Standing on the Fence

Standing on the Fence /blog/1 A balanced look at what is happening in the Information Technology world and its effects on businesses large and small. bknapik 2010-09-08T06:51:21Z Ebay bans use of Google Checkout - an Experienced Ebay Seller Perspective /blog/post/1/12 In late June Google <a target="_blank" href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/find-it-with-google-buy-it-with-google.html">announced</a> the availability of <a target="_blank" href="http://checkout.google.com">Google Checkout.</a> Google Checkout is a direct competitor to Ebay's <a href="http://www.paypal.com" target="_blank">PayPal</a>. Before Google is even given a chance to show its potential, Ebay has taken action to <a href="http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/accepted-payments-policy.html" target="_blank">block</a> Google as a payment option for Ebay auctions. Ebay cites that Google does not have proper fraud measures in place. Whether this is true or not is yet to be seen. As an experienced seller on Ebay, I can say that Paypal does not have excellent fraud measures in place itself. Ebay has the erroneous notion that fraud can only be committed by the seller and not the buyer. Ebay makes it extremely easy to shut down a seller. With a simple form, a buyer can lock a sellers Paypal account, preventing the seller from receiving, sending, and transferring funds. There have been hundreds of reported cases where the seller have been screwed out of money because the buyer was dishonest. Even a tracking number from UPS is not enough to prove a case. This is especially true with high value items such as jewelery or computer equipment. In my opinion, Google has a far better reputation than Ebay. Ebay over the past few years has become increasingly greedy - it is becoming more and more difficult to turn a profit due to the rate increases. It is quite clear that Ebay is trying to secure its place with Paypal. Google is the only company that can go toe to toe with Ebay. Google has a reputation for offering their services for free and making their dollar on advertising - Google has brilliantly pulled this off again. To quote the Google Checkout <a href="https://checkout.google.com/sell?promo=sbhp" target="_blank">Merchant Page</a> "Process sales for free. For every $1 you spend on AdWords, you can process $10 in sales for free. For sales that exceed this amount or if you don't use AdWords, you can process them at a low 2% and $0.20 per transaction." This essentially knocks Paypal out of the park. Currently, Paypal wants <a target="_blank" href="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-receiving-fees-outside">2.9% + a $0.30</a> transaction fee. Google can be free for advertisers or as little as $2% + a $0.20 transaction fee. I wish Ebay luck with their little restriction, I doubt it will hold. Ultimately, the consumer will decide who wins. Google has the capital, resources, know-how, and reputation to give Ebay a run for its money. E-Commerce 2006-07-07T22:50:49Z bknapik Getting Listed in Search Engines /blog/post/1/11 Many people expect people to just start finding their website out of nowhere. Just like brick and mortar shops, people need to be able to find it. The first step after the launch of a website is to get listed in major search engines. Search engines are the number one way customers locate websites and are the “yellow pages” of the Internet. The first step is to submit the website to www.dmoz.org. DMOZ is a large directory of websites that popular search engines like Google and MSN use to find new websites. Search engines then go through the new websites and add the new websites to their search results. You must also visit each search engine's website separately and use their site submission form. Some search engines charge to be listed, some charge to be expedited onto their search engine, and some are free. Not all search engines are worth paying for but, Yahoo, for example, is worth the price. Submitting your website to free search engines, does not guarantee that you will be listed in them. It can take weeks or even months before your website will even start showing up in search results. If you do not see your site listed after 2 to 3 months, feel free to submit again. So how do you find search engines? There is actually a directory of them at dmoz.org or entering “search engine” into Google will keep you busy for hours. There are even search engines specific to topic and country. E-Commerce 2006-07-05T00:06:12Z bknapik Online Customer Service /blog/post/1/10 How does a company be their competition with customer service? Easy! Many online giants lack timely e-mail response, product knowledge and friendliness according to a recent consumer group survey. There are several ways to improve customer service including one live chat, e-mail, and telephone. Implementing these three strategies will put your business ahead of most large e-commerce sites. One recent innovation is live online customer service chat. This allows customers to talk to a customer service representative directly from the company's website. Online live chat is a cost effective way of handling customer service since employees can handle multiple customer requests at one time. According to OSI Codes an online shopper is 20% more likely to buy a product after talking to an online customer service representative and that online live chat will grow to 59% of buyers by 2007. Not answering e-mail is the biggest pitfall of major online operations. They do not dedicate enough resources to provide quick and effective responses. If a company can overcome this obstacle, a major advantage is gained. E-mail is manageable and does not have to be answered right away like other forms of customer service making this the simplest form of customer support. Setting up the e-mail to auto-respond with a message saying that the customer's question will be answered within forty-eight hours and confirming the receipt of the message helps build confidence with the customer. Even the largest online giants do not provide telephone customer service. Amazon.com only provides a phone number to order over the phone, Ebay effectively hides their customer phone number and asks that all issues are handled by e-mail. Many people feel more comfortable talking on the phone than sending an e-mail or talking on live chat. Some customers will not order unless there is a phone number listed on the website. With these three strategies in place, it becomes easy to have a competitive advantage against the online corporate giants. E-Commerce 2006-06-24T22:06:09Z bknapik Top 10 E-Commerce Mistakes /blog/post/1/9 There are some common mistakes that small business e-commerce sites make. If you are not getting the response you are expecting here some possible reasons. 1.Amateur look - One of the largest problems with new e-commerce sites is an unprofessional look. The key to this is consistency including fonts, page colors, and layout and limit to three colors. 2.Trustworthiness - When a customer does not feel they can trust a company with their information, they will not order. 3.Slow page display - The display times are critical. If your website takes more than seven seconds to display fully then it is extremely likely the prospective customer will leave before the page is completely viewable. 4.Lack of contact information Many sites lack having contact information. Having the phone number visible on all pages of the website will not only help establish trust but also give the customer the means to contact you if they have a problem. 5.Poor checkout procedures - The checkout procedure is the most likely location to lose a sale. If the checkout procedure is to complicated or daunting, it is likely that the customer will leave. Making the procedure as simple will go a long way. 6.Website content not updated - When a customer believes that the site is no longer being maintained, the customer will not order. 7.Important information not above the fold - The fold is the content on the page before you have to scroll down to view more information. It is critical that the most important information is displayed in this area since it is the most likely area that the customer will read. 8.No privacy policy - Customers are concerned about their privacy and they should be. With all the talk about spam, and identity theft many customers do read a sites privacy policy. The lack of a privacy policy will drive away a customer in a hurry 9.Poor customer service - It only takes a few customers to damage your reputation forever. The best way to avoid this is to provide timely customer service. 10.Lack of integration with the current business - Many small businesses forget to include their website in common materials such as business cards. catalogs, press releases, and fliers. Be sure to put your website address on all business related promotional materials. E-Commerce 2006-06-13T20:48:28Z bknapik Establishing Trust Online /blog/post/1/8 One of the many hurdles of any e-commerce operation is making prospective customers trust the website. Customers need to believe the site represents a real business and not a fraudulent one, that product will be delivered, and that their financial information is safe after the purchase. The first step is to include privacy policy, terms and conditions, shipping and return policies, and contact pages. The privacy policy should specifies what the business does with contact and financial information.Terms and conditions details the rights of customers, copyrights, and trademarks of the company and website. Shipping and return policies detail how the company ships product and how to return merchandise. Contact pages should contain a way to electronically contact the company, phone numbers, fax numbers, hours of operation, and possibly driving directions to the physical location of the business. The customer needs to feel it is safe to transmit their financial information over the Internet. SSL companies provide its customer with a graphic it may put on its website to show it uses SSL technology to safeguard information transferred over the Internet. Putting this graphic, visibly, on the website helps achieve trust of the transaction. Also be sure that any pages that transfer customer information are secured properly. People do look to make sure that the page is secure when ordering. Some sites offer a secure shopping guarantee that outlines identity theft laws and guarantees that financial information will not be stolen. Finally, make the site look professional. The look of a website is as important as the look of a brick-and-mortar shop. People will judge a website within a few seconds, if the initial judgment is unappealing, the customer will leave. The site needs to look clean. Stay away from repetitive animated graphics, music or anything that may distract the customer from their actions. E-Commerce 2005-12-14T16:53:53Z bknapik Costs of E-commerce /blog/post/1/7 Small business owners fear of startup costs of an e-commerce website however, the truth is by investing one months advertising fund a company can may start an e-commerce site. For less than $500.00 a functional e-commerce site can be setup. The basic technical elements of an e-commerce site are domain name, web hosting, SSL certificate, and shopping software. Web hosting is a service that provides online systems for storing information, images or any content accessible via the web. Costs can range from $5.00 to $300.00 a month depending on the needs of the business. Most companies just starting e-commerce should look for web hosts pricing $9.00 to $24.00. Only large, busy e-commerce sites will need to look at web hosting that are more than $24.00. A domain name is the unique name that distinguishes your website from others (similar idea to your mailing address but, for the Internet.) Costs range from $4.95 to $49.95 per year. Since this is a long term commitment take advantage of the multiple year discounts for the domain name. Any site accepting credit cards online must have a SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate for security concerns. If a credit card company discovers a site accepting credit cards online without using a SSL certificate they will pull the companies credit card processing privileges. A SSL certificate secures and protects critical customer information from being exposed to identity thieves thus adding trust to your business. Costs can range from $150.00 to $1800.00. Starting e-commerce sites should look for SSL certificates in the $200.00 - $500.00 range. Higher priced SSL certificates do not offer enough benefits to justify the costs. There are hundreds of shopping software packages available for purchase. Prices range from free to several thousand dollars. However, there is one good shopping software package available for free that is worth considering. OSCommerce is a free full featured shopping system that many hosts are willing to install for little or no cost. There will be customization costs which may be done by reputable web development companies. These customization charges are not included in the startup costs since it is an ongoing process. E-Commerce 2005-11-20T23:05:05Z bknapik Why Establish Internet Presence? /blog/post/1/6 “If your company is not changing as fast as the world outside, then the end of your company is near.” Five years ago there were no instant credit card authorizations, broadband Internet, and online shipping. Companies adopted these technologies to obtain a competitive advantage. Today, small businesses must have a website to gain market share. Having an online store has several unique advantages that cannot be gained through other mediums such as print, television, radio, mass mailing and telephone. One advantage of an online business is it has world presence verses being local and regional only. Another advantage is online advertising is cheaper compared to other mediums. Furthermore, a website can coordinate other marketing efforts in the mediums previously mentioned. Finally, the biggest benefit is the customer's ability to shop or access information about your business at their leisure. Some small business owners believe that running a website is complicated, expensive and that there is little room to compete. This is hardly the case. Only 35% of small businesses in the US have a website (about 700,000 small businesses.) There has never been a better time to get involved online. Operation costs are now affordable, a person with basic computer skills may operate an e-commerce site, competition is low, and the market will continue to grow. In 2004 holiday shoppers spent 22.3 billion online, a 25% increase from 2003, and this figure is likely to grow for many years to come. E-Commerce 2005-11-07T23:28:18Z bknapik The cPanel Experience /blog/post/1/5 It is a well known fact that cPanel is the industry standard in web host control panels however, after my experience with their software it really suprised me how unreliable cPanel is and that it is used on the majority of servers today. These events ultimately made me choose Plesk over cPanel. The story begins when I e-mailed cPanel and asked if their software is stable on the AMD Opteron (x86_64) platform. I received a reply a few days later from cPanel exclaiming that indeed the software is stable on the Opteron platform. Thus I went ahead and installed cPanel on the server. The install script ran smoothly and it looked like everything was installed properly. Since the cPanel software has to be activated, I went and purchased the license in order to setup the software. This is where the tradegy begins. I logged into cPanel and begin their installation wizard. I filled in the information necessary and clicked submit. My browser said "Waiting for response" for approximately 5 minutes. The response never came, cPanel, SSH, and Apache all crashed. So I had to restart the server via the web based administration tool given by the datacenter. The machine came back online and I began the setup wizard once again. This time I got to the third page of the setup wizard before cPanel crashed. This time the reboot would not go so smoothly. I went to reboot the machine and the services never came back online. I contacted the datacenter to have a look at it however, no one was on site to see what was going on. Thus, I had to wait until the next day to find out what was happening. It turns out the whole entire usr partition was corrupted. There was over 1000+ files in the lost+found directory and the kernel could not load without some user intervention. I had to have the operating system re-installed by the datacenter. The cPanel script ran fine and this time I finished the setup wizard without a hitch. After running for a few hours the server would crash. This would happen constantly, the server had to be rebooted every couple of hours. There is no way I can run websites on a server this unreliable. I had the datacenter re-install the operating system for a second time. This time I had them install the 32 bit version of the operating system. This time however, there was a problem in the install script. It turns out the script would hang at a certain point (which I would find out later was a bug in their newest install script.) In order to get passed it, I logged into another SSH terminal and killed the process that was running. The script would resume and it would say complete. Next I went into the setup wizard and everything went smoothly. When I came back to log in to the server via SSH it would not let me log in. It would not even let me type in my username to log in. It would just instantly disconnect me. That was it, I was furious. I had the datacenter install the operating system for the third and last time. I had cPanel refund my money for the license, which they did with no problem thankfully. I then went and purchased Plesk which installed without a problem and has not crashed yet. The server at the time of writing has 29 days uptime and is running very smoothly. By the time everything was said and done, I spent $120 dollars on operating re-installs, and several hours of the datacenters' staff and my time. In my opinion cPanel needs a lot of work done to make it ready for the Opteron platform and that their install scripts need to tested more thoroughly. One of the things that cPanel does that also bothers me is the fact that cPanel downloads and installs every package in the update tree for the operating system. This overall makes the server bloated and possibly less secure. Plesk on the other hand only needs a handful of packages and it only installs the ones it needs elminating these concerns. Perhaps in the future if cPanel corrects these problems I will re-evaluate their software however, at this time I would not recommend that anybody uses cPanel under any circumstances. Information Technology 2005-05-31T08:36:15Z bknapik Welcome to Web Finesse /blog/post/1/4 I will be blogging on just about anything, mostly my thoughts on information technology, etc. Information Technology 2005-05-16T10:22:20Z bknapik