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Shopping Cart Hosting Advantages and Disadvantages

By Randy Roedl on March 22, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, article directory, article plugin, article themes, Blog Business, Blog Platform, Blog Posting, blogging, Blogs, Conversion, Domains, Free Reports, Google Adsense, Membership sites, Mobil Blogging, New Blogging, SEO, Themes, Traffic, Web Design, Websites, widgets, wordpress, World Internet Summit, Wp Headers, Wp Themes, Youtube Video

Shopping Cart Hosting Advantages and Disadvantages

There are many factors to take into consideration when you are deciding on what shopping cart software to use including the hosting. There are advantages and disadvantages to shopping cart hosting that you should carefully explore before deciding on a shopping cart software program. Generally there are local hosting and remote hosting options when it comes to hosting your shopping cart.

The advantages of remote hosting:

There are usually many features involved when you use remote hosting for your shopping cart including fast implementation, secure connection, monitoring of service just to name a few. Typically all of these features are a part of the hosting service. You will save on bandwidth charges because your shopping cart is hosted on another server especially if you sell soft products such as software.

Most remote shopping carts are actually total marketing solutions that contain affiliate programs and the ability to send sequential pre-defined messages out to your customers and leads. Most remote hosting will also include gateway services and an Internet Merchant account. Most remote hosting services charge a monthly fee for their features so choose carefully and look at many remote-hosting companies before you settle on one.

The disadvantages of remote hosting:

You may run into this disadvantage especially if you go with a small, unknown company or a one-man operation and that is a situation where the hosting company goes belly up overnight and leaves you high and dry?

You normally have less control over the various cart pages and how they display. Make sure that you are with a reputable remote hosting company as some are known to harvest your client databases in order to Spam them.

A very popular remotely hosted shopping cart service is 1ShoppingCart.com it’s motto is that it is your total ecommerce solution. The rates at this company start at just $19 a month. It is easy to configure and use and new features are constantly being added at no extra cost. 1ShoppingCart is a secure shopping cart system, which means you don’t need SSL for your Website. This remote hosting is set up for both physical goods and soft goods. It has a delivery system for digital goods that is secure and minimizes unauthorized downloading. It has an up sell module, and the ability to use gift coupons and also has a discount module. It also supports most payment gateways, unlimited client database and unlimited autoresponders. There is an affiliate programs tracking and management capability as well as ad/revenue tracking so that you can determine the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns.

The advantages of Local hosting:

With local hosting of your shopping cart you have total control over the software and incur no ongoing fees.

The disadvantages of local hosting is that you will probably spend more time installing, configuration and maintaining the shopping cart. You will incur greater initial outlay; will require a secure sockets layer (SSL), which can be costly.

A locally hosted shopping cart is hosted on your own server and is typically a one-time purchase.

If you run into difficulties installing or customizing, most shopping cart companies will help you for an extra fee.

A popular locally hosted shopping cart is Interspire shopping cart. This local hosting cart handles digital products and physical products, and has multiple inventory tracking options. No coding knowledge is needed as you can drag and drop design mode options. It has a full-featured couponing system and comes with free software installation and 12 months of phone, and email technical support. Any future updates are included in the initial price and there is a full 60-day refund guarantee.

The Benefits of Having a Shopping Cart on Your Website

By Randy Roedl on March 18, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, article directory, article plugin, article themes, Blog Business, Blog Platform, Blog Posting, blogging, Blogs, Conversion, Domains, Free Reports, Google Adsense, Membership sites, Mobil Blogging, New Blogging, SEO, Themes, Traffic, Web Design, Websites, widgets, wordpress, World Internet Summit, Wp Headers, Wp Themes, Youtube Video

The Benefits of Having a Shopping Cart on Your Website

There are many benefits that a shopping cart will bring to your ecommerce business. To discover some of the many benefits of having a shopping cart on your Website continue to read this article.

A shopping cart on your Website can actually increase your sales. The purpose of the shopping cart is to hold items you are thinking of purchasing as you continue to browse the Website. Shopping carts give customers freedom to explore your Website without losing track of where the items are that they wish to purchase during their browsing. A shopping cart allows the customer to do all the shopping on your Website in one transaction. Customers who are forced to check out every time they wish to buy an item, return to shop again only to checkout if they find another item will become frustrated if they have to do this multiple times.

A shopping cart can also display the cart total price so that as the customer adds items to the cart they are aware of how much money they are spending so that they don’t get any nasty surprises at checkout. Customers who are denied a way to check prices will not be as likely to purchase multiple items.

You will want to stay clear of shopping carts that load too slowly because in today’s world people want things fast and if they have to wait they just may move on to the next Website. So it is important not only to have a shopping cart but also to have the right one.

The presence of a shopping cart on your Website also says, “Professional” to your customers. A shopping cart tells your customers that you care about their shopping comfort and will provide what they need to make their shopping experience an enjoyable one. If they are made comfortable while shopping on your Website they are much more likely to return.

Some shopping cart software programs have the capabilities of being your storefront even being your entire Website. The benefit of a shopping cart with a storefront is that you don’t have to bother with any other Website designing.

A shopping cart makes shopping more convenient for your customer. Without a shopping cart you force your customer to browse and remember where items are located that they are interested in. This might cause them to forget items, misplace them, or just leave in frustration. Try shopping for multiple items in a physical store without a shopping cart and see how frustrating it can be. Without shopping cart customers buy less, think about it that shops without a cart? The person buying only one or two items shops without a cart. Do you want your Website visitors to buy just one item or do you want them to purchase multiple items? If you answered, multiple items, then you had better have a shopping cart on your Website.

Improve Your Shopping Cart

By Randy Roedl on March 14, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, article directory, article plugin, article themes, Blog Business, Blog Platform, Blog Posting, blogging, Blogs, Conversion, Domains, Free Reports, Google Adsense, Membership sites, Mobil Blogging, New Blogging, SEO, Themes, Traffic, Web Design, Websites, widgets, wordpress, World Internet Summit, Wp Headers, Wp Themes, Youtube Video

Improve Your Shopping Cart

If you want visitors to your site to use your shopping cart you need to make improvements to the usability of the cart and to make the purchase process as simple and short as possible.

Did you know that the checkout process is where more sales are lost than any other time during the buying process? Check your analytics and see if you have a large number of individuals leaving your site before finishing the checkout process, if this is happening than you know that you definitely need to make improvements. In order to determine where you need to make shopping cart improvements you can ask someone who is not familiar with your website to go through the process and check out the usability of your shopping cart. Ask them to specifically comment on how accessible the shopping cart is, if it is easy to use, if they ran into problems were they able to find instructions on how to use the cart, and did they find the shipping and payments methods that they prefer to use?

Investigate how easy it is to navigate around finding products. Do you have a search feature and does it give accurate results?

If you belong to any business forums ask members to rate your site and their shopping experience.

Ask yourself how organized your site is, how secure do people feel making purchases and how user friendly is the shopping experience on your site?

Your shopping cart is one of the most important parts of your Website. Periodically evaluating the shopping cart from a user’s point of view can improve not only your shopping cart but improve your sales as well.

Look at your shopping cart objectively does it meet all of your needs as the administrator? Can you manage all of the product fulfillment, payment and shipping needs in a timely manner without mistakes? Evaluate the hosting, customer service and technical support of the company who’s shopping cart you are using. How happy are you with the features? When upgrades are available is there an additional fee or are upgrades free to existing customers?

Does your shopping cart blend in well with your Website? Do you receive the information you need about your customers and their sales? Does your shopping cart have the capability to have an affiliate program, produce a newsletter or evaluate the shopping experience of your customers?

Does your shopping cart grow with your business or have you outgrown the shopping cart?

What do reviewers say about the shopping cart you are using? Can you find customer reviews of the shopping cart and if so, are they favorable?

After evaluating your shopping cart is customer service responsive to your need to make improvements? Do they give you suggestions or upgrades?

Seeing how important your shopping cart is to the success of your online business spending time evaluating how well your present shopping cart is performing and finding out what your customers think about your shopping cart is important and should be done on a regular basis.

New to WordPress

By Randy Roedl on March 10, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, article directory, article plugin, article themes, Blog Business, Blog Platform, Blog Posting, blogging, Blogs, Conversion, Domains, Free Reports, Google Adsense, Membership sites, Mobil Blogging, New Blogging, SEO, Themes, Traffic, Web Design, Websites, widgets, wordpress, World Internet Summit, Wp Headers, Wp Themes, Youtube Video

New to WordPress – How to Start a Free Blog
Are you new to WordPress? There is no need to worry as here are the simple steps to start using WordPress in creating free blogs. The following are the 9 steps in using WordPress to start blogging:
Step 1: Sign up for a free WordPress account
The very first step is to visit http://wordpress.com and register for a free WordPress account with only a valid email address. An email address is used for only one WordPress account only.

Step 2: Entering information
Next, you would have to choose a username which no other users are using and password. After reading the terms and condition and if you agree with these, you will be directed to a page. Here, one can choose to start blogging straight away or leave until you have time to start creating blogs.

Step 3: Creating new blog
To start, a name for your blog domain is required and the name ends with ‘.wordpress.com’ to make it easier for visitors to access the blog pages that they want to visit by typing the name into their internet browsers. The domain name cannot be changed once decided, but users choose put titles of their blog and users can change these anytime. Users can choose the languages and decide whether their blog pages are opened for public or for members only. If a user chose public viewing, search engines will be able to search these.

Step 4: Active account
An account is active when every detail in the previous step has been filled in. you will be notified when you have completed that step and an email will be sent to confirm the login details.

Step 5: WordPress Dashboard
Once login details are confirmed, you can log into you own WordPress blog and you can start personalizing your dashboard. Here, you can choose the themes, colour, updating profile, adding users, writing posts and designing your blog page. Whenever you come across a problem that you cannot figure out, there is always a help section and forums where you can search and ask for solutions to the problems.

Step 6: Dashboard Toolbar
The toolbar allows users to navigate WordPress for creating posts, personalization and adding additional features for easy access.

Step 7: Choosing a Theme
Users can choose from a huge variety of themes to suit their taste and personalize the pages to their own creativity. From the dashboard toolbar, direct your mouse to ‘Presentation’ tab and select ‘Themes’ to choose which themes that you like. You can choose according to the content of your blog. After some time fiddling around, you will turn into an expert and from then you can upload other features that suit your blog.

Step 8: Sidebars and widgets
Adding widgets allow customization of the sidebar of blogs and this feature can be found under the ‘Presentation’ tab in the dashboard toolbar. Widgets let the users to add features such as RSS feeds, calendar, search tools and text boxes and this is much easier with only the used of the mouse without the need to enter codes.

Step 9: First blog post
You are ready to start writing up your blog posts once you are familiar with the features. Coming up with a title and there you go: you can start writing up. When you are done with writing and customization, you can just click on ‘Publish’ button and the post is there in your blog page.

41 How to Recruit Affiliates

By Randy R on August 18, 2010 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, blogging, Blogs, Internet Marketing, New Blogging

Recruiting Affiliates: Part 2

You should understand that many affiliates have been doing this for some time and they know exactly what they want or don’t want. The kind of plan you choose to use when paying your affiliates will decide, in many instances, who will join with you and who won’t. There are three main plan categories for you to choose between. Furthermore, there are tiers. We’ll begin with the plans, and then continue onto a talk about tiers.

Pay-per-click, or PPC, plans are the type of programs you may have heard mentioned most often. This kind of affiliate plan, as well as the other choices, is performance based. The way it works is easy. A visitor to a website notices a banner ad or another kind link to a site. He or she clicks on that link. Every click is worth a certain amount of money to the web master of that site. While this is a wonderful plan, there has been some worry recently about “click fraud”, which means clicks are being made with the only purpose being to generate more money for the host site.

Pay-per-sale, or PPS, plans enable greater discretion. With this type of plan the seller only pays the affiliate if a sale is made. Whatever the commission rate is, the seller pays according to the price of the item sold.

Pay-per-lead, or PPL, is the last kind of commission plan. With this arrangement the seller will pay the commission to the affiliate whenever a lead is created. This can result from either directed traffic that visits the seller’s site and registers for something, or is a lead based on a pre-determined criterion.

Now let’s discuss tiers. Tiers work in an easy to understand manner. It all boils down to referrals. Let’s pretend you set up 2 tiers. The first tier is affiliates who approached you directly. They will earn commission on both the traffic they generate and on the traffic generated by their referrals. The second tier consists of affiliates who were sent to you by another affiliate. These affiliates earn commission on their referred visitors, and the first tier affiliate also earns a lower commission, without having to do any work.

These are the main choices you have regarding setting up an affiliate plan. You can iron out the details whatever way suits you best. Keep in mind that the primary question is whether or not your plan will be competitive enough to make affiliates want to join.

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