Online auction giant, eBay, yesterday announce measures that seem to complete its creeping transformation from a purely auction website to a shopping mall. The new changes will encourage more fixed-price sellers,This new changes is aimed at new customers who are not keen about auctions, just prefer to buy goods at fixed-prices. The move will also encourage larger organisations to have a store on ebay.
At present, ebay said 43% of its global sale revenue  are at fixed prices and growing, revenue from fixed-price item is expected to catch up with revenue from auction eventually.

While openly courting new businesses, especially larger retailer to have and outlet on eBay where goods can be sold at fixed-prices, ebay is also try to keep its army of 170,000 or so sellers happy by cutting list prices of goods but increasing commission on sale, this reverses the recent increases in listing prices which provoked a revolt among many of its sellers.

To assure buyers that eBay is not a den of dodgy Del boy style traders, ebay is increasing its seller protection for people using PayPal from £500 - £30,000.  eBay is undoubtedly the most popular shopping destination for UK Internet bargain hunters, it is claimed that 2 out of 3 online British shopper visits ebay once a month, helping to contribute significantly to ebay £30 billion a year worldwide turnover. It remains to be seen whether its new changes will answer its wall street critics claim that ebay has little room for growth.

You can discuss ebay and other ecommerce related issues at Boss Cart eCommerce forum

E Commerce is the process of buying and selling goods across the internet. Since the internet has universal reach, going beyond physical boundaries and making customers and retailers interact virtually, it has become one of the most sought after sectors by companies, big and small alike.
The most important reason for the success of E Commerce is the fact that it provides an electronic storefront to send and receive payments.

Does E Commerce really work? Yes, it does. It’s beneficial to the consumers as well as the store owners. From the store owner’s point of view, the reach of the product is universal and serves the customer according to their individual needs. From the customer’s point, they save on traveling, fuel, time and get door delivery of everyday goods also.

The money made through e commerce has exceeded more than $1.8 trillion as of 2004. And so, yes, a lot of money is involved in this business. But there are certain tips you must keep in mind while trading through e commerce:

1.    Be original and be creative. Give your customers a reason to visit your site and buy your product. Kindle their curiosity.
2.    Make the customer feel they are important and make sure there are products to suit everyone’s needs.
3.    Include the product in your signature in order to increase traffic to your site when you send them weekly sales letters.
4.    Not to forget, the sales letter must be written by you. This will make you seem more approachable for queries and transactions.
5.    Optimize the search engine. Search engines are the reason for most of the site trafficking.
6.    The most effective way of optimizing is to get accurate keywords so that people are not misled.

find out more information about how to make money from ecommerce at boss cart UK

Rising food bill, fuel cost and the credit crunch have forced shoppers to seek out bargains away from the high street, this direct beneficiary of this has been online retailers according to a survey by e-commerce group IMRG and consultancy Capgemini.
The report said that the total Internet spend was £26.5bn, up 38% on the same period last year, which also translate to the fact that online sales have reached nearly 20% of total retail spending.

Cloths and footwear sales on the high street see a sharp drop in sale despite tempting offers from high street retailers. Internet sales of cloths and footwear on the other hand saw a rise, with over all Internet clothing sales rising by 32%, lingerie sales rose 37% and footwear was up 38%.

Year on year, online shopping has been rising faster than traditional high street shopping, Christmas 2007 saw online shopping spend rise to 15.2 billion, with was an increase of 50% over online sales of December 2006.

Webmaster Forums such as UK Webmaster World, V7N, Site Point, Ozzu, Daniweb, Digital Point Webmaster Talk and other are know for facilitating discussion on various aspects of web development such as web hosting, domain name registration, web design, search engine marketing, web scripting and programming but the powerhouse of most webmaster forum is the Marketplace. This is were wembasters actually make money from buy, sell, exchange and trade in websites, advertisement, tools and even websites.
Webmasters Marketplace are usually the busiest section of forums, some forums such as Sitepoint are more famous for their marketplace than the SEO or other discussion. One of the things that make marketplace a success are the easy of use when compared with other ways of buying and selling small goods and services online, most webmaster markeplace are also free, do there is not buyer or seller premium on goods.

When offering items for sale, its is usually nice to give as much details about the item as possible, if it is an item needs a demo version, provide a link to where a working copy of the item you are trying to sell can be seen.
Not all webmasters are a fan of Marketplace, Zoltan Bagi, a webmaster with many years of experience using and moderating forums express concern “Webmaster Marketplace” are usually magnets for spammers.
Bagi’s observation is quite correct but spamming is not unique to marketplace, its a burden the entire world wide web is suffering from. Forum owner tends to have policy and mechanism inplace to reduce or eliminate spamming so that users of the Marketplace will have a pleasant experience.

Webmaster Marketplace Etiquettes

• Post you offer in the right topic or thread for example if you are selling, post in the for sale section and if you want to buy, post in wanted section.
• Create a new post for each items you want to sell especially if the items are completely different, for example if you are selling text link ad and website contents, do not start a thread on selling text link ads and then add that “by the way, I also have website contents for sale.
• Respond to enquiry about your item promptly when potential buyers contact you.
• If you are selling software or script, be prepared to prove ownership or evidence that you have reseller right for the software or script.
• After a transition completion, leave a feedback for the other party, iTrader or other ways of leaving feedback are usually provided.

Webmaster Marketplace Abbreviation
Like the Internet itself, webmaster forum and Marketplace in particular is full of abbreviation that can baffle beginners, here are a few examples of popular abbreviations in use in webmaster Marketplace:
WTB - Want To Buy.
WTS - Want To Sell.
ONO – Or Nearest Offer.
PM – Private Message.
iTrader - A rating and feedback system that allows you to comment of a transaction.
MTFBWY - May The Force Be With You.
YW - You are Welcome.
WRT - With Regard to.
AFK – Away from keyboard.
AFN – That is all for now.
MFA – Made for Adsense.

eCommerce websites are one of the most difficult sites to optimise for search engines. Partly because of the shopping cart application used to develop a site and partly because store owners do not take the time to take the basic steps required to differentiate their online store from other stores using the same shopping cart platform or selling the same goods.
The simple and easy steps below should help you make your site search engine friendly and hopefully help you increase sales.

1. Choose your shopping cart carefully:
If you are not using a bespoke shopping cart, then put a lot of thoughts into choosing a shopping cart. Ensure the shopping cart software you choose is search engine friendly. This means in addition to your product URLs being clean and without parameter passing, each product or at least product categories should have SEO keyword fields for title tag, meta tag, and keywords. If you have you shopping basket created for you, ask your developer to build SEO keyword fields into it.

2. Products and possibly manufacturers name in URL:
When creating your product category and sub categories, try to arrange it so that product and manufactures name appears in the url, for example:
www.ecommerceshopname.co.uk/uskids/juniorgolfequipment/golfclubs.php .

3. Easy to crawl site navigation:
Ensure your site navigation is created with code search engine crawlers can index. There are some very fancy navigation that makes eCommerce sites look good but cannot be crawled by search engines.

4. Internal site linking:
When linking from one product to another or even one page to another withing your site, use keyword rick anchor text, for example, don’t link to another product like this: thatProduct.php rather like this: golfBalls.php .

5. Do not stuff your homepage title tag:
Most eCommerce site tries to insert keywords of as many of the products they sell as possible, this can be counter productive. You should optimise your homepage title take for two or three of your products. In the body of the page, you can create keyword rich text linking to other pages of your site optimised for that particular product.

6. Optimise your product image:
Simply adding alt tag to images used on your ecommerce site will enhance usability to blind or partially sighted uses and could increase traffic from search engine image search crawlers. You should also give meaningful names to your images, for example call a golf bag image golf bag rather than image 2.

7. Linking from your blog:
If you have a blog as part of your online store, you should link to products you blog about with anchor text that is the product name rather than just saying “more” or “view details” .

8. Create product feeds:
Most modern shopping cart comes with product RSS feeds that enable you to export your products to Google base and other content aggregations such as Haabaa Price.

9. Create RSS feeds for your customers:
Some shopping cart have a product RSS feeds (different from the one in tip number 10) similar to RSS feeds from websites or forums, it enables the customer to monitor latest products as you add them to your site.

10. Create unique product description:
Many online store just copy and paste product description from the manufacturers, its create thousands of duplicate contents. Its important that you reword product description to make yours unique.

You can find more eCommerce optimisation tips, discuss shopping cart, payment gateways and other online store development related potics at UK eCommerce forum section of UK WW.