Internet Marketing With Affiliate Program » Shopping

Seven Strategies For Safer Online Shopping

admin — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 04:29:33 +0000

You say your shopping list is a mile long? You’re short on time – and just a big wary of shopping in cyberspace?
Never fear! The Internet is the perfect solution for shopping emergencies. And with the holiday shopping season nearly upon us, it’s a great time for a refresher course in online shopping safety. Shopping online is no more dangerous than shopping at the local mall, if you know what you’re doing – and it’s a lot easier to find a parking space!
The biggest worry about shopping online is fear that your credit card information will be lost or stolen. According to a June 2007 survey by J.C. Williams Group for MODASolutions, 80 percent of respondents indicated that the availability of “a safe and secure online payment option” was the most important factor when shopping online.
1.Learn to identify a secure website transaction.
Reputable online merchants use payment processing systems that automatically encrypt confidential data such as credit card numbers, making such information virtually impossible to steal. Fortunately, when you’re shopping online, it’s easy to tell whether or not your particular transaction is being processed securely
Here’s how.
Once you get ready to check out, two things should happen. The first is that the beginning of the website’s Internet address (URL) should change from http:// to https://. That “s” indicates that this section of the website is secure. (Don’t worry if you don’t see the “s” while you’re still shopping and adding items to your online shopping cart. The transaction doesn’t need to be secured until you’re getting ready to check out and enter payment and personal information.)
You should also see a padlock image on the right side of the Internet Address bar if you’re using Internet Explorer.
2.Shop from reputable merchants.
Knowing that a transaction is secure is one thing; knowing that the site’s owners can be trusted is something else entirely. Choosing when to trust a website depends in part on who publishes the website, what information they want, and what you want from the site.
Look for well-known and respected online retailers such as Amazon.com or online versions of companies you already know and trust, such as JCPenney.com or OfficeDepot.com. Websites that are certified by Internet trust organizations such as TRUSTe, BBB Online and WebTrust are preferable, as well, since they promise to protect your privacy and not to use information in certain ways without your permission.
Be wary of sites that ask for personal information such as credit card numbers or bank information before they logically need it, and of sites that do not reveal phone numbers, email addresses or other ways to reach them for customer support.
3.Use a credit card for online shopping.
A credit card is much safer than a debit card when shopping online, since you’re protected by provisions of the Fair Credit Billing Act (if you’re a U.S. consumer) and since you can also dispute charges with the credit card company if you suspect a fraudulent transaction. For extra peace of mind, consider using a separate credit card for online shopping and monitor it carefully.
4.Don’t save credit card numbers or personal information in any online store account.
Many online vendors ask you to create accounts so that it’s easier for them to notify you of special offers. That’s fine, if you’re interested, but resist the lure of “convenience” by having them save your credit card information as well. The fewer people who have access to such confidential information, the better.
5.Use a separate email address.
Guard your privacy by using a separate, free email account for your online activity. If you’re inundated with email or spammers get a hold of your email address, it’s easy to discard the “freebie” email address and get a new one.
6.Keep all receipts.
When you shop online, you’ll receive order confirmation messages and receipts via email. Double-check them for accuracy, and keep them – in a separate folder in your Inbox, perhaps – until you’re certain that the order was processed correctly and that you will not need to return anything.
7.Trust your instincts.
If you’re not sure of a website – if something strikes you as too good to be true, if the site seems unprofessional or downright pushy – just don’t order from that merchant. With the millions of retailers available online, there’s sure to be someone more reputable who has what you’d like to order – and they’re only a click away!
No one can guarantee that every Internet shopping transaction will be problem-free, but adopting the previous commonsense strategies will make it highly unlikely that you’ll be the victim of cyber fraud.

The Number One Article on Online Shopping Cart Systems

admin — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 04:26:32 +0000

As a solo service professional one of the biggest dilemmas I recently faced in my business was deciding which shopping cart provider to go with. I’d just created a digital information product and wanted to sell it via my website.

When it came to my own online shopping cart system I couldn’t decide the best way forward, even though I’d been setting up shopping carts for my clients for the past two years and knew my way around various systems.

Ultimately I ended up making a poor choice by going a cheaper alternative route, than the service I really wanted. The reason I made this poor decision was lack of confidence on my part – I wasn’t sure how well my product would sell and didn’t want to invest heavily in a service that I may not need or use!

The reality of going the cheaper route? I had customers who weren’t able to download their product or make a payment and I lost revenue because of this!

To save you the same trouble I went through, here are my top 6 tips for ensuring that you get the right shopping cart system for YOUR business.

1. Think about your long-term goals. Having a shopping cart system that grows with your business is crucial to your long-term goals, particularly if you’re planning on launching more products and services in the future.

You’ll want to ensure that the shopping cart system you choose can easily handle additional products and services.

2. How simple is the shopping cart to set up? Can you easily do the product setup yourself, or does it require you to hold a degree in computer programming! You don’t want to be spending huge amounts of your time on the phone to tech support, or getting frustrated because the shopping cart isn’t easy to set up.

If the shopping cart system provides you with HTML code that you have to add to your website, consider how comfortable you feel adding this. You may decide that this is a service to outsource to your Virtual Assistant.

3. Accepting online payments. Whether you’ll be selling digital or physical products, you will need a system that can accept online payments. These days customers want instant gratification, which is why digital products are so popular, and you need to be able to accept payments instantly too.

Think about this situation – you go on to a website and in order to buy a product you have to print off an order form and fax it in, or call to place an order! You will have just lost the sale as that’s not easy for your customer! The best solution is to get a merchant account, and ensure that your merchant provider’s services are compatible with your online shopping cart system.

4. Don’t Immediately Go The Cheaper Route. It can be a false economy to go the cheaper route, particularly if it doesn’t offer all the features and functionality you want. Come up with a list of what you would like in an online shopping cart system, and then find a service that will meet ALL of your needs.

5. Customer Service. You want to make it as quick and easy as possible for your customers to purchase from you and get instant access to their product. An online shopping cart system that offers digital download of your products will do this for you.

And if you have a physical product ensure that your shopping cart service can calculate postage and print shipping labels too.

Don’t make your customers jump through hoops just to make a purchase from you!

6. Autoresponders and follow-up messages. It’s much easier to sell future products to existing customers – after all they already know, like and trust you. In order to do this you need your shopping cart to be able to keep a database of your customers so that you can follow up with them. Autoresponders are a great way to do this. You can follow up with your customer several times after they’ve made a purchase and check in with them to see how they’re getting on with your product. And you can do this very easily and quickly if your shopping cart has an autoresponder feature.

Keep all of these points in mind when choosing your online shopping cart system, and you will find the perfect solution for you!

Online Shopping Market Leader – Ebay’s Business

admin — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:35:36 +0000

About eBay TodayAnyone who has invested in eBay stock over the last few years probably knows that eBay’s position in the Internet marketplace is rapidly changing. eBay’s 1998 IPO occurred during the fabled “dot com bubble” years and was influenced by many of the same forces that made other technology and Internet IPOs so (in)famous. On the first day of trading, the $18 per share target price gave way to an opening price of $53.50 and eBay’s revenue growth has stayed more or less continuous since then, staying percentage-wise in the 30s and even venturing at times into the 40s—enough to make any investor smile.In recent quarters, however, things have slowed down a little. Quarterly year over year growth is now at just over 30 percent and shows a downward trend—still excellent, but not quite as stratospheric. Some of this is due to increasing competition from eBay competitors, including Google (worldwide but especially in North America and Europe) and a number of alternative auction houses across Asia and the Pacific Rim. In some circles, people are talking as if the slowing of growth and the maturing of eBay as a company and stock mark end times for the company. Not so.In recent years eBay CEO Meg Whitman’s strategy has been to continue to strengthen eBay’s core auction business while at the same time to diversify eBay’s business model and holdings as a hedge against competition in the online auctions and ecommerce market. This strategic and markets growth has included a number of investments and acquisitions—big names that today are also eBay. You may have heard of some of them: * Skype—The wildly popular Skype VOIP (voice-over-internet-protocol) service is eBay’s largest acquisition to date and one of its most recent, purchased in 2005 for approximately $2.6 billion. Whitman’s vision for Skype is as a communications hub not just for Internet customers looking for alternatives to traditional telecom packages, but for eBay buyers and sellers, who will eventually be able to interact securely and anonymously by voice. She also sees a future in which the forthcoming Skype subscription charges will be cleared primarily through PayPal. * PayPal—By now, nearly everyone realizes that PayPal is now an eBay company, picked up for $1.5 billion in 2002 and a natural match: the vast majority of eBay transactions involving online payments at the time used PayPal, and this remains the state of affairs today. True to Whitman’s vision, PayPal has also grown to become the premier payment system for ecommerce across the Internet, second only to direct credit card transactions and safer as well. An increasing number of etailers and even brick-and-mortar stores accept PayPal payments today. * Craigslist—In 2004 eBay paid an undisclosed sum to acquire a 25 percent interest in Craigslist, becoming its largest single shareholder. Our company selling links of london on craigslist have good effect.eBay has kept a low profile vis-a-vis it’s ties to and influence on Craigslist, but with the classified service’s growth going through the roof and the classified marketplace becoming more important online in general, investors should see this as a strong asset with big upside potential for eBay. * Half.com—Half.com, acquired by eBay in 2000, represents eBay’s move into the online used media market. Half.com was a rising star in and in many ways the creator of this market which has now been joined by the likes of Amazon.com, among others. Half.com remains a perennial favorite amongst students, bibliophiles, game enthusiasts, film buffs, and others in seeking to buy used media products at reduced cost. Because these types of products are commodity priced and often have a long shelf life before being purchased, the alternate sales model that Half.com represents is both appropriate to its market and does not compete directly with eBay’s core auction offerings. * Rent.com, Shopping.com, Prostores—While not as monumental in scale as the aforementioned transactions, eBay has also diversified its retail and real estate businesses with Rent.com, Shopping.com, and Prostores, which together complement eBay’s existing eBay Motors, eBay Real Estate, among others, in retail beyond the commodity and consumer goods market.If together these acquisitions paint the picture of a company in the midst of steady and continued growth, they should—eBay remains the premier online auctions and retail space and is poised to continue along this trajectory for the forseeable future. eBay’s major threat at the moment is Google, also rapidly expanding and enjoying market-leading growth. eBay’s relationship to Google is a troubled one, as eBay relies on Google’s advertising model and market reach for its continued success even as Google continues to enter market niches in which eBay products already exist—for example, classified ads and online payments.Despite these challenges, prospects for eBay in the future look bright, as eBay growth continues to be strong and eBay’s recent acquisitions continue to pick up financial steam and Internet traffic as well.

You could find our china wholesale center and uk wholesale shopping mall for start your ebay business.

Online Shopping Strategies

admin — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:29:44 +0000

In the past, internet shopping was just a thing of science fiction. Shopping would usually mean strolling around for hours in shopping malls that seemed to never have exactly what you are looking for. If you wanted to shop at home, you would need to go through the thick mailed catalogs to locate the items you need.

Presently, everything that you need to do from communicating to banking can be conveniently and effortlessly done on your own computer at home. Shopping online has also become the best and easiest way to buy the rare and the not so rare merchandise.

However, for most people who are not yet very knowledgeable about the concept of online shopping and ecommerce, the use of credit cards for internet transactions could be a bit scary.

From the early days of the internet, a lot of companies offering online shopping have made great developments to make sure that they are able to maintain the excellent availability of their merchandise, proper shipping along with secure and convenient payment transactions.

Of course, online shoppers still need to be very vigilant and cautious particularly in giving out their personal details. With the right knowledge though, online shopping would prove to be more beneficial for modern consumers compared to conventional shopping.

As an online consumer, you would need to look for websites that offer comprehensive knowledge on setting up PayPal and Google checkout accounts, which would allow the storage of credit card information with a company that can then be used for future transactions with the other companies. There are also a lot of websites that teach consumers on making purchases on eBay and Amazon, as well as comparing prices and items on websites like PriceGrabber, BizRate and MSN Shopping.

How to Shop Online Securely

admin — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 04:28:46 +0000

Online consumers spend billions of dollars each year, and as online shopping becomes more and more favored, the major reason why there are still some people who would rather not shop online is shopping security. Here are some guidelines, which you could use to make sure that your security, privacy and rights will be protected when shopping on the internet.

1. Make sure that you are aware of the currency exchange rate before purchasing any international merchandise.

2. Know the delivery cost and time frame before you even place your order. A lot of shopping websites make use of couriers in the delivery of goods. Also, overseas delivery could be expensive.

3. Before placing a bid on eBay, make sure that you will be checking the feedback of the buyers and sellers. Make this your standard as you go on eBay.

4. Always, always, always read the FAQs of the website carefully.

5. If the company or individual you are buying from asks for cash as payment, say no. Using your credit card for payments would be able to protect you from fraudulent transactions. This is because credit card companies are able to issue refunds if there would be any proven fraudulent activity on your account.

6. View the contact page of the buyer. Verify if their postal address is on there. If it is not, do not do business with them.

7. If you have questions, ask. Genuine sellers are helpful and there are even shopping websites that have customer feedback forms.

8. Read twice the company’s terms and conditions, as well as their privacy policy.

9. Try searching the company in Google or any search engine to know more about the company from comments and reviews from other consumers.

10. If you still feel unsure on shopping online, then you could probably try shopping the conventional way. You need not force yourself on something that you are uncertain of. However, do not shy away from online shopping altogether. Eventually, you would realize that it could provide a truly worthwhile experience.