week vacation than how they’ll spend their retirement years. I don’t think that’s changed all that much despite the recent market fluctuations.
In marketing a small business or professional practice, it’s not much different. People don’t prepare for marketing as much as they “just do it”. Now, Nike’s tagline notwithstanding, that’s just foolish. And no different than focusing more time on planning your one week vacation than your retirement years.
Seth Godin made a great post on this very topic. He argues that business people are like “kids in a candy store” gazing at all the “goodies” — the myriad choices of marketing tactics that are readily available to us all…Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc.
Seth’s not saying there’s anything wrong with these marketing options (there isn’t). But, he admonishes us all to remember that they’re marketing tactics, not a marketing strategy. Tactics are supposed to support your marketing strategy, and if your strategy isn’t already in place…then using any marketing tactic is akin to launching a rocket but forgetting to add the astronauts before lift-off!
You’d scream if NASA did that, but in your own business…you may be doing precisely that if you haven’t chosen your marketing strategy before your marketing tactics.
Point:
It’s not the ‘quick and dirty’ approach to marketing (which is appealing, I will admit!)…but defining and articulating a viable marketing STRATEGY before you begin to consider which TACTICS you’ll use to implement and communicate your strategy is going to set you apart from your competitors and…far more successfully, too.
Bill Doerr is an authorized Duct Tape Marketing Coach. You can visit his web site at sellmoremarketing.com
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