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Building and optimizing a successful business website is an ongoing challenge that can be especially difficult for novice webmasters that are not experienced with e-commerce. Ultimately, the goal of an online store owner is to create a user-friendly interface that their customers can use to shop for products or services with minimal effort and maximum convenience. Unfortunately, accomplishing this is not as easy as it would seem, as there are many factors to consider when customizing the shopping experience of your site visitors.

Perhaps the most important aspects are those related to the product catalog and the checkout process, which is facilitated by integrated shopping cart applications. While the majority of e-commerce hosting plans include product catalog creators and robust shopping cart applications that can be installed quickly and easily on your site, most people do not know how to use such tools to improve their conversion rates.

Designing an Effective Product Catalog

Product catalog creators allow you to import hundreds or even thousands of product images, descriptions, and even reviews. However, if the product pages are not properly organized and categorized, the process of finding the right product can be very difficult for your site visitors, even with the use of a site wide search engine. When you add a product to your catalog you’ll have the option of adding keyword tags, which would cause the product to appear in search results if the specific keywords were searched for by one of your customers. Thus, it is imperative to add as many relative tags as possible to your products, to ensure that they will show up in search results when customers search for specific products, or related items. It is also important to enable features such as customer reviews, which will let your previous customers leave feedback about specific items, thereby increasing sales conversions by convincing future customers.

Setting up an Effective Shopping Cart

After creating a robust product catalog that is properly tagged, organized, categorized, and is easy to navigate, it’s time to set up a shopping cart that will allow your customers to purchase multiple items simultaneously upon checkout. Some shopping cart applications will even let your customers use issued coupon codes for purchase discounts, which you can grant to repeat customers for higher conversions and residual business. Shopping carts also give you the ability to accept multiple forms of payment by integrating payment processors such as PayPal, which will accept credit card payments from your customers on behalf of your business in a secure manner. After setting up the shopping cart, you’ll want to do a couple of test runs and proceed with the checkout process yourself to see how convenient it is, and to look for any errors that may be occurring.

Expanding Your Site’s Capabilities

Many shopping carts and product catalog creators are open source applications, which means they can be amended and improved by any developer with the interest to do so. Thus, there are many third-party plug-ins and extensions that can be added to shopping carts and product catalog creators to improve the overall functionality and add new features. If you want the highest conversion rates possible, then you’ll want to experiment with such extensions in order to refine the checkout process and provide the most enjoyable shopping experience for your customers.

E-commerce has been contributing to the global economy significantly during the past decade, as more business owners and entrepreneurs look to build their own online empire. As the Internet continues to grow, and more people start to use the Internet, companies in all industries are beginning to compete heavily for customers on the World Wide Web. This creates a situation in which hundreds of thousands of online purchases take place on a daily basis, with millions (or even billions) of dollars being spent and made in online purchases. However, most people don’t realize that the job of securing such transactions is entirely up to the web hosting provider, who is responsible for utilizing the correct applications, security precautions, and technological advancements to ensure the safety of your financial details and those of your customers. The following are three ways Web hosting providers secure e-commerce transactions.

Advanced Data Encryption

The first line of defense web hosting providers use to secure online transactions is advanced data encryption. When a visitor comes to your site and decides to make a purchase they are directed to a secured checkout page. All data that is submitted by the site visitor through this page is completely scrambled before it is securely transmitted to the web server, where it is unscrambled and decoded using a key that is only generated once, and is only accessed by the receiving server. In essence, even if someone was able to intercept the data as it moved through your website to your web server, they would not be able to understand any of it because it would be completely encrypted. The current industry standard for webpage encryption is SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), which is why it is common to see SSL certificates posted on checkout pages. In fact, some online shoppers will not even place an order if they do not see an SSL certificate, or a checkout page URL that begins in HTTPS.

Instant Suspicious Activity Notifications

Another way web hosting providers keep your e-commerce transactions safe is by providing instant notifications via e-mail or cell phone text. These notifications can be enabled within your web hosting control panel, and are automatically sent out if any suspicious activity occurs. Activities that would cause a notification to be issued may include account detail changes (for example if someone changed the default e-mail address on the web hosting account), or any personal details related to account administration or domain ownership. By having the ability to have notifications sent to your e-mail and cell phone text you can keep a hacker or cyber criminal from stealing ownership of your domains or web hosting account and utilizing the financial details of your customers nefariously.

Payment Processing Technology

Web hosting providers also secure checkout pages by utilizing payment processing technology, which allows your customers to provide their credit/debit card or payment details to a third party online payment processor (such as PayPal). Payment processors are simply financial institutions that collect and accept payments on behalf of web site owners, so that no sensitive financial data can be intercepted by someone that is spying on a secured checkout page. By utilizing a business-class web hosting plan that includes payment processing capabilities you can sure that you’ll be able to accept all popular payment types.

The keys to being successful with an online business are diversification, diligence, and persistence. Unfortunately, a single revenue stream is often not enough to create a full-time income, especially if you are depending only one website. Most successful online entrepreneurs continually expand their network of websites by building new sites and entering new niches on a constant basis. Rather than giving up and becoming disheartened when one endeavor does not go your way, you should grab motivation and experience from such occurrences and begin working on a new endeavor. In order to continuously expand your online reach you need to build new websites and have access to your own network of sites.

Diversifying Your Business through Several Websites

In the online world, each website that you own represents a new business opportunity – the ability to penetrate a new niche and begin creating a new revenue stream. With each revenue stream you can significantly increase your monthly and yearly income gradually. Unfortunately, if you operate your entire online business through a single website, you’ll be unable to adequately target multiple markets and optimize your site for keywords that are commonly searched for in search engines. As you continuously explore new niches and business opportunities online, you’ll undoubtedly be registering multiple domains. In fact, the average webmaster registers about 10 domains per year.

Recognizing the Importance of Multiple Domain Hosting

Although the majority of hosting providers offer plans that allow for the hosting of an unlimited amount of domains, it is still important to ensure that your hosting plan includes multiple domain capabilities. It is, however, important to note that although a plan may allow you to host an unlimited amount domains, this does not mean that you have access to an adequate amount of server resources to host more than several hundred domains simultaneously. Each website that you associate with your web hosting account consumes server resources, and therefore places an additional burden on your hosting Web server.

Security and Business Presence

By owning a network of sites you can efficiently build links to your main sites in each niche, and also have smaller websites within the same niche that are designed to funnel traffic to your heavily monetized sites. This can improve conversion rates by allowing you to introduce presell articles and concepts to your site visitors and it can also diversifying your search engine optimization efforts. You will also be able to create more leverage within each industry/niche because you’ll have a significant online presence, which ultimately results in thousands of unique visitors within your control on a daily basis. When new products or services are released in each industry you can take advantage of their popularity instantly using one of your many sites within your network.

If you are planning on selling products or services or accepting payments on your website then you need an SSL certificate. Therefore, it is important to make sure that your web hosting plan includes capability to host a wildcard SSL certificate (at SSL certificate can be used on my website), or you’ll have to purchase multiple web hosting plans in order to gain access to multiple SSL certificates.

The Internet and subsequently web hosting has improved communication and made the world much smaller. However, has this industry made an impact on World Trade? In the past, world trade moved extremely slowly. Individuals would have to wait weeks or even months for communication to reach different parties. With the advent of the telephone, communication expanded but was expensive.

The World Wide Web

With the release of the World Wide Web in 1991, no one imagined the communication revolution that would ensue. When web hosting began, users thought it would simply be used for information purposes. However, individuals began using personal email which developed into something further. As email use expanded, the speed of communication between traders improved thus increasing business transactions.

Website Development

Companies then became interested in owning websites to showcase their products and services. Concurrently, website development would make it easier for buyers and sellers to conduct business. Buyers could access a company’s website and input their requirements instantly. This eliminated time differences and greatly improved the speed of transactions.

The Involvement of Web Hosting

Web hosting for business organizations made this all possible. More opportunities appeared and companies did not have to waste time in the communication process. Instead, businessmen simply needed to click a mouse button to find many trade options. Furthermore, web hosting has helped the trade industry form communities. This did not occur instantly due to price. As more companies became interested, the price slowly declined.

Over the years this price drop has allowed almost all businesses to have a website while connecting millions of people globally. Even businesses in under-developed countries have this opportunity. Since this time, trade has grown significantly as a result of web hosting and the communities that were developed.

Instant Communication

Additionally, the growth has been assisted by free web hosting that is backed by advertising. This brought millions more users to online communities. Since the communication was instant, people were also able to utilize this tool to create more innovative ideas in the trade industry. For instance, they were able to buy and sell products to a global market.

Web hosting has created a multi-billion dollar trade and e-commerce industry. The convenience of only having to log in to purchase an item or service has allowed the industry to continue to grow. As web hosting improves, the number of items bought and sold online will progress and may even take over the physical marketplace one day.

Emerging coupon websites like Groupon are exploding due to their “crowd purchasing” programs that allow groups of Internet users to purchase products and services from local retailers. For online sites store selling items in bulk at discount prices, this idea makes perfect sense. Groupon is profitable in the fact that there is indeed power in numbers as it boils down to setting prices that are acceptable to all parties.

Around the holidays, shoppers would be more inclined to purchase additional gifts given a discount for multiple buys. This is the entire premise behind crowd purchasing. Most Internet shoppers are using this technique to save on shipping costs. Therefore, online retailers looking to increase amounts of each order and sell more products should consider offering a bulk-purchase savings when a shopper buys more than one SKU.

These types of deals are slowly appearing in the marketplace. Advertisers use the following call-to-action phrases to entice customers to purchase more:

• “Buy more and save”
• “Get 2 for just XX more”
• “Spend XX amount of dollars and receive this”

As you may notice, the words “bulk,” “volume,” and “discount” are rarely used. For example, one advertiser used the phrase “Mix & Match to Save Big” instead of “Volume Discount.” The first variant is much more appealing than the boring second version.

Also, when advertising savings, there are three ways to present the product. First, “two percent cash back” on a credit card is much more appealing than “saving 2 percent” when purchasing an additional item. This is known as the percentage discount. The second type is the savings amount such as, “Save XX amount when you spend $10 or more.” Finally, the amount paid is most appealing. For instance, “get another for just $2.79.”

Discounting products based on quantity involves some amount of strategy. Once the numbers have been calculated, this needs to be advertised on ecommerce site pages in a way that customers will understand without impeding on single-item shopping. The ultimate goal is to offer alternative products to those wishing to purchase more thus giving them less of a reason to visit comparison shopping sites.

There are many tricks of the trade that have developed over several years of retail sales which can also be applied to online merchandise. With new crowd purchasing and “step-up” type programs where shoppers get more for spending a little more, this is revolutionizing the way we do business.