Online Payment Options

If you own a web site that sells products, then you know how
difficult it is to find a payment option that fits all of your
customers. Many people like the convenience of some online
payment options but feel that some customers may feel alienated
by the need to sign up and be a member to purchase your product.
Here are some tips on finding an online payment option that will
work great for your site.

Paypal is perhaps the largest online payment option available.
Paypal which does accept all major credit cards as well as the
ability to have a Paypal account does have a few drawbacks. In
order to use Paypal, you need to have an account with them. Lots
of people don’t want to sign up to another site, just to use
their credit card. They want to pay for their product fast and
easy without the hassle of additional information being
requested. The other drawback to Paypal is that there are a lot
of spoof emails that are threatening the legitimacy of this
company. Many people each day are receiving emails that are
requesting their Paypal information. These emails are spoof
emails from criminals trying to steal your identity to gain
access to your financial accounts.

Small Merchant Accounts are also a way for online merchants to
get paid online. They accept all types of credit cards and are
very easy to use. Unfortunately, many of these accounts require
a long contract period and a minimum sale each month. For
instance, if you are starting out and in two months you close
down your website, you will still have to pay a monthly fee for
the remainder of the contract. If you do not sell any products
during this time you will also have to pay a non use fee. This
can become very costly.

Western Union online also allows money to be transferred on the
web. Many people have been transferring money internationally
over the years with the help of Western Union. If you sell
overseas, this might be a great way to conduct business. Western
Union can be more expensive than other options depending on the
amount of the sale and destination of the money, but it does
give you another option to make a sale.

So if you would like to receive payments from online customers
check out the above resources and continue to grow your online
business.

E-commerce is gaining pace! Research firm eMarketer predicts that
2003 will see online sales reaching US $58.2 billion excluding
travel. According to Forrester Research, another reputable research
company, business to consumer e-commerce will hit US $230 billion
by the year 2008. While offline retail sales are staggering and
will continue to do so in near term, online retail sales will
show a hefty 19 percent consecutive year over year growth! And
by the same year, two third of all US households will buy some
kind of products and services online. In 2003 alone 97 million
consumers will make some kind of purchases through the Internet.

If you are selling products and services offline, you should
seriously consider hopping on to the e-commerce bandwagon, or risk
loosing significant portion of your business to your more
proactive competitors!

Is it difficult to start selling products or services online?

May be, in the beginning of Internet era, this was a daunting
task, but today, with proper planning it is fairly easy.

- Choose the products or services that are viable to sell over the Internet

- Build an online presence

- Create an online product catalog

- Choose payment methods

- Promote

Select products or services to sell

Although, some products are easier to sell online, contrary to
popular believe, most of the products and services are, actually,
marketable on the Internet. At present, books, electronics,
information and travel related products are selling better online.
But, that does not mean that there is no room for other products
or services. As a matter of fact, you can sell just about
anything over the Internet! It depends more on the market segment
you choose, and how good you are in marketing. As you know,
traditional items that you can get in nearest grocery store
were not doing very well on the Internet. However, that is
going to change very soon! According to Forrester Research
many of today’s slow categories are poised to significant
growth as oppose to early online sales leaders like travel
and electronics, which will experience market maturity and
slower growth. Prediction is:

Food and beverage category will grow at a rate of 49 percent,
reaching $18.2 billion by 2007. The home products category
will grow by 42 percent over five years, from $7.3 billion
in 2002 to $42.0 billion in 2007. Flowers, cards, and gifts
will grow by 41 percent, from $951 million in 2002 to $5.3
billion in 2007.

That’s not all! By the year 2008, today’s best selling product:
books will have a mere 3 percent share of total business to
consumer online sales.

So, if your products and services can generate offline sales
there should not be any problem in selling these items online.

Build online presence

You can choose to build an e-commerce website either yourself
by hiring required experts, i.e. web programmers or by
appointing a website developing company to do the job for
you. In both of the cases, you have to be prepared to spend
a significant amount of money. E-commerce site is a very
broad terminology! Depending on you demand, it can cost you
from a modest US $800 to any where over a million US dollar!
That’s not all! You have to be prepared to spare considerable
time on it, as well. Writing the technical scope, choosing
the appropriate design for your site and creating proper
content for your site will take a lot of your time. And
there is no guarantee that you will do everything right!

That’s why, if you are new to e-commerce and do not want
to spend a fortune in your first endeavor, you should think
about making your online presence by choosing one of the
available, on the Internet, Web Store services. There are
enormous advantages of using these services:

- You can build one for a fraction of the cost, needed to create an e-commerce website.

- You can choose the design of your web store from numerous available templates.

- Simple editor allows you creating your web store all by yourself.

- You can be up and running within days.

- You can choose a merchant account from the one offered by the service provider.

There are many Web Store service providers on the Internet
like Yahoo! Store, Bigstep, Rusbiz, etc. Compare and choose
the one, which best suits your requirement. As an added
advantage, some of the Web Store service providers will
integrate your store with a shopping mall or e-marketplace
free of charge. This will instantly expose your web store
to a large targeted prospective customer audience.
Create an online catalog

If you sell only one or couple of products and do not add
products or services often, you don’t require an online
catalog. However, if you have a product line of over 10
products and you constantly add or change products, you
should consider a web store with the facility of an online
product catalog. This feature of a web store service allows
rapid developing and maintaining of you electronic catalog
without spending large sums on creating one by yourself.

Look for a web store service provider who offers wizard or
form base product adding method to the electronic catalog
and use some kind of standard product classification codes.
At later stage, if you choose to sell products through
e-marketplaces, this will allow you to integrate your
products to e-marketplaces and make sales offers with ease.

Choose a payment method

If you are planning to sell ebooks, reports, whitepapers etc.
I would suggest you to consider using clickbank’s marketplace.
That way, you don’t have to worry about getting a credit
card merchant account.

Around 90 percent of all sales transaction occur online are
by credit card payments. To accept credit card payment over
the Internet, you must first have a merchant account. A
merchant account allows a vendor to process credit card
transactions. If you built a web store online with one of
the web store service providers, you will see that they
offer gateways to one or several merchant account providers
and have partnership with them. In general, you get a better
deal with them. However, as charges vary significantly from
one merchant account provider to another, make sure you shop
around before committing yourself to one.

Promote you site

To sell your products through your site, you must draw
traffic. There are number of ways of promoting your site
on the Internet. This includes:

- Search engine submissions

- Adding your site to different online directories

- Opt-in email campaign

- Link exchange

- Banner and link ads

In you effort to promote your site, you should combine as
many offline and online promotional methods you can come
up with. The more traffic you can generate the better chance
you have of selling more products from your Web Store.

Nowshade Kabir is the founder, primary developer and present
CEO of Rusbiz.com. A Ph. D. in Information Technology, he
has wide experience in Business Consulting, International
Trade and Web Marketing. Rusbiz is a Global B2B Emarketplace
with solutions to start and run online business.
You can contact him at mailto:nowshade[at]rusbiz.com,
http://ezine.rusbiz.com, http://www.rusbiz.com

Executive Summary

eCommerce platforms are being commoditized. Enterprise level solutions are coming down in price and new open source solutions are being made available to anyone with an internet connection for free.

The most robust of these open source solutions is OS Commerce (OSC) - a community driven eCommerce solution that is flexible, scalable, and user friendly. As eCommerce becomes even more a part of mainstream retail, OSC will provide businesses of all shapes and sizes with the functionality and capabilities of the big boys. This brief examines some of the advantages of OS Commerce and provides insights into how it can help your business.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Maybe so, but you CAN get an eCommerce platform for nothing. Offered for free at www.oscommerce.com, this eCommerce solution provides tons of bells and whistles and provides a user friendly interface to manage the administrative portions of the store. The code is based in the PHP scripting language and runs on the Apache web server - a user also needs access to a SQL database to initially upload the files that manage the categories and products within the admin section.

Now that sounds complicated, but really anyone can do it with some concentrated effort. Much of the documentation online regarding OS is very thorough and provides step by step plans on how to get your store up and running. Any newbie to this type of work will likely come across some roadblocks, but the OS Commerce community forums are only a click away to start trouble shooting.

The solution is community driven, meaning that like minded OSCers are ready to help out their peers with answers to posted questions. Yes, at times this can be extremely frustrating waiting for an answer, but it is very rewarding to overcome a technology bug on your own.

Contribute to the Cause

The best part of OSC is the number of contributions that can be added to your site at any time. Again, there is no cost for these enhancements and upgrades - just the need to be patient in your installations. In most cases, contributions are located on the OS commerce community section and are downloadable via zip files. After opening the file, read the “read me” file which will walk you through the file additions, subtractions, and code changes needed to make your enhancement work properly. If you explore the OS platform be sure to upgrade with the following contributions.

Ultimate SEO URL’s by Chemo

This cool contribution allows the site owner to create static URL’s out of a database driven site. This will dramatically help in search saturation as more pages are able to be indexed. Its no secret that search spiders like traditional urls better than ones that are dynamic and this contribution helps achieve that.

Easy Populate

No need to input product data manually, this contribution allows you to import data from a basic excel file into your store. A true timesaver!

Featured Products

If you have an ecommerce store - certain products are more attractive to sell than others. This contribution allows you to tailor the featured products that you want to showcase within both your home and category pages.

Final Thoughts on OSC

Myself, I am a marketer. But after learning OS I really feel like I have some programmer blood in me! This platform is easy to use and perfect for a small to medium size business in getting online. Yes, there will be headaches along the way but stay with it and you will overcome them and soon have an ecommerce store to bring you in a new revenue stream.

Craig Smith is the founder of Trinity Insight LLC - a management consulting firm for the E-Commerce sector.

Finding the right affiliate programs to make money with is fairly simple. The first step is picking the niche topic or niche topics you want to have websites about. The best topics to start with are the topics you are interest in or passionate about.

After you decide the topics you can begin to look for affiliate programs that offer products that are related to your topics. Applying for most affiliate programs is easy and only requires you to give them your information and they’ll allow you to join their affiliate program. However, some affiliate programs have an approval process and won’t approve you to join their program without certain requirements like having a completed website, a certain amount of traffic or a certain method of advertising their product. For the affiliate programs that have tight criteria re-apply for them at a later date when your website is getting a large amount of traffic and your website is completely built.

While you search for affiliate programs you should also learn about what types of keywords people that search for the topic you have chosen use to search for to get to information about the topic. There are quite a few websites available that have keyword information. Some websites you need to pay for to use their service. If you want to minimize your costs you can do some research on your own. Keywords are determined by what a person is interested in regarding a topic and what words they use to search for topic.

Another topic to research while you are looking for affiliate programs is the how people advertise affiliate programs. Banner ads are a common way that people advertise affiliate programs, but many people say that banner ads have become ineffective means of advertising. The statistics of banner ads show they usually have low click through rates for affiliate programs. A popular way people are using right now to advertise affiliate programs are through text links. Text links can appear any where in an article and do best in a context that pre-sells the link and make a person want to click on it when they read it.

Text links also serve another purpose and that is to drive traffic to a website. Links that use keywords are considered ‘anchor links’ for a search engine and will give a higher ranking through a search engine.

Sometimes it can be hard to find a lot of affiliate programs for certain topics. If there are different websites that sell products for the topic you have chosen, but they don’t advertise that they offer an affiliate program you can contact them to see if they do have one or would be interested in setting one up. Many businesses don’t realize that they have nothing to lose setting up an affiliate program and everything to gain. When you are searching for affiliate programs you would be wise to learn about how affiliate programs are created and offer this to webmasters who don’t have an affiliate program started.

Content for your topic is the next step in creating your website. Having some knowledge about HTML coding can be very helpful, but often time it is not necessary, because there are so many programs available that make building a website easily.

When you create your website content it is important to keep three things in mind: Know the information people want about your chosen topic, know the keywords people search for and know the affiliate programs that are available to you. The content you write should be able to catch a person’s interest and direct them to an affiliate program website for the desired results. Learning how to pre-sell a product appropriately will give you the best results.

Another affiliate program type worth mentioning is contextual based advertising programs. Google ad sense and Kanoodle are two of the programs that offer this type of advertising. The simplest explanation of these programs is they analyze the content on a web page and display ads that are related to what you have written. If you have a topic that really interests you, but can not find any affiliate programs out there that will apply to your topic these are a good affiliate program to join and use on your website. These affiliate programs are good to use even if you have many affiliate programs already, because they can produce descent revenue by themselves.

The more affiliate programs you join the more chances for making money you will have. The more topics you have available for people to gain information from the more ways you can earn money from affiliate programs. Keeping up-to-date on the newest ways people use to advertise their affiliate programs and continuously improving your marketing knowledge will give you an advantage and lead you to a lucrative affiliate program business.

Kevin has been a successful online business owner since 2003.
Need Help Deciding Try a FREE HOME CAREER at http://www.ezymoneyathome.com
He is also owner of http://www.sheetmusicweb.com, and http://www.travelinsurancedot.com.

If you need help with a homebased business contact Kevin at ezymoneyathome@yahoo.ca