Just a quick note people. Yahoo and Microsoft announced a merger today as reported by the CNBC show Squawk on the Street and already Google's stock fell by 1%. Do you need to worry about this ? Yes, to some extent as I have pointed out before I notice My adsense earnings drop significantly when things like this happen but I doubt it will be for very long both Yahoo and Microsoft are kind of soft in the web scene and merging will do very little to rattle Google's strong hold on search with a 56.3% market share.
Microsoft dropped a whopping 44.6 billion to acquire Yahoo another old school internet company that prior to this merger posted weak fourth-quarter earnings and was loosing so much money it had plans to cut 1000 + jobs. So why would Microsoft buy Yahoo ? desperation I think however both companies combined would make them a monster in page views exceeding 70 billion page views a month experts predict which would make them the company / site with the most page views on the web, putting Myspace in second place with 35 billion page view difference.
However pages views does not necessarily mean conversions, ad relevance is key and Google is the king of that and this has been proven time and time again with it's Adwords program raking in a staggering $15.8 billion dollar net revenue for 2008. No one in search marketing can even claim something remotely close to that.
However in the August 2009 issue of Wired magazine an interview with Google's CEO Eric Schmidt points out his paranoia about Microsoft, reminding Google employees to stay on the ball because he feels Microsoft could crush Google at any moment. I think the word " crush " gives Microsoft too much credit yes they are an old school company with lots of money to throw around but they clearly lack talent in the online arena or else they would not have merged with Yahoo. This shows a desperate move on Microsoft's part and solidifies experts opinion that they have no new technological trick up their sleeves to steal the revenue that Google commands, but hey you never know. I guess we will just have to wait and see.
Today is Saturday and I actually made some money using Paypal and OpenCart. Yes I know, looking at the screen shot it's not much so why am I so excited ? because Saturdays for some weird reason is usually my worst day for sales. I'm usually lucky if I gross $300 bucks in sales on a Saturday, but today I grossed $550 + in sales. Not bad by My standards but to some heavy hitters in online sales this is what I like to it call " monkey money " but hey I'll get to the heavy hitter stage soon. I have only been selling online now for under a year so this is good for one days work. What do I attribute the spike in sales to ? OpenCart I recently switched to OpenCart as My shopping cart and saw my sales shot up 28% over the last two weeks. The software is just very easy to use from the admin end and it's intuitive and well designed front end features encorage customers to buy. Using the products viewed tool I was able to spot an item that had the most views but no sales. I lowered the price and those product views started converting to sales.
Paypal's reputation as an online ecommerce power house also helps to boost sales. At checkout time My customers have 3 different options in My store and 8 out 10 times the customers choose to pay via Paypal. If you don't use Paypal on your site I suggest you start right now because you are seriously short changing yourself and the growth of your online business.
That is all for now folks. I hope you found this post insightful and helpful, if so keep up with me on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Don't forget to Subscribe to this Blog.
Another way to make money from your online store is by using Square Trade a warranty service for online retailers that sells electronic devices like phones, notebooks, cameras, video games etc. The information I got from the Square Trade website says they sell and handle the warranty of your customer's electronic devices. The site I saw Square Trade integrated on had a button below the item description that read " 3 Year warranty $10 " that alone made me click it as I was looking at an ipod online. Ten dollars for three years coverage is a really good price.
Most large retailers like Best Buy would charge like $40 - $50 for an extended warranty on the same item so in the eyes of the informed consumer this is a deal.
How does this work out for you the store owner ? Well to get in Square Trade's merchant solutions program for your web store you have to email them first. I did today and I'm waiting on a reply. Based on what the site says you get paid a commission for sending Square Trade a customer and Square Trade handles everything. Sounds like a good plan but I will know for sure when they get back to me.
Clearly Square Trade is just another affiliate program you can make money from but where it differs is that it does provide value to your customers and if it works the way it's described on the site your customers will love you for recommending the Square Trade service.
That is all for now folks. I hope you found this post insightful and helpful, if so keep up with me on Facebook, YouTube or Twitter. Don't forget to Subscribe to this Blog.
I was online the other day looking at the OpenCart website and to my surprise My post on OpenCart was featured in the breaking news section of the site. Which is really awsome because I noticed a surge in visits to the Blog since they featured My Post.
This makes me feel really good. It's always nice to get some recognition for your work !
This past Saturday I was online searching for case for My new Acer Aspire notebook computer on Google. I came across a company that had the bag I wanted for $80 and saved it to My favorites. Being the budget nut I am I decided to save $20 a week until I had the $80 and go back to the site and buy it (this is something I practice with all My purchases). Later that day I logged into My Yahoo email account and there was a banner ad from the same online store I was looking at earlier. Strange, I thought what a coincidence. Never paid the Ad any mind after that because I already had saved the site in My favorites.
On Sunday I logged back into My Yahoo email again and there was the Ad. Creepy. It made me pay closer attention to the Ad this time though. After examining the banner I realized it was served by a company called FetchBack. Never heard of them in My life, but I'm always open to new ways and ideas of marketing. So I Googled them.
Fetchback calls them selves " The Retargeting Company " and rightly so. Their Ads are based on patent pending technology called Fido Technology. Fido (hence the dog logo) works by retargeting customers who have visited your site with banners on popular sites like social networks, news sites etc. when they already left your site. In My case they had an advertising arrangement with Yahoo to display Ads through out the Yahoo network. Because they enabled cookies on the computer online store I visited it recorded My visit to the site and when I did not make a purchase it realized this and as soon as logged in to another site in their Ad network, Fido automatically displayed a banner from the same computer store. This tool can be a God Send for conversions as studies prove most people who browse online stores don't buy there until they have been exposed to your product or company at least 3 - 7 times.
Most of us online retailers use Adwords to get sales and that is cool I use it too so I'm not suggesting Fetchback as an Adwords replacement in your campaign. However I do see value in this service and I will be trying it shortly and posting my results of the trial. To learn more about Fetchback you can visit their website here.
That is all for now folks. I hope you found this post insightful and helpful, if so keep up with me on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Don't forget to Subscribe to this Blog.
For the first time since I have been running Kontera on My site on 7/17/2009 it out performed Adsense in earnings. It even out performed InfoLinks. Wow ! Normally my earnings from Kontera are like $2.50 a day and this day it spiked to $5.94. Look at the screen shot and you will see that with 1090 impressions on 7/11/2009 I only made $2.76 for the day. On 7/17/2009 six days later with 1028 impressions I made $5.76 for the day. This has never happened to me with Kontera and the only thing I can think of is the competion on my site they are getting from Infolinks has made them step up the amount they pay out. However when you look at the number of clicks for roughly the same amount of impressions the clicks more than double from 23 - 56. Which means they probably up the density of the key words in My post.
Oh well what ever it is it's more money so I'm not complaining. That same day I only made $4.94 from Adsense so they out performed Adsense too. Unheard of on My site. To think I was considering removing Kontera from My site because of the low performance. Now I'm glad I did not. Look at the next graph and you will see there has been a steady rise in clicks over the last 30 days. Good Stuff ! I can't wait to see what the rest of the month looks like with Kontera. Adsense usually makes me about $15 per day but I recently saw they had stock issues and that usually means My earnings from Adsense will go down when that happens. Same thing happened when the whole Microsoft & Yahoo merger was about to go through some time ago My earnings from Adsense took a nose dive for about a month but then it bounce right back. That is why it's never a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket. Now that Adsense is not earning as much I have Kontera and Infolinks to pick up the slack.
That is all for now folks. I hope you found this post insightful and helpful, if so keep up with me on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Don't forget to Subscribe to this Blog.
Widgets are the new craze now almost every social network out there uses widgets and so do alot of websites. Well since you are in the business of selling I wanted to introduce you to a widget that can help boost your sales. I like to call it the Paypal Mini Store Widget. It is made by Paypal Labs Paypal's developement company that listens to product ideas from Paypal's user base and develops the ideas into real products.
Admin Section: This a really awesome widget. You can add item titles, description and a link to the product image. You can set the amount you have in stock and it will pull from the stock when some one buys the product. You are able to add shipping prices based on the dollar amount of the order. For example you can set it up so orders between a certain value say $1 - $20 will be charge $5 shipping and orders $100 and over get Free shipping. You can also choose to display the items in a thumbnail view, user scroll view or you have the items behave like a slide show so that they keep changing. This is the option I chose because for some reason I noticed people are attracted to moving objects online.
Store Front: On the store front your customers can. View an item and add it to cart all with in the Storefront Widget. They also have the option of promoting the store for you on their social network like Myspace when they click the link at the top that reads help sell these items. Once they are finished shopping a link at the bottom of the widget prompts them to checkout and when they click it they are taken to Paypal to pay for their order. They can also rate the product between 1 -5 stars and write a review but they cannot save it unless they have a valid Invoice ID which limits reviews of the items to real customers only.
How Can you use this Widget ? Place it on your blog or social network page to promote your store and urge your friends to do the same. Also if you have a content based website and the store is not your home page you can add the widget to your home page. To sign up for the Paypal storefront click here.
That is all for now folks. I hope you found this post insightful and helpful, if so keep up with me on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Don't forget to Subscribe to this Blog.
Based on some of My previous post some of My readers may think that I only push Open Cart as a solution for selling online. Well in my opinion for a large scale web store with more than say 25 items it is perfect for what you pay for (it's FREE ). However I do realize that some people who sell online do not need a full blow shopping cart like Open Cart for a web store as they may just be selling one item or maybe a few items. They may also don't want to be bothered with installing a php application like Open Cart on their web server or they are not tech savvy enough to install that type of shopping cart. However they want something more than just the bare bones basic copy and paste buttons offered by Paypal or Google Checkout. If you fall in to any of the categories above then Fat Free Cart is the answer to your prayers.
The good folks over at Techcrunch describe it as "a simple,free cut & paste solution" and that is exactly what Fat Free Cart is. If you have a site like a simple five page website where you sell one item like a work out plan or an ebook this solution will work perfectly for you. With Fat Free Cart you can accept payments using both Paypal and Google Checkout something much more complicated shopping carts don't offer. Well lets get down to the engine and show you how this bad boy works. Now before you start please note you must have accounts with Paypal and Google Checkout or either or but why short change your sales ? just sign up for both. Next open up a new tab in your browser and go to Fat FREE Cart's site http://www.fatfreecart.com click on the link you see in the screen shot in the red box that says " get code ". Once you click on that you will be taken to the implementation page for Fat Free Cart.
Looking at this 3rd screen shot you will see they are two options. You can hard edit the code by messing with the mumbo jumbo code in the yellow box or you can click on the link above the yellow box that says " FatFeeCart's Code generator ". I believe in working smarter not harder so I opted for the code generator. Once you click on the code generator you are taken to a page that converts the mumbo jumbo code to plain english and gives you a simple form to fill out. Don't you just love those forms ? so here is the screen shot of what the form looks like for your product. As you can see the first thing you need to enter is your merchant information. I'm assuming you took my sound advise and signed up for both Google Checkout and Paypal. Note the first thing you are asked to enter is your Google Checkout Merchant ID. This is the long number in the top right hand corner of your Google Checkout account. You can just copy and paste it there. Next fill out the email address you use for your Paypal account. Fill out the generic information like your email address to get notified of orders and your website url and then we can move on to the item. On the item field you can add shipping & handling cost. You also can use the cart item options to sell items like clothes so you can input different sizes like small, medium, large etc. this gives your customers a drop down box to select the size they want from the cart. Once you are done with the item click the "create cart code " button to get the code to paste in your page beside your product picture. You can always go back to the form and tweak the code till you get the desired results you want. Here is a screen shot of the Fat Free Cart in action on one of My sites. I changed the button image in the code to use a color and style that matched My site. I actually created it with info I learned from a site review about buy buttons that are successfully used by large online retailers. You can read that post here. This might sound stupid but just by changing the button sales went up. As you can see from the image the item I'm selling is a sport hoodie. Notice the drop down arrow with the default size of small, the buyer can choose all the way up to size XL for this item. Once the customer clicks on the add to cart button. They are taken to the next screen in your online store: Ok couple of key points to note in this screen shot. The cart won't say the name of your site so it looks kind of generic , hey it's free so work with it. Next you see the description of your item. Beside the description is the "remove" check box. When this box is checked, if the customer clicks the "update cart" button it removes the item from the cart. Right next to the check box is the quantity field your customer can type in a number and click the "Update cart" button and it will change the quantity of the item and adjust the sub-total as well. The shipping is a fixed option and cannot be altered by the customer (kind of retarded). The "Continue shopping" button allows your customer to keep browsing your store for more items of interest or they can checkout right then and there with one of two listed payment options Paypal or Google Checkout.
So there you have it My review / tutorial on the Fat FREE Cart shopping cart program. Good software for the novice just starting out in online sales or those of you who have websites with like 1 - 10 items. I use on a exercise clothing store I have which has like six items and it works great for me.
That is all for now folks. I hope you found this post insightful and helpful, if so keep up with me on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
Recently I was just surfing Blogger looking at different blogs for design ideas and I came across a blog with some unique in line text ads. Much like Kontera when you move the mouse over the link. It pops up a small ad balloon with some add info. However these ads pop up in a slightly different but smoother way. When you move the mouse over the double line link. A small flat box pops up then a larger box with the info slides up from behind the smaller box. Definately an eye catcher I thought.
The name of the company who provides these neat little ads is Infolinks. After the ads sparked My interest I decided to Google them to see what came up before I signed up for their publisher program. What I read from other bloggers was very convincing. Infolinks seems to be loved by almost everyone and the amount they pay is almost on par with Adsense per click.
Ok so I signed up and added the code to one of My sites and here are the results for the first day on just one site: As you can see from the screen shot I had a total of 403 impressions and got 24 clicks. Notice that My CTR (click through ratio ) was almost 6% at 5.96%. This is not bad at all considering that this was the first day I had it up and it was only on one of My sites. I made $2.24 from this test run which is about $0.10 per click. Now lets take a look at Kontera which I run on all My sites. Look at the screen shot to see what I made from Kontera for the same day ( June 8th 2009 ). Wow look at that I only made $1.78 for the same day from Kontera and you know whats the big bummer ? Kontera runs on all my sites even on this blog and it only made a lame $1.78 while Infolinks was only ran on one of My sites for that day and made me $2.24. I don't think I have to say anything else to kill Kontera. I think Kontera is killing them selves. With this kind of performance they will certainly start to loose their publisher base. Neat and Note worthy things about Infolinks:
1.) Infolinks has a very unique attention grabbing inline text ad. 2.) They pay almost as good as Adsense per click ( based on my test run ). 3.)Very flexible to implement into your site. Like Kontera you can change the link color to match the links on your site. 4.) The big Kontera Killing feature is the integration wizard they provide to their publishers. This tool allows you to change the link color as well as change it from a double line link to a single line link which sends your CTR through the roof. In addtion to that you can choose from 15 different categories for your ads to make them more relevant to your site content (something Kontera does not have ) so you get more targeted ads on your site which makes people click more.
Overall I give Infolinks two thumbs up and I'm in the process now of adding Infolinks now to all My sites. Will do a follow up post once I get paid from Infolinks. Can't take a picture of a check though because they pay by Paypal and BankWire but no worries I will have a screen shot for you guys once the payment is posted to My Paypal account.
If you have not checked out Inforlinks yet visit their site here. I hope you found this post useful and informative. Don't forget to Subscribe to this Blog for new updates and Follow me on Twitter.
Repeat customers are the life blood of your online business. You don't have to convince them to buy from you because they already did. Find a way to caputure their email address and gain their permission to email them about upcoming new products or sales you may and you can sell them sometimes at leaset 3 - 4 times a year.
What ever your online store is selling I'm sure just like any other business it will have a slow season. Those emails will help you maintain a postive cash flow during these slow times as well as keep your customers up to date on the latest products or deals you have going on at your online store.
Treat your online store like a real store and apply real world techniques to keep the wheels of sales turning.
In your quest to make money online I want to discuss a sales technique I like to call marring the products. In online sales just like in the real world when you have a store be it virtual or real you will always have some items that sell better than others. You as a retailer need to be able to monitor you best selling items and use this knowledge to try and boost sales on the lagging or slow selling items. Enter the age old and time proven tactic of getting your fast and slow selling items to the altar. Its time to start marring products. Anyone that owns an online store must take into consideration some type of tool to manage sales like Google Analytics. This tool or tools must be able to give you a forecast of how people are coming to your store what items they are viewing the most and what page they are leaving your store from. This type of basic monitoring of your online store will allow you to develop a profile of your visitors and their habits. Information that will no doubt allow you to tweak your web store to make your customers want to buy more.
How do you Marry a Product ?
Simple. Identify your fast selling item and and your slow selling item. Note that the items must be related for e.g a fast selling car rim and a slow selling car tire. Lets say the rim usually sells for $600 and profit on that is 50%. The slow selling tire ( usually an unknown brand item ) sells for $100 and your profit on that is also 50%. Now adding the cost to your customer for buying both items it would $700 ( for the rim & tire ) . Now lets move these suckers to the alter in your online store and create a category called Combo Deals 10% - 25% Off.
Now add the rim and tire together as a product to the Combo Deals 10% - 25% Off categoryand give it a name likeAvanti 19" rims & tires Only $630 You Save $70 ! noticed what I did. I brought attention to the name of Brand Name Rim Avanti but I did not mention the name of the tires. Why ? the brand of the rim sells the married products because it is known and it is your best selling wheel. Mentioning the brand of the tire is fruitless because people don't know it and don't care. However because they are getting a deal by saving $70 dollar they will buy the package deal and all of a sudden your slow selling tire is now a hot selling tire simply because you married it to a fast selling rim. Finally in your description of the item ( Avanti 19" rims & tires Only $630 You Save $70) make sure you includea link to each item individually and so people can see that they are getting a deal ( rim normally $600 and tire $100 individually ). Next push this deal hard on your email campaigns to existing customers and place it on the front page of your store.Now sit back and watch the cash roll in.
That is it for now money makers I hope you found this post useful and informative. Don't forget to Subscribe to this Blog for new updates and Follow me on Twitter. Peace !
If you sell online and you are not using Google Base (beta) you are selling yourself short. Google since it started up in 1998 has been a trend setter in online search eclipsing the likes of search giants like yahoo, msn (or whatever they are called now) and lycos to name a few, to become the dominant search engine of the web. So much so now that be people don't use the term search it anymore they just say Google it. They were the first to offer complete and total search with no omissions and also image searchs (i think. lol) just as how you can go to Google and search for G1 (the phone) and find related sites on the G1 you can also look in the top left hand corner of the page and click on images and you will get image results for the G1 too. Well now if you look in that same top left hand corner you will see another link Shopping. Click the Shopping link and you will see a host of online retailers selling G1 phones and related accessories.
This area my friend is where you want your products to be. Google Base allows online retailers to list their items for sale in the Shopping section of Google and this could be a big boost to your overall sales and best of all it's FREE ! How does all this work ? Sit tight and read I 'll explain to you how I use Google Base for My own online store and how to actually edge out your competitors on there. Look at the screen shot of my shopping search for Micheal Jackson (god bless the king ) and you will see mostly product sales for Michael Jackson albums and memorabilia. Notice prices are listed as well as the ability for the shopper to compare prices. Look at the top and you will also see Google looks out for it's interest by allowing the potential shopper to show search results only from vendors who accept payments via Google Checkout (hint hint ).
OK so now that you have gotten the idea of how the Shopping link works in Google lets look at how you can get your products on there. First hop on over to http://base.google.com to sign up for an account or if you already use a Google service like Adsense or Google Checkout you can sign in with that existing account.
Once you login to Google Base your first screen will look like the screen shot shown. As depicted by the red outline in the screen shot click the Add an item button to add your item to Google Base. This will take you to the next screen where you can choose the from a pre-made list of item categories or create you own category. I chose to create My categories because the items I sell in My online store are rather unique to say the least. A word of advise on creating a category for your item make sure it is very search engine friendly so test it in
Google first that way it will also be picked up by the general search engine not just Google Base. Once you have created the category for your item the next thing we want to do is set up the description of your product and for the that we will move to the next screen. Here you will have fields like price, price type, condition of your item etc. fill this info out as best as you can and with a lot of search engine friendly key words for your item while you are describing it. Remember you want to have your item picked up by the general search engine not just Google Base. Having your item listed on both the the Search engine and the shopping page of Google is a win win situation something you definitely want to be a part of if you intend to make money online.
In the description section of Google Base you can add links as well as do basic html edting of your description. I use the description area to drop in a coupon code for Google Shoppers so they get a discount off any item they buy from searching Google Shooping at My store. This creates the Winning Feeling effect I discuss in my earlier post about using Open Cart (check it out ) by giving your customers a discount you are edging out the competition. To do this you need some kind of shopping cart that allows you to create coupons. I use Open Cart for my site and here is a screen shot of the coupon code I set up in description of My item on Google Base. The discount is 25% off and notice that it will expire in early December of 2009. Why did I set to expire then ? The holidays My friend. I will create a new coupon code just for the Christmas season. Now this might all seem much for you to do for each of your items but I assure you it will be worth it. More and more people are using the shopping section of Google to help them decide on purchases and you want to make sure you position your items for success.
That is it for now money makers I hope you found this post useful and informative. Don't forget to Subscribe to this Blog for new updates and Follow me on Twitter.
A long time ago when I tried to make money online with my very first site, I applied for Chitika but got denied because I did not have enough search engine traffic. That has changed now and so recently I applied again. This time however as I guessed I would be, I was approved... you see now My site has search engine traffic and that is what Chitika looks for.
Chitika is a pay per click program much like Adsense but with a twist their ads don't show up on your site unless the person visiting your site came to it via a search engine like Google.
I have heard other bloggers say they have a better conversion rate than Adsense with Chitika...that I have not seen so far but it does convert pretty decent. Visitors are more likely to click Chitika Ads because they place small icon like images beside each text ad in the block as you can from the screen shot here. Notice as well the term make money online with netsel is highlighted in yellow in the ad block, because this is what I searched for in Google to find My Blog. Those little unrelated icons beside each text ad makes people click and this makes Chitika unique because Adsense does not have this feature nor are you allowed to use images beside your Adsense Ad blocks to influence clicking , do that and Adsense will close your account.
However even though this produces clicks on par with or more than Adsense Chitika still does not pay as much as Adsense per click in My opinion. What I have made for July with Chitika so far is what I make in a day with Adsense.
But never you forget the golden rule any secondary money is good money earned from your site or blog just as long as it does not affect your primary source of income. So will I keep Chitika on my site ? I most certainly will. Thats another check at the end of the month for little or no effort and it does not affect my Adsense earnings or My ability to sell online.
I will post more on Chitika when I get paid from them and I will also include some account screen shots and a copy of the check if their TOS allows for this. Hope you found this information useful. To sign up for Chitika and start displaying their ads on your blog or website please click here Don't for get to Subscribe and Follow me on Twitter.
So yesterday I made a post about Open Cart a shopping cart I use for selling and did the usual rounds of promoting it on the various channels I use. I'm new to blogging I just started this blog a couple of days ago ( at the prompt of my friend to do so ) so I don't really know that much about blogging. I know how to make a living online selling but I'm still learning this whole blogging thing by looking at the blogs of the famous online money gurus like John Chow, Shoe Money, Carl Ocab and Timothy Sykes to try to get an idea of how it's done.
I noticed all these sites pushed for people to subscribe to their sites by RSS feeds so i figured I would do the same. Well today to My surprise when I woke up and checked the blog and I had 4 subscribers. Woweee...Thats just awsome.
Anyways just wanted to let you guys know that I appreciate the visitors to My Blog and I will try to update it on a daily basis !
If you have read My prior post you will know that this blog is about making money online by selling. It is My primary source of income and things like Adsense and Kontera are secondary sources of income for me. That said I'm always on the look out for new and note worthy shopping cart software. When I just started selling online My first shopping cart was a crude FREE one that was tied to Paypal and nothing else. My customers would be able to add items to cart and before they checkout they would have to fill out a form with their name, address etc. and then submit it, at the end of this the shopping cart would provide them with a small button to click so they can pay through Paypal. Guess what ? That system really sucked ! for every 5 orders I got only 2 of my customers would actually click the Paypal button and pay. This was very depressing as I would loose 60% of my orders based on free technology, but free was all I could afford a little under a year ago when I was just started out in My online sales venture.
The next shopping cart I chose had more payment processing options (it had Google Checkout and Paypal ) but it lacked what I like to call the " Costco Effect ". What is the Costco effect you may ask ? Simple. Membership. Why I call this the Cosco Effect ? Costco is a membership only store like Wal-Mart but cheaper because they sell in bulk. I have bought there before because I'm a member and think it's cheaper than Wal-Mart. It's really not in the long run, it's mainly because you buy in bulk you get a discount but do I really need 40 pounds of chicken ? that will last me a year as a single man and it will certainly spoil by then. However me and thousands of other people on a daily basis flock to Costco for the savings. After some research I learned that people who have memberships at a certain sites are more likely to go back there to shop versus another site with similar or the same products even if it's cheaper. So now I realized I needed a shopping cart that provided My customers with the ability to create an account with a user name and password so they can login and do things like view their orders. My research had shown that these type of sites increase sales by 27%. This was a number I needed a 27% increase in sales would do me good. So I started Googling for a new shopping cart and almost a year later (after I started selling online) I now had some funds to spare.
My Search for the Perfect Shopping Cart:
The first thing I decided to do was to examine brand name sites to see who provided their shopping carts. I narrowed it down to 4 carts:
Web Asyst Shop Script
Volusion
Open Cart
os Commerce
Volusion hands down seem to be the most popular one it's used by large corporations like, Disney, Motorola, Ed Hardy and Crutchfield. They have all the standard membership features but they charge a monthly fee from $29.95 to $99.95 depending on how many items you add to the store.....mmmm nah...not in my budget.
Web Asyst Shop Script this was the company that made the free cart I started out with. The pay version is loaded with features. The feature that almost sold me was the Affiliate Widget. This allows your customers to become resellers of your items it gives them some code like Adsense so they can paste it on their blog, website or social network and if some one buys it gives them a commission. Awesome stuff but very pricey...this will cost you $300 per site you install it on.
os Commerce is ok, it's open source and it's free... but it's god aweful ugly. Yuck !
Open cart sold me first just by the interface it was well designed with a nice fluid layout that encourages people to buy (this was tested by several tipsy college girls in my dorm room :) It's open source too like os Commerce but Open Cart is the sexier of the too (os Commerce and Open cart are like two hot sisters but Open Cart is the cart with the bigger boobs :) The admin area is very powerful and allows you to do some really neat things like set different payment options on your site and the order in which they appear. Notice in the screen shot that I have Paypal as the first payment option. This is for a number of reasons like they have 100 million paypal users and people feel a lot safer buying via Paypal and Paypal orders represent 95% of my online sales. The second option is via credit card for people who don't have Paypal or hate paypal and just want to pay via Credit / Debit card. It's processed by Paypal but the customer enters their card info on My site and Paypal processess it right on my site in the background and returns with a Approve or Declined message before the order is complete. Cool Huh ? This done by using the Paypal Direct API and Open Cart supports this. You need to do two things to have this work with Paypal 1.) Sign up for Website Payments Pro through Paypal it will cost 2.9% + $0.30 USD per transaction + $30.00 USD per monthly fee but trust me it's worth it to take Credit Card orders from directly with in your site as this will boost sales by another 14%.
2.) Set Up the API on Paypal.com and then add the API user name, password and API signature to Open Cart and you will be ready to take credit card payments live on your site. Setting up the API in Paypal is kinda tedious so here is a video to show you how its done:
The other cool feature about Open Cart is the neat shipping cost options. You can set up one flat fee (on my site it's $10 ) or charge a per item fee (I charge $5 ) and in addition to those two you can also give free shipping if the order value is above a certain amount, on my site I set this to $100 so each order total $100 or higher gets free shipping as shown in this screen shot . The sub-total is $119.85 on this order so the option to select free shipping becomes available to the customer. If the sub-total was less than a $100 they would only have two choices for shipping cost: flat fee $10 or $5 per item. This as you can image helps to boost sales. You would be surprised to know how many people add extra stuff to their cart just to get it to $100 bucks to get free shipping. It's human nature we love to win and earning the right to get free shipping to them is like they won a prize this is called the Winning Feeling effect.
The final selling point on Open Cart I want to touch on is the ability take coupons. I use coupons codes for My exisiting customers. I email it to them (from the admin area in Open Cart) when I have a new item in stock that I want to start selling or to speed up sales of slow items. Using the same order as before have a look at this screen shot: You will notice that a coupon was applied to the cart before checkout and it dropped the overall total from $119.85 to $107.87 this has three effects:
1.) you are letting the customer get the Winning Feeling again by letting them save money.
2.) You are introducing a new product or boosting sales on a lagging item.
3.) You are creating repeat buyers, the life blood of the retail industry and this is something you need if want to continue to make money online.
Open Cart makes it very easy for you to apply coupons to your cart, lets take a look at the admin area for the coupon section. Notice that you can set the discount as a percentage of the overall cost or a monetary value like $10 off with a particular code. You can also set it up so that the coupon can have features like free shipping. Item assignment of the coupon is also another cool option. So lets say you have a site selling ladies shoes and you want to boost sales on some shoes that are not moving fast enough. You can apply a 10% off coupon code to that particular shoe or shoes in the coupon admin area just by selecting it or them from the Products list (as shown in the screen shot ) adding this coupon code to your email campaign (which you can run from inside Open Cart ) will help to boost sales. If they buy more items on the site while buying the discounted shoes the coupon will only apply the discount to the specified shoes, you win by up selling other items and selling some shoes that were not selling so well and they still get the Winning Feeling by saving money with the coupon . That's what you call a win win situation.
Open Cart is perfect for small to medium sized online retailers like myself, it's robust, flexible, well designed and best of all it's free. To me it has become a very useful tool in my quest to make money online.
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So I just got My biggest Adsense Check so far it was $333.51 ! Not much I know but it's a lot for me considering My first Adsense Check was around $150 three months ago. I just started My online business in October of 2008 with Adsense and it has been gradually getting bigger each month. This check will go towards buying a new notebook for My business and it helps :)
I took a picture of the check you can see it above and I also did a short video of me opening the check when it came in the mail from Google which you can view on My Youtube Channel.
The funds I got was fine by me mainly because Adsense is a secondary source of income for My business so its like extra money in the bank just for having a couple of links on My site.
You can see the video below.
Tip: Most of the clicks I got came from search engine traffic. This kinda of traffic is the best type of traffic you can get. They buy and click a lot. When visitors come to your blog or site make sure you have some Adsense text ads in the top fold. I use the 336 x 280 box and it's My top Adsense earner on My site.
Make sure to change the color of the links in your Adsense ads to match the color on your site. I noticed also a significant boost in clicks by doing too main things.
1.) Change the the back ground of the ads to a dark color and use a bright color for the links.
2.) Add Google Image ads next to your text ads as this make people click the text ads more and the text ads is where the money is at.
That's all for now folks ! I hope you found the tips useful and if so don't forget to subscribe to this blog !
