Enhancing your website for greater trust and a better customer experience is important, but it can be one of the hardest things to know how to do. We just posted an article on the HeroWeb site about using trust seals on your site.

The article describes what trust seals are (third-party endorsements, essentially, that ensure that your site meets certain trust and security expectations) and some pros and cons about them.

Let us know what your experience has been. Have you ever used trust seals on your site? Did it make a difference in your conversions? Are you thinking about using them? Some sites have seen increased sales when using trust seals, but it can be hard to know whether the increased consumer trust (which hopefully leads to more transactions on your site) is worth the cost of purchasing the seals.

If I dare bring up the subject of “passwords” to a customer I typically get an immediate response of an uncomfortable groan or moan. With the proliferation of social media sites, web service accounts, and other logins, managing passwords has become ever more daunting.

But, as painful as they are, good password policies are the cornerstone of any  sound security program. And, if you have an Ecommerce site and are serious about PCI Compliance, you want to formulate a password policy for your business and stick by it.

Here is a simple idea to help you with creating good passwords. You can think of it as a word game of sorts.

1. Start with a group of names that mean something to you. Perhaps the characters from Star Wars. Or maybe, your past spouses (okay, that one will only work if you have had a checkered marital past!).

2. Then layer on top a group of numbers that are already etched into your mind. Perhaps it could be the birthdates of your kids. Or it could be the uniform numbers of your five favorite basketball players.

3. And then think of a substitution you can use. For example, you will replace instances of the letter A with an Ampersand.

Using this methodology, I have come up with the following password: Y69d12n03&

What is that pattern, you ask? It is my brother’s name, Andy, spelled backwards, with his birthdate interspersed between the letters. For good measure, I swapped out the A with an Ampersand and led things off with an uppercase Y.

Compare this password to something like “Andy1234″ which would immediately flunk any password test. Why? Because a password with recognizable words, names, and number sequences is an easy target for a password cracking program. My more complex pattern only make sense to me.

If I used my password formula in conjunction with my other siblings’ names and meaningful dates, I could have a set of passwords that would be relatively easy for me to remember, but difficult to get hacked. The key is if I remember my formula, I can come up with a complex combination of characters without actually having to memorize a bunch of gibberish. The goal is meaningful gibberish.

Passwords and security are a dead-serious topic. But by having a little fun with your password selection you will help yourself in creating strong passwords that will serve your business well.

Web shoppers are getting smarter all the time. A website that you created five years ago might have passed muster for the typical shopper, but with increased competition from other small merchants as well as the big players you need to make sure you are covering every aspect of putting forth a professional and trustworthy presence.

How are you doing in these areas:

1. Providing relevant third-party certifications.

2. Developing on-site and off-site reviews of your products and services.

3. Keeping your website up-to-date and filled with relevant information.

4. Building your personal identity and credibility.

5. Creating a professional-looking web presence.

We have just posted a detailed article on our HERO-web.com website discussing a range of areas you want to consider to build your credibility.

View the full article:  Establishing Your Credibility

We are proud to announce the launch of customized product feeds for websites running the MightyMerchant platform! What does this mean, you might ask?

Simply put, product feeds are a way to send your website product data to countless other websites and comparison shopping engines, including the big ones like Google, Amazon, and Yahoo. They give you the opportunity to get your products in front of many more shoppers and drive them to your site for purchasing.

One popular service is Google Base (Formerly called Froogle), a free service which allows you to submit items to Google, which then come up in searches in Google Product Search. Sometimes, these products will even come up in a standard search. As an example, try searching for “simax heavy wall tubing” in Google, and you will likely see Shopping Results near the top of the page showing specific products available on one particular MightyMerchant site, glass supply distributor Winship Designs. Talk about great exposure!

Although MightyMerchant has offered Google Base feeds for years, we are now offering managed feed services to ensure your products are optimized for maximum exposure, as well as target a much broader range of comparison shopping engines. There are many other services online that allow you to submit a product feed to increase your product’s visibility. Some of these include:

• Yahoo Shopping
• Nextag.com
• Shopzilla.com
• www.become.com
• Shopping.com
• Pricegrabber.com

…and many more! Chances are if you find a site that accepts a feed, we can build a custom feed in the required format and get your products an online presence far beyond your site.

If you would like more details about this exciting feature, or feel like this is something your site must have, then Contact Us and we’d be happy to discuss how custom product feeds could help your business.

Let me start by saying there is no foolproof way to prevent people from downloading images off your website. However, there are a number of strategies that will deter the average visitor to your website.

1. Disable right-click. There are a number of javascripts available that will disable a user’s ability to right-click and download an image to his or her computer. There are a number of javascripts available at Dynamic Drive. However, these javascripts may not work in all browsers and even if the javascript works, an easy workaround is taking a screen shot.

2. Watermark your images. A watermark directly embedded into your images will make it harder for someone to use the images unless they have really good image-editing skills. However, watermarks can be cropped out unless they’re fairly large.

3. Transparent gif. A transparent gif the same size as your image with, for example, the word “Sample” can be placed over the image. If someone right-clicks to download the image they will end up downloading the gif file, rather than the image itself. Screen shots and editing are still problems, but this method may be easier than embedding a watermark.

4. Post low-resolution images. Low resolution images (72 dpi) are unlikely to be used for hi-resolution printing.

5. Have a copyright statement on your website. This lets people know that the content of the website is officially yours.

Sample copyright statement: “Contents of this web site and all original works are © copyright your name here – All rights reserved. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of owner.”

If you find that someone has used your images on another website, DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) rules require the website host to remove the images if, after notification and any counter-claims, it is found that the site has violated copyright. DMCA official website: www.loc.gov/copyright

Google has a new competitor. Search engine Cuil, pronounced “cool” (the word ‘cuil’ is a Gaelic word meaning knowledge), officially launched today. And while Google can definitely use some competition, I don’t expect Cuil (www.cuil.com) to revolutionize the search experience.

One thing it has going for it is that Cuil was started by former Googlers, who presumably learned a thing or two while with the search behemoth. But it has some immediate differences. For one thing, Cuil can’t use PageRank to organize the results, as Google obviously has that technology squarely in their clutches and they’re not letting go. So Cuil has to look for different criteria with which to assess the relevance of a page. Cuil actually looks at the content of a page, and ignores the popularity measures that Google considers most relevant, such as link analysis.

First, Cuil finds pages with the keywords you searched for, then analyzes that page’s further content and “its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.” The results are returned not in a list but in a 2- or 3- column format, which is visually a more interesting way to view.

Another nice thing is that Cuil’s home page is black, with no ads or other distracting clutter, and there are no sponsored results at this time, so the user experience is bound to be a little cleaner.

Cuil also offers suggestions for refining results. Cuil claims to have a searchable database that’s 3 times the size of Google’s, but really that doesn’t matter much. The size of the index isn’t the most important thing to a user; if the engine doesn’t return the results the user is expecting, they just won’t use it again, and it won’t matter how many pages Cuil has to pull from.

Another thing that makes Cuil a little bit cooler than other search engines is that they promise not to collect or save user data, so your search history is always private, unlike the big Google.

Still, there’s something missing. I searched for “blackberry,” thinking that would be a good search term to test because of the different meanings of the word. All of the results were about the hand-held device, but to the right of the page was an “explore by category” button with the option “Hybrid rubus,” in case you were wanting info about the fruit. Under that category was three options: boysenberry, loganberry, and olallieberry, all of which are varieties of blackberries. However, clicking on those subcategories revealed that Cuil didn’t have any information about them. Cuil suggested that I entered a typo, that my search term was rare, or that I had entered too many search terms. If Cuil is going to come anywhere near to being the Google-killer they claim to be, they’re going to have to beef up their relevancy algorithm, and quick.

People often ask why they should invest in a hosted web application. Paying a monthly fee for someone else’s software doesn’t sound like a very good deal at first. I recently joined MightyMerchant’s team, and I can tell you from personal experience, hosted web solutions are a very good deal! I wasted thousands of dollars and hours trying to get an expensive desktop application to do the job I wanted before finally giving up. A little research led me to web-hosted applications, and I quickly realized the benefits of having a professional team of programmers and developers at my disposal. Web-hosted solutions absolutely make the most sense for business owners who want a profitable web presence.

There are a few people who seem to have an innate knowledge of the mechanics behind those glossy webpages we love to surf. They don’t mind spending the extraordinary amount of time and effort it takes to get professional results. Those are the people who’ll tell you you’re better off buying the software. Without their training and experience, you’re treating your business like a DIY project. I’m going to give you the same advice you’ve heard from friends the world over. “Save yourself the headache and hire a professional!” Personally, I’d rather enter a few dozen lines of copy, download an image or two, and go to lunch. I’m happy to let the professionals do the work for me. At the end of the day, I’ll total the sales and smile. Teh nice.

I shared my experience comparing hosted web solutions and desktop applications in detail on the MightyMerchant website.

Paige Pryor joined MightyMerchant in June as the new Account and Project Manager and self-appointed Environmental Coordinator. Her background and experience in marketing, sales, and database administration led her to web-hosted solutions as a convenient and cost-efficient method of relaying products and services to customers.

Your ecommerce website is live. You’ve got a marketing plan to draw people in to your site and the quality content and usability experience to keep them happy and coming back to you. You’re ready for customers and eager to see your business thrive. The last thing you want to do is turn down an order, right?

Actually, when your ecommerce site is new, a cautious approach to filling orders and shipping is a good idea. For new ecommerce sites considering whether or not to ship internationally, there are a few things to keep in mind which could cause you to avoid shipping internationally or at least delay it until you have more experience and your site is more established.

The two major issues involved in the decision of whether to sell your products internationally are order/credit card fraud, and shipping costs. If your business is based in the United States and you decide to sell internationally, it is likely only a matter of time before you are faced with a fraudulent order. That’s not to say that fraudulent orders don’t originate in the United States, because of course they do, but there are a few reasons why overseas orders are particularly problematic.

Price

One of our new sites, LearningServicesUS.com, sells educational software for teachers. As the site owners were preparing to get their site ready to go live, they were investigating international shipping options and discovered that the shipping to Brazil for one item would be over a thousand dollars! Probably not realistic to consider shipping at that rate. After discussing the options with LearningServicesUS, the verdict was that after they build up clients and sales that they would revisit the international shipping issues and reconsider later. In general, we wouldn’t advise new ecommerce sites to offer international sales, partly for this reason of exorbitant costs, and also because order fraud is much more rampant overseas.

Lack of enforcement

Many developing and Third-World countries don’t and can’t allocate the resources necessary to properly monitor fraud, track fraudulent activity online, and pursue and prosecute thieves. There’s just no money for these tasks. Additionally, the market for stolen credit-card numbers is most active outside of the United States. If you do offer overseas shipping, you may want to consider avoiding orders from certain high-risk countries where fraud is known to be a major problem. Countries such as Romania, Latvia, Belarus and other Eastern European countries have high fraud risks, as does Nigeria, Sudan, and Ghana, countries in southern Asia (Phillipines, Thailand, Malaysia) and Middle Eastern countries (Iran, Iraq, Libya). *

What you can do to avoid fraud

It’s wise to have some internal checks in place on your ordering system. These suggestions for protecting yourself from fraudulent orders hold true even for domestic orders, but are especially important if you do decided to offer international shipping.

Avoid shipping to post office boxes. United States Postal Service (USPS) shipping rates are more affordable for overseas shipping when compared to UPS or FedEx, for instance, but USPS can’t track overseas packages and postal service in the destination country may be unreliable.

Compare the credit card billing address to the shipping address. For an overseas order, insist that they match.

Hand review each order over a certain amount. Pick an amount that makes sense for your business and manually review all orders over that amount. If you normally get orders averaging only$100, a $250 order may ring some alarm bells. Consider calling all customers who place orders above this set amount to personally verify their orders. Depending on your product and sales volume, maybe a $500 order would seem suspicious. Just keep in the back of your mind that a “too good to be true” expensive order really may be too good to be true.

Do a BIN look-up. The Bank Identification Number, or BIN, is the first six digits of a credit card. These numbers identify the bank that issued the credit card. The free service at http://all-nettools.com/toolbox, financial allows you to enter the BIN numbers to determine the issuing bank. It’s worth investigating if the issuing bank is located in a country other than where the order is originating.

*source: Scribd

If you’re in the business of selling products or services online, I’m of the opinion that you really only have two jobs to do, both equally important. One job is to provide your customers with quality information, so when they’re searching and find you they stick around because you have what they want. The other is to provide them with a quality experience while they’re on your site, so they feel comfortable buying from you. A customer that does not trust you will not make a purchase. Customer anxiety is a common cause of shopping cart abandonment, and there are some key elements that your site can and should provide to help people feel comfortable with your site’s security and make the sale. Let’s look at a few customer anxiety issues and along with solutions.

Present a professional appearance – This is probably the hardest to define but perhaps the most important. Often a site just “doesn’t look right,” possibly due to a clashing color scheme, too many flashing and whirling animations, misspellings and poor grammar, or just a tone that is “too commercial.” Use clear language and a familiar navigation. You only have a few seconds in which to impress upon a potential customer that you are trustworthy, and if your site doesn’t meet expectations it’s only too easy to click away and go to the next one.

Display your guarantee - Guarantees give customers peace of mind. There’s no doubt in your mind that you are a legitimate business that sells quality products you stand behind, right? Give your customers that same confidence with a guarantee. Place the guarantee on your home page for all to see, as well as include it on the order now, view cart and check out pages.

It makes sense to display guarantees and credibility indicators near the actions that they are most closely related to. Credibility indicators are affiliations with or endorsements by trusted companies or trade association such as Better Business Bureau Online, TRUSTe, and Hacker Safe. These should be displayed on your check out pages as well as home page.

Testimonials - Include positive customer testimonials throughout your site. If the testimonial is from a customer with a website, link to them so people can click through. I have been amazed in the past to look at sites offering search engine optimization and marketing services, promising incredible results and providing testimonials that don’t link to the customer’s sites! That makes their claims really hard to believe. If you have a testimonial that mentions the ease of ordering, responsive customer service, or the ease with which a return or exchange was made, consider adding that to the order page for some extra reassurance. [MightyMerchant's article Gathering and Using Testimonials has more info about this topic.]

Contact info– Prominently link to your contact information, official company address, and customer support phone number and other support information. Include your support telephone number on the check-out page. I’m a big fan of About Us pages to give a sense of the people behind the products, and I think they engender trust.

Privacy policy – Include a statement outlining how personal information will be used, or not used.

“What will happen next” statements – Let people know what to expect before they complete an action. Let them know if they will they receive an email or phone call, what the expected delivery date is, and any other pertinent information.

Prominently display shipping prices and policies. It stretches the limits of acceptability when these appear to be hidden or choices in shipping costs aren’t offered.

And finally, avoid unexpected redirects to another site. Link out when you have to in order to provide complete and necessary information, and have the link open in a new pag. In the event that this is not possible for some reason, provide a warning message that people will need to leave the site.

These simple elements combine to give potential customers a high-quality experience on your site, which will in turn reflect how comfortable they are giving you their money. As your website’s usability works together to reduce customer anxiety, you should see an attendant rise in your sales or other conversions.

I recently put out a call asking for people to share their best business resources. Could be anything…a newsletter, website or blog you turn to for marketing inspiration or a time-saving tool you use everyday. I plan to turn those responses into a series of posts on this blog-with a link to the respondents’ websites and a little about the business if you like-about what real businesses feel are their best resources. If you would like to share your most helpful resources with me and our readers, please email me or leave a comment here and I will respond. This is the first post on this topic.

One of the first responses I received was about a topic on the minds of every small business that sells online-order fraud. Unfortunately, this is a widespread problem and one that is likely to burn every ecommerce webmaster sooner or later. I broached the subject of identifying and preventing order fraud in a previous post, but here is the experience of one of our clients who wished to remain anonymous, and the tools they use to combat the problem of fraudulent orders.

“Identity theft is a real concern for us. Early in 07 we learned the hard way how to avoid being victims after we shipped three orders worth about $800. Two out of the three were delivered, we had UPS do an intercept of the third package worth about $300. As you know there is a flag system for detecting if a transaction may be suspicious. One of the most helpful resources is the white pages for reverse phone number look up. Out of the services we have tried their listings seem to be the most complete, even if it is a cell number, the city and state is listed.

“Another resource is used for IP look up that shows the customer’s general location. [Vanessa's note-this is a free service.] Our credit card processing company, Authorize.net, lists our customer’s IP number on each transaction, from there we can plug that into the IP look up and see the location of our customer. Location is everything! Once I detected a fraudulent transaction…the customer’s “bill to” address was Michigan, the “ship to” was Miami. By looking up the IP location I found that the person placing the order was in fact in Columbia.”

It’s likely you aren’t checking every single order that comes through your shop, but when you do get that feeling that something’s not right or perhaps you conduct a random check, these tools can help you avoid being a victim. What do you do to help decrease the incidence of online order fraud?