Small Business Information

eBay has announced that it will soon begin making some major changes to its site.

One major change that has been mooted involves the way items are listed. Instead of listing them on the basis of closing time bidders may soon be seeing listings based on the seller’s reputation.

Now how hard is that going to make things for new sellers who are just beginning to try and make some extra money by selling items on eBay?

Abandoned shopping carts are fast becoming one of the biggest problems for e-commerce on the Web.

While some businesses are reporting an abandonment rate as low as 10% others are reporting a figure closer to 80% and the average seems to be somewhere between 40% and 60% and those figures are way too high.

A lot of the problems with shopping cart abandonment can be attributed to poor intergration into the website. The more hoops a potential purchaser has to go through just to get to the shopping cart the higher the abandonment rate climbs.

There are other factors too and you’ll find Better Shopping Cart Design an interesting read.

We all know … or at least we should all know … that good site design is important when it comes to making sales on the Net.

But sometimes - zanny things draw people in just like this site does. A website on the top of a fridge and a stove is definitely way out there on the fringe but I bet most of you will follow the links right through to the end.

So the New York Times claims we’re seeing a massive drop in online sales and it’s going to continue on for the rest of this decade and it’s a case of shock and horror?

Damn! If the sky is falling then someone forgot to tell the Discovery Channel. They’re closing all their bricks-and-mortar shops and concentrating their sales online because that’s where they’ve seen an increase of 144% in sales this year.

Damn! If the sky is falling then someone forgot to tell a lot of other smaller businesses that are taking their business online because they’re getting more sales there than they are through the front door of their shopfronts.

Hitwise is recording increased traffic to shopping sites and big business is rushing to get more exposure online. It’s also more convenient to shop online and it’s cheaper to shop online too and the consumers aren’t about to stop shopping online.

So if you read that story and are beginning to get a little worried just stop for a moment and compare the story to the facts that you see around you and you will see that the sky is definitely not falling.

Growth in sales might be slowing but that’s only to be expected and something that any prudent business man would be expecting to happen.

It’s now been made official, StumbleUpon has now been bought by eBay … much to the horror of many StumbleUpon members.

From an online marketing point of view StumbleUpon is a valuable source of paid and unpaid traffic for websites. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see if the paid traffic continues to be available after eBay takes full control of the company.

From a search engine point of view the purchase gives eBay control of the beginnings of a search engine that has interesting possibilities.

Regardless of what sort of marketing you’re doing … whether it’s face-to-face, web-based, media advertising or whatever … who is your target market?

Have you even stopped to consider who will be looking at, watching or listening to your marketing? Does it really matter?

You bet it does and A Tale of Two Cultures is a ‘must read’. It might be talking about search engines and websites but there is a lot of food for thought there for everyone.