Ecommerce is just exploding right now on the Net. More and more people are doing their shopping online. Some Internet retailers are even beating out their offline counterparts. So what does mean to you? It’s important that you are taking full advantage of your web site to get your share of the billions of dollars spent online every year. In this article we are going to cover 7 tips that you can put into practice immediately to increase your sales and revenue with your ecommerce web site.

1: Introduction
Make sure to have a brief introduction on the homepage of your web site. Your introduction should be concise and clearly identify the benefits of your visitors shopping at your site.

2: Navigation
Make sure that your site has clear and easy navigation, such as a visible search box on the top part of your web site, clear categories to browse through, a FAQ page that clearly explains your shipping and return policy, and etc.

3: Gift Certificates
People love getting gifts at certain times of the year, so make sure that you have gift certificates that your visitors can purchase right on your web site.

4: Customer Loyalty
Instead of just focusing on getting new customers why not take advantage of repeat business? Why not give your customers an incentive to come back and do business with you again? You can easily do this by offering coupons and special discounts to ones who have already purchased something from you. This is a lot easier than acquiring new customers since they already know you and feel comfortable shopping at your site. You can also add more value to your customers by adding live customer support to your site.

5: Special Offers
Make sure to have a section on the top part of your home page devoted to featuring your current special offers and sales items. In fact if you happen to have a lot of special offers you can just feature the most popular ones and then make a separate web page that shows all of your sales items.

6: Shopping Carts People want the checkout process to go as and smoothly as possible, so make sure that your visitors are always just one click away to checkout. Try to reduce the checkout process to as few steps as possible. Make sure to offer multiple payment options such as credit cards, Paypal, online checks, mail orders, and such. When you no longer have a product in stock make sure to either remove it from your site or clearly mark it as “out of stock”. There is nothing more irritating for a customer to go through the whole checkout process only to find out that you no longer carry the item they ordered.

7: Affiliate Program
Do you have your own affiliate program? The most successful web sites have one and you should too. By starting your own affiliate program you will develop an increasing online sales force where you only pay them when a sale is made. There is really no risk and it is one of the best low cost effective advertising methods that you can use.

If you put these tips into practice you will notice a drastic increase in your sales and web site revenue.

When the Internet was booming, the media headlines were screaming about
consumers safety and the opportunity of their credit cards being stolen during the online purchasing process. With all the preventions that have taken place to ensure consumers’ safety, it has neglected the risk of the merchant’s safety from the consumer. Where is the protection of consumers defrauding merchants?

The last person in line of protection when it comes to Internet fraud is the merchants. Listed below is ten helpful tips that you can take action on to prevent yourself from consumer fraud.

1. Carefully Review Orders – Whenever you receive an order, take some extra time and review the order carefully. Make sure the consumer filled out all the information correctly, and that all of the customer’s information matches. If the order is a fraudulent order, in most cases you can catch anything that doesn’t seem right by just carefully reviewing the entire order.

2. Contact, Shipping & Credit Card Information – The customer’s contact information should match up with the information they used for the shipping address and the credit card. If this information
doesn’t match up, then you need to find out why they want the products
shipped to another address or use a credit card with different contact information. This is a very good sign of a scamster, but not in all cases.

3. Address Verification Service (AVS) – Provided by most merchant
processors, you can run the AVS service on all of your transactions to ensure that the information they gave you matches with the information
on the file with the card issuing bank. If this information doesn’t match, then special precaution is encouraged.

4. Free Email Addresses – The majority of scamsters will use a free email address to hide their identity. To find out if the email address they used is a free one, just visit the domain name after the @. For
example: Bob@hotbot.com – Go to Hotbot.com and you can usually tell if that is a free email service provider. It might be a good idea for you to require an email address from their ISP on your orders forms.
This way, you can save yourself time with the free email address. If they did use one, just email them and let them know what is required of them.

5. Document All Contacts – To give yourself greater protection and a bigger fighting chance against the consumers, document all contacts you have with them. Use caller ID, a voice mail box and keep all emails to show as proof in fighting your case.

6. Domain Name Records – One unknown trick is to look up the domain name records of the domain name they are using in their email address to see if it matches with what they provided in the order. This will only work if they have their own web site and used their own domain as
the email address. Take the same procedure as explained in tip #4, and use Network Solutions’ database to search for the records. The url can be found here: http://www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois Their information might not completely match up, depending if something changed or if they are using a business address verses a home address, but you should get an idea, like in the same state or city.

7. Above Average Order Amounts – Take special caution when receiving
noticeably high orders, the amount of products or services they are purchasing, especially around holiday seasons. Also pay attention to orders that are sent buying over night deliver. Since the scamsters aren’t paying for it, they don’t care how much it costs, and want it as fast as possible.

8. Use Fraudulent Notices – Place fraudulent notices, buttons and images on your order forms and your web site content. Let the customers know that fraudulent orders will be pursed to the fullest extent of the law. By having these notices, it will usually run off most scamsters.

9. Telephone Search – You can purchase a database of phone numbers on a CD or you can use services such as http://www.anywho.com/ that will do a reverse search on a phone number for you. This will allow you to confirm the contact information for the phone number that the consumer has provided.

10. Call The Consumer – The last and usually the most affective way to
clear up all confusion, is to call the consumer with the phone number they provided. If the number they provided isn’t good, then try contacting the consumer via email for a valid phone number.

By using these tips, hopefully you will not experience any fraudulent
orders. If you are scammed, then take serious action, by following the order and prosecute the fraudulent consumer.

This is a list of shopping cart software for use on an ecommerce website. The first section consists of free, LGPL, and GPL licensed shopping cart software, and the second section is commercial software.

You will often hear the terms “payment gateway” or “ecommerce payment processing” and suchlike and it’s important to draw the distinction between these, and merchant accounts.

Here’s the primary difference.

The merchant account is the license, the service that allows you to process Visa, Mastercard and a range of other credit cards online.

However, in contrast, the payment gateway is, if you like, the technological vehicle that passes credit card information from merchant accounts to the banks for them to process the charges.

So in essence, you need both of them in order to process credit cards online. Some startups have been known to get these two mixed up, meaning they carefully apply for a payment gateway, but haven’t got the merchant account to begin with.

You have two options. If you already have a merchant account for offline business, go back to the company that provided you with the merchant account service and request to be given an internet merchant account, then apply simply for a payment gateway lease online. Alternatively, most online merchant accounts (especially those we recommend here at Merchant Account Forum come complete with payment gateway.

Keep your eyes peeled – and ensure you know what you’re applying for. All recommendations from this site include both in one package.