peat dot org

A lot of people pay a lot of money for a lot of bad advice for higher rankings in search engines. It seems like you can’t throw a rock without hitting a breathless search engine consultant, touting MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF TRAFFIC and REALLY AWESOME BUZZWORDS.

These are the New Internet Hucksters.

Now, search engine optimization and marketing isn’t completely worthless — I’ve seen healthy improvements that can come from embracing a few simple practices when building your web site.  The point is that they’re simple practices, and only a piece of the much larger marketing puzzle.

So, how can you spot one of the good marketing gurus, and dodge the hucksters?

Hucksters focus on your website. Gurus focus on your competitors. Chances are, you’re not the market leader .. so you better start paying attention to the dogs leading the pack. Where are they advertising? What products are they promoting? What’s on the front page of their web site? Who links to them? Terribly ugly web sites can see a significant improvement in sales after they start emulating the other practices of the market leaders, without updating a single line of code.

Hucksters focus on traffic. Gurus focus on sales. Why? Because traffic is expensive, and sales make you money. Here’s an example: Lets say you sell shoes. To drive traffic to your site, you buy advertising around the word “adidas.” Very visible … very expensive … and most of your visitors probably aren’t interested in buying what you’re selling. Instead of “adidas,” focus on the people who are shopping for a pair of “adidas Campus ST” shoes, which you conveniently have in stock at a reasonable price. Focusing your marketing on specifically what you’re selling is the path to sales, not driving the hordes to your doorstep.

Hucksters tell you about your market. Gurus listen. Unless your consultant has experience in your market, don’t let them tell you people’s buying habits or industry trends. A guru will listen to your experiences with your customers, and use their expertise to figure out the best ways to reach them. And this leads directly into the next point:

Hucksters sell an easy solution. Gurus take the time to understand your problems. Retail is not easy. Managing a store is not easy. Understanding customers is not easy. Making a profit is not easy, and becoming a market leader is damn near impossible. A guru will help you figure out a long term strategy, and knows that it takes more than a few hat tricks to make your business successful on the Internet.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is a huckster.

This is an exciting year: My company is growing, our prototypes are working exactly as we hoped, and we’ll be rolling out our first public products and services over the next few months.

What’s really exciting is watching our clients succeed: they’re doing phenomenally well. In one case, they’ve seen monthly revenue grow over 2000% — in 2007, they’ll easily clear a million dollars in sales.

Pretty soon we’ll be coming out of stealth mode … and in the meantime, I’m looking for a couple more clients.

I know most of the people who read this site are technically inclined, and quite a few of you have an interest in e-commerce. So, if you’d like expert guidance on building, managing, and growing a successful e-commerce site, and you’re interested in a sneak preview of what we’re bringing to market, lets talk.

Call me at (503) 701-4135, or send an e-mail to peat@peat.org. I look forward to hearing from you.

One of my first thoughts when I saw Woot.com was “Oh man, this would be great way to sell wine,” and The Wife and I were scheming away until she found .. Wine Woot!

Now we have to find another way to make a bazillion dollars. Blast!

How easy is it to create your own online bookstore?

Very, very easy. You just have to be an Amazon Associate to do it, and be willing to only sell Amazon’s products.

Amazon’s service is called aStore, which lets you create … a store! It’s still in beta, but it only took me about 5 minutes to build a simple shop with only nine products: Peat’s Web App Books of Hotness, which probably gives you a good idea of what you’ll find there.

Beyond my simplistic demonstration, you can add pretty much anything in the Amazon catalog (not just books), lots of sidebar goodies for people to oogle while browsing, and a reasonable amount of customization. Good stuff.

Amazon — so hot right now.

Ahh, credit card fraud. How I detest thee.

Fraud is a fact of life for retail businesses, and e-commerce shops are particularly hard hit, particularly those who sell internationally. Direct fraud is certainly the most common: some jerk places an order with someone else’s credit card in an attempt to get their hands on your products. Pretty straight forward.

Indirect transactions, on the other hand, are a bit more troubling.

The Scam

The Jerk sells a product to The Buyer on a legit site, like eBay or Craigslist. However, The Jerk doesn’t have the product!

So, The Jerk buys the product from your web site. Using fake or stolen credit card info, The Jerk uses The Buyer’s personal information to place the order on your site. You ship the product to The Buyer.

The Result

The Jerk pockets the cash from the first transaction.

The Buyer receives the product, and thinks everything is perfectly legit: he received the product he bought, and paid the expected amount for it.

You’ve been scammed, and you’re in the awkward situation of attempting to reclaim your products from someone who thinks they were legitimately purchased.

Protection

The easiest way to prevent getting involved is to fully check each of your credit card transactions: make sure the information is valid. Use CVV verification. Take the credit card transaction off line to make sure it’s seen by a human before it’s processed. Call the customer when addresses don’t match.

However, there’s only so much credit card verification can do for you: here are two things that can significantly improve your ability to spot bad transactions:

1. Save the IP address the order came from, and use a geolocation service to find out the approximate location of the customer. Raise a red flag if the billing and shipping address for the order are in Billings, Montana … but the order was placed from Singapore. A limited, but free, geolocation service is provided by IP2Location.com
2. Include a note at the top of the packing list that says something along the lines of: “If you did not buy this product directly from xxxxxxxx, please call us at xxx-xxx-xxxx to verify the authenticity of your purchase.” Even if everything else checks out, savvy consumers appreciate the ability to inform you of anything suspicious.

According to Aaron Biddar, president of Control Scan, 40% of e-commerce sites comply with MasterCard’s standards for data protection — and he considers that number optimistic. (http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/51756.html)

Most store owners aren’t aware that there are established standards for protecting customers, but they all know it’s important. Getting hacked or inadvertently leaking customer data is almost always the end of an online shop — not only do customers loose trust, but the business risks having their ability to process credit cards revoked.

With the risks so high, why is compliance so low? Three big reasons:

• Lack of awareness. The standards are typically not emphasized or included in merchant account contracts, compliance audits are practically unheard of, and standards generally aren’t brought to the attention of business owners until after something has gone wrong.
• Too many standards. Visa has a standard. MasterCard has a standard. American Express and Discover have standards. There are government privacy and accounting standards (HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley). There are even standards that are combinations of different standards.
• High learning curve. Data security is a highly technical issue. The typical business owner doesn’t understand firewalls, encryption standards, or application security, and neither do their customers. It’s simply not possible to educate everyone about every aspect of security.

Where To Start?

The best first step to securing an e-commerce shop is to put someone in charge of security, preferably someone on staff who has some technical knowledge of how your site works and how it’s hosted. The person should also have a good rapport with staff who interact with your website and customers. It’s important to make this an official role in your business, rather than an afterthought looked after by whomever has a spare moment.

Download, print, and keep handy a copy of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) — the closest thing there is to an industry standard, and the most likely to be enforced by Visa and MasterCard. Although the PCI-DSS is fairly technical, it’s important for your security person to understand the essential components and concepts. If they don’t, it’s worth while to contract a third party to help them through the learning curve, and assist with issues specific to your web site. Finding the right person is worth writing another article about — in the meantime, feel free to ask me questions.

Talk with your vendors. The PCI-DSS has requirements that may not be possible to meet — limitations imposed by your e-commerce platform, hosting company, or other third party vendors may make it impossible to know whether or not you can actually meet the criteria of the PCI-DSS. Savvy vendors should be able to offer solutions and advice to help you gain compliance, and those who know nothing about PCI-DSS should become aware of the issues it raises.

What’s Next?

The consortium behind the PCI-DSS is revising the standard in the next few months, based on feedback from vendors. The changes aren’t expected to be particularly radical, and the core principals still apply, so the current PCI-DSS is still a very good guide to protecting customer data.

I’ll post an update when those changes are published.

Are You Experienced?

I’m interested in hearing from people and vendors who have experience helping e-commerce sites become PCI-DSS compliant — I work with a lot of e-commerce shops, and I’m always looking for vendors to refer clients to. Thanks!

Here’s a little snapshot from the Google Analytics dashboard for one of my clients. Why is this interesting? Because targeted search engines account for about 75% of the total traffic to the site.

It’s missing figures about how the Google and Yahoo visits break down, so I’ll fill them in:

• ~ 70% of the Google traffic is from Froogle. The rest is a mix of AdWords and organic searches. I suspect that three quarters or more of the Froogle traffic is from link placement at the top of normal Google searches for the products this store carries.
• ~90% of the Yahoo traffic is from Yahoo! Shopping. The rest is organic.

One of the big issues with their site is that it’s based on osCommerce — a nightmarish morass of antiquated technology, best described with words invented by dockworkers. osCommerce is notorious for being search engine unfriendly (amongst other things), and is one of the big reasons the organic searches account for such a small amount of traffic.

Despite the problems with their e-commerce platform, I worked with them to plug their catalog into targeted search engines, and their sales grew 1500% over the course of three months.

I’ll post more numbers after we roll out their new site, and we’ll see how good markup and better technology makes a difference.

This is a continuation of a series of articles about the basics of e-commerce, and getting noticed on the web. My previous article was about “sell through” stores — the Amazon Marketplace and eBay Stores. I also wrote a bit about prepping your site for search engines, and using targeted search engines like Froogle and Shopzilla.

This post is about attracting traffic from personal blogs, and sending content to sites and people that specialize in aggregating interesting tidbits from around the web.

Blog What?

Blogging is all about people telling other people interesting bits of information.

The information part of it can be anything anyone wants to write about — a backpacking trip in Europe, politics, local news, software development, etc. Regardless, the critical part is that what you write has to be interesting to the people you want to attract.

But what to write about? And how much time will it take? A long article can take several hours; a quick post can take a couple of minutes. Here’s a few examples:

• Regular Promotions — Announcing a deal a day, like woot.com. Under 5 minutes.
• Related Deals — A snow sport store noting a ski pass deal at a local resort. Under 5 minutes
• Calendar Events — a Fifth of July Fireworks Clearance Sale! 15 minutes
• Customer Content — A customer writes in with her story about using your products on a trip. 30 minutes
• Case Studies — When and where to best use a specific product, typically related to the current season or an event. 30 minutes to 2 hours
• Product Comparisons — Why Widget X is better than Widget Y in some situations, but not in others. 2 to 4 hours.

All of these things are interesting to people who are keen on buying what you’re selling, and that’s what counts in e-commerce — getting the attention of people who are ready to buy.

And Then?

If you want people to read what you’re writing, there are two prominent ways to gather eyeballs:

• Send your content to related sites and interested readers (syndication).
• Get links to your site from people who are interested in what you’re doing.

Syndication is a big deal. The more sites you can get your content on, the more frequently it will be seen, and consequently the more traffic you’ll receive. A bunch of generous people figured this out a few years back, and today syndicating your content (and tracking how it’s used) is automatic, free, and easy. Case in point: if you’re reading this article, there’s an 80% chance you found it through another web site or syndication service, and I haven’t paid a dime for any of it.

That said, an lot of the people who read your content will be bloggers. Bloggers are always looking for something to write about, and they’re usually quite generous about linking to things they find interesting. Those links are important for three reasons. First, links back to your site generally improve your standing amongst search engines. Second, links are usually part of a personal endorsement, leaving a much bigger impression on people than a banner or text ad. Finally, it’s very targeted — blogs are read because they’re interesting to the reader, and if someone spends a lot of time writing about collecting clocks, or fishing, or base jumping, chances are their audience is likewise interested.

Add it all up, and blogging becomes a powerful medium for reaching customers.

What’s Next?

I’m going to get off the subject of attracting people to your shop, and focus on some general principals of converting them into customers. Stay tuned, and feel free to leave questions or comments in the meantime.

Do you build e-commerce sites?

Do you own Jakob Nielsen’s E-Commerce User Experience?

It’s one of the best books about building e-commerce sites. It provides a substantial amount of insight into how people interact with sites, what visual cues are most helpful, common stumbling points, and how to present product information. The book is based on a fairly rigorous survey of how people interact with 20 sites in 7 categories — clothing, department stores, flowers, food, furniture, music, and toys — and includes a detailed report on the methodology of the survey.

It’s solid stuff.

This book has been very valuable to me because I’ve seen how easy it is for designers, developers, and managers to slip into groupthink about the site they’re building. We all become comfortable with the sites we construct, and with comfort comes resistance to changing how things work or look. Every site becomes “intuitive” after spending a few hundred hours designing, building, and tweaking it … but it’s a very different story for Joe or Jane Internet User who finds your site for the first time.

E-Commerce User Experience has 389 pages, 207 tips, 221 screenshots, and covers categorization, product pages, shopping carts, checkout, registration, search, trust and credibility, and selling strategies. The book is more expensive than others of the same genre, but it’s certainly worth it.

A few days ago, Google unveiled Checkout — their e-commerce tool for making purchases directly through Google. The service is straight forward: a little shopping cart appears next to your AdWords text advertisements. Someone clicks on the shopping cart, pays you through Google’s site, and you ship it. Pretty simple. You can also add their payment services to your website, so that people who have a Google Checkout account can buy products from your site a with a couple of clicks.

This is similar to PayPal in that it’s a trusted third party mechanism for making payments. Both of them support online payments for goods and services, but they’re pointed in different directions: PayPal is geared towards people sending each other money; Google Checkout is designed specifically for e-commerce. PayPal’s primary commercial use is within eBay’s web site; Google Checkout is distributed everywhere AdWords are shown. PayPal operates independently of advertising efforts; Google Checkout is (currently) strictly tied to AdWords.

PayPal and Google Checkout overlap, and there will certainly be fierce competition over common ground, but I think they’re sufficiently different (and well funded) to survive in their own right.

What’s Next?

The logical extension of Google Checkout is through Froogle, their shopping comparison search engine. With Google Checkout handling financial transactions, and Google Base providing a huge inventory of products, the mating of the two is a natural progression … and if that happens, who’s going to feel the heat?

Amazon.

For the last several years, Amazon has been making a huge push to become an end-all, be-all market place. Their core business may be books, but their partnership with other retailers and heavy promotion of sell through merchants has expanded their business tremendously. Froogle + Checkout directly competes for those customers, and with Froogle and AdWords results along side Google searches, I think it would catch on very quickly.

My expectation is that Google Checkout + AdWords is the testing ground for the technology before combining Google Checkout with Froogle. If that’s the case, we’ll probably see little green shopping carts on Froogle and at the top of our Google searches before the winter shopping season.