When people think of tools to add to their website, the tendency is to think that you will need to hire an expensive programmer to make them work. More often than not, these tools are easy to implement and are reasonably priced.
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Jason Chance, a contributor at sitepoint, manages the day to day business operations of numerous e-commerce sites and consults to small businesses on developing online selling strategy. Over the years he has critiqued numerous e-commerce site and seen the best and worst.
The following humourous and very sarcastic tips should be followed if you want to create a website that won’t work.
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Web Content Management consultant and author, Gerry McGovern looks at Ryanair’s success and provides a very good Web lesson.
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Brendan Sinclair, Editor of Sitepoint’s Tribune explains why he finds branding to be one of the most misunderstood aspects of marketing.
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If you are starting your own ecommerce website, you have many decisions to make. Do you write your own shopping cart or use an existing one? Who should be your merchant account provider? Who will deliver your goods? With so many decisions to make, you hardly have time to sort through all the information you’ll need in order to make the best choice for your business.
After setting up over 1000 merchant accounts as a sales agent John Conde is now a full-time Web Developer for a credit card processing company. In this article originally published on Site point John reviews the following six payment gateways:
» Authorize.net
» Verisign Payflow Pro
» Verisign Payflow Link
» LinkPoint API
» LinkPoint Connect
» Plug ‘n Pay
In his article John explains what is a payment gateway and the criteria established for his comparison.
At first glance, it seems that all of these gateways are the same and that your decision should be based on cost alone. However his comparison shows us that the difference between gateway features can vary dramatically and can mean that one gateway is a better choice than another for your business.
John’s detailed article is a must read for anyone considering adding e-commerce to their website.
Email marketing is one of the most cost effective medium of promotion. Sending out a newsletter builds client rapport, creates credibility and allows you to sell additional products and services to your existing client base.
The growing concern for spam has resulted in stringent anti-spam filters and strict rules and regulations by email service providers for delivering emails to their users. Thus with these new measures how can you be sure that your newsletter doesn’t end up in the junk filter?
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Pay per Click (PPC) advertising has been touted as a lower cost alternative to traditional promotional methods. By paying a set fee you bring qualified traffic to your website via key word searches on pay per click search engines. Its proving very attractive especially to those organisations with a limited marketing budget but there are issues that must be taken into account and research that needs to be done in order to implement a pay per click strategy that works.
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Many people succumb to the “Build it and They Will Come” notion. Create a website, display your products or services and customers will come flocking in. Unfortunately, building a website is no guarantee of success. Business is based on leveraging and one of the ways to do this is by authoring an e-book.
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Podcasting is the latest trend in digital downloading. The word itself is a combination iPod (the leading digital music player) and the word broadcast and, as the name suggests, a Podcast is simply a means of broadcasting audio files to a computer or any digital music player.
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You’ve taken all of the required steps to build your website and you’ve found a Web design company to work with. The first thing you’ll need is to do to secure a domain name. Buying a domain name is very simple and takes a few seconds. Most Web design companies will gladly make the purchase for you and include it as part of the Web design package. If you decide to let the Web design company purchase the domain name, make sure that you discuss ownership of the domain name.
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