I came across this article about what to look for in an E-Commerce package. It’s really good advice. It’s practical, easy to understand, and covers what’s essential. Turns out, Michael knows of the author, Ian Lurie, follows him on Twitter and met him at an SEO conference in Portland a few years back. Ian is one of the most respected voices in internet marketing and his blog has a ton of great content.

Many of our customers would be categorized as micro-ebusinesses. They have 1-5 employees. Quite a few of those customers are quite successful. It is tough to go up against the likes of Amazon.com and the myriad of big box online retailers. And maybe “going up against them” is not the best approach, but the small-ebiz entrepreneur can compete on their own terms.

So how do they/you do it?

We would like to suggest that you use the small size of your company to your advantage. You need to be ready, willing, and able to establish your personal brand and push it across the many social avenues that are now available.

We have just posted an article on our HEROweb Marketing and Design website called Competing by Being Small.

Hopefully we have provided some food for thought for the micro-ebusinesses of the world. Let us know what you think.

I have always wanted to coin a term and maybe this is my chance. How about “The Law of Just Simple Enough”. Here is how it goes:

Software has a certain difficulty threshold; when the software stays below the threshold, it will be used productively, but when it passes the threshold it will cease to be used at all.

So many software packages have slick Flash demos that make them look like the cat’s meow. But once a user starts using the software day in and day out, and really gives the core features a workout, many features will be quickly abandoned because they are too hard to use or just don’t make any sense at all.

We have come up with (what we thought were) some great features in our software, but when a user starts clicking down the wrong path or produces an unintended result, they will often give up rather than persevere.

A lot of work and thought goes into making software obvious to a wide range of users who have varying thought processes and needs. There is nothing more educational than sitting down with a novice user and watching them use your software and seeing where they succeed and where they fail.

When software is done right it makes a difficult task seem easy enough for a small child.  That is exactly how MS Word was – six versions ago!

“Green” Consumers want to know; is shopping online good for the environment?  If you’re trying to make environmentally responsible choices, you may have wondered whether you can shop online with a clear conscience. What is the net effect of shopping online and having items shipped right to your door? You already know that it is incredibly convenient, saving you time and money, especially when you factor in the astronomical price of fuel. But is shopping online really a good choice for the environment?

You might assume making a ten-minute trip to the store would use less fuel and energy than having the same product shipped hundreds of miles straight to your door.  I was surprised to find the opposite to be true, and to find out just how many ways eCommerce helps the environment!

Dr. Joseph Romm, Lead Author and Executive Director for The Center for Energy and Climate solutions reports, “Internet shopping uses less energy to get a package to your house. Shipping 10 pounds of packages by overnight air – the most energy-intensive delivery mode – uses 40 percent less fuel than driving round-trip to the mall. Ground shipping by truck uses just one tenth the energy of driving yourself.”

The energy efficiency and emissions control potential of online shopping is growing exponentially.  I cornered the delivery man in our office today to ask if there had been recent internal policy changes to improve fuel and energy efficiency.  I’m glad I asked!  He reported substantial changes in the way UPS manages deliveries. In addition to their recent policy of “No left turns”, which conserves fuel and controls emissions, UPS recently bought 500 alternative fuel vehicles. According to UPS, the switch to alternative fuel vehicles will save 176,000 gallons of fuel per year, which is roughly the equivalent to taking 100 UPS trucks off the road. Moreover, the trucks powered by compressed natural gas will reduce truck emissions by another 20 percent. Fedex quickly followed suit, announcing plans to replace 30,000 trucks with hybrids.  When the largest fleets in the country start competing for the title of “Greenest Carrier”, everyone wins!

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, in terms of the potential impact of increased internet sales on the world’s economy.  According to Dr. Romm’s report:

• The Internet decreases our need for commercial building space. The resulting energy savings from operations and maintenance alone were estimated to save a total 53 billion kilowatt hours and 67 trillion BTUs worth of natural gas per year by the year 2007.

• The avoided construction would save the equivalent of 10 more power plants worth of energy, and another 40 million metric tons of greenhouse pollution.

The Internet saves million of tons of paper every year.  The American Forest & Paper Association reported paper production has experienced a steady decline since the year 2000, an average of .7% annually, according to an article published by Recycling Today Magazine.  Newsprint production is sliding even faster, decreasing by 28.7% since 2000.  For the first time, in February of 2008, the Whitehouse published it’s 3000+ page annual budget online, saving roughly 20 tons of paper, or 480 trees.

In the second quarter of 2008, the US Census Bureau reported 34.6 billion dollars in ecommerce sales, an increase of 8.9% over 2nd quarter of 2007.  Apparently, consumers agree, online shopping makes sense!

Ecommerce is reaching new heights of convenience and affordability.  Major retailers like Gap, JC Penney, and Target are focusing on internet sales, which are growing as fast as in-store sales are declining.  The Gap recently re-organized their website to include Old Navy and Banana Republic, one convenient shopping cart for all three stores.  JC Penney took bold steps, offering an improved rewards program and discounts to internet shoppers that compare with their in-store sales.  Target offers free shipping on orders over $50, and let’s face it, it’s easy to spend $50 at Target.

Check out a few of your favorite retailers online, chances are, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to see better sales and shipping deals than in the past, not to mention increased availability.  I used to hate clicking on a product only to read “Only available in stores.”  I’m happy to report the imminent demise of that particular caveat, I haven’t encountered it in months!

Affordable hosted shopping cart solutions like MightyMerchant’s ecommerce platform make it easier than ever for small business owners, local artisans, manufacturers, and tradesmen to market their unique products and services online. Vendors who couldn’t afford to open a brick-and-mortar store are able to reach a huge and ever expanding audience, on the internet.  This is a major step toward sustainability in local markets and toward helping small businesses and mom and pop shops thrive!

It’s never been easier or made more sense to “Go Green.” Energy, resource, and fuel conservation have quietly slipped into our collective social conscience.  Americans are going green in record numbers.  The good news is, going green saves green, and we all appreciate money in the bank.

Tags: environmental, ecommerce, shopping, green, business, shipping, conservation, economy

This post comes to you from Staci Schipporeit, co-owner and lead software developer at MightyMerchant. This is my first blog post, but I’m full of ideas and always reading so this will be the first of many!

Today’s issue of Ecommerce Notes from Practical Ecommerce announces that NetSuite received the 2008 CODiE Award for Best Ecommerce Software. My curiosity was piqued, to say the least. I frequently recommend to our customers that they subscribe to eCommerce Notes because the newsletter contains good content and ideas for online merchants. Will our customers who subscribe to the newsletter (or see the award in the countless other places you can find it online) click over to NetSuite and abandon us?

I clicked over to NetSuite and, my god, it does EVERYTHING. Part of their service is running an online store, but it does payroll and sales force management, too. My first question was, hmmm, how much does this cost? Since it got a CODiE award, it’s probably good software so that wasn’t my first question. I tried to find pricing information on the site, but couldn’t find it quickly. The most obvious options are “FREE Trial”, “Schedule a Demo” and “Contact Me”. Apparently, they want to know who you are before they divulge pricing. But, hey, this is the internet, so I popped over to Google and searched for “netsuite pricing“.

The first result was this blog post, which has a comment with a long list of the pricing as of March 08. If you’re interested in NetSuite, you’ll definitely want to take a look at the price list which is vast and certainly in a much higher bracket than the MightyMerchant services and platform. But the post topic and the comments that follow are what’s most interesting. The blog post is mainly about “churn” or customer turnover. It claims that based on filings with the SEC, in the past 5 years NetSuite has been losing more customers than it is gaining. A response from a NetSuite employee says in part that given the nature of the small merchants they serve, that’s to be expected.

So, what does this all have to do with MightyMerchant? Plenty. We have extremely low churn. The vast majority of web sites we develop are still online and still with us years later. Maybe 90%. I’m going to see if I can query our billing system to find out the exact number and if I can I’ll post it here. It’s clear that our product is serving the market we target quite well based on customer satisfaction and success. It’s clear that our pricing delivers the value that our customers expect. We’re growing slowly and have a much smaller customer base than NetSuite, but our customer base is quite stable. So, at least for today, I’m not worried about NetSuite. But, oh, how I’d love to get a CODiE award of our own!

There are lots of things in this world that we use everyday and don’t know how they work…televisions, cell phones, microwave ovens, search engines, URLs, speaking for myself, of course. If you’re involved in online business (and if you’re reading this you no doubt are) having a working knowledge of a URL is an important tidbit of knowledge. If you’re a programmer you might just want to skip back to another post and catch up on your reading, but for those of you who may not know all the parts of a standard URL, please keep reading!

First of all, a URL is a “uniform resource locator,” and it is a way of identifying and locating items on the web such as files or pages.

Let’s look at this example URL:

http://www.blog.example.com/faq/link-policy/index.html

The http is the protocol, or method of accessing the file and stands for “hypertext transfer protocol.” Other protocols are https (secure hypertext transfer protocol) ftp (file transfer protocol), sftp (secure file transfer protocol). The portion following the protocol, www.blog.example.com, is the host, the subdomain is blog and the domain name is example.co and www indicates is an acronym for World Wide Web.

Items in the slashes, /, are directories or folders where the files you are looking for are found. /faq/ is the directory, /link-policy/ is the subdirectory, and “index.html” is the “resource ID.” This is the name of the file for the page which is stored on the specified server. /index.html is the file name for the specific page. The file name ends with a three or four letter designation of the file type like .rtf, .pdf, .jpeg or others.

If a website has a URL like this example:

http://podcast.example.co.au:80/podcastplay?id=1073682064&

the “au” is a country code and is also the “top level domain,” meaning the website originates from Australia. The second-level domain is “.co.au.” “:80″ is the default web server port. Ports may be identified in other ways but if it is 80 it is most often left out. The path is /podcastplay which is where the folder is, like in the previous example. The characters within the ? and & are a parameter. The parameter has the name id and the value 1073682064. A URL can have many parameters and they are always set off by ? and &.

A static URL is a document that can be returned by the server without the server having to do any computation. A dynamic URL, on the other hand, does require the server to perform some computation to return it. If the URL contains a question mark, it’s usually considered dynamic while no question mark in the URL usually means its static. The contents of a static URL don’t change whereas a dynamic URL is basically a template in which to display changing content, which makes updating a site much easier; Instead of changing information in the static HTML code, the content is changed in a database.

For a non-programmer, how did I do? If I missed something, join the discussion and let me know!

“I read this great blog post the other day…was it from the Search Engine Watch blog? Search Engine Roundtable? Search Engine Land? Search Engine Guide? Or maybe it was SEO Chicks?”

Never again will I have to scroll through 208 blog posts looking for that one “needle in a feedstack” that I just know I read somewhere two weeks ago. Finally, Google has added a search feature to their feed reader, Google Reader.

How could Google, a empire company built on search technology, never have included a search feature in their two-year old Reader before now? It’s inexplicable that Google Reader would have launched without a search feature, but it did. Just to make Reader users feel very special, or more likely distract us from the fact that we should be angry about not having search before now, they have included some other tweaks to the service. You can now read your posts on a full screen by clicking on the separator to the right of the side navigation menu. It never bothered me before to have the post I was reading share the space with my subscription list, but with the navigation menu hidden there is less text competing for my attention and I’m happier. They have upped the limit of unread counts from 100 to 1,000. It would scare me to come back from vacation and see 1,000 unread blog posts, but at least you would know how far behind you really were. And finally, Reader now lets you use the forward and back buttons to move between folders and subscriptions that you’ve navigated to, just like any other web page.

Yay!

Tags: Google,, Google, Reader

25 years ago today a revolution was begun. Some shrugged off the new media as the generation before them had shrugged off The Beatles. (”Rock and Roll won’t last.”)

The first compact disc was pressed in Germany by the Philips factory, a division of Polygram. Overlooking their unfortunate choice for first pressing — ABBA’s The Visitors – the first music CD manufactured on August 17, 1982 ushered in a new technological age, moving us away from analog and into the realm of digital. The original compact disc was designed to hold 60 minutes of music. (The 8GB iPod nano, which holds 2000 songs, wasn’t yet a glimmer of a dream.) As much of the early CD catalog was classical, Philips and Sony extended that capacity to 74 minutes . . . long enough to accommodate the complete performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.

Thank you, Ludwig.