Beginners Guide to Selling Online – eCommerce Made Simple

Beginners Guide to Selling Online

The less than promising outlook for the economy coupled with the gloomy jobs outlook makes starting a small business one of the best ways to weather the gloomy economic outlook that seem to be one of the few things most top economist agree on. Echoing a similar line, the Universities minister David Willetts advice students leaving university to to cast off “old-fashioned” ideas about what constitutes a graduate job and instead consider starting a business.

Knowing you want to start a small business or being urged to start a small business by a government minister and the reality on the ground when you think of the whys and the wherefores of starting a small business is quite different. First you need to identify a gap in the market that you business can fill, you have to convince the banks (which at present are not lending that much to small businesses) to finance you business idea which in an uphill struggle at the prevailing economic climate. Given the impossible huddles you must jump through to establish a traditional small business, starting an online business is a much better and far easier alternative.

The Basics of Selling Online

One of the easiest and the cheapest ways to start a small business is by giving the traditional start up model a wide berth, you cut out the long winded business proposals and endless meeting with bank officials and the routine rejection application for start-up loan tends to get by starting an online business.
Ecommerce based business tends to be easy and much cheap to setup. This article is not an exhaustive guide to starting an ecommerce website but it lists the basics of starting an ecommerce website including everything you need to start making money online.

Starting an online business can be divided into three parts:

1. Choosing an ecommerce shopping cart
2. Choosing a payment processing company
3. Search engine marketing for your business

Choosing a shopping cart
There are hundreds of shopping cart ranging from the cheap and cheerful to deluxe shopping cart that will set you back several thousands, you can also have a bespoke shopping cart created for you, bespoke shopping carts do not come cheap. It will be assumed that capital is tight hence you want to get the best shopping cart possible for as little cash outlay as possible.
The first shopping cart that comes to mind are the free one but given that free shopping carts tends not to have technical support you can call on when you need help, and aspiring small business owner who is not a techie should steer well clear of free shopping cart.
One of the best shopping cart you can start you online shop with is Boss Cart.

Choosing a payment gateway

Hi-tech credit card to combat online fraud – Visa CodeSure

eCommerce Card Fraud – Visa CodeSure to the rescue

Giving all the anti-fraud mechanism put in place by banks and credit card companies, you would think online fraud and credit card fraud will be a thing of the past. Card fraud seem to behave like a badly laid carpet underlay, you push the air out in one end and it pops up at another end. At least on the credit card front, a new Hi-tech card by Visa seem set to dramatically reduce credit card fraud if not eliminate it outright.

The new Visa card comes with a built in keypad and LCD screen, the new card is called Visa CodeSure. CodeSure is exactly the same size as a standard credit card but it features a tiny screen above the signature strip and 10 pressure keypads which card owners can use to input pin number.

Visa CodeSure has undergo extensive trials in Europe, Visa is not confident enough that the it is giving the banks the go ahead to start rolling it out to their customers very soon. Visa CodeSure will replace the cumbersome card reader that is in current use, instead of carrying a card and a card reader, you have it all rolled into one small credit card. The main security feature of the new card is the fact that it generates random authorisation code for each transaction instead of inserting preprepared password which is the way the current Verified by Visa system works. Visa CodeSure is expected to replace verified by Visa system once the roll out of the new card is completed.

Verified by Visa is said to have help online card fraud continue to fall, last year, £266 million was lot to card fraud which was a reduction of 19% over loses due to fraud the previous year.

Sell online with free ecommerce template and Zen Cart

There is over 10 million people in the UK without Internet connection, what is worst is that there are also a significant number of businesses without any form of online presence. Such businesses are lost a lot of potential revenue by not selling online.  One of the reason some small businesses cited for now having online shop is the cost of selling online. The fact is that it has never been cheaper to sell online. There is a number of shopping carts one can basically install and start selling on without any cost, to make it even easier, there are free templates as well to make the free shopping cart look different from thousands of other sites that probably use the default template free ecommerce cart are shipped with.

Free ecommerce template

Velnet has just announced the release an interiors decoration themed ecommerce templates. The template was originally designed for Boss Cart premium but with basic modification, it can be changed to be a stand alone online shop template, modified and ported into other shopping cart such as Zen Cart.

Technical Specification

Though you do not need any technical skills to install the free shopping cart template but for the more technical webmaster, technical details of the free shopping cart template follows:

Sources Available: .PSD;.CPT;.CSS;.PHP
Software Requirements:
- Boss Cart 1.5.9;
- Adobe Photoshop CS+;
- Adobe Dreamweaver 8+ (or any php-editor);

The package comes compressed, to uncompress it you need:
- WinZip 9+ (Windows);
- Stuffit Expander 10+ (Mac)
- gZip (Linux/Unix)
Template Width: 955px
Colors: Gray, Blue, Green, Orange

You can download the template from here.

Promoting Ecommerce Sites with Google Merchant Centre formerly Google Base

Google Merchant Center is a place where vendors can submit products, sell them through this service and promote their goods by search indexing.
Formerly known as Google Base, Merchant Center is better optimised for items listings and products managing. If you are a Google Base user, all your feeds, items and settings have been already relocated into Merchant Center database.
Uploading your products to Merchant Center doesn’t mean targeting a higher position in Google search but being listed when somebody uses the “shopping” link from the Google’s top page, so it’s a targeted action for people searching to buy different stuff using this shopping place. However, depending on their relevancy, uploaded products can also appear in a regular Google search, though this is not a rule.
Items are uploaded into Merchant Center through data feeds so this tutorial will be for submitting products through this method. Its has an extraordinary potential for sales boost so using this service might be a good trick for marketing and selling your items.
Creating a feed translates into compiling your products inventory into a single file that will be added by Google in its products’ searching engine. This is a free service, however, starting to upload your feeds requires setting up a free Google account. So here are the steps for uploading data feeds to Google Merchant Center:
1. Create a Google account

2. Enable Google Merchant Center
Go to Google Merchant Center and fill the required information.

3. Create Data Feed

Accepted data feeds are only in text or XML formats. The easiest way to create a text feed is by working in Microsoft Excel and converting the feed into .txt.
a) On the first line include any relevant information that best describe your items. This header might look like this:

In the rows below, enter information for each product displayed into separate rows:

When you finished your spreadsheet save as .txt and submit it.

b) For uploading items using XML, only RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3, and Atom 1.0 versions are supported. Creating and editing these feeds can be done using any text editor, like Notepad for example.

Creating a single item in RSS 2.0 would look like this :

4. Register a data feed

For registering a feed, click on Data Feeds link followed by Register New Data Feed. Here is what you will need to fill in:

Target Country – select the country where you want your items to be displayed in search results
Data feed type – select googlebase
Data feed file name – enter the exactly name of created file and use an extension supported ( text versions with .txt and Atom or RSS with .xml )

Hit Save button. Now data feed is ready to being submitted into Google Merchant Center.

5. Submit Data Feed

There are 3 possibilities for submitting data feeds:

a) Uploading through Google Merchant Center Data Feeds page for files with maximum 20MB size
b) FTP for more than 20MB file size ( a FTP account is required for larger file size )
c) Automatic scheduled upload for a maximum 15MB size
Google recommends uploading via Data Feeds page while the FTP method is prone to encounter different errors. Here are the final steps for uploading a feed to Google Merchant Center:
- sign in and go to Data Feeds link
- locate the feed through the registered ones and click upload file from Uploads column
- click Browse
- select the feed and click Open, verify the name that appears near the Browse button to match with filename
- click Upload and process this file

Once the file have been uploaded a success notification will appear on your screen. It may take 24 hours for a feed to be uploaded, so don’t panic if hours go by and still no updated account.

Online Payment Processing by Streamline.com

eCommerce payment processing by Streamline.com

This service provider in the payment card processing domain claims to be the largest of its kind within Europe and boasts of being able to cater to all types of businesses irrespective of the size. They are a member of The Royal Bank of Scotland Group.

Since this company is also one of the premier providers of merchant accounts, it has the flexibility of accepting both debit and credit card payments by different modes such as by phone or through the website.

With card transactions on the increase, you as a merchant need the support of a company which makes your business dealings easier and more customer friendly. Streamline is the company which makes that possible through their different service offerings.

Services offered

a) Cardholder preferred currency service

This is made possible through the many point of sale terminals provided by the company and the transaction is easily processed due to the terminal duly recognizing the card in question and making available the required currency.

b) Card payment on the move service

This service is for those who are always mobile as the company provides mobile payment terminals through which the card payments can be processed.

c) Streamline online service

This is another management type of service which allows you to view the various card transactions that you have done for the business and since they are up dated daily, you can have real time information on all your card transactions.

d) PAN truncation service

The primary account number truncation is a service wherein the card number is disguised and is not made visible to avoid any fraudsters taking advantage of accessibility to such numbers.

e) Internet trading service

With the growing popularity and access to internet, many businesses are able to now conduct a lot of their business activities through the internet. So ecommerce and online trading activities are very much a part and requirement of many customers. Streamline is able to offer internet retailing opportunities and also provides general guidelines on how to get started on this activity.

Strengths

1. Handle a huge number of transactions within the UK
2. Can process most major card payments and as a merchant you can cater to diverse customers.
3. State of art technology which ensures that transactions are quickly done and there is no waiting time for customers.
4. Great back up systems to ensure total reliability at all times

Support Provided

They provide support services to help customers manage their account much better by helping out in areas like easy authorization, ensuring fraud free sales, reconciling statements to reflect the up dated information and so on.

They place great emphasis on getting proper feedback from customers and encourage it through the online feedback form. Customers can also use the email and visit the website to place complaints or offer suggestions.

They offer both call back as well as Text phone services to enable customers to get through to them.Your browser may not support display of this image. Your browser may not support display of this image. Your browser may not support display of this image. Your browser may not support display of this image.

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