Qualiteam announces release of certified UPS integration module for LiteCommerce online store software.
Now LiteCommerce based shops can interface to UPS online tools to get instant shipping quotes from UPS directly.

Qualiteam Software Ltd., the maker of X-Cart, LiteCommerce and Sales-n-Stats software, announces the release of Google Checkout add-on for LiteCommerce online store builder implementing Level 2 Google Checkout integration.

by Lena Crossan © 2007, All Rights Reserved

It’s probably one of the most misunderstood aspects of Internet business. While others make it seem so scary, truly, there’s
nothing to fear. Getting an online merchant account can be one of the easiest steps in setting up your ecommerce business, if
you know what to look for and what to avoid.

It used to be - in order to get a merchant account - you had to fill out mounds of paperwork at a stodgy old bank, then try and
convince the branch manager that small businesses deserved merchant accounts, too. If you were an Internet-based business, the uphill battle was even steeper. Today, however, site owners have many other options including merchant account providers, independent sales organizations and more. Because the marketplace has opened so widely, getting an online merchant account is quite a simple process.

THE APPLICATION

Tip: You should never pay an application fee.

This is an old-school practice many institutions used to use to bring in a little extra cash. While applying for an online merchant account these days still requires an application to be completed, account providers stopped charging application fees long ago.

You’ll be expected to provide the basic information (company name, principle’s name, address, phone, fax, type of ownership, website address, etc.). You may also be asked for information such as estimated average credit card transaction, estimatedmonthly sales volume, federal tax ID number or Social Securitynumber, bank account number, routing number and other financialinformation. This is typical in order to allow the onlinemerchant account provider to assess your qualification for theservice, and to determine your credit rating.

Warning: Never fill out an unsecured online application. Look inthe address bar for a URL that begins with https:// to be sureyour information remains safe.

THE FEES

Tip: Calculate a set number of fictitious monthly charges (forexample, 50 charges at $55.00 each) using the fees each merchantaccount provider you’re considering charges. This way you cancompare apples to apples.

Merchant account providers make money by charging for the use ofthe service. Certain flat and percentage-based fees are imposedon everyone who transacts business via credit card online.Let’s look at the fees you can expect and find out what each onerepresents.

· Discount Rate - The percentage of each sale due to themerchant account provider.
· Transaction Fee - A flat-rate amount charged for eachtransaction you process.
· Statement Fee - A flat-rate amount charge for generatingmonthly statements of your account.
· Monthly Minimum - A fee collected if your monthly sales don’texceed this amount.
· Annual Fee - As the name implies, this fee is charged annuallyfor use of the online merchant account.
· Set Up Fee - A flat-rate fee charged for setting up your newmerchant account.

Warning: Many merchant account providers require no contract atall. Others offer discounts for committing to a long-termcontract. If the provider you’re applying with requires alengthy contract without offering a discount, reconsider.

LOOK FOR FLEXIBILITY

Watch for flexibility in online merchant account providers.You’ll want to work with someone who allows you to use theirshopping cart or your own or to use their Internet gateway oryour own. Being forced into using everything the provideroffers can get complicated and expensive. The same goes forflexibility in service. You want a merchant account providerwho will be there if you have questions or need advice.

THE PROCESS

Once your application has been approved, you’ll be ready toaccept credit cards online! Your customers can process theirorders via your site and make purchases immediately. How doesit work? Once the customer enters their credit cardinformation, that data is whisked over to the processing center.The processing center requests authorization from the issuingbank of the credit card. When everything is approved, the salegoes through. It all happens in real time at the blink of aneye!

Just remember:

1) never pay an application fee
2) make sure online merchant account applications are secure
3) use a set number of sample transactions to compare various merchant providers
4) look for flexibility

Before you know it, you’ll be raking in sale after sale on your website thanks to the benefits of online merchant accounts.

Lena Crossan is Marketing Manager of GoEmerchant.com that hasoffered affordable award-winning ecommerce services since 1995.Discover their proven, innovative online merchant account andother solutions today at http://www.GoEmerchant.com.

Many small business owners will find the need to accept credit card payments for products and services offered on their website.

When I set up my first ecommerce website I found the information surrounding online credit card purchases to be more confusing than any other aspect of marketing on the Internet.

The reason as it turns out is that the various organizations offering to advise you on how to set online payment systems up have conflicting interests and, in some cases, no idea how the systems work together.

The other potentially confusing aspect of online payments is that the entire system involves a number of service suppliers each providing one element of the entire chain. The real trick is getting them all working together.

So let me outline the parts and then give you a couple of suggestions for how you might approach an ecommerce system for your business. (There are dozens of ways to get the same thing done!)

Internet Merchant Account - In order to take online payments, when you don’t physically swipe a credit card, you need an Internet merchant account. This account can be issued by your bank or by a host of companies, such as Merchant Warehouse, that offer Internet merchant accounts. It’s important to note that if you already have a merchant account for your store or business, you will need to get an Internet account as they are different. This account will include a set-up fee and some % per transaction fee.

Most banks only provide merchant accounts for Visa and MasterCard. It is a very good idea to offer American Express and Discover card payment options. In order to do this you need to contact American Express and Discover and activate accounts. Once you have this information you can provide it to your merchant account provider’s payment processor to process all four cards in the same account.

Virtual Terminal - A virtual terminal is an add-on service that comes with your Internet merchant account. This allows you to take phone orders or in-person workshop orders and then go to a secure Internet based site and process the orders into your account.

Secure Payment Gateway - Since Internet traffic is susceptible to eavesdropping you will need a secure payment gateway that allows your customer’s credit card data to be secure as they place orders. This is yet another service provider that specializes in secure transaction and takes the secure data and passes it through a secure gateway to your payment processor. You want to make sure that this part of the process works with your merchant account and your shopping cart. I would stick with one of the leading gateway providers. This would include Authorize.net, VeriSign and SkipJack There is a fee for this service as well. It is important that you communicate who your gateway provider is to your merchant account provider.

If you are selling goods that are available to download immediately you will also need what is known as real time processing from your secure processor. This is simply a connection that gets a credit card transaction approved or declined in real time as a customer places an order. There is an additional charge for this service.

Shopping Cart - shopping carts come in software and hosted service based versions that allow your customers to shop for multiple items and then pass the order to your payment system by way of checkout. This service is very important if you have multiple products available on your web site. There are some very stable, fully functioning shopping carts that are free or very low cost. Some leading cart systems include osCommerce, zencart, and 1ShoppingCart. I must repeat that you need to make sure that your shopping cart is supported by your payment gateway and vice versa - just ask.

Third Party Processing - There is an alternative solution to the entire puzzle known as a third party processor. In this approach, the third party provider may offer all of the processing and no merchant account is required. The drawback to this approach is that you generally pay a higher overall fee per transaction and have limited ability to customize your customer’s check out experience to match your website. PayPal, an eBay company, is the largest provider of this approach and is a very acceptable option.

A Few Words of Advice

Each piece of the ecommerce puzzle comes with a fee, either as a monthly set price or on a per transaction basis. Make sure that you understand what the fees are. Online merchant account providers are notorious for charging very high application and set-up fees. Start with your bank, but shop this aspect around. Most small business owners should be able to set-up a fully functioning, real time processed site with a shopping cart for less that $150/mo (not including per transaction fees)

Make sure that you find out which parts work well with each other. In other words, when you are looking for a shopping cart or payment processors make sure that they integrate with your real time payment gateway and vice versa. If you stick with the big names in each category you shouldn’t have any problems.

————————

John Jantsch is a marketing coach, author and creator of the Duct Tape Marketing System. You can get more information about the Duct Tape System and download your free copy of How To Grow Your Small Business Like Crazy by visiting http://www.ducttapemarketing.com

Starting immediately, Miva Merchant will offer a new no-fee "Basic" partner category in addition to the current Standard and Premium categories. Benefits of the Basic Partner agreement include rights to resell Miva Merchant software, wholesale pricing for Miva Merchant products and access to Developer, API and Hosting documentation.The Basic Partner agreement is available to both existing and new partners. New partners will be eligible to receive free initial installation and set up training from Miva Merchant technicians. In order to apply as a Basic, Standard or Premier partner, please complete our partner interest form at http://www.mivamerchant.com/partners/signup/.

In the online world, when a shopper starts the purchase process, but does not complete it, it is referred to as “abandoning the shopping cart”. The purchase could be for a product, service, subscription or any other transaction, where an individual has to pay money via an online form.

Research undertaken by MarketingSherpa (www.marketingsherpa.com) and E-Tailing in 2006 discovered that average abandonment rates were 60% and 47% respectively. This means that the average commercial website is losing as much as half of its potential revenue.

Shopping carts abandonment is the single biggest cause of lost revenue for commercial websites.

The top ten reasons for abandonment, in order of importance, are:

- Hidden charges at the checkout

- Having to register before buying

- The buyer was comparison shopping and found a better deal

- The shipping costs were too high

- The buyer didn’t have time to complete the checkout process

- The product was out of stock

- There were no clear delivery details

- No phone number was provided

- The checkout process was too long

- The buyer was uncomfortable with the checkout process

Any website with a checkout should continually test and redesign the process, until the dropout rate is minimised. There is no single right answer to creating the perfect checkout design, but there are many things that can be done to make the process better.

Ten Simple Ways You can Improve the Checkout Process

Avoid adding hidden costs during the checkout process. This breaches trust and makes people question the value of the product or service you are selling

Provide all the information a customer could possibly need at the beginning of the checkout process, including confirmation of what they are buying, the total cost including postage and packaging, delivery times, availability, links to the terms & conditions and returns policy, as well as contact details for a real person.

Don’t make people register or give personal details until they are ready to make a purchase and pay. Many websites still make the mistake of demanding personal details as soon as a visitor wants to add something to their shopping cart.

Limit the choices that people have to make when checking out. Research has shown that the more choices people are given, the higher the dropout rate.

Ensure that any shipping costs are fair and reasonable.

Ask for the absolute minimum of information required to process a transaction. Every extra piece of information you ask for increases the chance that your buyer will not complete the purchase.

Ensure you have clear contact details on EVERY page of the checkout process. Most people won’t call you, but it reassures them that someone is available if they need help.

Clearly state that all transactions processed through your site are secure and encrypted. Also make it clear that you have a privacy policy, which protects the buyers’ identity and data. The statement linking to the policies could read “We take your privacy and the security of your data very seriously. Click here to read our security and privacy policies”.

The first piece of information you should collect is an email address. This gives you the chance to email people who don’t complete a transaction, to ask if there was a problem, and if you can help them complete their transaction.

Make the checkout form visually appealing and very, very simple. Studying and improving the checkout process on your website can have a dramatic impact on the revenues you make. Many of the changes are simple and common sense, while others will only come to light through continual testing.

Above all else, you should make a trial purchase every time you make a change, and at least once a week to ensure everything is working properly, and so that you can experience what your customers are experiencing.

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SubHub provides an all-in-one solution to enable you to rapidly design, build and run your own content website. Publish for profit on the web.
Website: http://www.subhub.com
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Miva Merchant Conference 2008 is coming to the Marina Conference Center here in beautiful San Diego, California, and is scheduled for February 28th, 29th (Leap Day) and March 1st of next year. Meet the new owners and find out what they have in store for Miva Merchant's future by joining us at the conference next year. Get the complete details at the conference website (www.mivamerchant.com/conference) and save $50 by registering before November 15th.

New X-cart 4.1.9 release features major improvements and opens new opportunities for merchants.

Online Payment Security

If you are new to online business, you best bet might be to
outsource credit card processing. PayPal is the best example of
outsourced credit card processing. Online vendors using this
service don’t have to worry about buying or renting credit card
processing machines. In addition, they don’t need to create a
merchant account because PayPal is the gateway.

More established businesses usually opt for an in-house credit
card processing solution. There are two basic methods of
accepting credit cards online, real time processing and deferred
processing.

Real Time Processing

The biggest advantage of real time credit card processing is
that there is no delay in the buying process. The customer
immediately knows if the order went through. This method is
especially effective with companies selling downloadable
products such as audio, video, or e-book. As soon as the credit
card is authorized, the customer can download the product. The
real time processing fulfills the need for instant
gratification. If you are looking for automation, real time
processing is for you. It requires more complex set up than
deferred processing, but once it has been set up, credit cards
are processed quickly, efficiently, and most importantly
automatically.

Real time processing simplifies selling online because
customers receive instant feedback. For example, if they enter
an incorrect credit card number, the transaction will fail and
the customer is notified instantly. Declined credit card
transactions are immediately reported back to the buyer.

Secure payment gateways are the most important components of
real time processing because they provide a secure connection
between your website and your merchant account. Some of the
largest secure payment gateway providers are authorizeNet and
VeriSign.

How does payment through a secure gateway work?

·Your customer adds the product to the shopping cart.

·The connection enters secure mode, as the customer is required
to complete payment information. The customer’s browser encrypts
the data between the web server and the customer computer.

·The website forwards the encrypted payment information to the
secure payment gateway.

·The payment gateway forwards the encrypted payment information
to the vendor’s acquiring bank account.

·The acquiring bank forwards payment information to the
customer’s bank account.

·The customer’s bank responds to the payment request. It either
approves or declines the charge.

·The payment gateway received the response and forwards it to
the vendor’s website.

·Order completed or failed message is communicated to customer.

Please keep in mind that the above process is highly simplified
version of the actual process. The entire transaction described
above should take less that ten seconds.

About The Author: George Meszaros http://www.webene.com

By Nowshade Kabir

In recent years we are seeing a great deal of interest in
eCommerce from retailers. An increasing number of retailers are
adopting eCommerce tools and getting involved in online business.
The influx of large number of new players has intensified the
battle for customer’s time and pocket book. Gone are the days
when you could build a good site and expect a number of visitors
to rush in. Today, websites are using every possible promotional
method available to attract visitors. As a result, web promotion
has become a complex and expensive part of company’s overall
online marketing strategy.

However, getting a visitor to your site is just half of the job,
even if the visitor is from your targeted segment of the market!
One of the primary issues that you have to deal with as an owner
of an eCommerce site is to convert a visitor to a real customer.
You have to take a number of measures in order to increase this
odd. Unfortunately, a huge number of prospective customers leave
a site after even placing items in the shopping cart. Most of
the site owners grossly underestimate the number of abandoning
customers. When asked, none of the respondent site owners gave
a figure for visitors from this category more than 30 percent.
But, the reality is quite different! According to various
studies, the abandonment rate can be a staggering 67 percent
for an average eCommerce site! So, what do you have to do to
reduce this number and increase your sales?
Some latest web development ideas combined vaguely under the
name of Web 2.0 technology can be used to increase
functionalities of a website and lower shopping cart abandonment
rate.

Web 2.0 as a concept has become big in the Internet world, but
this phenomenon has yet to make large impact on conservative
business segment like eCommerce. Over the coming months this
is going to change as more and more online shopping sites are
embracing Ajax based technology and other Web 2.0 ideas. The
originator of the Web 2.0 describes this term to define new
generation websites that use collective contribution, social
networking, tagging, open APIs, remix, etc.

Ajax, a short name for a combination of website developing
technologies and a key instrument of Web 2.0 concept, is used
to create web applications with enhanced usability, interactivity
and speediness. Present eCommerce sites are also in a position
to reap similar benefits.

Below are listed the primary reasons for visitors to abandon a
shopping cart and possible ways of dealing with it.

1. Cost of shipping too high and not shown until checkout

This seems to be the number one reason for most of the people
to abandon a shopping cart. The first step you need to take here
has nothing to do with technology. You have to understand that
people are not willing to pay extra on top of the real shipping
and handling charge. People are not stupid! They have more or
less rough idea, how much shipping might cost. That’s why keep
shipping and handling costs really low or at least reasonable!
The second step which can radically improve your conversion rate
is the use of new technology to keep the shopping cart with all
its content visible at the right upper side of the page presently
visited. Once a new item is added to the cart, all calculations
will take place right away without reloading the page or the
cart. If you feel that shipping and handling costs could be
crucial in buying decision, once the first item is added the
system will ask for visitor’s zip code and automatically
calculate the final price.

2. Changed mind and discarded cart content

In this case, unfortunately, you can’t do much! However, if your
site automatically saves the content of the cart, there is a
chance that the same buyer might come back and continue shopping.
Analysis of the exit page of the visitor might also help you
determine the reason why she/he has left.

3. Comparison shopping or browsing

Apart from monitoring your competitors’ sites and keeping your
offers aggressive, you should also create a site with better
functionalities and contents than your competitors.

4. Total cost of items is too high

Again, if the cart is constantly visible with the final price
always calculated automatically, the buyer will be able to
take a more informative decision.

5. Saving items for later purchase

The moment an item is added to the cart, it should be saved
automatically without reloading the page. If the buyer is not
logged in, request the buyer to register with just login
and password, explaining that this way he or she can come
back and continue shopping on your site.

6. Checkout process is too long

If you have a shopping cart as described earlier all the buyer
will need to do is click to check out. A simple form with
minimum information needed to execute the check out process will
appear upon checking out. The filling out of this form should be
the final step of the buying process.

7. Out of stock products at checkout time

The functionalities of the cart, as described earlier, will let
the buyer immediately know whether the product is available.

8. Checkout requires too much personal information

The Web 1.0 eCommerce sites collect a lot of information about
the customer, which presumably help get marketing data. These
days, online customers are not willing to reveal more than
necessary information for nothing. Avoid the temptation to ask
questions unrelated to check out. All you need is name, shipping
and billing address and credit card information. That’s it!

9. Poor site navigation and long download times

With the help of above mentioned technologies you will be able
to increase interactivity, speed and better navigation experience
many folds.

10. Lack of sufficient product or contact information

Your contact telephone numbers should be always visible! Use A
form or wizard based product adding system. This will help you
not to forget crucial information related to an item when you add
it to your database.

Of course there are other minor reasons why visitors abandon a
shopping cart, but if you make over your eCommerce site with
the help Web 2.0 technologies many of these issues will also
disappear.

About the author:
Nowshade Kabir is the founder, primary developer and present
CEO of Rusbiz.com. A Ph. D. in Information Technology,
he has wide experience in Business Consulting, International
Trade and Web Marketing. Rusbiz is a Global B2B
eMarketplace with solutions to start and run online business.