The default osCommerce version 2.2MS2 comes with the Authoize.net SIM module pre-installed. Unlike other payment gateway modules, there is no additional contribution to install. To enable payment gateway with Authorize.net, the following setup is required:
1. Login to Authorize.net and generate a “Transaction Key” or use the one provided at signup.
2. Go to Authorize.net “Settings” page, and go to “Transaction Response” page. Add “Receipt URL” and “Relay Response URL” as the secure “checkout_process.php” of the osCommerce catalog directory.
3. Go to osCommerce Admin page (Modules -> Payment -> Authorize.net), and enter ID and Transaction Key.
Posted by admin on Thursday Apr 14, 2011
Filed under :SEO
The Robots META tag is a simple mechanism to indicate to visiting Robots (Search Engines/Crawlers) if a page should be indexed, or the links on the page should be followed. The meta tags are placed in the <HEAD> section of an HTML page.
The META tag contents parameter contains one or more directives separated by commas. The currently defined directives are “[no]index” and “[no]follow}. The “index” directive specifies whether the robot should index the page. The “follow” directive specifies whether the robot should follow links on the page. The defaults are “index” and “follow”. The values “all” and “none” set all directives on or off: “all=index,follow” and “none=noindex,nofollow”. The META tag (as with all HTML tags) is case-insensitive.
Posted by admin on Wednesday Apr 6, 2011
Filed under :SEO
As described on URL Canonicalization article we published in March, having a unique URL (“canonicalization“) for each webpage is important in improving your “Pagerank“. Canonicalization is accomplished by redirecting non-standard webpages to a preferred (“standard”) webpage. There are a number of ways to redirect a webpage, but 301 (HTTP/1.1 Status Code, “Moved Permanently”) redirect is the search engine friendly method which passes the pagerank and search engine ranking status from old to a new page. Here is an examples of how 301 redirect can be implemented on LAMP (Linux/Apache/Mysql/PHP) environment.
Apache .htaccess: non-www to www subdomain redirect
1. Make sure your httpd.conf file has the “Directory” directive with the “AllowOverride All” setting.
<Directory /path/to/your/domain/document/root>
AllowOverride All
</directory>
2. Enable Mod-Rewirte Module
Your apache configuration should have the mod-rewrite module enabled, which is the default. You can verify this by perusing httpd.conf file for the following line:
LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
3. Create a .htaccess file in the document root directory of your website with the following content.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{http_host} ^webtrafficexchange.com [nc]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.webtrafficexchange.com/$1 [r=301,nc]
Just replace the “webtrafficexchange.com” with the domain name you’re trying to redirect.
The first six digits of each credit card account number is called the Bank Identification Number (BIN) and the next three digits determine the card type. The first nine digits of credit card numbers allow merchants to identify card-issuing institution and what type of credit card is being used.
A bank card number is the account number found on credit cards and bank cards, which follows ISO/IEC 7812 numbering scheme. The first digit identifies the Industry of entity who issued the credit card, commonly known as Major Industry Identifier (MII). The MII digits represent the following issure categories (extracted from WikiPedia).
0: ISO/TC 68 and other future industry assignments
1: Airlines
2: Airlines and other future industry assignments
3: Travel and entertainment and banking/financial
4: Banking and financial
5: Banking and financial
6: Merchandising and banking/financial
7: Petroleum and other future industry assignments
8: Healthcare, telecommunications and other future industry assignments
9: National assignment
The first six digits including MII digit are known as the Bank Identification Number (BIN). The BIN number identify the institution that issued the credit or bank card to the card holder. The next three digits represents the card type. Online merchants may use BIN lookup to help validate transactions. The following BIN ranges represents commonly used Credit Cards in the USA.
American Express (15 digits): BIN starts with 34 or 37.
Discover Card (16 digits): BIN starts with 6011, 622126-622925, 644-649, 65
Master Card (16 digits): BIN starts with 51-55
Visa Card (16 digits): BIN starts with 4
The next three digits of the card number represents the card type. In order to determine commercial card type, you’ll need a BIN database. By looking up first 9 digits against BIN database, you’ll be able to determine the card type. The BIN database contains LowRange and HighRange values of the first 9 digits (which you’ll need to lookup), and the CardType value associated with this range determines the type.
In order to qualify for best rate available for Corp and Business cards, you’ll have to submit Level 2 or Level 3 data with your card processing data. The Level II data is supported by Authorize.net and PC Charge products; and they require the following additional data.
1. Customer Code – No longer required but encouraged if they have it.
2. Sales Tax – a tax amount included in the total transaction amount must be submitted separately.
Level III pricing can be obtained by Plugnpay Internet Gateway (virtual terminal) service and PC Charge products; and they require all Level II data plus the following:
3. Freight Amount – If unavailable, enter $0.00
4. Duty Amount – If unavailable, enter $0.00
5. Line Item Details:
A. Product / Service ID (Product ID)
B. Product / Service Description
C. Quantity
D. Product Amount
E. Unit of Measure
Posted by admin on Tuesday Mar 8, 2011
Filed under :SEO
One of the first things discussed when beginning SEO project is the URL canonicalization. You may argue that the impact on having multiple URLs resolving to a same page may not have huge effect on SEO (if you use it consistently internally), but it certainly doesn’t hurt to normalize the URL so that only one Url serves a single webpage. Implementation is not too difficult for most webmasters, and there is an evidence that URL canonicalization will have a positive effect on your SEO effort. You may use one form (www or non-www) of Url for all your internal linking, but you cannot guarangee that others will do the same on 3rd-party websites.
Search engines such as Google and Bing rank URLs, not websites or webpages. Having multiple URLs for single contents will hurt your ranking especially when Google implemented “Farmer” algorithm (February 2011) to penalize sites with duplicate contents. So, how do you canonicalize your URL? There are a couple of ways to achieve canonicalization. Suppose, we want www.webtrafficexchange.com to be the default homepage of our website. We can make our webserver so that if someone requests http://webtrafficexchange.com, we can do a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.webtrafficexchange.com. That helps Google know which url we prefer to be canonical.
If you have an ecommece website with a lot of GET parameters such as sort order, category ID, session ID or tracking ID for your conversion tracking; you may have single content served by various URLs like http://www.kiddietoys.com/?src=nextag&session=abc and http://www.kiddietoys.com/?src=shopping&session=xyz. To let Google or any search engines know that you have preferred url for all variation of those urls, you may use <link> tag inside the <head> tag as shown below:
Google will understand that the duplicates all others refer to the canonical URL shown above. Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well.
What is URL Canonicalization?
URL Canonicalization (also known as URL normalization) is the process of resolving multiple URLs to a single standard URL known as the canonical name.
How does non-canonicalized URL impact your SEO?
If Google sees a page as being published at two different URLs, it may rank your pages lower than they would otherwise. Non-canonicalized URLs can split link juice between pages if people link to variants of the URL, and hence affects link popularity (or pagerank) of the URL as well as possibly affect depth of search engine crawl.
How do I resolve URL Canonicalization problem?
You can permanently redirect non-www URL to the www URL with 301 redirect. For apache web server, you can create a .htaccess file on your document root folder with the following content:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^webtrafficexchange.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.webtrafficexchange.com/$1 [L,R=301]
Posted by admin on Sunday Mar 6, 2011
Filed under :Google Adsense
Google Adsense is one of the most popular Ad Network you can use to publish advertisements on your website, and start earning income immediately. Depending on impressions (CPM) and click-through-rates (CTR), your Adsense revenue may vary from a few dollars to a few hundreds per day for high traffic websites. Optimizing your Adsense placement could potentially double, or even triple your Ad income if correctly implemented.
This article describes a few tips on improving eCPM (effective Cost-Per-Thousand Impressions), which effectively increases the Adsense income provided that you have constant traffic. For Adsense, eCPM depends on two primary factors: CPC (cost-per-click) and CTR (click-through-rate). The CPC depends largely on the content of your website. The more competitive keywords that your content serve, the higher the CPC will be. For example, the contents relating to “Web Hosting”, “Merchant Account” and “Smart Phone” will generate higher CPC than less competitive topics such as “Toys & Games” and “clothing or Apparel”. If you’re writing new topic for your website, try choosing topics that are more competitive or target keywords that have higher CPC. The second factor that affects eCPM is CTR. The more click your Ad generate, the higher eCPM will be. There are a number of ways to improve CTR, and they are:
Improve your Ad placement by making your Ad more visible. Try using larger Ad sizes such as 336×280, 300×250, 160×600 and leaderboard (728×90) Ad units. According to Google Heatmap, higher CTR is achieved by placing your Ads on front and center at the top of your main contents.
Limit the number of Ad Blocks per page.
Blend the Ads as naturally as possible.
Decreasing bounce rate will also improve CTR. If you have higher bounce rate, your visitors are leaving your website after viewing only one page. Provide a lot of relevant contents on your website (essentially draw targeted traffic), so that your visitors view more than one page before leaving your website. Lowering your bounce rate will make your visitors stay longer on your website, and will increase chances of clicking on your Ads.
Google implemented “Smart Pricing”, which reduces maximum cost-per-click (CPC) bids for published Ads that are less likely to convert. If clicks your Ads generated is flagged as non-converting traffic, your Ads will be smart priced and your CPC will drop dramatically. To improve your CPC, experiment the following:
Remove Ads from pages with low eCPM. Try bringing it back within a few days to see if eCPM improves. Perhaps doing this avoid being smart priced. If it does’t improve remove completely.
Add targeted Title tag, Meta Keyword, and Meta Description tags to make it easier to target the content of the webpage.
Posted by admin on Monday Feb 21, 2011
Filed under :Ecommerce
Now that you have built an ecommerce website that converts (How to build an effective ecommerce web site?), you will have to drive traffic to your website so that you can make sales. There are a number of ways to drive traffic to your website, free and paid traffic. The goal is to use freely available resources first, and then explore the paid resources when you’re ready to expand your business.
Part 2. How to promote your ecommerce website?
1. Before spending any money driving traffic to your website, you must sign up to receive free traffic from shopping comparison engines. The three most popular shopping comparison traffic you can draw freely include (1) google prduct search, (2) bing, and (3) thefind. Those are shopping portals that allow merchants to add products to their shopping engine at no cost to you, and send traffic to your site for those customers interested in the products that you sell.
2. You may also consider selling your products through 3rd-party marketplaces. You’ll pay pre-determined commission (rate up to 15%) on each sale you make through marketplaces. The most popular marketplaces are Amazon, EBay, buy.com, newegg, sears and Walmart which will join the force in the very near-term. The benefit of selling through 3rd-party marketplaces is that you only pay comission when your product sells at the price you want.
3. Join an affiliate marketing program. Allow other publishers to advertise your business and drive traffic to your website by joining an affiliate network. By joining an affiliate network, you agree to pay pre-agreed percentage of commission to affiliates when they help you sell products (or services) on your website. Similar to marketplace sale, you only pay fee when sales occur.
4. Build search engine traffic by optimizing your website for major search engines. Although it takes much time to rank well on SERP (search engine result pages), it is worthwhile investing preset percentage of your marketing dollars in search engine optimization. Paid PPC traffic stop immediately when you suspend you advertisements, but when you have organic search traffic you’ll be less pressured spend hefty marketing dollars in drawing traffic to your site.
5. Explore CSEs such as Nextag, Shopping.com, Shopzilla/Bizrate, shop.com, Amazon Product Ads, and etc.
Posted by admin on Sunday Feb 20, 2011
Filed under :Ecommerce
Building and running an ecommerce website is not a trivial task. This two part article will discuss how to build a feature-rich ecommerce website, and also cover strategies for promoting your website efficiently.
Part 1. How to build an effective ecommerce web site?
Building a website is not hard, but building a converting website is not easy. It cost a lot of money and effort to bring traffic to your website, so it is your job to build a website that converts. Depending on whether you have the targeted traffic, your conversion rate will vary significantly. Assuming you have ppc or display advertisement traffic, you will most likely convert about 2% of your traffic which is not too bad.
There are a number of factors that will determine whether a prospect will purchase a product or service from your website. Here are a few important factors to consider when building an effective website.
1. Customers don’t have the time. Make it up front and show everything you’ve got on the product description page. Customer look at the pictures, price, description and product reviews. Make sure you display “add to cart” button next to the picture and the price. It will be noticeable and won’t be missed. Offer free shipping or at least be upfront about it. Don’t waste customer’s time or yours.
2. Customers make buying decision based son number of factors. Price is one of them, but it’s not the sole criteria. Make your description very clear, and have the answers to all FAQ questions. If they have a doubt or unanswered questions, they will haunts somewhere else. Remember, it cost you alot of money to bring this customer to your website. While they are on your website, you will have to convert this visitor to a customer.
3. Before committing to buy a product, over 55% of the people read product reviews. If your don’t have the product reviews, your are missing a puzzle in your ecommerce strategy. Solicit your past customers for product reviews even if you have to offer something free. Be sure to read those reviews, but do not delete or forge negative reviews. If a product received a lot if negative reviews, there are reasons for it. Help your customers and yourself by removing bad products from your catalog.
4. Provide closeup pictures in a different angle, and also provide videos if you have them. A picture is worth a thousand words. Give detailed description about the product. Customers will have a lot of questions before buying a product. Your description should answer all those questions, or you will not make a sale.
5. Make your checkout process simple and short. Every additional step require to complete a sale, your are risking your prospective customer abadoning their cart. Amazon introduced a 1-click checout, and pay phrase which perfectly explains streamlined checkout process.
6. Maximize your profit by offering cross-sell and up-sell. Cross-selling related items, and up-selling accompanying accessories will not only increase average order size, but will also increase profit as combined shipping will yield higher profit.
7. Make it easier for your customers to find the products they are looking for. Displaying best sellers, clearance items, deals and featured items are a good examples of showcasing hot sellers. Also, offering products by price, manufacturer, and category are must have feathers. Just understand that the customers don’t have a whole lot of time to spend on your website.
Posted by admin on Sunday Feb 20, 2011
Filed under :Ecommerce
Building a traffic bearing website is easier said than done. It takes time, dedication and a careful plan. There are a number of ways to build a website, and each web site is built differently based upon their unique requirements. I personally like building a website with WordPress (blog), even though drupal, joomla and other open source content management systems offer more powerful features.
WordPress is a blogging application written in PHP, and it is available for free. There are thousands of plugins that you can download and install on your WordPress website to add functionality that is not available on standard installation.
WordPress has been around for more than a decade, and it is one of the most popular blogging application that is available on the Internet. It can be used to build a personal blogging website, or dynamic portal site with all the bells and whistles. For those trying to build an affiliate marketing website, display advertisement website (such as google adsense) or technology blog; WordPress is the desirable platform. It encourages site visitors to add comments, and contribute toward building additional contents which is the right steps for making the site search engine friendly.
As a beginner, you may be challenged by spammers who post spams on your blog. With the help of plugins, you may add captcha or prevent bot postings by installing 3rd-party plugins.
You will also be challenged by realizing how much time it will take to build quality traffic. You will not build traffic overnight. Just dedicate your time regularly, and write quality articles on your blog regularly and soon or later you’ll attract thousands of visitors a day.
Posted by admin on Wednesday Oct 27, 2010
Filed under :SEM
What is PPC?
PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click, and it is the placement of an advertisement on the search engine result pages (SERPs) for a specific keyword phrase in return for specified payment when a visitor clicks on the link. The PPC link is also known as Sponsored Link, and the advertiser pays an agreed (or bid) amount each time a visitor clicks on the link.
The advertiser generally places PPC advertisements on the search engines in the hope of selling products or services on their website. The job of a PPC link is to send targetted traffic to the website (landing page). Regardless of the visitors spending money on your website, you’re obligated to pay the agreed sum to the search engine company. One more thing to note is that the advertiser pays nothing to make a sponsored link appear on the SERPs, but pays the fee only when someone clicks on it.
How to place a PPC Advertisement?
With ever growing ecommerce population, many businesses place advertisements on search engines in the hope of attracting buyers. One of the easiest and quickest way to attract targetted traffic is by using PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertisement. The following 4 easy steps will help you place PPC Ads on search engines.
1. Choose your keywords
Choosing the right keywords is a starting point in placing a PPC Ad. The goal is to attract potential buyers to your website (the people who are in the market for purchasing goods that your company offer). Attracting visitors who do not intend to buy reduces overall conversion ratio, and demage ROI (Return On Investment). There are plenty of free and commercial keyword analysis tools available to help you research your target keywords. Word Tracker is one of most popular tool available which will help you decide on the right keywords.
2. Determine your budget
If you are new to PPC, it’s best to use well known search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Unless you have a good chunk of money to burn, it’s generally good idea to start out small and increase incrementally based on the ROI results. No advertiser can continuously place PPC or any other forms of advertisement, if there are no increased revenue from the dollars spent.
3. Decide on Title and Description
The title and description of your advertisement is critical in attracting your potential customers to click on the Ad. The description is generally limited to 200 characters, and some PPC search engines control the text that will appear in the search engine results. True representation of your products and services is critical in increased click-through and conversion ratio.
4. Bid on the keywords
Before you can bid on the keywords, you must register with search engine marketing company and fund your Ad campaign. You may fund your account with credit card for a set of amount, and may optionally decide to replenish your account when your fund falls below certain amount. You may use this funding amount to limit maximum daily Advertisement dollars, in which case Ad stops when the limit is reached.
For each keyword that you would like to avertise, you can place a bid amount ranging from a few cents to several dollars depending on the popularity of the search term. The bidding amount determines placement of your Ad compare to your competitors.
How to develop an effective PPC Advertisement?
As with any advertisement, a PPC advertisement needs to be crafted in order to produce effective results. There are no known single method that will produce the best result, and hence each advertisement has to be carefully crafted based on the needs of a company. Developing an effective PPC marketing campaign is very time consuing and costly work if started from scratch. Please use the following tips from the pros to save time and avoid wasting money.
1. Contextual Ads (also known as content ads), such as Google AdSense, do not generally produce a good ROI as compare to search Ads. For starters, turn off the content Ads completely or only bid a small fraction of your search Ads.
2. Bid on targeted phrases with less competition. General keywords are more expensive and usually produce a lower conversion rate. Use targeted keywords with phrase or exact match instead of broad match. To place a phrase match, place quotation marks around your keywords.
3. Increase your Ad conversion by tracking your campaign using A/B split testing, and multiple landing pages for greater consistency and relavancy.
4. First position isn’t always the best. The #1 position will generate more clicks, but not necessarily a good conversion rate. A number of studies show that search positions in #3 to #5 positions generate a better conversion rate than positions #1 and #2.
5. Use second-tier PPC search engines such as kanoodle, findwhat, epilot and enhance. Bidding on popular keywords in Google and Yahoo can be very expensive, but the same keywords will cost a lot less on second-tier search engines. Those second-tier engines will generate less traffic than the incumbents, but they are cheaper.
Google Adwords Train & Gain
Google Adwords recently offered 4 weeks of Train & Gain Challenge, and provided tips and tricks on improving merchant’s PPC campaign performance.
