Clothing:
Ties4Guys.com Ties and accessories for fashion-forward guys
Shop:Lush Quality leather bags
Shaman Fun Funky Fashion with Flare
Bitablue.com Stunning Chinese dresses

Home and Decor:
Alefs in Wonderland Specialists in paper trees and exotic butterflies since 2000
Shangri-La Enterprise Beautiful water and ink art
Russian Crafts Everything from Nested Dolls to hand-crafted tree ornaments

Infants:
Hippy Grandma Eco-Friendly products for both mom and baby
Zakeez Inc. Soft cuddly comfort for baby and parents
Jolie Bee Classic smocked dresses for the little ones

Toys and Games:
Peru Handcraft Games, Teddy Bears, Hats, and so much more
Backgammon Hellas Wooden game boards for the whole family
RusToys.com Handmade wooden toys

Jewelry:
Chaotic Trading Jewelry for the whole body
Amberizon Authentic Baltic Amber earrings, jewelry, key chains, and carvings
No Nickel Watches and jewelry for sensitive skin

Beauty:
Summer House Natural Soaps Natural soaps that feel and smell terrific
Dreadsock Protection and comfort for deadlocked hair
Kimberly Sayer of London Affordable, effective, high quality skin care

Sports:
Muay Thai Art A full range of Thai Boxing gear
Krupee Freefly Suits Freefly jumpsuits designed by Freeflyers
Prime Cuts Bodybuilding DVDs A vast library of Bodybuilding and Fitness DVDs

For Fun:
Jing Tea Shop A selection of tasty teas and beautiful accessories
How to Breakdance A personal favorite, hours of fun and good exercize
Roses & Sweets Flowers, candy and gifts for everyone on your shopping list

2Checkout sincerely wishes you all joy and peace this Holiday Season!

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.

What customers are really searching for is the most for their money.

How do you prove to them that your site offers greater value than the millions of others they’ll encounter?  Through your copy.

You’ve got only a few weeks left before the frenzy of online shopping breaks loose.  Use this time to take one last fresh look at your site copy.  Does it:

1.  Clearly differentiate you from your competition on every page? If I were to happen upon your site during my holiday surfing, could I – in 10 seconds or less – determine that you are a better option than the eight other sites I’ve just seen?  If not, insert some copy that lets me know why I should buy from you and not them.

Some call this a unique value proposition (UVP) or a unique selling position (USP).  I call it good sense.  If you don’t already know how you’re different or better than the competition, it’s time to do some high-speed brainstorming.  If you do understand your differentiating factors, don’t keep them a secret.  Make them known to your site visitors.

Maybe you offer free shipping. Or free returns.  Do you provide samples or swatches?  Perhaps you have a rewards program similar to frequent flyer miles. It could be that you really do offer the lowest prices.  Whatever your “hook” is, you’ll want to communicate that through your copy on the Home page, Category pages and Product pages.  Continue through until the buyer hits the checkout process to ensure she doesn’t forget why you’re the best choice.

2.  Hang a welcome sign on all your doors? I just returned from SMX East in New York where I spoke to a session full of ecommerce site owners about this very topic.  I’ll fill you in on the gist of my presentation and save you the $1,600 admission fee.

Econsultancy.com recently conducted research of over 60 ecommerce sites and found that the Category pages were the ones that lacked the most.  I’ve found the same in my professional experience.  We tend to pay the most attention to Home pages and individual Product pages. However, over 60% of visitors come into your site through other pages.  Make sure you’ve got them all covered.

While 60% of people who land on Product pages leave immediately, according to the study, only half that many (about 33%) leave Category pages once they arrive.  There’s a natural affinity between Category pages, consumers and also the search engines.

If a visitor landed on one of your Category pages, would he get enough information to make him stay and shop?  Or would he be part of the 1/3 that clicks away?   Make sure you provide easily viewable images, not small photos.  You’ll also want your Category pages well branded, including copy that explains your UVP.  Lastly, don’t skimp on descriptive copy at the top of your Category pages and/or beside or underneath images.

RosettaStone.com, OmahaSteaks.com and Walmart.com give some creative examples of incorporating these elements.

3. Use canned copy? There’s no doubt, there are numerous benefits to using manufacturer-provided copy on your site.  It’s well written; it’s free, and it’s easy to insert into your site.  But it does absolutely nothing to set you apart from the crowd.  As a matter of fact, just the opposite is true: it only serves to make your site blend into the masses of other resellers online.

Consider your customers’ experience.  Suppose they search for a particular stuffed Teddy bear that you – and millions of other sites – sell.  The shopper goes to the first site and reads the copy.  She looks at the images and makes note of anything the site offers that she could take advantage of (discounts, free shipping, etc.).

She moves on to the next site.  Same exact copy.  In fact, same exact pictures.  Hmm… nothing new here.  She clicks away to the third site and on it goes.  It won’t take long before she’s seen enough and decides to buy at the next site she visits because they all seem to be exactly the same.

Take the extra time and effort to use unique copy instead of the same, tedious text others are using.

When you give financially strapped shoppers a solid reason to purchase from your site, you do them a huge favor.  You cut their shopping time down, and you enlighten them as to how you can provide better value for their money.  While it takes a little more work, it also pays off with much higher returns.

Karon Thackston is President of Marketing Words, a copywriting agency specializing in SEO copywriting. For additional information about copywriting services, visit www.MarketingWords.com.

“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.

I believe leadership is misunderstood. Many people mistakenly believe that by being a business owner or entrepreneur, you are automatically a leader. Nothing, in my opinion can be further from the truth. To be truly successful, a business owner needs to develop (and continue to develop) the necessary skills to not only influence the people in their organization, but their prospects and customers.

So what are some of the key elements of effective leadership?

Here’s a quick method to access what factors you rely upon to persuade people to follow you. For the following factors listed below, rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10. (1 means it’s not a factor while a 10 means you rely on it continually)

Now, try to determine ways to better utilize the factors with low scores.

Joe Costantino is a Duct Tape Marketing Coach located in Boston, Massachusetts. You can visit his website at www.businessmarketingsuccess.com.

X-Shops solution combines a flexible shopping cart engine with the whole set of technical services:

* Powerful e-commerce platform – X-Cart shopping cart including all of its commercial add-ons and free skin templates. 100% open source code and a template-driven design architecture along with numerous ready-made third-party solutions (available at an extra fee) enable you to customize your online store to suit your specific needs.

* Reliable and secure hosting service – Web servers configured and protected in full accordance with e-commerce industry standards (PCI DSS). Number of accounts per server is limited in order to achieve maximum performance. Every day backup of store files and databases.

* Qualified technical support – more than eight years of experience in e-Commerce.

This fact allows you to concentrate solely on sales, marketing and customer relations.

Web site: www.x-shops.com

Sell Downloads Guide is a complete course, designed especially for beginners who are interested in selling digital downloads and setting up their own online business from scratch. From product creation to product security, web designing to uploading, creating a “Buy Now” button to delivering the product, writing an ebook to marketing, this course covers everything you need to finally start selling digital downloads online. There is no such thing as ‘get rich in one night’ and, thus, this course teaches real and practical techniques you must have in your possession to succeed as an internet business owner.

Click here to visit SellDownloadsGuide.com

Click here to apply to be a 2CO Spotlight.

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:

• 3.1 Keep cardholder data storage to a minimum.
• 3.2 Do not store sensitive authentication data after authorization (even if encrypted).
• 3.2.3 Do not store the personal identification number (PIN) or the encrypted PIN block.
• 3.3 Mask PAN (Personal Account Number) when displayed (the first six and last four digits are the maximum number of digits to be displayed).

I have to admit, after reading what is involved with this portion of PCI compliance, I nearly gave up. This part of PCI compliance doesn’t really have a cost that can easily be measured in money. The cost is in time – hours and hours of time spent looking over what information is stored, where it is stored, how long it should be stored, what systems are used to backup that data, etc. it gets exhausting.

As you become familiar with the standard, you will need to figure out what data you must keep on hand and how long would be a reasonable amount of time to keep that data. The longer you keep the data, the more risky and potentially costly it becomes in the unfortunate event the data becomes compromised. Generally, to comply with requirement 3, you need to understand that all information you collect from your customers must be protected. This means that you can only store a limited amount of the data, and the data you do store must be encrypted (see below).  A simple overview of the requirements for card data storage encryption can be found here.

Requirement 4 is a little more straightforward. While most people recognize the need to encrypt sensitive information during transmission over networks that are easily accessed by malicious individuals, few recognize the importance of encrypting information sent between back-end systems. This also means that stored information needs to also be encrypted.

Encryption is the most effective way to achieve data security by translating data into a secret code. Essentially, both stored and transmitted data must be made unreadable. The most common method used by credit card processors to protect high speed transactions is a network security protocol called Secure Socket Layer(SSL).

To get an SSL certificate you will first need to choose a certificate that matches your specific needs. Then you need to generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) for the site. For example, I found a site selling a certificate for a single domain for $600.00/year. This is on the low end for SSL pricing considering that it comes with a warranty, re-issuance, and provides features I like (priority phone support and regular security audits). I should also note this is a 2Checkout supplier.

If someone were to access our network from the previous article, we want to have protections in place that both limit their access to our customer’s information and makes any information they may access unreadable. Complying with the second set of requirements provides another layer of security for our customers.

Bottom Line for Step 2

Time:
Hours and hours – Literally HOURS and HOURS

Cost:
SSL Certificate: $250-$700+/ year

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:

• Your Name
• Your 2CO Supplier ID Number(s)
• Your Preferred Email Address

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 First 10 API Calls:

• acct/detail_company_info
• acct/detail_contact_info
• sales/create_comment
• sales/detail_sale
• sales/list_sales
• sales/mark_shipped
• sales/reauth
• sales/refund_invoice
• sales/refund_lineitem
• sales/stop_lineitem_recurring

New Features:

1. Suppliers are now able to send order notes to customer in VA and to also copy themselves on those communications.
2. Improvements to the Recurring Billing Process
3. 5 New Purchase Currencies:
   • ARS – Argentina Peso
   • BRL – Brazilian Real
   • INR – Indian Rupee
   • MXN – Mexican Peso
   • ZAR – South African Rand

Resolved issues:

• Fixed issue that prevented suppliers from uploading and attaching purchase page and order page logos.
• Fixed issue that prevented suppliers from sending order comments to customers and themselves in VA.
• Fixed Mark Shipped and reauthorization issues in VA.

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.

KnowledgeBase Manager Pro is web based knowledge base software. It is commonly used as internal knowledge base for sharing of articles, white papers, and guidelines, as knowledge base for customer self-support, as FAQ software or documentation software for sharing user manuals, troubleshooting information and user guides. It’s never been so easy to share information between staff, partners, and customers. Advanced permissions system enables everyone to contribute to the knowledgebase and at the same time helps to keep information well-organized and consistent.

KnowledgeBase Manager Pro includes lots of must-have features: LDAP (SSO with Active Directory Integration), powerful search, searchable attachments, publication to several sites at once, unlimited entries and categories, active response system, WYSIWYG HTML editor, related articles, multiple users, groups and permissions, custom styles, comments, reports, statistics, RSS syndication, email subscriptions, Dashboard for everyday tasks, article version history, backup and undelete functions, SEO tools, Google Gears support and much more other useful features!

Knowledge base software is available as installation package for your website or hosting and also as service hosted on your servers.

Click here to visit Web-Site-Scripts.com

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