Category Archives: eCommerce

Is Your Web Store Ready To Sell EU Wide?

If you have a business that sells products online, and you currently focus only on selling in your own country, it can be a good idea to consider broadening your marketing and sales approaches to bring in more potential business from the EU as a whole. After all, one of the main reasons the EU exists is to make it easier for people in different member countries to trade with each other. If a product range or service is doing well in your country, there are likely to be similar markets elsewhere in the EU that you could be harnessing.

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Of course, it takes a little research and preparation to get ready to start openly welcoming customers from other member states. Here are some things to do:

Ensure You Can Sell in Compliance With EU Regulations and Can Handle Things Like Tax Using The Latest PrestaShop Update

Before you can begin selling to people in other countries, you’ll need to make sure your site is equipped to do things like currency conversions for pricing, handle different taxes, add on different shipping and handling costs for people in different locations (obviously this is not applicable for digitally delivered products like downloadable software and media or eBooks), and is compliant with EU trade regulations. This may seem a bit of an overwhelming thing to have to add to your site’s back end, but actually it can be done very simply.  If you install ecommerce platform PrestaShop, you’ll find that the latest version has a whole module geared towards making EU compliance and EU wide sales easy to manage, and ensuring you’re doing everything right.

Research Different EU Markets

The EU is pretty diverse, and the markets vary quite a lot. As has been in the news a lot recently, some countries are in a better economic state than others, and also, different things tend to be in fashion or important to people in different member states. This means that before you start marketing in other EU countries, you should do some research to establish where your products are going to sit well with the consumer public, and if you can find a gap in the country’s own market to sell in. The web is full of resources and stats that can help you learn more about different markets, so spend some time looking at those that interest you and prioritise countries for marketing.

Translations

A final thing to consider is how you will handle copy, such as advertising and product descriptions. You will of course need translations, but as well as this, consider if you need to actually change things like your trading name or logo to appeal more in other countries. Translation only takes into account language, but if you really appear to care about a country’s culture and understand the market, you will do far better.

By readying your business and website in these ways, you can soon begin tapping into huge markets all over Europe!

How To Compose SSL With Merchant Account?

It can be said that a merchant account is not a typical account like saving or any other account. It is however like a contract between you and your bank. Now people prefer to use credit or debit card payments instead of using hard cash. So if you also want to have the facility in your online or retail store then you can go for opening a merchant account. While generating the bank statement the name of your business along with a specified charge will appear on your customer’s credit card statement. Here the processing dimensions passes through every 7-14 days.

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It is not that you will have to work with one account as a business owner you are allowed to have more than one active of merchant accounts at the same time. Generally people go for over-the-counter (OTC) merchant account which is most useful for retail stores. The second types of merchant accounts are termed as Internet Merchant Accounts used by for eCommerce merchants for online webshops, it is though a very high risk Merchant Account associated with a few specific categories like gambling and adult, pharmacy, where there is a more chance of fraud. The next most common kind of merchant account is for the E-mail and telephone made orders account, which provides you services related to the regular Internet Merchant Account as well.

It is true that the common people think it is however difficult to go for a merchant account especially for new businesses as they have experienced that the customers turn away rate regarding payment processors is not up to as high as 98% for all merchants.

Apart from that the most important aspect for small business owners is the cost effectiveness. Though it is associated with many advantages for a business to run but the cost of accepting credit or debit cards for an online business is too high to afford for a small or new business. They can go with 3rd party merchant accounts like PayPal and 2CO as the processing fees here is less as compared to others. Moreover it is suitable for the business of any sizes or all types.

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Now it is the era of online business where everybody wants the ability to operate with credit or debit card payments, whether in a retail store or an eCommerce store on the internet. The user will feel comfortable using their cards and if you will be unable in providing them with this facility then you will most likely lose the customers.

SSL means Secure Socket Layer. It is a developing standard discovered by Netscape Communications to transfer important data and information across the Internet. It is however a reliable and secured way of data transfers. Through SSL your customer’s browser will be connected to your web site and can avail a transparent communication channel. After implementation of the connection you can securely exchange the credit card numbers over the web.

For this process you definitely need a verified “Merchant Account” from an accredited financial institution as all the actual processing of the credit card will be done through this. SSL does not use any software to process the credit card transactions, it also based on the Merchant Account for their transaction processing.

If you are making a web-based form of business where you are required to attract the traffic towards your website and need the visitor to enter data and submit the form online, then you can take the help of an SSL encryption service. This is especially helpful and secured way of exchanging sensitive information like entering credit card numbers.

The SSL service thus uses an encrypted form of information transfer technique. Once after receiving from the web server it is automatically decrypted which enable you to read, store and process the information as usual on the web server.

If you are having an SSL certificate previously then you don’t need to go for the whole process again. You can just send a backup file to renew the certificate that has been generated on the previous web server, along with the password associated with the certificate file. By this you can be able to use the facility over the web with a small setup fee.

About Author:
Mark Wilston is a Content Writer and marketing professional working with PixelCrayons (a reputed Web & Mobile Application development company). He loves to read and write different blogs related to web design and technologies. Contributing in a blog post aids him spreading the words online with a new set of people.

Monetizing A WordPress Blog

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Once your blog has reached some level of popularity, either within its niche or more broadly, the question arises: how are we going to make some money from this? Blogging at a small scale is cheap, the writers and editors usually work for free, and WordPress hosting is inexpensive. But, the more popular a blog becomes, the more expensive the infrastructure needed to support it, and, of course, most people get into the blogging business on this level as a way of making an income.

The publishing business has been trying to figure out the best ways of monetizing their online content for a long time now, and has developed various means of generating revenue. We’re going to have a look at five of the most popular and give you some pointers as to how you could implement them on your own site.

 

Advertising

Advertising is the traditional route for making money from editorial content. Unfortunately, traditional advertising revenue is on the decline. There has been a constant drop in CPM (Cost Per Mille) for display advertising over recent years. However, if your blog has built up a large enough audience, or a reasonable sized audience with demographics that marketers are particularly interested in, then there is still considerable scope for making money this way.

The biggest advertising network around is Google’s AdSense, which is a flexible and straightforward way for publishers to show relevant ads next to their content. The Quick AdSense WordPress plugin is one of the more popular ways to get ads onto a WordPress site.

There are many advertising networks that compete with Google’s that are worth checking out, including Chitika and Bidvertiser.

The alternative is for a site to go it alone and find its own advertisers. This can be a fruitful approach for large blogs with the staff to find and manage advertising opportunities, but it’s a time consuming process, and smaller sites are better off using an advertising network that will do much of the hard work for them. One exception to this is for blogs that are already very popular and well-known within a particular niche industry. They may find it easy to attract advertising.

 

Affiliate Links

Affiliate links are the second most popular method of monetizing. Affiliate links are coded links to products and services online. When a user clicks on an affiliate link, the point of origin is registered by the site, and the site owners get paid some percentage of the sale value. Many sites around the Internet exist entirely as affiliate sites, although they tend to have poor quality content and are often associated with spamming. Nevertheless, given the decline of advertising revenue, some large content sites plan to start using affiliate links to make up the lost revenue, including the Gawker Network.

Thirsty Affiliates provides a popular method for adding affiliate links to a site, as does the WP Auto Affiliate Links plugin.

 

Premium Content

Premium content can be an awesome way to make money, but it depends on the particular audience a blog has, and the sort of premium content. Opting to make some proportion of articles available only for a fee is not likely to go down well with readers who have become used to getting it for free, but with services like Google Wallet for Content, it can be done painlessly from the site owner’s perspective. This can also be used as a method of providing white papers, podcasts, and other value added content for a price. The Restrict Content Pro is another method for achieving much the same thing.

A very popular way of monetizing is to create an ebook based on the content of the blog. This isn’t strictly a WordPress-based process, but Amazon and Apple both provide excellent self-publishing tools.

 

Donations

If a blog has a very loyal audience, then donations can be a lucrative revenue stream. Unobtrusively soliciting donations from regular readers and providing an easy mechanism for payment has proven a viable source of income for a number of sites. PayPal is the most popular service used in this way, and for regular readers it’s a great way for them to say thank you.

However, for the casual reader, who wants to donate in response to an article they particularly enjoyed, it can be a disincentive to donation if they have to go through the process of making a PayPal payment just to send the small amount of money appropriate to a blog article. The Flattr service was designed so that making small donations is very easy. Flattr allows users to designate an amount of money that they are prepared to pay for content each month. As they read articles they enjoy, they click on the Flattr button attached to that content. At the end of the month, their money is split between the sites they have “flattred”. The Flattr WordPress plugin makes it easy to add the button.

 

Paywalls

Paywalls are a process, similar to the premium content model we mentioned earlier, that restricts access to some or all of a site’s content to registered users who have paid a fee. Paywalls are largely the domain of big media organizations like the New York Times, but there are a few bloggers who are making it pay, most notably Andrew Sullivan.

Unfortunately, not many people have the huge following that Sullivan has, so for all but the most popular blogs, a paywall is very likely to be a failure. There may be exceptions to this where a blogger is a recognized industry expert who publishes useful, actionable information regularly, but for your everyday blogger, asking is better than demanding, so the donation route is probably more suitable.

If you want to go ahead and implement a paywall on your site, TinyPass is a good way to do it.

 

How are you making money from your blog? Let us know your experiences of taking your blog into the black in the comments.
About Graeme Caldwell — Graeme works as an inbound marketer for Nexcess, a leading provider of Magento and WordPress hosting. Follow Nexcess on Twitter at @nexcess, Like them on Facebook and check out their tech/hosting blog, http://blog.nexcess.net/.

20 new WordPress eCommerce Plugins Review for 2012

ZaakPay Gateway for JigoShop
1. ZaakPay Gateway for JigoShop

This WordPress ecommerce plug-in is designed specifically to simplify payments in India. ZaakPay is intended for integrating in online business with an intranet merchant account. What makes this plug-in so unique is that it is designed to deliver the fastest merchant account approval of any payment gateway in India. Continue reading 20 new WordPress eCommerce Plugins Review for 2012