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Saving Money On Your E-commerce Site
By Gary McHugh, Sat Dec 10th
After building and transferring many e-commerce sites it stillamazes me that owners of e-commerce businesses are still wastingmoney in three basic ways. For fear of stating the obvious,saving money is the same as making money $100 saved is $100added to your profit margin. Here are three basic ways to savemoney on your e-commerce site and increase your profits. Whilethey may be simple we know they are overlooked time and timeagain resulting in thousands of dollars in lost revenue. ABORTED SALES While most modern shopping carts come with manyfeatures, they all involve the collecting of information fromclients. Name, address, telephone number, user name, password,email address and so on. Yes we understand that these detailsare only required for the first order but let's take a look atthe new buyers experience. They have browsed your site and found a product they wish tobuy, they begin the checkout process and input all the detailsabove. Your cart then builds the order and transfers them topaypal 2 checkout or what ever payment gateway you use. Whathappens next? "Please input your name, address, email, telephonenumber......" The result? Lost and aborted sales, surfers arelazy creatures we know that. In an ideal world your cart wouldhave passed all those variables to the gateway and the userwould not have to input them again, however because there are somany gateways and they all require different variables this isdifficult.
So now you log in to the admin section of your cart and see anorder only to find there is no matching payment. Thje solutionis simple, fire up your email program and send them an email."We noticed that you placed an order for our xxxxxxx howeverunfortunately we did not receive payment for that item so wereunable to despatch it. Did you have difficulty with our orderingsystem? Is there anything we can do to help you? If so pleasecontact us in one of the following ways....." Taking a few moments to send them an email can recover the sale,or at worst you can find out which part of your ordering systemisn't working for them and have it worked on. If you have yourown merchant account you could have them call you and take theirorder by phone. Customers like to feel like customers notnumbers, the fact that you took the time to contact them to findout what was wrong will give them confidence in your store andmay recover the sale. CHARGEBACKS The curse of any e-commerce store the dreadedchargeback. We are sure you have all experienced it. You take anorder, despatch it and a few weeks later get a chargeback. Theresult you have sent goods and have to refund the price of theproduct and pay a chargeback fee normally around $15. Firstly make sure your payment gateway offers some sort ofseller protection. aypal for example have a full sellerprotection policy. This is useful to prevent fraud. It istotally unfair that some dishonest people initiate chargebacksafter receiving goods, however as long as your gateway hasseller protection and you have saved order details and proof ofdespatch you can go someway to protecting yourself against that. Surprisingly most chargebacks are not fraudulent, they arecaused by the seller forgetting who they bought from, especiallyif your registered company name with your gateway is differentfrom that of your site. An example your company is called fredsenterprizes but your website is widgetsgalore.com, the clientbuys a widget and at the end of the month sees a charge to theircard from freds enterprizes. They don't recognize it theycontact their card issuer and chargeback. This is very easy to avoid. Before they get
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transferred topayment sate clearly in your cart "Please remember you will bebilled by freds enterprizes not widgetsgalore.com". When theyare returned to your site thank them for the order then remindthem again, "Please remember you will be billed by fredsenterprizes not widgetsgalore.com" When you send them an email telling them their order has beendispatched tell them again "Please remember you will be billedby freds enterprizes not widgetsgalore.com" By now they shouldbe getting the message. However, and this alone has reduced thenumber of chargebacks to many of our clients, we recommend thatyou FOLLOW UP YOUR ORDERS and a couple of weeks after thepurchase send the client another email. Thank them for theirpurchase, tell them you hope they are enjoying your product andonce again remind them "Please remember you will be billed byfreds enterprizes not widgetsgalore.com" Repetition is the key the more you tell them the more chancethey have of recognizing your company name on their credit cardstatement. HOSTING The money being wasted on inflated e-commerce hosting isincredible. Many of our clients have moved to our service due tothe limited and very expensive packages of many so callede-commerce hosts. Let us be very clear on this, if you have yourown store this is what you should have. 1. Your own design. Your store should not look like everyoneelses, or be template built. If you used an online storedesigner to build your site we guarantee there are 100 otherstores that look just like yours only with a different name.Hardly good for your online image. 2. You should have your own hosting. Not a sub folder of somelarger site or virtual hosting. You should be able to add thingslike a links directory, message boards, support forums,guestbooks and what ever else you think would enhance your site.You should be able to have features added or removed from yourcart so that it operates as you want it to. To find out if youhave your own hosting email your host and ask them if you canadd any of the above. It never ceases to amaze us how many storeowners do not even have access to simple things like MYSQL orftp. 3. There should be no fees payable by you other than a monthlyhosting fee. Incredible as it sounds we have seen sites charge amonthly fee, plus a per item listing fee, a per item maintenancefee, commission on sales and other such ridiculous charges. Many e-commerce hosts charge inflated prices for what is nothingmore than virtual hosting (a sub folder of someone elses site)It never ceases to amaze us that most online stores are payingupwards of $50 a month for a restricted and sub standardservice. E-commerce hosting is no different than regular qualityweb hosting. It requires only mysql and php capabilities. Ofcourse stores can use up more space than an information site forexample, however in our opinion you should not be paying morethan $30 a month to host your store. For $30 you can get ampleweb hosting for a fairly large store. If you are paying $50 plusthen change your host, this can be done without interruption toyour site by a competent host. A saving of $20 a month either adds to your profit or gives you$240 extra per year to spend advertising your site. Just like a major corporation as an online business owner youneed to look at your bottom line, it affects profit. You need tomonitor and improve the shopping experience of your clients. About the author:Gary McHugh is SEO of http://www.2001web.com . A design andhosting company specializing in e-commerce. Their service is acomplete solution for webmasters including design, building,hosting, editing, programming and ongoing support. They alsohave a very reasonably priced site transfer service for newclients.
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