e-Transaction
Choose the Right Shopping Cart for Ecommerce Site
An online retailer is an online marketer. Often the difference between a successful online business and a failed one is not the product or products available for sale, but how the product is promoted.
How to choose the Right Shopping Cart for your online shop
As an example, consider the case of Marcel Salathé, a Swiss artist and theoretical biologist, who painted the numbers 1 to 1,000 in blue ink on white canvases. Salathé has sold nearly 800 of his numeric masterpieces for several hundred dollars each, thanks to fantastic marketing.
Salathé’s marketing focuses around an unusual pricing model that makes his numbered paintings more expensive as more are sold. The model invests buyers with a sense of urgency and a willingness to pay extremely high prices for rather simple artwork. This pricing model was intriguing enough to capture global media attention. Wired magazine featured the artist’s work and the story of how Daniel H. Pink paid almost $600 for the number 41. And, promotional guru and author Seth Godin has blogged about Salathé’s marketing.
Once we recognize, as I think Salathé did, that the ecommerce task is very often a marketing task, we begin to make better choices, including how we select a shopping cart.
In this edition of “Ecommerce Know-How,” I will share eight shopping cart “must haves” that I believe can help you select the proper ecommerce platform for your business and your marketing plan. If the cart you’re considering doesn’t have these must-have features, keep looking. I’ll also quickly mention how I define shopping carts.
No. 1: Pick an SEO-friendly Cart
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the first order of business in ecommerce marketing. While there are a lot of things that site owners can to do create interesting content, they have less control over technology’s effect on search-engine indexing. So choosing an SEO-friendly ecommerce content management system (CMS) becomes essential. A telltale sign of a good SEO-friendly CMS is how it rewrites URLs (web page addresses).
Take note of the URLs here on Practical eCommerce. They include the title and provide a rich source of keywords. Your shopping cart or ecommerce platform should do the same.
No. 2: Coupon Code Support
Nothing attracts customers like saving money, and coupon codes are a great way to promote your store. As I reported in January 2009, online searches for coupon codes are on the rise, and it is clear that customers value, share, and use online coupons.
A good shopping cart platform should support coupon codes or other adjustable rate models right out of the proverbial box. Don’t use a cart that doesn’t offer coupons.
No. 3: RSS Capability
RSS, which is most often defined as really simple syndication, is simply a set of data formats that make it easy to syndicate page content.
This technology is a powerful tool for marketing. You can offer discount feeds that customers and potential customers will use in a reader or news aggregator. You can submit RSS feeds to Twitterfeed and have all of your new products, coupon codes, inventory alerts, or other specials effortlessly posted on Twitter, Facebook, iGoogle, MySpace, Identi.ca, or just about any other social networking site you can imagine. And you can even use RSS to generate alert emails using services like MailChimp.
Choose an ecommerce platform that generates RSS feeds for new products, special or discounted products, coupons, sale items, and product categories. Don’t consider a cart without RSS capability.
No. 4: Cross-selling Functionality
Cross selling is simply the idea of selling a customer more and related products to increase total per-checkout revenue. We’ve all seen cross selling done well. As an example, when a toy store recommends batteries to go with a battery-operated Elmo doll, we appreciate the reminder. Or, when an online fashion shop recommends shoes to accompany a suite or dress purchase, we appreciate that, too.
Your shopping cart should offer cross selling as an automated or semi-automated process. The best ecommerce platforms will have a system to associate products and then dynamically place related items on the proper product and checkout pages. If a cart doesn’t cross sell, don’t bother.
No. 5: Customer Reviews
Customer reviews encourage more sales. Psychologically, customer reviews are akin to having a peer recommend the product and the store. Think of it as a way to let your customers market for you — plain and simple.
Your shopping cart should integrate customer reviews, either supporting a review system itself or easily connecting to a third-party customer review tool like PowerReviews or similar.
No. 6: Product Sharing and Recommendations
A customer visiting your site should be able to email or otherwise share product details. Imagine that a teen is searching for clothes at some hip online shop. The teen finds the perfect pair of pants and wants to let, say, Uncle Bob know that this is what she really wants for her upcoming birthday. No smart ecommerce marketer is going to get in the way of that sort of communication. Rather, a good store should give the teen an easy way to send her important message to Uncle Bob without any messy cutting and pasting.
The best of carts include this sharing feature, usually as part of a wish list function that requires some form of registration.
No. 7: Multiple Images, Image Zooming
Sometime the very best ecommerce marketing you can do is to have great pictures of the product. Nearly every product detail page should offer several images of the product from different angles, and when it makes sense, include image panning or zoom to show specific details.
Your shopping cart should support multiple image and image manipulation; or at the very least, it should easily integrate with a third party product image solution like Zoomify.
No. 8: Manage Campaign Landing Pages
Pay-per-click advertising dominates many ecommerce marketing budgets. Marketers want to refine their ad copy, scrutinize keyword selection, and squeeze every ounce of ROI from their campaigns.
So don’t consider a cart that cannot manage campaign landing pages. Your shopping cart or platform should support custom, non-catalog pages. Some carts refer to these as “CMS pages,” others call them “landing pages,” but, regardless of what you name them, make sure your cart offers them.
Picking the Right Cart
So I have pointed out eight cart features that I believe are deal breakers. Of course, there are a lot of other things to consider when you select the web platform for your business. But with hundreds of carts to choose from (and dozens that include all of these features and more), you can be very selective.
What Is An Ecommerce Shopping Cart?
I also wanted to describe what a shopping cart is. I think there is a significant amount of ambiguity in the term, and since I just outlined eight “must haves” that I think will eliminate many weaker carts, I felt like I needed to do some defining.
An ecommerce “shopping cart” can be defined as just the portion of your website that manages transactions, or the term can describe an ecommerce-specific content management system that stores product catalogs, monitors sales, and serves up database-driven content for just about every page in your site.
It is the second of these possible definitions (an ecommerce CMS) that I really had in mind in this article. You can think of ecommerce platforms like Magento and GoodBarry as the specific sort of shopping cart in view.
By contrast, I have recommended Instinct’s WP e-Commerce to folks on Twitter. This cart is really an add-on to the WordPress CMS, which itself does not have all of the features I describe here. It fits the first definition of “shopping cart,” but when combined with WordPress it is even more able.
Source: practicalecommerce.com
Google Checkout store gadget, the real competitor for Paypal?
On Thursday (July, 29th), Google released the experimental version of Google Checkout store gadget, software that allows any Google Docs user to create an online store and sell items using a Google spreadsheet.
“Using new Spreadsheet Data APIs, we’ve integrated Google Docs and Google Checkout to make online selling a breeze,” explains Google Checkout strategist Mike Giardina in a blog post. “In three simple steps, you’ll be able to create an online store that’s powered by Google Checkout and has inventory managed and stored in a Google spreadsheet.”
Giardina insists that the process is simple and can be completed in less than five minutes.
To use the gadget, Google users first have to sign up for Google Checkout. They can then list whatever they want to sell in a Google spreadsheet and insert the Checkout gadget, which can also be used on Google Sites, Blogger, and iGoogle.
It’s high time to be on alert of Google Checkout store gadget, Paypal!
PayPal is trying new interface
PayPal, eBay’s well established but aging mechanism for online payments, is trying to rebuild itself for a new generation of online commerce possibilities.
At an event for press and developers on Thursday, PayPal and its partners described several new programming interfaces that are part of the company’s upcoming Adaptive Payments Service and showed what developers can do with them.
For example, Microsoft will use the interface to enable payments within its forthcoming Azure cloud-computing service. And LiveOps‘ on-demand outsourcing service will use it to automatically handle fluctuating payment amounts and changes to who’s being paid. Finally, the interface takes PayPal beyond the browser, opening it up for use on mobile phones, set-top boxes, and other increasingly smart devices.
“It’s truly disruptive,” said PayPal CEO Scott Thompson at the event. “It puts developers in the driver’s seat by allowing you to do what you want to do and (choose) how you want to get paid.”
The new service will be available to 300 PayPal partners starting Thursday, with a public beta this November–just in time for PayPal X Innovate 2009, its first developer conference.
PayPal is pitching the Adaptive Payments platform to developers as a way to more easily build PayPal-powered payment options into their applications. It’s also a more streamlined version of PayPal’s existing program for letting businesses manage transactions between several different parties.
The new payments service is a key part in PayPal’s plan to double its revenues within the next three years. Back in March, PayPal’s president Scott Thompson promised as much, saying that by 2011, the company should be doing somewhere between $100-120 billion in annual payments. PayPal has also had a fire lit underneath it since Amazon rolled out its own online payments service around this time last year. It let users make online purchases using billing information that was stored on Amazon.com
PayPal isn’t just central to eBay’s future. It will eclipse the company’s auction and commerce operations, the company says.
“PayPal is a business that will be bigger than eBay,” eBay Chief Executive John Donahoe said Thursday at the Fortune Brainstorm conference.
PayPal is a force to be reckoned with. On average, more than $2,000 goes through PayPal every second of each day. It has 75 million active accounts, and it’s available in 190 markets and 19 different currencies.
Beta testing
Before the announcement, PayPal had been working with a handful of companies to test the new APIs (application programming interfaces). One of those companies is Microsoft, which is tapping PayPal for online payments in the Web applications built for the company’s upcoming Azure platform.
At the unveiling, Yousef Khalidi, a Microsoft distinguished engineer, demonstrated an application that integrated PayPal’s payment and billing functionality. It took only two days to integrate it into the existing product, Khalidi said.
Khalidi said that Microsoft plans to offer a simple way to build PayPal’s mechanism into hosted applications as part of Azure’s full release later this year.
Microsoft probably had an easier time choosing PayPal for its payment service than some of the alternatives: Amazon Flexible Payment Services and Google Checkout both come from companies in direct competition with Microsoft’s Azure cloud-computing service.
Michael Ivey, CEO and co-founder of TwitPay, also took the stage to show his company’s use of the new PayPal API–specifically to let people pay multiple people at once.
“In one transaction, I’m paying four different people,” he said. Before the new APIs, the service would require users to make each payment as its own transaction.
Sites already using the new API include: Webassist, GroupCard, Lottay, Rainfall of Envelopes, and MedPayOnline.com
“PayPal will help you get paid for your innovations–your business will become our business,” Thompson told the developers. “We view you as our third set of customers.”
New features
The new payment service has a handful of new features designed to make it easier for developers to make money with their applications and services.
Thompson said that even if developers were acting as an intermediary between the person sending the money and the recipient, they would now be able to take their cut of that transaction–just as PayPal does.
Part of getting that to happen involves a new API that lets developers create peer-to-peer and business-to-business money-sharing applications. They can now also split up payments into several transactions and let users authorize a payment after the transaction’s been made. Those two mechanisms can speed purchasing, regardless of whether the buyer is ready to pay the full amount at the outset.
As part of the new platform, PayPal also is changing the way fees are charged. Application developers can choose to have the sender of the money, not just the recipient, pay the fee.
In addition, the fee rates can be changed based on the type of purchase, which should ease the chore of handling both high-value transactions and micropayments (transactions below $12) within the same application. As it stands today, PayPal currently requires sellers to have two different accounts open, one for bigger payments and another for micropayments–and each has different rates.
People use PayPal today through a Web interface, but a new API will bring PayPal to nontraditional computing platforms including mobile phones, set-top boxes, and gaming consoles. That’s important, given that those devices increasingly are networked and have their own ecosystems of applications. And moving to a browser can be disruptive to a user who just wants to make a quick payment.
Using PayPal that way also means that a developer must build the necessary user interface, though. PayPal didn’t provide specifics on that element of the new payments system.
Overall, Thompson said the new payment system will help PayPal keep pace with changes in technology and business.
“The pace of innovation is just staggering,” he said. “And the next wave of innovation is poised to move that much faster. ”
CNET News reporter Ina Fried contributed to this report.
Source: CNET News
The Latest Criminal Schemes in E-commerce
Sebbe Jones, manager of fraud and disputes at 2Checkout, details the latest criminal techniques using online payment transactions.
E-commerce fraud costs retailers approximately $4 billion each year, according to the most recent results of an annual survey conducted by Cybersource, a provider of electronic payment and risk management services. Sebbe Jones, manager of fraud and disputes at 2Checkout, is in the business of keeping e-commerce fraud at bay.
2Checkout, an international online payment service, is a reseller for small-and-medium-sized businesses. The company has more than 20,000 active suppliers and handles more than 200,000 transactions a month. Merchants come to 2Checkout to handle the financial life of their transaction. Naturally, criminals hoping to defraud people out of their money and credit card information also attempt to use the system for financial gain. Jones outlines how 2Checkout monitors fraudulent activity, and details some of the latest scams he sees on the job.
CSO: You provide online payment services for vendors. Where does the interest in preventing fraud come in to play?
Sebbe Jones: Once we start accepting transactions, we are legally the reseller of that product. Because we are legally the reseller, we are the merchant of record. It’s our merchant account and if the charge backs are over one percent, it is our merchant account on record for that and we could receive fines from Visa or MasterCard. So we have to make sure our fraud rate is down. We have a fraud department and we also have a risk department. We have two or three departments that make sure our vendors are doing what they are supposed to doing; providing service. We keep an eye out on terrorist activities, such as money laundering, or putting fraudulent credit cards through an account. So we really have multiple departments to watch every door that there is.
Tell me about the system you use at 2Checkout for identifying possible fraud.
We use 41st Parameters’ Fraud Net. We put 100 percent all of our orders through Fraud Net. There are about 300 or so rules turned on that all orders go through Fraud Net. It will take all of that data, and score each order with a points system and we at 2Checkout use that points system.
Based on those points, there are orders that go into ‘reject’ bucket and a ’suspect’ bucket and then even a ‘approve and note’ bucket. If an order is rejected, it means the system is flagging it, saying ‘This looks bad. Take a look at this.’ Anything in the reject bucket we manually review 100 percent of that.
Then there is the suspect bucket; these are a little bit more interesting cases where the system is saying ‘Maybe. This might be suspect and this is why.’ The order scored poorly in our algorithms.
If the scoring on each order goes at or above 2,000 points, that will kick into manual review. Our team of analysts will go through and make a determination on whether or not to allow, reject or put on hold until we can get further verification on the order.
What are the points based on?
There are about 300 algorithms turned on. It can go anywhere from they didn’t capitalize first and last name or the billing address. Also let’s say they put their name as Fred Derf. It will fire on easy keys. Things like that. Rules that add more weight is the CVV code on the back of card failed, or the AVS code failed.
More substantial rules include the IP address. We have a list of high -risk countries because we are global. Places like Nigeria, Ghana, Vietnam. While we get a lot of business from there, we also get a lot of fraud from there. So we review every order that comes from there; we review the billing address or IP address or where the credit card is coming from. Or let’s say the browsers language is configured to Vietnamese. Any of these things will make an order get flagged for review.
What are the more common types of fraud you deal with?
We are global, so we see a lot of different kinds of fraud. We’ll see international frauders, whether in Ghana or Nigeria, or further east, like Vietnam, Malaysia, Turkey, trying to fraud credit cards out of the U.S. The U.S. has many more credit cards out there. Someone from third-world country like Nigeria can’t very well steal from his neighbors because his neighbors are just as poor as he is. So we see a lot of fraud coming from third-world countries where they are trying to defraud someone from a country with more money and commerce. Usually they are trying to buy an intangible service, like an immediate download or maybe a membership, a hosting service. We see that a lot.
We also see scenarios where a presumed vendor will open an account and start getting some orders in. Often times we find if a frauder gets that first one or two orders in and stops there, they may be successful. But the greedier he becomes, and starts getting three, five, ten or more orders in, we are going to catch him. That’s when we can usually connect it with other places within 2Checkout.
Often times a vendor will sign up for an account and start placing orders into the account using fraudulent credit cards. If that frauder is really good, he knows how to mask his IP. Let’s say all orders show as all U.K. or U.S. He will make the IP address match up to the billing address of that order. So this looks legitimate to us and we will start passing those first few orders. But after he gets a few orders in, he’ll place an order that may connect to another order. That is when we will investigate a little bit deeper into the account and these orders and start checking the PC print; which basically is device identification.
We try and ID the device of each one of these sales. And often times we find the device placing all of these different sales is the same device. We then try and liken it up to the vendor. And that is when we often times will find that it’s a possibility of money laundering. Last week we had a case where we were able to connect this vendor to an OFAC SND (Office of Foreign Asset Control’s Specially Designated Nationals List). It is a list of names and aliases of known terrorists. We were able to link this vendor to that list and get them shut down before ever paying him.
What about counterfeiting or stolen items? Is that an issue you see often?
Yes, absolutely. That falls under our risk department. We are reviewing every account and reviewing the products and services they are selling. We see a lot of copyright issues; whether it’s music or movies and people trying to sell movies or music. Or a vendor trying to sell Coach handbags where they don’t have the approval of Coach, or Louis Vuitton is another big one. We do have a prohibited products list that contains things that a we can’t sell because we dont have ownership of it or because in the past we have had fraud experiences.
We had a case a few years ago where a guy was selling computers for what appeared to be a good price. We contacted the customers and found that what was arriving was not computers. Inside the box was ripped up phone books. The vendor kept insisting on payment because the products had been shipped. But fortunately we were able to get in touch with the customers first and, of course, stop payment and refund their money.
What is the biggest thorn in your side?
I always feel frauders are going to be one step ahead of the merchants. Some of our best tools that we had five years ago really aren’t anymore. So now common sense tells me the tools I have today will be out of date in a few years and we hope we can have something new when the time comes.
In dealing with disputes probably the biggest thorn in my side recently is friendly fraud. That plays out in a couple of different scenarios. For instance, a customer placed an order and then saw the charge on their statement and said ‘I don’t want this.’ But instead of contacting their bank and saying ‘Hey, I did place this order, but I don’t like it,’ they claim fraud. Or someone else in their household places the order and they claim fraud. But bottom line is they have to be treated as fraud when in all actuality it really isn’t fraud. The credit card companies, so far, haven’t really provided merchants an avenue to challenge those types of things successfully.
Also, I worry about people from terrorist groups trying to defraud us, because not only does that hurt my company, it hurts all of us. Fraud is bad enough, but when you are frauding to gain money for your evil empire, that makes it all the more worse.
Source: csoonline.com/