There are basically two types of people who work in web design, designers and developers. Designers go for the graphics, bells and whistles, sharp colors and flash. Develops are coders, functional people, people like myself who look at the why and how on a page. ...<< MORE >>

Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook. These are the holy trinity of social media. Well I guess you can add blogs as well. I’m going to discuss how to use these to help you gain following. The more people know your name, the more they will recognize your product. It’s an age of method of brand recognition, is a whole new way.<< MORE >>

Lots of companies are out there saying they will get you listed within___ days and they will get you ____ this many quality links in this many days. Take my advice, a lot of them are bunk. those that aren't bunk, the majority of them are outdated as they apply to the current requirements of the search engines to get great visibility. The line your mom told you..."If it sounds to good to be true..It IS!" She wasn't lying!<< MORE >>

I have read about and have seen websites using Wordpress Blogs as the framework for their website and then the other day, one on my regular stops, the Wall Street Journal, has completed the transition to being powered by a Wordpress blog. Amazingly enough, these other companies have come to rely on free Wordpress blogs as well: Sony, People Magazine, Samsung, Playstation, NYTimes Blogs, Wired, Mozilla Firefox, Giga OM, CNN, Flickr,<< MORE >>

Optimize Video Podcasts It does not matter what you call them: vodcasts, vidcasts, videocasting, or video podcasting... there are a few behind-the-scenes actions you can take to help attract more attention to your video productions.<< MORE >>

The most important and often least understood tool for online marketers is the search engine. This article will explain how you can and cannot use meta tags to increase the visibility of your website with meta tags. << MORE >>

by Nelson Tan

1. Use the addition (+) sign to make sure you get all the terms in
your search results. So: '+internet +marketing +strategies' will
get you results containing all those words, leaving out web pages
that only contain 'internet'.

2. Use the subtraction (-) sign to exclude references that you are
not interested in. For example, if you are not interested in web
pages that talk about viral marketing, enter: 'internet marketing
strategies -viral'.

3. Sometimes, your search terms may be far off from one another on
a web page. To ensure your terms appear together in a phrase, put
them in double quotations, like this: "internet marketing
strategies". This ...<< MORE >>

If you have used Word, you can make a website. But like so many brick and mortar businesses out there, just because you build it doesn't mean the will come. The next company comes along and guarantees you traffic, which you get, but are they completing the task on the site? Ease of use, also called usability is king on the web these days. Content and how easy is it to achieve the reason I came to your site. ...<< MORE >>

This has been an exciting and revealing week on the web.   Several things are coming to the surface and what are the implications?   The world became a much smaller place with the acceptance and widespread use of the internet.   Now you can talk to someone real time on the other side of the world as though they are in the next room.   News is instantly broadcast worldwide   Way back when, it took days if not longer for news to travel.   Wars have gone on for months before all of the troops were made aware that an end had been reached and the fighting stopped.   Now, within minutes of something happening in Afghanistan, it is broadcast worldwide.  It has been reported that Osama bin Laden himself watched the unfolding terror of the 911 attacks on CNN.   Never has instant information played the role in government than this past Presidential election in the US.   The choice of Joe Biden as the running mate for VP was going to be released via text message to the world, but a reporter trumped the move.   

Obama was quoted as saying "We are the people that we have been waiting for" in government.   He pledged to open the government to give you and I "The People" a greater choice.   This is supposed yo be a"Government for the people, by the people".   In reality it has turned into a government for the people ruled by a select few that we put there to truthfully watch out for our best interests.  Boy, did we ever screw up.   The Obama administration set up a forum to hear peoples' opinions about how things can be done better in government and the item that got the most responses was legalizing marijuana.   How apathetic are we as a country?   Are we that ignorant to the current state of the world and our future that it hasn't hit home yet?   Everyone knows of someone that the economy has hurt very badly if not themselves.   I never served in the Military, however, looking back now, I feel everyone should have to serve their country for several years in one form or another.   The military is just one option.   Whether or not you support the conflicts we are involved in around the world is your choice, but not supporting the troops that are there fighting for America is Unamerican.   

Now more than ever, we are all connected to the internet and mass communication in some form or another.   My 6th grader feels he needs to be able to check his email on his phone!   Within a few years, television as we know it may change to being provided solely by dish and available over the internet.   Look at www.blip.tv, online since 2005.  Several countries around the world have made voting via text messaging possible.   Will we get to the point voting on Presidential mandates and/or ideas overnight on our phones for the administration to gauge the American response?   How is that going to affect all of the aging seniors when the younger generations can affect the majority vote in such numbers?  I think it leaves more questions unanswered then it answers.

Where does that leave us?   The world has changed as we know it over the last few weeks.   Sears announced it is going online with the Sears Marketplace in a direct response to Amazons' Marketplace domination.   Walmart announced the same thing several weeks back.   Amazons' domination of online sales may have just been truly challenged.   Both Sears and Walmart will be offering  3rd parties the opportunity to sell on their marketplaces further widening their offerings in those categories.   Sears will be open to any 3rd party seller, Walmart is only open to their chosen few partners.   We the consumer will have more choices of online marketplaces as a result.  We are already not limited to Amazon because of other places like Buy.com and Ebay.com, but neither of them have the retail punch of Sears or Walmart.  Will this change our shopping patterns?  Only time will tell, but going into a holiday season, it does offer us more reputable choices to be able to shop from home.

Thanks to Scott Wingo and his blog at Channel Advisors, the best multi-channel ecommerce platform available.

        

What do you do as an owner, manager or front line team member to create 'Raving Fans' out of your customers? Do you as an owner or manager create 'Raving Fans' out of your employees? “There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” Sam Walton, Founder of Wal-Mart<< MORE >>

Have you ever watched a baby trying to navigate their first real footsteps across the room?  The are so excited to do what mommy and daddy do as well as the whole impact of the new environment/new territory that they never take those first steps immediately.  Instead the forward momentum of their body and and excitement of mommy sitting 5 feet away saying "come here, come on you can do it" propels them in an awkward almost slow motion gallop forward.  Yes they traveled 4 feet, but they barely took one uneasy step.   The rest of the movement was flying forward and falling on the tile floor with a loud SLAP.    Then there is the other Mom who stands over jr holding his little hands helping him take his first few steps in a nice leisurely yet secure pace.   Jr will walk first, probably be less of a klutz in life and more secure about his ability to do things   It all starts with that first simple step.  You cannot run jr until you have mastered walking.

Personally I have never been a huge Internet shopper, or any kind of shopper for that fact.   When I go shopping, I generally know where I am going, what I am getting and I try get in and out, no muss, no fuss.  Don't bother me with surveys at the mall, or lines wrapped around the building.  If you have the entire tribe with you, stay to the right so us impatient shoppers can pass easily on the left.    The same goes for shopping on the net.   If I go online to play games, then the bells and whistles, 2 minute flash intro, excessive talk about the sites abilities or accomplishments are all fine and to be expected.  If I am going shopping online I want to know just a couple of simple things,  How much? Is it what I am expecting? Does it have enough information to clearly explain what it is used for?   Is it easy to order(less than 5 clicks)?  Do they accept easy forms of payment?  Are they confident enough in their products quality to make return policies easy to find?  And most important to me ....can I get all of that without waiting for a useless 2 minutes flash intro, have to search 3 times to find the product because its hidden and hard to find, search through my payment methods to find one that is compatible with theirs and get a live chat option that is only live less than 20% of the time?     High expectations?   I don't think so, but it still surprises me how few companies deliver on these simple basics that go back to the start of ecommerce on the web.

Times have changes, the company names have changed, but companies large and small are still making these simple yet gigantic errors is User Experience

• Loud, slow, heavy flash intros.
• Navigational categories that obviously follow the manufacturers structure but not the real world, making finding things very difficult.
• Search functionality that takes you to dead pages or does not return simple clear, concise results.
• Link buttons to accounts, policies, customer service and my personal favorite.... the super duper top secret company phone number are hidden 3 pages back behind 2 planters and a box.
• The inability to organize listings to indicate multiple variations and/or sizes
• Avoidance of customer feedback and testimonials out of fear of making an error and admitting to it.
• Customer Service policies, return policies being more of a riddle than a clear statement and not being surfaced in the right places when the questions arise such as during order processing.
• Value added offers such as free shipping or coupons being a closely held secret that only the selected "chosen" have access to.
• Failure at the kindergarten classic, "show and tell", looks great but with no description or specifications, or great pictures with no explanation of what all the very visible buttons and settings are for.
• The overuse of icons and symbols which assumes we all know what the rss square means or what perky little icons indicate.

        

Welcome to my blog. Please check back soon for new entries.         9/7/09

As you come here to visit, you will find a fairly regular commentary on the state of the Ecommerce Market and Ecommerce  Best Practices as it relates to selling on the internet.   This will also be a place for customers and the public alike will be able to come and get hints, tips and tricks to selling successfully on the internet.   

Not that I didn't have a lot of fun and a huge sense of accomplishment from what I do, because thats not the case, I did have a lot of fun and made a lot of good friends and business contacts   It's just that I decided lets put the profits where they truly belong, in my families pocket.    I am very proud of the accomplishments from while I was there.  When I started we had a website that did ok, 2 ebay stores that puttered along,  an amazon seller account that did ok  and a custom division separate from ecommerce.      The company had always centered around the custom division which supported the company financially.   Ecommerce had always been a side income stream, great at different times, but never incredible.    Not being the type of person to watch oppurtunity walk by, I took the bull by the horns, flipped on his back, skinned it, butchered it and made a million juicy steaks out of it.   Next thing you know all heck is breaking loose at DSI due to the amount of orders that just wouldn't seem to quit.    In Dec. of '08 on the busiest day of the year, Amazon was processing 72 orders a minute, up from 64 a minute the year before.   They processed 6 million orders in one day.   My goal was to get a small chunk of that.  We were not doing much on fulfillment then, but we sure are now.     We came in on that Monday after the weekend of their busiest days to 242 orders for us to ship and 40 or so Amazon fba orders.      This year in the slowest time of the summer, we were walking into around 100 orders every Monday plus over 100 fba orders.     We are averaging about 2500 orders total across all platforms and all stores right now, that should be close to 4500 by xmas this year.    Yes I am the person that might have changed the numbers on certain prices or analyzed how to knock the competition off the table, its been a group effort from day 1.   I couldn't focus on what I needed to focus on if I didnt have high caliber people watching my back, ensuring the other stores were on course, processing orders, getting quality product in at a resonable price etc....  

If you come back often, I promise to tell all my secrets in the form of Best Practices and strategy statements.    Putting them into practice, thats your job, unless of course you want to hire AEC to take your company to the next level.   Its the best investment you will ever make, I promise.   Are you ready for the challenge.   Its a lot of work and definitely not for everyone.

My first goal for this blog will be getting a spell checker widget. lol