This is a guest post by Alice Delore. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

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This is a guest post by Alvina Lopez. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

As the Internet develops and grows in it’s capabilities, it also transforms and redefines the marketplace and business world.  Twenty years ago an individual could start a physical company with far less concern for financial ruin or competition than she could today; but by the same token, that same individual can start an online business today and be successful in a way that a physical business never could.

People born with an entrepreneurial spirit in this generation have an advantage over the older generation in that they can start a business faster and with more creative flexibility than ever before with the internet.

No one, however, is born with all the knowledge and skills required to start a business, and starting a business online can be especially challenging in some unexpected ways.

If you are dying to start your own business online, but don’t know where to start, here are a few tips to get you on the right track:

First, you have to identify your niche.  It is unlikely in our market that you will be able to offer a universally demanded product, so try to start off thinking small.  Small doesn’t have any bearing on your profit margin in this sense—just try to target a specific need, like a software that controls your dishwasher.  See how specific that is?  And yet, the market is so super-saturated with consumers that there will be a buyer for almost anything.  Don’t try to sell to everyone, just a small group that will faithfully buy your product.

Next, after identifying a niche, you’ll have to produce, buy, sell, or market the product that fills your niche.  It is probably at this stage that you will have to decide what kind of online business you will run, based on the nature of your product.

There are three basic kinds of internet businesses:

• Buying or selling digital products
• Shipping tangibles to consumers
• Providing online content to users

No matter what kind of business you sell, you’ll also have to become familiar with search engine optimization (SEO) methods and online marketing.

SEO is what determines how searchable your site is on engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and so forth.  The easier it is to find your website, the more traffic you will get to your site, and the more potential buyers you will get.  Some companies specialize in SEO tactics to make other sites more searchable.  Basically, SEO is finding the right balance of keywords, tags, titles, and links to your site, without being spammy.

Online marketing comes in many shapes and sizes, but the most important kinds that you should worry about in the beginning are affiliate marketing and ads.  Affiliate marketing is a partnership between two online companies, where one site advertises for the other, and is entitled to a percentage of every sale the second company makes from referrals.  Sounds complicated, but really it’s just having a review of or a link to another product or service on your site.

Similarly, you can put ads for just about anything on your site, and receive a few cents every time someone follows the link.

This is meant to be just a basic introduction to online business.  One of the greatest things about the Internet is that you can research how to build an online business just surfing the web.  There are hundreds of great sites and resources at your fingertips.  It only takes a little motivation to get going.  So get to it.

Alvina Lopez is a freelance writer and blog junkie, who blogs about accredited online colleges. She welcomes your comments at her email Id: alvina.lopez @gmail.com.

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This is a guest post by Marc McDermott. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Deciding whether or not to launch an eCommerce business is an important decision best not made in haste. Keep in mind that expansion into a new market like eCommerce requires planning, research and an investment in new technology. It’s important to analyze whether the benefits can be expected to outweigh the costs before diving in. Do that by considering the following questions recommended by SCORE, a non-profit association focused on promoting small business growth:

1. Can you showcase your product or service online?
2. Do you have an existing website that you can position for online sales?
3. Are you prepared to invest in a full-fledged eCommerce website?
4. Is eCommerce a strategic business direction for your firm?
5. Can you offer faster, 24-hour customer service online?
6. Do you have a dedicated IT staff and/or budget?
7. Do you currently accept credit card payments from your customers?
8. Do you have established supply and delivery chains?

If you answered an honest “yes” to a majority of these questions, you may be ready to start developing your eCommerce strategy. A compelling business case can be made for making the leap to online transactions, but you need a foundation built on careful planning and a true commitment to your business and your customers.  Merchants who already have a successful traditional retail operation should talk to their merchant services provider about merchant account options for credit card processing on the Internet. It’s also advisable to choose a consulting firm that’s experienced in building an online eCommerce presence to make the most of this new, potentially profitable opportunity.

If your answers are an even mix of “yes” and “no”, slow down, take a deep breath and re-examine your interest in jumping into the eCommerce pool. Analyze whether expanding to online will make it easier for your customer base to purchase what you’re selling. Take inventory of your infrastructure and determine what needs to be added — hardware/software, functionality, supply/delivery chains. Your merchant services provider should be able to help with some of these questions, and can set you up with the right merchant account if you decide to move forward.

If you answered mostly “no” to these fundamental questions, you have more work to do before eCommerce will pay off the way you want it to. Do a thorough requirements analysis to determine what changes need to be implemented in your current infrastructure to support the move. Consult with the experts, including your merchant services provider, to make sure the risks are manageable before committing to an online business.

Marc McDermott is the Online Marketing Manager at Merchant Express, a provider of merchant account services and payment processing technologies with a specialized approach to credit card processing, merchant bankcard processing and transaction processing services.

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Interspire Shopping Cart Review

Introduction

Interspire Shopping Cart is made by Australian Company Interspire. Interspire
make several web products, e.g., a CMS and email marketing software. Their
shopping cart product is, despite the version 3 tag, quite new, but has more
maturity than many far more established shopping carts. It comes in three
versions: starter, professional and ultimate. You can find a
features comparison
table on their site. I tested 3.6.2 Ultimate.

In the interests of disclosure, I have used this product on a client’s site.

Initial Impressions

Interspire has the slickest back end I’ve seen. Someone has obviously put
some thought and likely some research into how to structure it. The things you
use all the time are in your face, those you use less often are a little more
hidden but still quite accessible.

You are greeted by a flash based dashboard, which shows you key
statistics for your shop over the last 7 days. A minor quibble is that it uses
the same scale for visitors and orders. With most stores converting around 1 -
3% of visitors, it’s going to be very hard to see the orders and conversion rate
numbers next to the unique visitors. The numbers do popup when you mouse over the day, so you aren’t reliant
on the graph alone.

Administration home page

Setting up & Managing Products

One word comes up again: slick. You’ll be seeing a lot of that throughout
this article. This product has a lot of polish and really focusses on the
needs of the shop owner. Adding a product is simple and painless. The key
features are on the homepage. More advanced features such as product
variations are on easy to access tabs. A particularly impressive feature which
I’ve only seen once before (on Magento, whose implementation was amateur compared to this)
is the ability to choose a unique template for a product. Most of your
products are probably fine on one template, but if you have for example, a
promotion on certain products, you could create a special template with whatever
different formatting and features you wanted. The same applies to category
pages.

Product setup

The main product categories page is to die for. While it looks similar to
others – a nested list of all your categories – you can rearrange categories
simply by dragging and dropping with your mouse, and that’s it.
Much of the backend is done using AJAX and DHTML type functions, making common
jobs very quick and easy. Very slick.

Interspire does product variations, allowing you to have variations such as
size, color, etc. As is becoming more common amongst the better products on the
market, and not before time, is the ability to handle stock levels at a
variation level, so you can have 2 large shirts and 4 medium shirts in stock. It
also allows pricing variations such as making extra large shirts $5 more.

There’s lots of other nice touches, such as support for brands, purchase
cost, and so on.

Search

A lot of products don’t pay much attention to site search, but Interspire isn’t
one of them. Some of the site search options include putting site search specific
keywords (as opposed to general meta keywords) in for products. This allows you
to “rig” the search results, or modify for common customer mistakes. Speaking of
which, there are good search reporting facilities including popular searches and popular searches with no results (your customers are telling you they want something!).

The front end search box has a nifty AJAX search
suggestion function (similar to Google suggest). As you type in your search query, results are shown that get refined
as you continue to type. The results even show thumbnail images! I’m not sure
what this does for sales, but it impressed me.

Payment, Shipping & Taxes

Interspire has a long list of supported gateways, with a lot more coming in
the next version. The shipping handles multiple countries and/or regions very
well, even allowing you to enter zipcode/postcode level shipping options.

The tax options are fairly thorough. Apparently Canadians struggle with
taxation in the
current version, but they will supposedly be supported in the next one.

Checking Out

Interspire has a choice between one page checkout or regular checkout. The
one page checkout is very slick, the best I’ve seen. Unfortunately in some tests
I ran, the one page checkout hurt sales, and so I am using the regular checkout
on my client’s site. Your mileage may vary, every shop is different, but it’s
definitely worth testing.

They also have the choice between guest checkout and registered checkout, a
definite sales booster.

Skinning

Of all the impressive features in Interspire shopping cart, this one takes
the cake. First of all, there is a wide range of templates available. These
don’t come preinstalled but can be previewed and then installed seamlessly with
literally one mouse click. The standard
of the templates is fairly high.  There is even a simple but effective logo
creation tool built in.

A view of templates available to install

Modifying the template is a dream. You really have to experience it.
You put the store into “design mode” through the back end, and then
go to the front end and simply move things about. Want the “related products” on
the left instead of the right? Just drag it there. It’s really that simple. If
you want to change the name from “Related Products” to “Other Products”, just
click on it and change it. If there are more detailed changes you want to make,
just right click on it and select edit, and you can start editing the very
simple and well structured HTML template files and CSS using the web based editor. I have found changing the templates to be
in almost all cases very simple and straight forward.

Editing the skin in design mode. Note the right click menu on the right.

Marketing tools

Discounts

Marketing tools is possibly the weak link at the moment. The tools currently available are usable but fairly basic.
On offer is a basic percentage or amount off
with expiry date, usage limit, and category restriction. When
mentioning this to Interspire I have been told “you just wait till the next
version”, so I’m waiting!

Creating discount coupons

Emails

Interspire have made an interesting decision to not include any bulk emailing
features into the software (although the do support capturing email addresses). Some may say this is through avarice, as they also
sell bulk emailing software, and conveniently include hooks into it. Personally,
I think this is a sensible decision. Bulk email is something that seems very
simple on the surface but is deceptively hard to do well (I have been involved
in the development of an enterprise bulk mail system), and I have long
recommended my clients use a 3rd party email service. As always, I recommend you
sign up for one of the many excellent bulk email services, or pay to get the Interspire bulk email
software.

Other marketing tools

Interspire has a feature I’ve never seen before – “Banners”. This allows you to put a message at the top or bottom of the
homepage, brand page, category page or search results. This could be a “10% off Brand X this month only”, an image, or whatever you want.
As a wonderful extra touch, you can set the expiry date on banners, so when the promotion is finished the banner finishes as well – no need to
stay up till midnight.

They also have a well thought out gift certificates implementation. You can create different themed
certificates, e.g., birthday, Christmas, wedding, etc, so the purchaser can choose the most relevant theme (which you can design, or use the built
in designs) and print it themselves. You can also set whether you want fixed dollar amounts available, or if the purchaser can do any amount. Customer
reviews are also available.

Reporting

Interspire has a good collection of reports. Their presentation is certainly above average, using some fancy flash charting technology to make
sure they look extra nice. The reports available are:

• Overview – sales, orders, conversion rate
• Top 20 customers
• Best selling products
• Order locations (with nice Google Maps integration)
• Orders by items sold
• Orders by revenue – work out your most common order size
• Product overview – a group of product statistics
• Most popular products by views
• Inventory report
• Revenue by customer
• As previously mentioned, search statistics

Most of the reports above can be filtered by date.

Extensibility

One of the biggest expenses for most shop owners is the cost of customisation. Some products are a nightmare to customise so you save a few
hundred dollars up front and end up paying thousands in developer fees or lost time. Interspire ranks pretty well. As far as skinning goes, it’s
by a long shot the easiest yet. As far as deeper functionality, you will need solid PHP skills. The code is neat and well structured.
It doesn’t use any 3rd party frameworks (Zend, CakePHP, Smarty, etc), but uses their own
in-house system. Any competent PHP developer should,
with a bit of orientation, do just fine.

There is a concept of “add ons” but provision of these seems to be restricted to Interspire.

Support

The product includes 3 months free support, and paid support is available after that at a reasonable price. I have always preferred this
model as it is sustainable for the company, and means you aren’t relying on the goodwill of the developers to support you. I used support on
a few occasions. Responses were generally received within 24 hours and were helpful. In one case, the engineer went above and beyond the
call of duty and fixed something that was mostly my fault. In one critical incident, it did take 48 hours for my first response, which
I wasn’t too pleased with.

Other features

Another feature I’ve never seen before is the ability to integrate third party tools. Many shopping carts use Google Analytics, an affiliates
tracking system, and a live chat system. Normally, it would take at least an hour or two of hacking into footer files, header files, checkout completion
files, etc to get these working. Interspire have taking the sensible approach of saying:
most people do it, why not make it easy? So, all those
things can be setup from the backend without touching code. I installed a new affiliate tracking system in about 5 minutes.

There is also a returns system and a messaging system, allowing you to communicate with your customers via the site.

The customer wish list is nicely done, and a particularly nice feature is the ability for customers to make their
wish lists public and share
them with friends. This could possible double as a bridal registry.

Conclusion

Interspire Shopping Cart is a product to seriously consider. The company seems to have a great, customer focussed culture. They have, in theory,
a release every 8 weeks. I haven’t witnessed this so not sure how accurate it is, but even as a goal it’s admirable. They also claim new features
and developments are determined or heavily influenced by customer suggestions, this is true from what I’ve seen.

With their focus on creating a polished, reliable easy to use product, I can see myself coming back for more.

A detailed review takes significant
time. The cost of time was partially offset by a payment from Interspire. No
pressure direct or indirect was put on me for future work, kick backs or other
incentives. Payment was received before they saw the review. They thoroughly
respect and value the independent nature of this site.

Article courtesy of Shopping Cart Reviews.

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I received an email over the weekend about an update in the terms of Paypal’s Buyer Protection.  In the past, buyers that used paypal where protected from the usual things that happen, but really had no recourse when items were not as described.  The process was always he said/she said and Paypal was right in the middle.  Most sellers won these types of disputes, but now Paypal will be changing the game.  I don’t like how they plan on doing it as I used to sell online for 6  years and came across many of these disputes.  The issue is that most of the “not as described” disputes were because the buyer did not want to pay, so they tried to get their money back via Paypal.  It is a large hassle and looks like it is going to become a larger hassle for honest and viable sellers.  Here is the email that was received.

Hello,

As of 11/01/10, your customers who pay with PayPal are protected
for items they receive that are "significantly not as described".
This means that you may be liable for the cost including the original
shipping charges should they file a claim. However, by offering
this protection, PayPal helps encourage customers to shop on
your site.

We recommend that you make sure that photos and written
descriptions on your site are as accurate as possible, to help
avoid these types of claims.

The change to our buyer protection policy will take effect from
*November 1st, 2010* and won't apply to transactions made
before this date.

Thanks,

PayPal

While this update is great for buyers as it protects them from bad sellers, it can cause a problem with honest sellers.  What Paypal might not know is that there are far more unethical buyers out there than their are sellers.  Many people want something for nothing and now they know they have a leg up when it comes to something not as described.  Some buyers might not like the color, so they will just make a Paypal dispute, but how do sellers combat these issues?  I can see this being a major setback in seller protection that Paypal has pretty well with in the past.  What do you think of this new change?

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