Author Archive: Steve

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Set Up Your Website (2)
By December 3, 2013 0 Comments Read More →

Set Up Your Website (2)

Choose How to Set Up Your Website As outlined in the previous article about Website basics, your choices to set up a website often come down to using professional web development software or a content management system (CMS). The main alternatives include: 1. Use Professional Web Development Software Over the years I’ve met brilliant designers […]

Posted in: Your Website
Website Legal Stuff
By November 24, 2013 0 Comments Read More →

Website Legal Stuff

Once you’ve decided how to set up your website, it’s a good idea to follow a few basic legal rules to help keep your business trouble-free. Most of these rules are based on common sense and good ethics – and there can be big financial reasons to follow these guidelines, too. The list below is by […]

Get the Right Shopping Cart
By November 15, 2013 0 Comments Read More →

Get the Right Shopping Cart

Your shopping cart is software that allows visitors to select the items they want to purchase, calculates shipping and tax, and communicates the costs to your payment gateway so that customers are charged the correct fees. The shopping cart also provides reports to help you manage your inventory, keep your financial books, and perform other important tasks. […]

Posted in: Your Money, Your Website
Choose How to Get Paid
By November 6, 2013 0 Comments Read More →

Choose How to Get Paid

After you’ve decided on a shopping cart, you’ll need to choose a payment gateway (sometimes called a payment provider) that securely authorizes and charges customers’ payment cards, temporarily holds the funds in a merchant account that’s part of the service, and sends you the payments less transaction fees. Examples of payment gateways include PayPal, Authorize.net, Chase Paymentech, and Sage […]

PayPal Secrets
By October 28, 2013 0 Comments Read More →

PayPal Secrets

If you search online for the phrase “PayPal sucks” you’ll find discussion board comments and even entire websites with bad things to say about PayPal. Many of the complaints seem to suggest that PayPal freezes funds and even shuts down the accounts of honest merchants for completely unfair and arbitrary reasons. Reading between the lines, I […]

Shipping Your Products
By October 19, 2013 0 Comments Read More →

Shipping Your Products

If you sell physical products online (as opposed to electronic downloads), the choice of shipping options presented to your customers and the way that shipping fees are calculated will both be determined by your shopping cart. Very basic shopping carts (like PayPal Standard) usually calculate shipping fees based on weights that you configure and order quantities, in […]

Make Your Website Visible
By October 10, 2013 0 Comments Read More →

Make Your Website Visible

Now that you’re ready to start selling online, it’s time to make your website visible to search engines like Google, Bing and the others. You can make your website visible through a combination of basic setup steps that announce your presence to the search engines, and search engine optimization (SEO) practices to follow each time […]

Advertise Online
By October 1, 2013 0 Comments Read More →

Advertise Online

As discussed in the article about making your website visible, there are important reasons to buy online advertising from Google* and others. The benefits of online advertising can include jump-starting traffic to your website, and keeping you focused on the key terms you’ll need to emphasize on your web pages and in your ads so that […]

Steve’s Marketing Rule
By September 22, 2013 0 Comments Read More →

Steve’s Marketing Rule

As our business grew, we made a real effort to measure each marketing program to find out how much of a return it provided. We carefully monitored our online campaigns, and used incentives like coupons to test the effectiveness of print ads. Because we measured the return on every dollar spent on marketing, we learned […]

Steve’s First Rule of Money
By September 19, 2013 0 Comments Read More →

Steve’s First Rule of Money

Steve’s Marketing Rule, discussed in the previous story, is really just a corollary to a general rule that I’ve always found to be true. While this general rule doesn’t have much to do with selling online, I think it’s worth sharing. Steve’s First Rule of Money: Never trust anyone who tries to sell you anything with a […]