Every day, a growing number of people enter into the world of online commerce, or ecommerce, in order to sell their goods and services online. When merchants first venture into the online realm, they can get in over their heads by using solutions that are too costly, too complex, or just have way too many features than what the merchants truly need.

The good news is that there are solutions that allow the first time online ecommerce merchant the opportunity to sell their products and services with much less commitment and cost on the part of the merchant. Solutions such as PayPal offer the first time ecommerce merchant the opportunity to go into the online realm and get their feet wet without drowning. One must follow the standard safety precautions associated with solutions such as PayPal and they can be on their way to earning an online income.

The next section will go over what you the merchant, will need to consider if you think a payment processing system like PayPal will be work for you or not.

1. Low monthly business volume on your ecommerce website

If you don’t have a lot of sales on your ecommerce site, and especially if they are low ticket items, then you may want to consider using a pay-as-you go type of merchant account system such as PayPal. Usually these types of payment processing solutions have a higher percentage rate that they charge the merchant. Sometimes it can be as high as 15% of the price of the item being sold by the online merchant.

Typical merchant accounts usually have a monthly charge associated with the account, whether you sell anything online or not. They also have a lower percentage rate they charge the merchant, so for higher volumes, the merchant will end up saving money with this solution.

When deciding what type of merchant account you should get, you will want to determine the costs associated with merchant processing based on estimated monthly sales volumes. For instance, if you expect to sell 15 items that cost $25 each on average, then determine how much a third party processor like PayPal would charge you for that, and then how much a standard merchant account processor would charge you for the month based upon the same volume. You will find that in going through this exercise, you will discover a break-even point at which you will pay less using a standard merchant account as opposed to the third party processor such as PayPal.

2. You are new to the whole ecommerce concept

If you are new to selling your product or service online (ecommerce), then it may make sense to use a 3rd party processor, such as PayPal to handle your online payments. This way, you aren’t forced into any long term contracts, and can discontinue using it if your business isn’t working. In most cases you can do this without having to continue to pay additional fees, such as a monthly service charge, to the type of merchant account processor. With PayPal, it is easy to start up the online processing again without any additional costs, if you choose to give your online business another try.

3. You sell your items on EBay

EBay is one of the largest selling platforms on the Internet today. EBay became so successful, they even purchased PayPal. EBay does accept payments through other means besides PayPal, but they set it up so that it is easier to perform your transactions through PayPal than other methods.

If you are doing a huge number of transactions through EBay, it may make more sense to use your own merchant processing account as you will save a lot of money. However the average EBay seller usually doesn’t have the volume to justify using their own online merchant account unless they are already using it for another online business.

Different needs for the ecommerce merchant require different solutions. By no means is there a “one size fits all” type of solution. Merchant processing solutions that work well for one online merchant, may spell disaster for another. The best thing an online merchant can do is to determine their expected sales volume, and their needs, and then find a solution that best serves them. For merchants who are new to ecommerce, and don’t expect to generate a lot of volume, PayPal can be a good solution to get them started.

Every day millions and millions of people head to Google and do searches in hopes of filling a need or a desire. Our desire is to show up when they are doing those searchers. However, unless we have a website that will convert the traffic, it does us no good.

There are a lot of little things that can make a big difference in a website design, for example;

Placing testimonials on the right-hand side alongside of the order form has been shown to increase conversion rates.

Using Arial 12 point will increase readability and help in conversion.

Using 20 point Tahoma font for headers and adding quotation marks around the header has been shown to increase conversion.

Using negative headlines will increase conversion.

Using a blue buy now button converts better than a red buy now button.

These are all small changes that can make a big difference when it comes to designing a website.

Red is a conflicting color.

It is the color of passion and love as well as anger and hate. To make it worst it’s also a color that is hard on the eyes. If you stare at a red background for moment and look away from the red background and stare at a white wall your eyes will take a moment to refocus and readjust.

However blue is a color that builds trust. A light blue background converts better than just about any other color you can come up with other than light grey.

When trying to build the perfect site that will convert the best there are a lot of things we need to look at.

According to Grok the top ten best converting sites online are;

1. Proflowers.com – 14.1%

2. Coldwater Creek – 13.3%

3. FTD.com – 13.0%

4. QVC – 12.8%

5. Office Depot – 12.4%

6. eBay – 11.5%

7. Lands’ End – 11.5%

8. Tickets.com – 11.2%

9. 1800flowers.com – 10.0%

10. Amazon – 9.6%

We also need to keep in mind that when dealing with companies that are able to spend millions on off and online advertising, conversion will always be higher because of brand recognition.

Keeping that in mind let’s take a look at some of the things these sites have in common.

I will start with proflowers.com

We have a small header with the logo and the phone number on the left hand side. Most sites have the phone number on the right hand side so I thought that was a bit different then what I normally see.

We have the need it now banner in the header. It lets people know that we can get your order out today if this is a last minute decision. Under that is the navigation and under that is a banner for Birthdays. I’d think that when there are no special holidays that would be their biggest seller.

Too the right we have a call to action that is changing, showing different items for sale. Under the main banner we have two more call to actions and another banner showing when the next special holiday will be.

It’s hard to believe that PayPal would increase conversion but we have no credit card logos on the page yet we do have a PayPal logo.

Now onto http://www.coldwatercreek.com/

We have the logo in the middle of the header with no contact information on the page, other than a link for live help and another for customer service.

Clicking on customer service we can find the email address and contact number.

It’s interesting that they give the email address and not a contact form.

The layout is pretty much the same.

Header with logo, menu under that and banners with a call to action under that. Little to no text on the page.

http://www.ftd.com/

Logo in the top left of the header, phone number under the logo, navigation main banner on the right instead of the left like it was on proflowers and the call to action in the banner.

The colors and look of the sites may change but the layout for the top three conversion sites all have about the same layout.

And http://www.qvc.com/ and http://www.officedepot.com/ are the same way.

A small area in the top for the logo, navigation under that, large banner under that with a call to action in the banner and a couple smaller banners under those with a call to action as well. You can take what you want from this but it would appear to me that a pretty picture is better than words.

I did a post on making money online. I wanted to get a little more into some of the things you need to do but the post was getting so long I stoped before saying everything I wanted to say.

One of the things you need to understand is your competition and what your competition is doing.

There are all types of neat little tools you can use to do this, one of them is a plug-in for Firefox called SEO Quake and it is a pretty neat little plug-in.

As you search Google this tool can provide information such as:

• Age of a Domain
• Pages Indexed in Both Google & Yahoo
• Number of Other Sites Linking to a Domain

While understanding your competition is important something that is more important is having a good list of keywords.

Below is a list of a couple tools you can use to find keywords online for free.

WordTracker.com

http://freekeywords.WordTracker.com/

http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

https://www.PayPal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_shop-ext

http://buy.eBay.com/

http://www.shopping.com/top_searches

http://www.Google.com/sktool/#

http://www.Google.com/trends

Making Money Online

I’ve got a friend of mine wanting to make some money online. He’s no different than the millions of others wanting to do the same thing. He’ll be heading this way in about two hours and I’m sitting here thinking about what I’m going to tell him.

There are basically four ways to make money online.

1. Selling your own product
2. Affiliate Marketing
3. Blog flipping
4. Google AdSense

Google AdSense

The people who have been successful with this are few and far between, with the average person making a couple bucks a month at best. Most people never see a dime from their efforts.

I’m one of the ones that have been lucky enough to turn $10,000.00 plus a month using a combination of several different ad programs and building thousands of junk sites. Building, monitoring, ranking and all the other wonderful things that seem to go hand in hand with any website became more than I was willing to do and I got out of the business.

It’s not a good business model however you might be able to make a couple extra bucks per month with it. I believe Google pays out after the first 45 days and you have to make at least $100.00 to get paid.

Blog Flipping

I’ve not tried this yet but hope to get the time to start messing with it this coming month. The cash is a lot faster, you can get the money the same week you sale your blog. You basically build and set up a blog, write some articles and stick on it, as well as point some links at it.

Then sell it for as much as you can. You can use sites like eBay as well as several SEO forums to sell the site. Fast easy money, it all sounds good but like I said, I’ve not tried it yet.

Affiliate Marketing

This is where the big boys play. You’ll notice that most SEO experts want touch this area with a ten foot pole. And most people talking about it aren’t making the first Penney with it. This is where you get paid for the paying customers you can send someone.

We averaged about $5,000.00 per month last year in this area and I hope to get into it a lot more this year. I’d say less than 3% of the people that mess with it are able to make a living with it. It’s for the serious marketers and isn’t for the faint of heart.

Selling Your Own Products

If you’ve got a product or service to sell then this is by far the best option. We’ve made our living online for the last 7 years selling website designs. There are times I want to scream but I’d guess it’s that way with any real business.

You’ve just got to keep your head in the game and keeping moving forward.