These days there are more and more ways to connect with your customers and potential customers, and there are as many effective ways to engage your customers as there are ways to alienate. Recently, I have been researching how to use your existing customers to help you increase sales by simply telling their friends (online and off) about your business.

“For people to talk about you in an authentic way you have to give them a reason, and that reason should be how much they loved using your product or service.”

This is the cornerstone of a good word of mouth marketing strategy. Start with giving your customers a reason to talk about you. Matt Reece, from Brains on Fire has even more sound advice.

2Checkout is supported by an ever-growing list of third-party shopping carts.

Traditional shopping carts, like X-Cart and ClickCartPro, have supported 2CO for many years now. Others, like Summer Cart and ViArt, are more recent additions. 2CO is also supported by hosted shopping carts like 3DCart and hosted invoicing systems like FreshBooks.

We’re proud to recommend these carts and services and all of the others we’ve reviewed and confirmed for compatibility. You can see our entire recommended cart list, organized by category (PHP, ASP, Hosted Services, etc.), here. There’s a solution for almost every need and we’re adding more all the time, so check back frequently.

If you have developed a 2CO-compatible shopping cart and would like to have it included in our recommendations, please email us directly at integration@2co.com and we’ll be happy to provide all the information you need to confirm compatiblity.

Vic Cleary and Geno Arce from 2Checkout will be featured speakers at the Internet Dating Conference (iDate) in Beverly Hills, California Friday, June 26.

Cleary and Arce will provide internet dating executives and entrepreneurs a product demonstration of 2Checkout’s features and benefits explaining why 2CO is an excellent value for businesses competing in the online dating space.

iDate, the largest Internet Dating and Social Networking business management conference of its kind, is held twice in the U.S. and at least once internationally each year. Event topics include internet dating business strategies, payments, mobile technologies and marketing, social networks, and a number of legal and consumer safety issues.

In addition to Friday’s product demonstration, 2Checkout will also be compared to a variety of e-commerce options used by online dating companies in a discussion led by Courtland Brooks’ Director of Strategy, Glenn Millar at 9:00 a.m. the same day, titled “Removing the Veil: Payment Processor Rates and Options for Dating Companies”. Attendees interested in learning more can also speak to a 2Checkout representative at the company’s booth during the event’s Expo starting Thursday, June 24.

In a recent article on the Harvard Business Publishing website, Peter Bregman writes:

Small companies with low overhead, reliable owners, a small number of committed employees, personal client relationships, and sustainable business models that drive a reasonable profit are the great opportunity of our time.

He also make the case for establishing relationships with your customers. Something many of you are already doing.

We simply don’t trust companies anymore. We trust people.

This is something that I think most of us can understand. We are individual small businesses establishing relationships with individual customers. If Mr. Bregman is correct, we are the ones who will be winning in this economy. Nice to hear.

We recently talked about building a community as a means of developing relationships with your customers. One positive result of having a strong community is the development of trust between you and your customers. With understandable fears of identity theft, establishing this trust can go a long way in making that initial sale.

Two other ways to gain the trust of potential customers is having a clear guarantee and a return policy. Both of these tell your customers that you are willing to stand behind your product. Making sure that your customers know your refund policy before purchasing directly reduces the number of chargebacks you will receive.

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