Small Business Information

In the United States Hitwise has found that traffic to Google Checkout is dwindling by quite a substanial amount - 34% down for the week ending December 8 compared with the same time last year. (That report is here)

Yet in the United Kingdom traffic to Google Checkout is slightly above the traffic levels that are headed PayPal’s way. So if you’re an online merchant which billing option should you choose?

Here is a quote taken from a comment in the Hitwise report on traffic to PayPal and Google Checkout in the UK

“… they told me that as a dog breeder, I am in violation of their policies on acceptable products. It took Google checkout a year to figure that out. I went back to Paypal several weeks ago and have not looked back. Google checkout customer service stinks.”

You can read the Hitwise post and all of the comments here.

Christmas can be a very busy time if you’re selling online and, while Christmas is just about over for this year, it’s never too late to get some great tips that will help improve your sales next Christmas.

You’ll find 50 of them here and now is the perfect time to start preparing for next Christmas.

Psst … wanna know the secret to making more sales? It’s hidden in these three sentences:

“Writers using short words and short sentences tend to sell more.

It is easy to think that if you just do more and add more value that you will make more money, but sometimes doing more just means simplifying and clarifying your words, or publishing in a more friendly format. If you want people to take action, to believe they can afford it, making them feel confident and comfortable works”

You’ll find the rest of the post that this quote comes from right here

Obviously not, MySpace is not about to disappear any time soon. However people are beginning to move on from MySpace and you will find some interesting possibilities and a lesson to be learned in this report from Hitwise.

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.

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.

 No, I’m not talking about ethnic minorities here, I’m talking about the minority of surfers who don’t surf the Net using Internet Explorer. There’s quite a variety of browsers out there and not all will render your website in the same way that IE does.

That means that if you’re trying to sell something online not everyone is going to see your website - or your product - in quite the same way. In extreme cases people who use browsers other than IE may not even be able to buy from you because their browser can’t display your shopping cart.

Even just a minor glitch in the way your site is displayed in their browser could be enough to put them off buying from you. So you really do need to make sure that your site renders correctly in all browsers … otherwise you are going to lose sales.

You can read more about how the online appearance of a site can damage sales here.

Ironically when I view that site in my favourite browser - Firefox - every apostrophe is displayed as a question mark.

If you’re a small business trying to sell your product online there’s an interesting lesson to be learned from allergybuyersclub.com.

This year their first quarter sales have increased by 18% over the same period last year. The company believes that two of the reasons for the increase is better product photography and better copy that appears with each product.

You can read the full story here

Good news for retailers and e-tailers in the United Kingdom. Google has now extended its online payment system - Google Checkout - to the United Kingdom.

You will find the full story here.

Now if only Google would bring both Checkout and local search to Australia