Last month we added a some new carts to our review listings that we would like to highlight.

Shoopz is a new free shopping cart solution. Currently in beta this cart offers an easy skinning solution to alter the appearance of the store. Review Shoopz

E-junkie provides you copy-paste buy now buttons and shopping cart to let you sell digital and tangible products. With E-junkie you can centrally manage your products while selling your products on multiple sites (your web site, your blog, MySpace, Craigslist, eBay etc.) at the same time. Review E-junkie

RMScart is an eCommerce Cart solution that integrates with Microsoft Retail Management System (RMS). Review RMScart

Wahmcart (Work At Home Mom Cart) is a hosted solution with a reasonable price tag. WAHMCart gives you the tools to Collect Leads , Develop Prospects, Maintain Strong Customer Relationships, Keep In Touch With and Train Your Affiliates, Track Your Marketing Efforts Run, Newsletters, Offer eCourses, Distribute Digital Products Automatically, and more. Review Wahmcart

These carts were submitted by our users. If you would like to add a new cart for review with us please use our submission form.

Try WAHMCart before the prices go up on August 15, 2008.

Everyone who has an ecommerce website knows the importance of having a reliable shopping cart as part of an automated business. Shopping carts that are easy to navigate and have secure credit card processing will eliminate customer frustration and will build consumer trust in your business.

WAHMCart is a full-feature shopping cart that has become the favorite shopping cart among work at home moms, men and small businesses!

This secure shopping cart includes the following features: unlimited autoresponders, tracking capabilities, recurring billing options, and affiliate software.

Basically, everything you need to build an online ecommerce business is included when you subscribe to WAHMCart’s service.

WAHMCart offers a 14-Day Risk Free Test Drive For Only $1

Today I took a look at a hosted-solution shopping cart geared toward the working mom. Apparently the ease of use, feature rich, cost-effective solution appeals to the work-at-home-mom niche! I’m guessing most of us can appreciate those qualities in a shopping cart.

Wahmcart is a full featured ecommerce solution that allows you to manage your Products, Sales, Prospects, Clients and Affiliates all in one place.

Highlighted features:

• Secure Shopping Cart so your customers can order with complete peace of mind.
• The ability to automate your product management
• Offering multiple payment options to your customers. Wahmcart works with most popular credit card merchant accounts.
• Unlimited autoresponders, newsletters and mailing lists to help you follow up automatically with your customers or prospects.
• Digitial product delivery so you can be free of manually emailing customers ebook orders and customers receive their purchases without waiting.
• Tracking system so you know exactly which promotional efforts are paying off and which are dead in the water, never to be repeated again.
• Affiliate management system so you can have a team of people selling for you even when you aren t working.

Wahmcart is well suited for, Selling Information Products (eBooks, Audio Books, Digital Videos, Special Reports, etc.), Products, Managing a Coaching or Consultants Business, Marketing Multiple Services and Managing a Paid Newsletter or Ezine.

WAHMCart gives you the tools to Collect Leads , Develop Prospects, Maintain Strong Customer Relationships, Keep In Touch With and Train Your Affiliates, Track Your Marketing Efforts Run, Newsletters, Offer eCourses, Distribute Digital Products Automatically, and so much More!

At present you can use this cart for $30 a month. A positive selling point is that there is currently no limit or price increase based on the number of products you sell on your site.

RMScart is an eCommerce Cart solution that completely and seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Retail Management System (RMS).

This Microsoft RMS integrated Shopping Cart solution’s standard features far exceed those of any other Retail Management System - compatible Web Integration and Authoring Application. Inventory synchronization between a physical store and a web store can be immediate or scheduled for a later time. Although, RMS cart is a feature rich application, many features can be further customized to fit specific business needs.

Some of the advantages of this Microsoft RMS integrated eCommerce Cart Solution are:

• Customizable eCommerce Website
• Scheduled Inventory updates between RMS and Online Shopping Store
• Automatically Downloads Orders into RMS
• Show Standard and Matrix items with multiple images
• Accept payments through major payment gateways
• Creates New Customer Records in RMS
• Updates Shipping and Billing Information on each Customer
• Uses the Existing RMS Tax Structure
• Supports RMS Sale Pricing
• Intuitive and effortless navigation
• Powerful Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools
• FREE RMS cart setup, FREE training

RMScart gives the ability to quickly create and manage an online store in combination with a brick and mortar retail operation running RMS. For either online businesses opening retail locations or retail stores adding online stores, Microsoft RMS and RMS shopping cart give any retail business a complete solution for maximum revenue in a global market.

RMS cart Solution, also known as Microsoft RMS ecommerce cart, has been developed by LAN Services, LLC to bring together the leaders in Information Technology (IT) and experts in Online Store design, custom application and database programming.

RMS cart’s web interface allows anyone to create a web store in just a few steps. Their team of professionals, at no additional cost, helps in creating a web store, selecting the products one wants to sell online, and launching the web store. The web store is built quickly and becomes an extension of any business, adding convenience and increasing revenue to the bottom line.

Microsoft RMS e-commerce solution, i.e, RMS integrated cart is a powerful eCommerce cart for use with your Retail Management System. A few clicks of the mouse on the Web Integrator interface and RMS cart creates product pages for all of the products in the Retail Management System database. Then, the RMS shopping cart publishes those pages in the web store. From this point forward, the store owner is providing products to customers walking in to his store and online customers who are surfing the Internet anywhere around the globe.

E-commerce transactions are provided using the state-of-the-art in merchant systems from the leaders in the banking industry, at the lowest rates in the industry, and all electronic transactions are supported 24X7 at no additional charge. After the customer makes a purchase, a fully customized rich text email is sent to the customer’s email address confirming the order. This email contains information such as Order Confirmation and hyperlinks that take one’s customer back to the store to get additional information about their order status, order history or complementary and available products in your store.

With RMS integration, you receive unlimited FREE technical support, FREE setup, FREE training, your own domain, secure hosting, Search Engine Optimization, registration with Search Engines, maintenance, email boxes, daily backups, storage, and 99.99% uptime.

My recent experience with my email being flagged as spam may seem minor or even unrelated to the realm of ecommerce and shopping cart software. However the success of your email delivery can be a significant factor in the reception of your estore… both actual and perceived. Imagine you are following up with a customer, soliciting new customers or providing support via email and your emails never reach their intended recipients. Or they do get them but they are relegated to the user’s spam box or filter. Not exactly the impression you are working so hard to achieve.

Assuming you have not taken any part in bad e-mail practices you would think this would not apply to you, right? Not so. Perhaps they have been flagged as spam by commonly used services like Spamhaus or SORBS.

Let me explain. I recently had an issue where my email was getting flagged as spam and I had no idea how to resolve the issue. Like many web developers I have a web site that is hosted with a web host (HostGator) which offers POP/SMTP email. I then use MS Outlook to access that account in order to send and receive email using my website’s domain. This is common practice and allows you to have an address something like YourName@YourStoreDomain.com instead of YourName2008xyz@yahoo.com. I’ve done this for years with no problems. However, since I have many sites and thus many e-mails which tend to make their way out into the web I also get my fair share of spam. Solution? I activate SpamAssasin via my web host to allow me to flag and filter my emails and reduce my spam.

Things go well for a time with this solution. It’s is now easier to weed out the good from the bad and though the solution is not perfect it seems reasonable. That is until email from my own domain begins to get flagged as spam. At first I assume it is a fluke but then I test it by simply sending an email to myself and there it is again! So I view the details as reported by SpamAssasin.

Content analysis details: (6.4 points, 6.0 required)

pts rule name description
—- ———————- ————————————————–
5.0 RCVD_IN_PBL RBL: Received via a relay in Spamhaus PBL
[69.253.111.111 listed in zen.spamhaus.org]
3.0 RCVD_IN_SORBS_DUL RBL: SORBS: sent directly from dynamic IP address
[69.253.111.111 listed in dnsbl.sorbs.net]
0.7 SPF_SOFTFAIL SPF: sender does not match SPF record (softfail)
0.0 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message
0.1 RDNS_DYNAMIC Delivered to trusted network by host with
dynamic-looking rDNS
0.3 DYN_RDNS_SHORT_HELO_HTML Sent by dynamic rDNS, short HELO, and HTML
-2.6 AWL AWL: From: address is in the auto white-list

If you are like me then this probably seems like mostly gibberish to you. However, I’m a reasonably smart guy. I’ve been using email for years and I haven’t made any changes. However, my email goes through the mail server with my web host so perhaps they have made some changes to the IP that I see listed in that gibberish above. I contact my web host and they are patient with my ignorance on the matter and inform me that the IP in question is my ISP’s which happens to be Comcast.

OK, so I probably should have done a tracert on the IP do see who it actually belonged to before pestering support but too late now. But I’d like to have a bit more info to provide to Comcast support in order to plead my case and get some resolution. I check my IP against SORBS and get the following details.

Dynamic IP Space (LAN, Cable, DSL & Dial Ups)
Netblock: 69.253.0.0/16 (69.253.0.0-69.253.255.255)
Record Created: Mon Apr 7 13:27:21 2008 GMT
Record Updated: Mon Apr 7 13:27:21 2008 GMT
Additional Information: [#193969 Comcast Supplied list - 07/04/08] Dynamic/Generic IP/rDNS address, use your ISPs mail server or get rDNS set to indicate static assignment.
Currently active and flagged to be published in DNS

Now armed with real info I muddle through the support pages of Comcast and quickly realize I’ll have to contact support. After a number of unrelated, automated and useless responses from them on how to configure my Outlook and connect to POP email I decide I’ll spend a little more time investigating in the hopes that I don’t need a real live support person from Comcast to help.

Let’s see what Spamhaus has to say…

Ref: PBL191960

69.253.0.0/16 is listed on the Policy Block List (PBL)

So far this is of no help either so I take a look at their FAQ and there I begin to understand my problem… and solution.

The first thing to know is: THE PBL IS NOT A BLACKLIST. You are not blacklisted for spamming or for anything you have done. The PBL is simply a list of ALL of the world’s dynamic broadband IP space, i.e: IP space normally assigned to broadband/ADSL customers. It is perfectly normal for dynamic IP addresses (DSL, DHCP, cable, dialup) to be listed on the PBL. In fact all dynamic IP addresses in the world should be on the PBL.

The PBL does not prevent you sending email unless your email program is not authenticating properly when it connects to your ISP or company’s mail server. This can happen if you have forgotten to turn on ‘Authentication’ or if you have switched ‘Authentication’ off by mistake.

If you are using a normal email program, such as Outlook, Entourage, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, and you are being blocked by a Spamhaus PBL listing when you try to send email, the reason is simply that YOU NEED TO TURN ON ‘SMTP AUTHENTICATION’ in your email program’s account settings.

Great! Now we are getting somewhere. I go to my outlook and setup SMTP authentication and it works. Here are the basics if you have MS Outlook.

Start Outlook 2000 or Outlook Express. From the menu, select Tools, then Accounts. Click once on the appropriate account from the Mail tab. Select Properties. From the account properties dialog box, choose the Servers tab. Put a check in the box for “My server requires authentication”. Click on the “Settings” button. In the ‘Outgoing Mail Server’ dialog box, make sure “Use same settings as my incoming mail server” is selected. Press “OK”. Back at the “Properties”, click “Apply”, then “OK”. Click “OK” to close out of all dialog boxes.

Turns out my listings in Spamhaus and SORBS were normal for my type of ISP connection and the solution was quite simple for me. My e-mails are now finding their way back into inboxes. However, had I not been using SpamAssasin it may have taken me much longer to become aware of the situation.

I hope my small mishap can help others avoid or correct for this issue in their personal or business e-mail. Ecommerce tends to depend upon e-mail communications. Yet it seems that even legitimate e-mail is harder to get past the gatekeepers these days. Be diligent in testing and protecting your email service. Your customers expect this!

Last week I mentioned some eBay updates that went into effect in January. Some of the updates affect how eBay sellers receive feedback and rewards. I found this brief article from eBay Chatter helpful for some easy tips and experience to improve your feedback ratings.

In case you missed it, eBay announced some changes in January affecting eBay sellers. Below is a brief explanation.

Reduced Listing Fees
- Insertion fees reduced
- Final Value fees adjusted for lower up-front costs
- Free gallery picture per each listing
- Lower fees for Gallery Plus, Picture Pack, and Feature Plus

Rewards for higly rated sellers
There will be discounts and incentives for those who satisfy customers best. Who decides who gets rewarded? Customers do, by giving sellers high Detailed Seller Ratings (DSRs).
- Increased search exposure through Best Match
- Fee discounts for PowerSellers
- Increased protection for PowerSellers

Feedback Changes
Significant changes coming soon will increase buyer confidence and showcase good sellers.

An overview of the changes can be found on eBay at http://pages.ebay.com/sell/update08/overview/index.html Additional information available in the eBay forum.

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

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.

————————

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.
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