Ecommerce Marketing: Domain Name Tips

Like every other small business ecommerce owner, you probably run just about every aspect of your ecommerce shop, including all the small business marketing efforts. If that's the case, tune in to Andrew Lock's Web TV show -- just click on the video below. He's got marketing tips, resources and advice that you can easily adapt to your own business.

I love The Apprentice TV show with Donald Trump, and the spin-off series Celebrity Apprentice, too. I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s chock full of useful business (and marketing) lessons for small business owners, including you. In this episode, I talk about the finale of Celebrity Apprentice where Brett Michaels and Holly Robinson Pete are tasked with creating a new flavor of drink for Snapple ice tea.

What should you do if your ideal domain name is already taken by someone, especially if they’re just sitting on it, and haven’t used it for any specific purpose? That’s the question raised in this week’s “Ask Andrew” segment. I hope you benefit from the reply I share with you.

I’m often asked to recommend a good online video converter that doesn’t require a lot of fiddling and tweaking of settings. I have exactly that to share with you, it works on both Mac and PC, and it’s free. Don’t say I don’t have your best interests at heart!

This week’s big marketing lesson is from Toyota. As you know, they’ve been in a spot of bother recently when they discovered that some of their models thought that braking meant accelerating. Well, we all make mistakes. Toyota had a major mess on its hands and they’re now in their final stages of clearing it up and fixing the negative perception of the company that has been implanted by the media.

I’ll show you how to adapt what Toyota did to your small business. As usual, let me know your opinion about the topics covered in the show this week -- leave your comment below, it’s really easy to do.

You'll find lots more small business marketing tips and resources from Andrew Lock in our Small Business In-Depth series, Lock in Your Marketing Resources.

Andrew Lock is a self-described maverick marketer and the creator and host of Help! My Business Sucks, a free, weekly Web TV show full of practical marketing tips, advice and resources to help small businesses "get more done and have more fun."

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Free Ecommerce Website Tools: Creating Content

Providing fresh, relevant content on your website will not only keep the search engines happy, it'll help keep your customers, both current and potential, coming back for more. These three tools won’t cost you a thing, but will let you add tips, videos and humorous "news" to your site. Small Business Computing has the full story.

DayTipperIf you’re looking for ideas for written content that you might want to pass on to your customers, you might want to consider a visit to DayTipper.com. Here you’ll find thousands of helpful tips left by average people that provide value by being practical, by saving time or money and just generally by being smart.

Read the complete free Web tools article

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Ecommerce Marketing: 10 Email Marketing Tips

One of the best ways to increase sales is to earn repeat business. And one of the best ways to communicate with your customers to keep them coming back is through email marketing -- but it can be tricky getting your customers to open those emails. Of course you want them to do more than open and read your news…you want them to buy something. These 10 tips will help you catch your customers' attention and drive sales. eCRMGuide has the full story.

According to Dean Levitt, the head of customer relations and marketing at Mad Mimi, a Brooklyn, New York-based email marketing company, you literally have just seconds to capture customers' attention with your email. And if you email them something with a boring or unhelpful subject line, that looks (or sounds) like spam, or is difficult to read or understand, your email is going to wind up in the trash.

So eCRM Guide asked Levitt to share 10 tips for getting prospective and existing customers to not only open your emails but to read them, click on the links, and ultimately become loyal followers of your brand/business.

Read the complete 10 email marketing tips article

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Twitter Tips to Boost Small Business Marketing

Twitter is both a fun and useful small business marketing tool. The best way to get the most out of Twitter is to incorporate the service into your current marketing strategies, but keep in mind that Twitter is only helpful tool -- not a small business marketing solution on its own.

In this Twitter tips article, we'll take a look at different ways you can boost your small business marketing messages by maximizing the content of and exposure to your 140 character-length messages.

Learn the Twitter Basics

There is a lot of information readily available for Twitter novices, so for the purpose of this article we'll assume you have an active Twitter account and are ready to start tweaking your tweets for maximum exposure. If you are new to Twitter, we recommend that you start by reading this Twitter Dictionary on Webopedia.com to get familiar with the Twitter lingo and to learn more about how the service works.

One way that small business owner, ecommerce site owners or entrepreneurs can use Twitter is to send out links to new content-relevant articles, blog posts or even promote new store products, contests or anything else to spread the word about for your small business.

Using Twitter, you can send this information in a message that is 140 characters in length. While that may sound rather simple, as with any marketing message, there are a number of things to consider. For example, you'll want to track how successful the message is and also ensure that Twitter users with related interests see the message to maximize retweets.

Prepping Your Twitter Marketing Message

The first thing to do is to get the URL -- or Web address -- of the page you want to tweet about, and come up with a descriptive message about the page you are linking to.

Throughout this article, we'll use this recent article, A Buyer's Guide to Remarketing Service, as an example.

For this you could use any number of descriptions including; A Buyer's Guide to Remarketing Services, Learn about Ecommerce Remarketing, How to use remarketing to convert cart abandoners, or any brief statement that would pique someone's interest.

Shorten URLs and Track Twitter Traffic

Once you have an idea of the message you want to send out, the next step will be to take the URL of the page you will direct Twitter users to and shorten it in length to give you extra characters for your small business marketing message. In the tweet you can provide a direct link using a URL redirection service (more commonly called a URL shrinker). This is an online service that will assign a short URL to the page and redirect users from that shorter URL to your website.

Using our example, we would need to include the following URL in the Tweet: http://e-commerceguide.com/article.php/3886596. Our URL is 46 characters. By using a free URL shrinker we can change that to a 20-character URL and use those saved characters to add more meaningful details in the Tweet. The Bit.ly service (20 character URLs) can redirect people with this shorter URL: http://bit.ly/94pZA9.

As an added benefit, once you have found a URL shrink service you like, you can register for a free account and obtain tracking information and see how many hits the shortened URL gets, and also track how many people on Twitter will retweet your short URL. This tracking information will be useful to help you determine which of your small business marketing messages work on Twitter -- and which get ignored.

Some of the other URL redirection services you can try include: Cligs (20 character URLs), and TinyURL (25 character URLs).

Put Your Twitter Message in Front of Those Who Care

Every tweet you send as a part of your small business marketing strategy should be written with goal of obtaining the most exposure on Twitter as you can -- which means you want people with similar interests to your message, and hopefully, retweet it to their followers. For this reason, you need a good Twitter following with an interest in what you tweet about, and you also need to make sure people not in your follower list can also find your message to retweet it for maximum exposure.

On Twitter, a hash tag is a way of organizing your tweets for Twitter search engines. Basically, this will allow others to search Twitter for a specific topic -- and if you have tagged your message with the search term your tweet will be seen by a larger audience with related interests.

You will add a community-driven hash tag in your tweet to help others discover relevant posts when they search twitter. For example, with our EcommerceGuide.com tweet, popular and relevant hash tags include #ecommerce and #smb.

To narrow down good hash tags you can search Twitter for a number of your related topics to see how popular that subject is. Choose several hash tags and leave space in your 140 character update to include one or two with each tweet. This helps expose your message to others who tweet about the same topic.

Finalizing Your Small Business Marketing Tweet

So now, our example tweet that we have been creating along the way will read something like this: "A Buyer's Guide to Remarketing Service http://bit.ly/94pZA9 #ecommerce #marketing." This is only 81 spaces, so we still have lots of room to spice the message up a bit.

Retweeting is crucial to maximizing your exposure so making it easy for others to send out your small business marketing message is helpful. You can encourage retweeting simply by leaving space for someone else to include the standard retweet statement without having to edit the tweet. This means you will need to leave the number of characters in your username, plus space for adding the RT @ message.

On Twitter I use "AuroraGG" so I need to leave enough character space that anyone can just add "RT @AuroraGG." So in this case, we would have 94 of the 140 characters used.

Lastly, you can use the remaining characters to expand your topic message, add an additional hash tag or whatever you choose to do. Often when tweeting about EcommerceGuide.com articles I will add something like "Check out my new #ecommerce article today" or something that lessens the feel of marketing to those reading. For example:

I have a new #ecommerce article online today. Learn about ecommerce remarketing services http://bit.ly/94pZA9 #marketing.

There you have it. A good 140-character tweet that gets your small business marketing message out in the twitterverse, with less than 5 minutes of planning, once you know how to do it.

Looking for More Small Business Twitter Tips?

Read more Twitter articles on EcommerceGuide.com by this author:

Expert Tips for a Tweeting BusinessHow to Use Twitter as an Online Marketing ToolA Beginner's Guide to Twitter Terms

Vangie Beal is a veteran online seller and frequent contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com. She is also managing editor of Webopedia.com. You can tweet with her online @AuroraGG.

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Ecommerce Marketing: Understanding Web Analytics

When you're designing your ecommerce website, you should include be a means of tracking website visitor statistics. The process might be simple, and your ecommerce web hosting provider may include this as part of the service. If not there are solutions like StatCounter and Google Analytics that you can use.

Tools like Stat Counter can give you detailed information about where your visitors are coming from and where they are entering and exiting your site.
(Click for larger image).

However, simply tracking the data isn't sufficient -- you need to analyze it and use it to understand how visitors come to your site, what they do once they arrive and to identify areas of the site that need work. If you're not tracking and analyzing your website visitors then you're operating blind -- you could be hemorrhaging visitors and you won't even know or be able to stop the flow.

In this article, I'll explain what information you should track, and how you can use the information to fine-tune your website design.

Is Your Site Even There?

If people can’t access your site when they try to visit, you're losing visitors before you've had a chance to sell to them. Your site's statistics will tell you if visitors encounter a 404 Page Not Found error message. This occurs when a visitor tries to load a page that doesn't exist. It might be an incorrect link from another site or a broken link on your site.

While you can create a custom 404 page to capture visitors who encounter this error and redirect them elsewhere, it's much better if the error doesn't occur in the first place. However, you won't know if you have this problem -- or what's causing it -- if you don't check for it.

If the cause is an external link, contact the site's webmaster and advise them of the issue. If you get a lot of traffic from that site, create a special page to capture these visitors, explain the problem and redirect them to the correct page. If the problem is your own -- fix it.

How Do People Find Your Site?

Your site's statistics will tell you where your visitors come from -- through a search engine such as Google, through ads you are paying for or referred to your site by another site. For example, if you get a lot of referrals from another website you might think it worthwhile to advertise on that site or offer a giveaway to encourage more visitors from there.

You should also let that site owner know when you have something new in stock that would be appreciated by their visitors. While you want people searching for your products to find you through a search engine, it's even better when another site recommends and encourages its visitors to go to your site.  

Google Analytics is another free service that will tell you a lot of information about your site's statistics.
(Click for larger image).

A good referral can result in significant increases in your visitor traffic in the short and long term, but you won't know this is happening if you don't track where your visitors come from. And you can't focus your marketing strategies to capitalize on good relationships with website owners if you don't know they are referring visitors to you.

What Do Visitors Do on Your site?

Your website statistics will provide you with information about the most popular pages on your site. These might vary week to week depending on referral traffic, but over time you should see which pages receive the most visitors. You should keep these popular up-to-date and focus on improving in any future website design.

If these pages showcase products, and if they don't convert into sales at the expected rate based on the traffic they get, then ask yourself (or your customers) why they aren't buying. If these pages lead to sales, consider adding complementary products to your inventory or link these product pages to other complementary products you already have in stock to increase sales even further.

How Long Do They Stay?

Other data you can glean from your visitor statistics include the amount of time that people spend on your site and the average number of pages they view. This will tell you how exciting your site is for visitors and whether they find what they came looking for. If you have lots of visitors who stay for only a few seconds and then leave, then you're losing the visitors you've worked hard to attract.

Look at where they come from and what pages they are visiting to determine why they leave so quickly. You may need to research and talk to people to uncover the underlying problems, but you won't know they are there if you don't look for them. Visitors who leave quickly are an opportunity -- if you can keep these visitors on your site longer you have a better chance of selling to them.

What Search Terms Do They Use?

Many visitors will find your website through a search engine and chances are it's Google. Your site's statistics will confirm not only which search engine visitors use, but what keywords they were searching for. Use this data to improve your position in search engines.

Creating a custom 404 Page lets you redirect visitors to your site when they are looking for a page that can't be found.
(Click for larger image).

If you're being found using search words that don't accurately describe your site, focus on your SEO efforts to improve your visibility for the terms that will attract the visitors you want. Alternately, the keywords that are leading visitors to your site might indicate opportunities for tweaking your product line to meet an untapped need.

If you don't regularly check and analyze your site's visitor statistics then, to a large extent, you don't know much about a sizeable proportion of your visitors. While you might know a lot about the people who buy from you, you can impact your sales substantially from the people who visit but don't buy. Information you unearth through studying your web visitor statistics will show you the way to turn these people from tire-kickers into buyers.

Helen Bradley is a respected international journalist writing regularly for small business and computer publications in the USA, Canada, South Africa, UK and Australia. You can learn more about her at her Web site, HelenBradley.comYou'll find lots more software tips and tutorials from Helen Bradley in our Small Business In-Depth series, How-To With Helen Bradley.

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GoMobi: Tools for a Mobile Website

Ever try to look at a website on a cell phone or a smartphone? Unless the site's been optimized for mobile devices, it ain't pretty. DotMobi says it has tools to let you build an optimized site easily and affordably.

And, as more people use mobile devices to access the Web on the go, it makes sense to have a mobile site as part of yoursmall business marketing strategy. Small Business Computing has the full story.

As the Internet access device of choice for many consumers rapidly shifts from their desktops to their smartphones and other mobile devices, many small businesses find a sudden need for their websites to present not just a compelling experience for home users but also for mobile users on the run.

The main problem to date, for many small businesses, has been the lack of a small business computing platform that makes it easy and cost effective to have a mobile presence that's on a par with its full-sized desktop pages.

Read the complete GoMobi mobile website tools article

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Marketing Apps and More from Constant Contact

Constant Contact, a leader in small business email marketing, recently launched a new online application marketplace to help small business owners and etailers find help for a host of tasks including website design, SEO and mobile device apps. Small Business Computing has the full story.

Many small business owners have known about, and dealt with, email marketing firm Constant Contact for years.

After all, the Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT) launched its first product in 1998. Today, in addition to email marketing, it offers event marketing and social networking marketing, as well as online survey and Internet marketing tools.

Tuesday, the company launched Constant Contact MarketPlace, a free online service designed to help small companies find products and services to help them build their businesses.

Read the complete Constant Contact application marketplace article

Ecommerce Marketing and Social NetworkingGet back to bootstrapping roots to speed your business’ recovery

Google Hopes Commerce Search 2.0 Boosts Online Sales

Google has taken the wraps of Google Commerce Search 2.0, the first major revision of its commerce offering that debuted last year for online retailers. The new version of the cloud-based service is available now in the United States and United Kingdom.]

The hosted cloud service leverages Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) search expertise to help smaller e-tailers better compete with the ecommerce giants such as Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN).

"There's been a lot of innovation in the past 10 years, but the reality is that it's been limited to a handful of retailers. When you go to the other ones there's a big difference in the user experience," Nitin Mangtani, senior product manager at Google, told InternetNews.com.

Mangtani noted that some ecommerce sites have no real search function and lack basic features like spell-checking, which can impact how well the search features they do have perform.

"Misspell Nike in a query and you'll get zero results, even when it's an item the store carries," he said. Commerce Search 2.0 includes spell-checking and an auto-completion feature similar to Google's main search engine that's designed to offer users suggestions as they begin to type in a query. With Commerce Search 2.0, auto-completion is specific to what the store offers, rather than offering suggestions from the Web at large. A Dashboard for Ecommerce Customization

This kind of customization is the biggest improvement in Commerce Search 2.0.

"What we heard from customers is that they want some control on top of the automation engine, and that's what this 2.0 launch is all about," Mangtani said.

The new version includes rules wizards and a dashboard designed to let the ecommerce site factor in promotions and sale prices items into search results. For example, a consumer electronics site can be sure a special on Nikon cameras shows up in response to a query for digital cameras anytime between Friday and Sunday when the sale price is in effect.

Google said it's designed the auto-completion and results ranking to be easy to implement without any custom coding.

The original Commerce Search had an entry price of $50,000 annually, but in a bid to broaden its appeal, Google has dropped the entry price to $25,000 annually, which also includes around-the-clock support.

High-traffic sites with lots of inventory may still be subject to the original higher rate, as Google charges based on the number of products (SKUs) in a site's catalog and the number of search queries entered on the site each year.

IDC analyst Hadley Reynolds said there are several other search companies, notably Endeca Technologies and Mercado Software (now owned by Adobe), that offer sophisticated ecommerce solutions with high levels of customization, though they're priced much higher than Google's product.

Hadley said Google is playing catch up with its dashboard interface, but thinks the service has great potential to appeal to Internet retailers who can't afford the competitive offerings and perhaps don't need the same depth of features.

"Lowering the price point underscores that Google is going after the low- to mid-range of the market that isn't being served today," Reynolds told InternetNews.com. "When Google came out with Commerce last year it was considered a good opportunity, but it didn't make the splash a lot of people expected because it wasn't easy to build a good navigation experience and there was no dashboard console."

While he's waiting to see how well Commerce Search 2.0 performs, Hadley said his initial take is that it's following a similar path as Google's enterprise search offering.

"When Google introduced its enterprise search appliance it came with a relatively entry-level set of capabilities that they expanded over time, and it became much more competitive," he said. "I suspect the same thing is going on with Commerce Search. The 2.0 release fixes some of the obvious shortcomings of ecommerce search products, and I expect Google to continue to enhance the service."

David Needle is the West Coast bureau chief at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.

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5 Low- or No-Cost Ecommerce Marketing Methods

Whether you’ve just opened a small business ecommerce store or if you’re looking to build your customer base, there are many affordable or even free options that can help you build your clientele. Instead of sitting waiting for customers to find you, these small business marketing tips let you turn idle moments into traffic building opportunities.

You can implement many of these techniques piecemeal. You can start today, and then work a little more every day to drive traffic to your site.

1. Search Engine Registration

It’s critical that people can find you when they search for the products or services that you provide. When you first open your store, register your site with search engines. Start with the big ones like Google, Bing and Yahoo -- it's free. Enter the URL for the home page of your store, and click the "Submit URL" button.

In most cases, you’ll submit just your home page and the search engine’s crawler will find the other pages from that one. The downside is that it takes some time before your site will be listed on the search engines, so it’s best to get your registration done sooner rather than later.

Ensure that every page of your small business ecommerce site has both a description and keywords placed in Meta tags in the head of the page. Many search engines use these to index your site and to display search results, so they can affect how easily potential buyers can find your site and how it shows up in the results list.

2. Product Reviews and Information

Distinguish your small business ecommerce store from others on the Web by including product reviews and detailed product descriptions. First, search out and link to reviews and information about the product elsewhere on the Web. Introduce these links with a short paragraph or two summarizing some of the reviewers’ opinions or the information you’re linking to.

In time, as your business grows, your own purchasers are a great source for reviews. Encourage your customers to review the products they bought by offering a coupon or code for a discount on a future purchase. You get reviews that help boost your site’s appeal, and your customers get a thank you that encourages them to buy from you again.

The more information you provide about the products you sell, the more trust your customers will have in you and your business. Over time, this content will also be indexed by search engines and can help improve your site’s ranking.

3. Leverage Traffic from Other Sites

Harness the popularity of other websites by exchanging links with other business. Look for websites for businesses that are complementary to yours but that don’t directly compete with you. For example, if you sell wedding cake decorations, look for any website offering products and services related to weddings and commitment ceremonies. Offer to link your website to their business in exchange for their website linking back to yours.

Reverse links not only help improve your site’s ranking with many search engines, they also encourage traffic to your site from these other websites and vice versa. Contact the site owners either via email or by phone to ask for the exchange. Make sure to provide them with your URL and some suggested link text or an image so that you make it easy for them to link to your site.

If you decide to put a little more effort into this process, create a page with banners and images that other website owners can choose from as a means to link to your site. This way they can choose a size that fits their site’s design.

4. Blog, Guest Blog and Write Articles

A blog linked to your small business ecommerce site is a great way to drive traffic when it contains posts and information that add value to your business. If you sell wedding cake decorations, write a post for each new design you get in (or for slow sellers or popular designs).

Post photos of cakes topped with your designs, tell how customers use your products; show customers how to paint their toppers with their own clothing colors; explain how to place the decorations on the cake; suggest what they might do with the toppers after the wedding. Bottom line -- anything to do with cakes, celebrations and decorations is a potential blog post.

Offer to guest blog for other sites related to your business, and accept guest posts from those site owners, too. When your guest blog post includes a link back to your site, it will drive traffic from that blog back to your site.

Another way to showcase your product knowledge and expertise is to submit relevant articles to article syndication sites. These sites get a lot of traffic and rank high in search engine results. Again, when you include a link back to your site in your article, you’ll drive traffic they’ve found back to your site.

5. Post Answers and Opinions on Other Sites

One great way to subtly advertise your small business ecommerce site is to increase your visibility on the Web in places where your potential customers gather.

Seek out sites where your customers hang out and look for readers with questions or comments that are within your area of expertise. In the wedding decoration scenario, you could visit sites that discuss wedding planning and answer questions and comment on topics that relate to your area of knowledge.

It’s vital when you do this that you show yourself as being informative, knowledgeable and helpful rather than being there just to do the hard sell on your products. Add a link to your site below your signature when you post an answer or comment so interested readers can find you.

Bottom Line

You can start these techniques immediately and implement them over time. All of them can and should be part of your ongoing marketing efforts. It will take time and work (but not a lot of cash) to develop a base of links around the Web that all point back to your site. While each link may only drive small amounts of traffic -- when you add all the small amounts of traffic together they can build over time to become a steady stream.

Additional ResourcesTop 10 Free Small Business SEO ToolsSmall Business SEO: How to Use Google AnalyticsBuild Your Business: How to Establish Your ExpertiseThree Reasons to Keep Your Small Business BlogHow to Set Up a Blog for Your BusinessHow Small Businesses Can Attract New Customers

Helen Bradley is a respected international journalist writing regularly for small business and computer publications in the USA, Canada, South Africa, UK and Australia. You can learn more about her at her Web site, HelenBradley.com

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20 Free and Low-Cost EBay Tools for Sellers

When it comes to selling on eBay there's no denying that item listing pages often need a little more oomph than the standard eBay tools you'll find on eBay.com provide. Our list of 20 tools are best suited to small and mid-sized sellers, are free to use or are eBay tools that you can use for less than $20 per month.

Using eBay tools can help you enhance the look of your eBay listing and make the process of listing on eBay quicker and easier. Plus, some of these eBay tools for sellers can add interactive features to make your listing stand out in the crowded eBay marketplace.

EBay Tools for Image Manipulation and Hosting

Gimp for Windows is a free and open-source image editor that offers eBay sellers a Photoshop-esque look and feel. You can use Gimp for photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. Because Gimp is beta volunteer-developed software, support and updates may not be available. Gimp for Windows requires Windows 2000, XP, 2003 or Vista. Gimp is also available for other operating systems.

Photobucket is an online service that eBay sellers can use to host listing images. Photobucket automatically generates your link code for email, instant messaging, a direct link, or an HTML code link. Other options include slide shows and some image editing tools. The free account offers 1GB of storage.

PhotoPlus Version 9 is free photo-editing software from Serif Europe Ltd. that can be used to edit brightness, contrast, color balance, remove red-eye and other common editing functions for digital photographs. It offers an export optimizer, photo enhancements, selection tools, image slicing and editable text. PhotoPlus is free, with an enhanced version available for $9.99.

Picasa is free image software offered by Google that lets you organize all the photos on your computer and also edit those photos and add effects.  You can use it to do basic editing functions such as crop, straighten, red-eye removal, change color or contrast, change the lighting and also add effects like soft focus, tint, glow, and others. The software is completely free, and it is a professional organizing and editing tool.

Village Photos is an eBay Certified Developer, so you can be sure that its image hosting service will work well for eBay sellers. Village Photos assigns a permanent URL to the images you upload and also provides URL, HTML and Thumbnail view code you can copy and paste. Free accounts are limited to 50 images and monthly plans start at $3.75 for up to 800 images.

EBay Tools for Creating Interactive Listings

SitePal  is a hosted service that allows you to create a speaking avatar for your eBay listing or website. Character options allow you to use your own photo and record your own voice or use built-in Text-To-Speech.  SitePal offers a free 15-day trial is offered with monthly subscriptions starting at $19.95 per month.

Page Mage is a listing eBay tool (see Listing Tool section below) with eBay templates, however its features allow sellers to add video, moving text, slide shows and more to eBay listings. The service is free for up to 24 listings per month and $9.95 per month for unlimited listings. You can read our in-depth Page Mage coverage here.

EBay Tools for Bulk Listing and Auction Management

AuctionSound is an eBay auction management software product that sellers can use to manage eBay consignment and online inventory. The software handles image hosting, eBay templates, consignor management, and offers reporting tools. AuctionSound offers a free 30-day trial with a $24.99 AS Lite (starter version) price.

Auctiva auction management provides eBay sellers with a number of tools including professionally designed eBay templates, marketing tools, image hosting, listing software and inventory management. Auctiva offers a free 30-day trial with monthly subscription plans starting at $19.95

Blackthorne Basic is a software application that will enable you to create professional listings in bulk, track the status of sales, and manage buyer communication and feedback - all from your desktop. Blackthorne Basic offers a free 30-day trial and costs $9.99 per month on a subscription basis. Medium to high-volume sellers can upgrade to Blackthorne Pro (free trial and $24.99 per month subscription).

EBay Selling Manager is free for all eBay sellers and can be accessed from within your "My eBay" tab. The tool is designed to help medium-volume sellers manage their eBay listings. Features include the option to track active listings, generate bulk feedback, and print invoices and labels in bulk.

EBay Turbo Lister is a free listing tool that lets sellers list multiple items and upload in bulk to eBay. Turbo Lister offers bulk editing capability, search tools, and a toolbar for better control of your listings.

Supreme Auction is an eBay Compatible application that lets you create multiple listings and submit them to eBay. The application offers free template designs, widgets, images and more. With this tool you can list on eBay US, eBay UK, eBay Germany. A freeware version is available with options to upgrade to add more features.

EBay Tools for Creating Unique HTML Listing Templates

BiggerBids offers eBay HTML layouts for your listings. The template allows you to store information that remains the same from one auction to the next. Free 30-day trial available after which the monthly fee is $8.95 for unlimited auction layouts and image hosting.

Listing Factory allows you to create professional-looking eBay Templates using more than 100 pre-designed templates or you can design your own. The service automates eBay HTML output without the seller needing to type a single line of code. A free trial account provides access to Listing Factory's hosting server. The standard version is available for $49.95 per year.

EBay Tools for Market Research

HammerTap is an eBay research tool that helps sellers to discover what products to sell and how to make more sales more often. The HammerTap service provides tools for research, market trending, listing optimization, keywords and more. HammerTap offers a free 10-day trial with monthly plans available for $19.95.

Marketplace Research by Terapeak is available to eBay sellers, via the eBay website. It offers eBay sellers the option to view average selling prices, find the best performing keywords and categories, Track products to gauge market demand, and can help you determine the most effective listing format to use for your item. Monthly subscription plans start at $9.95 per month.

EBay Tools for Shipping Assistance

EBay Shipping Calculator is an eBay tool that lets you specifying shipping costs in your listing. eBay's free Shipping Calculator provides real-time shipping costs to buyers all over the world -- and since all sellers are required to specify shipping costs, this is a pretty handy tool.

UPS Shipping Calculator is a free online tool that lets eBay sellers provide shipping and package details to obtain rate information for available UPS courier services. On the UPS website you simply provide the shipping and package information to calculate the cost of shipping your eBay packages using UPS.

USPS Shipping Calculator is another free online shipping tool that lets sellers provide shipping and package details to obtain rate information for available USPS delivery services. The USPS website also offers a number of helpful guides including Domestic Price Charts, International Price Charts, Postal Zone Charts and information on APO/FPO/DPO Restrictions.

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Vangie Beal is a veteran online seller and frequent contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com. She is also managing editor of Webopedia.com. You can tweet with her online @AuroraGG.

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Google's 'May Day' May Affect Ecommerce SEO

New changes to the way Google handles and ranks 'long-tail' queries -- searches that use multiple words -- have caused many websites to be displaced from the search giant's pages index. Dubbed "May Day," the new update could have serious repercussions for website page ranking. Small Business Computing has the full story.

At the beginning of the Web era, many search queries were only a few keywords in length. Times change, and Web users are now searching by using longer queries of more than three words.

As Web searching habits are changing, so is search engine giant Google -- with serious implications for how businesses' sites are ranked as well.

At a keynote presentation at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) Toronto conference, Maile Ohye, senior developer programs engineer at Google, explained how Google's "May Day" update -- which actually began impacting search results on April 28 -- changed the way Google indexes so-called 'long-tail" queries, in which a user enters multiple keywords for a search.

Read the complete Google page ranking article

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Will Bing Search Definition Affect Ecommerce Ads?

Bing began its second year of operation at the end of May but it didn't get any birthday presents, except for maybe not losing any ground to Google.

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Bing's share of the global search market remained nearly flat in May compared with April, according to numbers released Friday by Web analytics firm comScore (NASDAQ: SCOR).

However, a controversy has come up over how to define a "search."

Recently, both Bing and Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) have introduced "slide show" features that are counted as searches as users scroll through them, causing the numbers to be a little off from previous measurements, post on the company's blog.

In the meantime, Schachter said, direct comparisons of market share month to month may be off.

"It is easy to make adjustments for May (based on the numbers provided), but understanding the baseline of comScore's 'core' search will only become less clear," he said in a research note Friday.

"On an adjusted basis, backing out Yahoo and [Bing's] use of contextual shortcuts and image slide shows from both May and April, we estimate YHOO's share declined ... in May to 16.6 percent, while Bing's share was flat month to month at approximately 10.8 percent," Schachter added.

Yahoo's April numbers were 16.9 percent.

Meanwhile, Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) share of the search market gained a point, from 65.4 percent in April to 66.4 percent in May.

However, without taking out the "definitional" changes in comScore's numbers, the scoring comes out somewhat differently.

For instance, without removing the slide show data, Bing holds 12.1 percent, a slight gain from April's 11.8 percent showing, while Yahoo came in at 18.3 percent again a small gain from 17.7 percent in April. Using the same criteria, Google had 63.7 percent share, a slight decline from 64.4 in April.

Stuart J. Johnston is a contributing writer at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.

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Google Predicts Mobile Ad Surge as AdMob Deal Closes

Less than a week after winning the blessing of antitrust authorities, Google has closed its $750 million acquisition of the mobile ad network AdMob, giving the search giant pole position in the emerging wireless advertising space.

"It's clear that mobile advertising is becoming a much larger part of our clients' and partners' strategies and with this acquisition, it's now a central part of our own business," Susan Wojcicki, Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) vice president of product management, said in a blog post.

Now that the papers are in order, Google is beginning the work of integrating the companies' personnel and platforms, offering mobile marketers the assurance of a smooth transition and more specific product announcements in the near future.

Google had a tough time selling the AdMob acquisition to antitrust officials at the Federal Trade Commission, who worried that it would extend the company's dominance in the digital advertising space and took a long look at the transaction. Ultimately, and largely aided by rival Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) subsequent acquisition of the mobile ad firm Quattro Wireless and launch of its own iAd advertising platform, the FTC commissioners unanimously voted to close the investigation.

Google had argued that the mobile advertising market is highly competitive and evolving rapidly, and that AdMob is only one of a growing number of mobile ad networks competing for marketers' advertising dollars.

AdMob was of particular interest to Google both for its reach and its innovation in new ad formats, such as units placed within third-party applications. Google's Android platform is actively courting developers as it looks to narrow the application gap with Apple's iPhone, its chief rival in the smartphone sector. Mobile Ads On The Rise

Wojcicki had high praise for AdMob's work in developing interactive and rich-media ad formats for applications, but she said that search remains the order of the day for mobile marketers.

In the past two years, Google has seen a more than fivefold increase in its mobile search queries, and it's only picking up steam, she said. In the first quarter of this year, smartphone users with full WebKit browsers submitted 62 percent more search queries than they did in the fourth quarter of 2009. Innovations such as the click-to-call feature found in many mobile search ads make the format more compelling for users, who often use their smartphones to search for local businesses while on the go.

"With many more advances to come, search advertising will remain the central way that many businesses connect with consumers on mobile devices," Wojcicki said.

Google executives have talked often of the enormous opportunity of the mobile ad platform as smartphones take on more of the functions of notebooks and desktops. Eric Schmidt, the company's CEO, has predicted that mobile ad revenues will eventually eclipse ad sales from the traditional Web on the company's balance sheet.

The narrative that Google is presenting to marketers holds that mobile is no longer an experimental medium, but rather an engaging digital platform that is attracting increasing levels of consumers' attention and deserves a proportional slice of the media mix.

Surveys such as the one released yesterday by ABI Research help bolster that argument. The firm found that of mobile users who had visited a website on their handheld device, 27 percent said they had clicked on a banner ad or text link, up from 21 percent in a similar survey 14 months earlier.

"Every day, more marketers are looking to take advantage of the mobile-specific capabilities, extended reach, great returns and value that mobile advertising provides," Wojcicki said. "Advertisers are now starting to see mobile as an essential part of their overall campaigns, not just a siloed experiment on the side."

Kenneth Corbin is an associate editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.

AT&T adds smartphone price optionsGoogle Predicts Mobile Ad Surge as AdMob Deal Closes

Google Predicts Mobile Ad Surge as AdMob Deal Closes

Less than a week after winning the blessing of antitrust authorities, Google has closed its $750 million acquisition of the mobile ad network AdMob, giving the search giant pole position in the emerging wireless advertising space.

"It's clear that mobile advertising is becoming a much larger part of our clients' and partners' strategies and with this acquisition, it's now a central part of our own business," Susan Wojcicki, Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) vice president of product management, said in a blog post.

Now that the papers are in order, Google is beginning the work of integrating the companies' personnel and platforms, offering mobile marketers the assurance of a smooth transition and more specific product announcements in the near future.

Google had a tough time selling the AdMob acquisition to antitrust officials at the Federal Trade Commission, who worried that it would extend the company's dominance in the digital advertising space and took a long look at the transaction. Ultimately, and largely aided by rival Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) subsequent acquisition of the mobile ad firm Quattro Wireless and launch of its own iAd advertising platform, the FTC commissioners unanimously voted to close the investigation.

Google had argued that the mobile advertising market is highly competitive and evolving rapidly, and that AdMob is only one of a growing number of mobile ad networks competing for marketers' advertising dollars.

AdMob was of particular interest to Google both for its reach and its innovation in new ad formats, such as units placed within third-party applications. Google's Android platform is actively courting developers as it looks to narrow the application gap with Apple's iPhone, its chief rival in the smartphone sector. Mobile Ads On The Rise

Wojcicki had high praise for AdMob's work in developing interactive and rich-media ad formats for applications, but she said that search remains the order of the day for mobile marketers.

In the past two years, Google has seen a more than fivefold increase in its mobile search queries, and it's only picking up steam, she said. In the first quarter of this year, smartphone users with full WebKit browsers submitted 62 percent more search queries than they did in the fourth quarter of 2009. Innovations such as the click-to-call feature found in many mobile search ads make the format more compelling for users, who often use their smartphones to search for local businesses while on the go.

"With many more advances to come, search advertising will remain the central way that many businesses connect with consumers on mobile devices," Wojcicki said.

Google executives have talked often of the enormous opportunity of the mobile ad platform as smartphones take on more of the functions of notebooks and desktops. Eric Schmidt, the company's CEO, has predicted that mobile ad revenues will eventually eclipse ad sales from the traditional Web on the company's balance sheet.

The narrative that Google is presenting to marketers holds that mobile is no longer an experimental medium, but rather an engaging digital platform that is attracting increasing levels of consumers' attention and deserves a proportional slice of the media mix.

Surveys such as the one released yesterday by ABI Research help bolster that argument. The firm found that of mobile users who had visited a website on their handheld device, 27 percent said they had clicked on a banner ad or text link, up from 21 percent in a similar survey 14 months earlier.

"Every day, more marketers are looking to take advantage of the mobile-specific capabilities, extended reach, great returns and value that mobile advertising provides," Wojcicki said. "Advertisers are now starting to see mobile as an essential part of their overall campaigns, not just a siloed experiment on the side."

Kenneth Corbin is an associate editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.

Google Predicts Mobile Ad Surge as AdMob Deal ClosesAT&T adds smartphone price options

Microsoft Bing Becomes More 'Social'

Microsoft announced it has integrated live feeds from Facebook into its Bing search engine's results, making Bing's social networking ties tighter than ever. Additionally, the company's developers are working on a significant upgrade to the Bing Webmaster tools.

The move comes as Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) continues to roll out new and enhanced search capabilities in what has been referred to as the Bing spring update. Last fall, Microsoft announced plans to include Twitter feeds in Bing search results.

Now, it has extended support to Facebook feeds as well, Microsoft spokesperson Lawrence Kim said in a post to the Bing Community blog Wednesday.

"Today, [we] ... announced bing.com/social -- the first search experience integrating the full Facebook fire hose with non-pages content," Kim's post said. By that he means it integrates the social site's entire data feed.

"In addition to Tweets, we also search through Facebook fan page updates and surface matching results. For example, a search for 'NBA Finals' will return fan-page content from Facebook, including posts from a local TV station," Kim's post continued.

That may provide more opportunities for search advertisers and ecommerce players, conceivably helping Bing gain more market share vis-а-vis other search competitors, particularly Google (NASDAQ: GOOG). Beyond beefing up Bing's social pedigree, however, Microsoft's engineers are also working to make it easier to manage sites.

The company is giving preview demos of some of the new capabilities coming in the free Bing Webmaster Tools for Webmasters and search engine optimizers (SEO), according to a separate post to the Bing Community blog, by Rick DeJarnette, a spokesperson for the Bing Webmaster Center.

In that post, DeJarnette described the main areas that developers are focusing on in updating the Webmaster tools as crawling, indexing, and traffic, but he also pointed out that the tools add a new user interface as well as enhanced charting capabilities.

"A key, new feature to Bing Webmaster Tools is Index Explorer, a tree-view that enables webmasters to see at a glance all of the crawling and index data for their website," DeJarnette said.

In addition, the toolset is adding a feature that lets webmasters send a list of URLs to Bing to be prioritized, the post said.

"URLs submitted through this tool will be recrawled or crawled and added to the index if not already included," DeJarnette added.

Finally, a new Block URLs tool gives Webmasters control over what content to block from search engine results pages, he said.

Microsoft’s updated Bing Webmaster Tools will be available this summer, a company Microsoft spokesperson told InternetNews.com.

Stuart J. Johnston is a contributing writer at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.

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A Mobile Goldmine? Growth in Smartphone Ad Clicks

In the latest indication of the rise in mobile Internet use and the growing potential there for marketers, a new survey finds there's been a jump in how many users click on ads while using their mobile phone.

In its most recent consumer survey, ABI Research said 27 percent of mobile phone users accessing Web site using mobile phones have clicked on a mobile banner ad or text link. A thousand U.S. consumers participated in the survey.

While the new results represent a bump from the 21 percent of mobile users who said they clicked on an ad or text link in a survey ABI conducted 14 months earlier, it still means the bigger number is the majority of mobile users who said they aren't clicking on ads on their mobile devices. Still, Neil Strother, ABI Research's practice director for mobile marketing strategies, said the latest results are encouraging.

"More people are accessing Web sites through their mobile phones today than 14 months ago, and clicking on ads is becoming more commonplace," Strother said in a statement. "This trend is a positive one for marketers and advertisers, and should give them greater confidence in their mobile efforts, knowing that well-targeted offerings can find traction among consumers.”

To get better response, Strother said mobile marketers should purchase inventory on mobile Web sites that have the most relevant audience profile for the products or services they're advertising. Another key, he said, is to present creative elements that meet the needs of those mobile consumers.

Beyond ads, the Mobile Marketing Consumer Survey includes some other interesting metrics related to mobile use. For example, the number of mobile users accessing the Internet on a daily basis is up. ABI said 28 percent of mobile phone users said they access Internet sites at least once a day from their phones, a jump from 16 percent in the earlier survey.

Companies looking to send promotions to mobile would find some measure of good news in the latest survey. About 45 percent of the respondents said they were willing to accept promotions like coupons and discounts if they have control over the process. In the earlier survey, only 36 percent said they would accept mobile promotions. However, ABI noted that even the consumers who said they were willing to accept promotions were "not enthusiastic" about the prospect of receiving them.

There was also some bad news in the findings for e-commerce marketers looking for signs of growth in mobile purchasing. Asked about using their mobile phone to make purchases, 76 percent of survey respondents said security related to such transactions is a major concern. That number is up from the earlier survey when 71 percent said security was a major concern.

The ABI Research survey was completed in February; meanwhile, mobile ad providers continue to push the envelope with new technology designed to get users to be more engaged with ads. Just this week iVdopia, which has rolled out ad formats for the Apple iPhone and Android mobile OSes, introduced a new "Viper" ad format for the iPhone. With the new iVdopia-powered ads, a simple fingertip swipe on an ad reveals a menu of interactive options to get more information and play multimedia content.

Google also previewed a similar kind of swipe-to-see-more in-depth ad feature for Android devices at its recent Google I/O developer conference.

David Needle is the West Coast bureau chief at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.

A Mobile Goldmine? Growth in Smartphone Ad ClicksMarketers put new American shopper under microscope

Google Tweaks Search With New Features

Google has pushed out several new search features that reflect both innovation and, in at least one case, represents a response to rival Bing.

The news is key for industry watchers, search marketers and users of the world's most popular search engine, which is working to not just safeguard its massive hold on users and ad dollars by enhancing its appeal, but to stave off competition from players like Microsoft's Bing.

Several new Google improvements aim to make it easier for users to find what they seem to be seeking. That's the case with an enhancement to Google Suggest, the feature that gives a best guess for a search term so that a query can be entered at a click without typing in the full word or phrase.

For example, as you enter the letters, B, A, R, A... in the search box, a drop-down menu suggests a list of popular related search terms starting with "Barack Obama". Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO), Bing and other search engines have a similar feature.

Now with the latest enhancement, Google Suggest adds a "did you mean" feature designed to offer a meaningful suggestion -- within the search box -- to cover misspellings in instances when Suggest wouldn't typically offer any completions.

That's a feature that could make it easier for searchers to find products and services on Google that they might not necessarily know how to spell -- a potential boon for marketers.

In practice, however, users might not need the feature very often because Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) already is pretty good at guessing users' intention despite misspelled queries. In a brief test, it was pretty hard to get the "did you mean" drop-down box to appear at all. For example, Google readily suggested "Steve Jobs" when the term "Stve jbs" was entered and it also offered "Boston Celtics" for the entry "Bstn clltcs."

Marissa Meyer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, said in a blog post that the "did you mean" feature is currently only available at the Google.com search page in English, but the company is looking to roll it out internationally "in the near future." Android and iPhone Apps, Bing-like Backgrounds

Developers looking to market their mobile apps may have a slightly easier time of it as well, thanks to another recent enhancement to Google.

For end users, finding the right application on a mobile device can often be daunting now that there are over 200,000 applications for the iPhone and tens of thousands available for Android devices. Now, Google said it's offering more information to app search results to make effective discovery easier.

Mayer said Google's now offering a "special result" at the top of a mobile search that shows basic information about the app, whether it's a travel tool, budgeting, game or other application. The Google result will include title, price and publisher and a link that takes the user directly to the Android Market or iPhone App Store, depending on the device a searcher is using.

When Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) overhauled its search strategy and launched Bing a year ago, it brought a few new wrinkles to the search page. One of those was break from the standard, barebones search page popularized by Google where there are very elements on the page besides the search box and logo.

A third enhancement is designed to broaden Google's already-massive appeal by co-opting a feature found on a rival. In addition to presenting an industry-standard search box, Bing introduced a series of dramatic background images that change daily on its search page.

Google is keeping its Spartan design, but is now giving users the option to add their own choice of colorful backgrounds. The main Google search page now includes a "change background image" link on the lower left-side of the page that lets users choose from a public gallery of images or add an image of their own.

David Needle is the West Coast bureau chief at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.

Google Tweaks Search With New FeaturesAT&T adds smartphone price options

Reward Ecommerce Customers with Loyalty Programs

Offering a loyalty or rewards program to customers can help your ecommerce business acquire, engage and retain customers.  Offline, traditional retailers have offered these types of rewards programs to boost sales by encouraging repeat business.  More importantly, the back-end management of a loyalty program allows you to discover who a customer is, and to track and build demographic profile of that customer.

When considering a rewards program for your ecommerce business, Peter Oxley, CEO and co-founder of RewardStream,  says that a rewards program is used differently between retail stores and ecommerce businesses.   When you don’t have an ecommerce business, he added, “The big challenge is that a store just doesn’t know who their customer is when they go through the check-out.”

A retail store owner would consider a loyalty program simply because it is difficult for a retailer to have loyalty with someone they don’t know.  In contrast, an ecommerce business owner would already have some profiling and tracking in place, but the reward program would help you to further profile customers who use “guest” check-out or those who purchase using different credit cards, and also give you an advantage over your online competitors. 

A big benefit of rewards programs is the data you collect that will help you identify profile and segment your customers.  Once you discover who your customer is through demographic profiling, Oxley says that you are then able to build a relationship with that person and meet other customer relationship management (CRM) objectives, such as customer acquisition, engagement, retention, and advocacy.

Affordable Rewards Programs for Small Business Ecommerce

Until recently, rewards programs, were largely seen as something only the mega big-box retailers could afford.  After all, who other than the “big boys” could spend upwards of $300,000 a year to discover who their customers are and reward that loyalty?

The cost of offering rewards programs has decreased as cloud computing, software-as-a-service (SaaS), hosted ecommerce platforms, and IT outsourcing have become more pervasive.

Oxley said that the cost of offering a sophisticated loyalty program to your customers is around one- quarter to one-fifth the price it used to be -- making loyalty programs a more affordable investment for smaller retailers and ecommerce businesses.

While the cost of earning customer loyalty has changed, one thing that hasn’t changed is how to plan and deliver a rewards program that is appealing to customers and also meets your business objectives.

Decide on Your Loyalty Rewards Program Objectives

Ecommerce businesses that are considering a rewards program first need to decide what specific behaviors they want to obtain with the program. If your objective were only to acquire new customers, the type of program you would offer would be different than if your goal were to gain repeat business from your customers.

Oxley said that planning a successful loyalty program starts with deciding which behavior is the most important to your business. Once you have that figured out, he then recommends that you plan your rewards program around the behavior you are most looking to get from your customers.  

Before you launch a program, first decide the objective:  are you trying to acquire more customers, are you having a problem with retaining customers, or do you want to encourage brand advocacy? Once you decide on the behavior, then you can then create a program to meet that objective.

Ecommerce Loyalty Rewards Trends

One of the most common ecommerce rewards we see online is coupons, or coupon codes. Consumers love to search for discount codes to obtain an instant reward when they make an online purchase.  One reason it is so popular is because it is easy to get and it's a reward that a customer obtains immediately.

Oxley says that this type of reward is very transactional in nature, and if your objective is mass acquisition, then this would a type of rewards program to consider, but if you are looking to capture another consumer behavior, you may need to go a little deeper.

Here, Oxley suggests that even a coupon program -- if the right tactics are applied -- can help you to acquire new customers in addition to those one-time coupon shoppers.  One suggestion is to offer the coupon codes to the masses, but then move towards a more deeply targeted loyalty-based rewards program. This will help a small business ecommerce site convert that one-time coupon shopper into a repeat customer that it can profile, and have a loyal relationship with.

Tips for Starting a Small Business Ecommerce Rewards Program

When looking to incorporate a loyalty rewards program in to your ecommerce business, it is important to remember that many of the popular rewards programs that work well in retail stores may not be a good fit for an ecommerce business.

 Oxley offers the following tips for ecommerce business owners who are planning to incorporate a loyalty program:

There are a lot of marketing incentives, such as online coupons, available to ecommerce businesses to get a consumer to your Web site. Plan a rewards program that will convert those one-and-done coupon shoppers to be loyal customers.Small business ecommerce site owners can work with manufacturers to help fund a reward program that is based on product sales.  For example you can reach out to your vendors and offer product-specific promotions and have the vendor pay or co-pay for the reward. Use available technology to create a real-time (occurring immediately) online rewards program. The rewards and points should be earned in real time and redemption should also be in real time. It is important to give consumers choice. Your reward program should allow customers to choose different ways to redeem their rewards. If you are using a points-based reward program, let customers do different things, like store the points to obtain a free product or redeem for immediate cash off when they make a purchase.  Choice-driven reward programs are very much in demand by today’s consumers.  Make it easy for your consumer to join the program and redeem rewards when they choose. For example, if you offer a vendor rebate for a specific product, ensure the reward is obtainable immediately at the check-out and not as a future purchase or a mail-in rebate.  Customers should not have to “jump through hoops” to obtain their loyalty reward. Vangie Beal is a veteran online seller and frequent contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com. She is also managing editor of Webopedia.com. You can tweet with her online @AuroraGG.

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Google Predicts Mobile Ad Surge as AdMob Deal Closes

Less than a week after winning the blessing of antitrust authorities, Google has closed its $750 million acquisition of the mobile ad network AdMob, giving the search giant pole position in the emerging wireless advertising space.

"It's clear that mobile advertising is becoming a much larger part of our clients' and partners' strategies and with this acquisition, it's now a central part of our own business," Susan Wojcicki, Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) vice president of product management, said in a blog post.

Now that the papers are in order, Google is beginning the work of integrating the companies' personnel and platforms, offering mobile marketers the assurance of a smooth transition and more specific product announcements in the near future.

Google had a tough time selling the AdMob acquisition to antitrust officials at the Federal Trade Commission, who worried that it would extend the company's dominance in the digital advertising space and took a long look at the transaction. Ultimately, and largely aided by rival Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) subsequent acquisition of the mobile ad firm Quattro Wireless and launch of its own iAd advertising platform, the FTC commissioners unanimously voted to close the investigation.

Google had argued that the mobile advertising market is highly competitive and evolving rapidly, and that AdMob is only one of a growing number of mobile ad networks competing for marketers' advertising dollars.

AdMob was of particular interest to Google both for its reach and its innovation in new ad formats, such as units placed within third-party applications. Google's Android platform is actively courting developers as it looks to narrow the application gap with Apple's iPhone, its chief rival in the smartphone sector. Mobile Ads On The Rise

Wojcicki had high praise for AdMob's work in developing interactive and rich-media ad formats for applications, but she said that search remains the order of the day for mobile marketers.

In the past two years, Google has seen a more than fivefold increase in its mobile search queries, and it's only picking up steam, she said. In the first quarter of this year, smartphone users with full WebKit browsers submitted 62 percent more search queries than they did in the fourth quarter of 2009. Innovations such as the click-to-call feature found in many mobile search ads make the format more compelling for users, who often use their smartphones to search for local businesses while on the go.

"With many more advances to come, search advertising will remain the central way that many businesses connect with consumers on mobile devices," Wojcicki said.

Google executives have talked often of the enormous opportunity of the mobile ad platform as smartphones take on more of the functions of notebooks and desktops. Eric Schmidt, the company's CEO, has predicted that mobile ad revenues will eventually eclipse ad sales from the traditional Web on the company's balance sheet.

The narrative that Google is presenting to marketers holds that mobile is no longer an experimental medium, but rather an engaging digital platform that is attracting increasing levels of consumers' attention and deserves a proportional slice of the media mix.

Surveys such as the one released yesterday by ABI Research help bolster that argument. The firm found that of mobile users who had visited a website on their handheld device, 27 percent said they had clicked on a banner ad or text link, up from 21 percent in a similar survey 14 months earlier.

"Every day, more marketers are looking to take advantage of the mobile-specific capabilities, extended reach, great returns and value that mobile advertising provides," Wojcicki said. "Advertisers are now starting to see mobile as an essential part of their overall campaigns, not just a siloed experiment on the side."

Kenneth Corbin is an associate editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.

AT&T adds smartphone price optionsGoogle Predicts Mobile Ad Surge as AdMob Deal Closes

ProPay Adds Encryption to ACH Transactions

Protecting your customers' personal data, particularly their financial information, is not only common sense and good business, it's the law. That task gets more complicated, and your liability can increase dramatically, when you accept credit card payments. Small Business Computing has security news from ProPay about encrypting ACH transactions to make them more secure.

Automated Clearing House (ACH) fraud is on the rise among criminal networks, and the increasing use of ACH data for electronic transactions means that companies collecting that data and expose it and them to increased risk. Enter ProPay, a credit card processing and electronic payment services company, which this month added encryption and tokenization of ACH data to its suite of ProtectPay services.

Read the complete secure electronic transations article

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A Mobile Goldmine? Growth in Smartphone Ad Clicks

In the latest indication of the rise in mobile Internet use and the growing potential there for marketers, a new survey finds there's been a jump in how many users click on ads while using their mobile phone.

In its most recent consumer survey, ABI Research said 27 percent of mobile phone users accessing Web site using mobile phones have clicked on a mobile banner ad or text link. A thousand U.S. consumers participated in the survey.

While the new results represent a bump from the 21 percent of mobile users who said they clicked on an ad or text link in a survey ABI conducted 14 months earlier, it still means the bigger number is the majority of mobile users who said they aren't clicking on ads on their mobile devices. Still, Neil Strother, ABI Research's practice director for mobile marketing strategies, said the latest results are encouraging.

"More people are accessing Web sites through their mobile phones today than 14 months ago, and clicking on ads is becoming more commonplace," Strother said in a statement. "This trend is a positive one for marketers and advertisers, and should give them greater confidence in their mobile efforts, knowing that well-targeted offerings can find traction among consumers.”

To get better response, Strother said mobile marketers should purchase inventory on mobile Web sites that have the most relevant audience profile for the products or services they're advertising. Another key, he said, is to present creative elements that meet the needs of those mobile consumers.

Beyond ads, the Mobile Marketing Consumer Survey includes some other interesting metrics related to mobile use. For example, the number of mobile users accessing the Internet on a daily basis is up. ABI said 28 percent of mobile phone users said they access Internet sites at least once a day from their phones, a jump from 16 percent in the earlier survey.

Companies looking to send promotions to mobile would find some measure of good news in the latest survey. About 45 percent of the respondents said they were willing to accept promotions like coupons and discounts if they have control over the process. In the earlier survey, only 36 percent said they would accept mobile promotions. However, ABI noted that even the consumers who said they were willing to accept promotions were "not enthusiastic" about the prospect of receiving them.

There was also some bad news in the findings for e-commerce marketers looking for signs of growth in mobile purchasing. Asked about using their mobile phone to make purchases, 76 percent of survey respondents said security related to such transactions is a major concern. That number is up from the earlier survey when 71 percent said security was a major concern.

The ABI Research survey was completed in February; meanwhile, mobile ad providers continue to push the envelope with new technology designed to get users to be more engaged with ads. Just this week iVdopia, which has rolled out ad formats for the Apple iPhone and Android mobile OSes, introduced a new "Viper" ad format for the iPhone. With the new iVdopia-powered ads, a simple fingertip swipe on an ad reveals a menu of interactive options to get more information and play multimedia content.

Google also previewed a similar kind of swipe-to-see-more in-depth ad feature for Android devices at its recent Google I/O developer conference.

David Needle is the West Coast bureau chief at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.

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Google Predicts Mobile Ad Surge as AdMob Deal Closes

Less than a week after winning the blessing of antitrust authorities, Google has closed its $750 million acquisition of the mobile ad network AdMob, giving the search giant pole position in the emerging wireless advertising space.

"It's clear that mobile advertising is becoming a much larger part of our clients' and partners' strategies and with this acquisition, it's now a central part of our own business," Susan Wojcicki, Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) vice president of product management, said in a blog post.

Now that the papers are in order, Google is beginning the work of integrating the companies' personnel and platforms, offering mobile marketers the assurance of a smooth transition and more specific product announcements in the near future.

Google had a tough time selling the AdMob acquisition to antitrust officials at the Federal Trade Commission, who worried that it would extend the company's dominance in the digital advertising space and took a long look at the transaction. Ultimately, and largely aided by rival Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) subsequent acquisition of the mobile ad firm Quattro Wireless and launch of its own iAd advertising platform, the FTC commissioners unanimously voted to close the investigation.

Google had argued that the mobile advertising market is highly competitive and evolving rapidly, and that AdMob is only one of a growing number of mobile ad networks competing for marketers' advertising dollars.

AdMob was of particular interest to Google both for its reach and its innovation in new ad formats, such as units placed within third-party applications. Google's Android platform is actively courting developers as it looks to narrow the application gap with Apple's iPhone, its chief rival in the smartphone sector. Mobile Ads On The Rise

Wojcicki had high praise for AdMob's work in developing interactive and rich-media ad formats for applications, but she said that search remains the order of the day for mobile marketers.

In the past two years, Google has seen a more than fivefold increase in its mobile search queries, and it's only picking up steam, she said. In the first quarter of this year, smartphone users with full WebKit browsers submitted 62 percent more search queries than they did in the fourth quarter of 2009. Innovations such as the click-to-call feature found in many mobile search ads make the format more compelling for users, who often use their smartphones to search for local businesses while on the go.

"With many more advances to come, search advertising will remain the central way that many businesses connect with consumers on mobile devices," Wojcicki said.

Google executives have talked often of the enormous opportunity of the mobile ad platform as smartphones take on more of the functions of notebooks and desktops. Eric Schmidt, the company's CEO, has predicted that mobile ad revenues will eventually eclipse ad sales from the traditional Web on the company's balance sheet.

The narrative that Google is presenting to marketers holds that mobile is no longer an experimental medium, but rather an engaging digital platform that is attracting increasing levels of consumers' attention and deserves a proportional slice of the media mix.

Surveys such as the one released yesterday by ABI Research help bolster that argument. The firm found that of mobile users who had visited a website on their handheld device, 27 percent said they had clicked on a banner ad or text link, up from 21 percent in a similar survey 14 months earlier.

"Every day, more marketers are looking to take advantage of the mobile-specific capabilities, extended reach, great returns and value that mobile advertising provides," Wojcicki said. "Advertisers are now starting to see mobile as an essential part of their overall campaigns, not just a siloed experiment on the side."

Kenneth Corbin is an associate editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.

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Ecommerce Dictionary: 20 Words to Know

From launching an e-commercewebsite to understanding industry regulations, this Ecommerce Dictionary -- with 20 definitions and links to helpful tips and how-to articles on Ecommerce-Guide.com -- will make your transition from retailer to e-tailer easier a much easier task to understand.

Ecommerce Hosting Lingo

Before you can open up shop online, you first have to find a place to host the website. This Ecommerce Dictionary explains some of the more common types of ecommerce site hosting phrases you are sure to encounter when setting up your online business.

Dedicated hosting: Sometimes referred to as a dedicated server, it means your website is the only one on hosted on the server. With a dedicated server, security is often tighter; however you will largely be responsible for the server management -- not just the website.

Shared hosting: Sometimes called virtual hosting, or referred to as a shared server, it basically means your website will share resources with other websites as multiple sites are running (hosted) on the same physical server.

Virtual host: A provider of Web services that includes Web server functions and Internet connection services. A virtual host is often used by companies or individuals that do not want to purchase and maintain their own Web servers and Internet connections.

Web host: The company, or service provider, that provides server space, Web services and file maintenance for Web sites controlled by individuals or companies that do not have their own Web servers.

Web server: A computer that delivers Web pages. Every Web server has an IP address and possibly a domain name. When a user types your domain name into a Web browser, it sends a request to the server to fetch the page.

Related Ecommerce-Guide Articles:  Buyers' Guide: How to Find a Web Hosting Provider, Hosting Plan Primer Common Ecommerce Website Processes

The following ecommerce phrases are ones you will encounter when designing, hosting and launching your own ecommerce website. There are a number of ecommerce standards and financial accounts you will need to be familiar with before you can accept online payments.

Credit Card Interchange: The phrase used to describe the process involved in completing a credit card transaction. The "Interchange" refers to all organizations involved in the transaction, including processors, acquirers and issuers.

Merchant Account: The type of account a business obtains from their banking institution that allows you to accept credit card payments. Merchant accounts are usually required for a retailer or e-tailer to accept customer credit cards and electronic payments

Payment Gateway: A service provided by a third-party organization, that automates a payment transaction between the shopper and merchant.  A payment gateway is actually a system of computer processes that process, verify, and accept or decline credit card transactions on behalf of the merchant through secure Internet connections.

Shopping Cart: Ecommerce software that acts as an online store's catalog and ordering process. A shopping cart is the interface between a company's Web site and its deeper infrastructure, allowing consumers to select merchandise; review what they have selected; make necessary modifications or additions; and purchase the merchandise.

Commerce Server: Web software that runs some of the main functions of an online storefront such as product display, online ordering and inventory management. This type of software is also called storefront software .

Related Ecommerce-Guide Articles:  Choosing a Payment Gateway Provider Ecommerce Marketing: Email Marketing Lingo

Learning email marketing lingo is important to help you understand what features and options you will have for tracking your email marketing campaigns. To get you started, here are ten email marketing terms you should know before starting a subscriber list for your ecommerce business.

A/B split: A type of marketing test where an email subscriber list is split into two groups; every other name in the list is sent one email message and vice versa to see which marketing message has the most successful response.

Conversion rate:  In online marketing, this phrase refers to the percentage of visitors who take a desired action. For example the percentage of people who click a hyperlink in your message and make a purchase from your Web store.

Direct digital marketing: An online marketing method that is addressable -- meaning you can identify the recipient of the email message you're distributing. Addressability comes in a variety of digital forms including an email address, a Web browser cookie or a mobile phone number.

Event triggered e-mail: A message sent to list subscribers based on an event. For example, a special message or discount coupon delivered to subscribers on their birthday or anniversary dates. The events are determined based on the information the subscribers provided when joining the list.

Open rate: This is a common email marketing phrase that basically means the number of list subscribers who opened the email message you sent.  Open rates are used to track how successful your email marketing campaign is.

Related Ecommerce-Guide Articles:  How to Find an E-Mail Marketing Service Provider, Small Business Marketing Guide Ecommerce Laws, Standards and Protocols

CAN-SPAM: The CAN-SPAM Act applies to almost all businesses in the U.S. that use email, and provides recipients of spam with the right to opt-out of these spam messages, and have their opt-out (or unsubscribe) request acted upon.  Under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, permission of the email recipient is not required prior to sending out the emails, however if a recipient wants to unsubscribe or opt-out of the mailings then the business must stop sending the emails as per the opt-out request or face severe penalties.

Certification authority:  An organization or company that issues digital certificates used to create digital signatures. The role of the certification authority (CA) is to guarantee that the individual or business that has been granted the unique certificate is, in fact, who they claim to be. CAs are a critical component in electronic commerce because they guarantee that the two parties exchanging information are actually who they claim.

Electronic Data Interchange:  The Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is a standard for the transfer of data between different companies using computer networks. EDI is becoming increasingly important as an easy mechanism for companies to buy, sell and trade information.

PCI-DSS:  Short for Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) , it is a standard that all organizations, including online retailers, must follow when storing, processing and transmitting their customer's credit card data. To be PCI complaint companies must use a number of security features, such as a firewall between a wireless network and their cardholder data environment, and also use the latest security and authentication. The PCI DSS standard specifies 12 requirements for best security practices

SSL:  Short for Secure Sockets Layer , SSL is a protocol for transmitting private documents via the Internet. SSL uses a cryptographic system with two keys to encrypt data -- a public key known to everyone and a private or secret key known only to the recipient of the message. Many websites use the protocol to obtain confidential user information, such as credit card numbers.

Definitions to hundreds of electronic commerce and email and online marketing terms can be found on Webopedia.com.

Vangie Beal is a veteran online seller and frequent contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com. She is also managing editor of Webopedia.com. You can tweet with her online @AuroraGG

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How to Optimize an Ecommerce Press Release

An old adage says that the three most important things about real estate are "location, location, location. When it comes to your small business ecommerce site, it's SEO, SEO, SEO. Anything and everything related to your site should be optimized for search engines, and that includes press releases. We show you everything you need to drive traffic with a press release. Small Business Computing has the full story.

Like practically every other form of communication, the Internet has transformed the press release. And small business owners who understand how the press release has evolved -- and how to use SEO techniques within them -- can help boost their bottom lines.

Press releases used to be mailed or blasted over wire services to journalists and analysts. The media would then decide, based on the release’s contents, whether to pursue a story or not. In the best of circumstances, the shelf life of a press release was roughly equivalent to that of a spotted banana -- extremely brief.

Read Small Business SEO: How to Optimize Press Releases

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