I’m thoroughly unimpressed and underwhelmed.

As far as I’m concerned, Microsoft took a giant step backward with  this software.

Before I begin criticizing - let me tell you what I liked.

um…… well….. er….. hmm…..

Okay, I liked the split screen feature.

Other than that, I found this software to be good for absolutely nothing better than to send as a Christmas gift to people I despise a whole lot.

The number one complaint I’ve heard about frontpage over the years is how it writes bloated source code.

Expression web takes this to a whole new level. Attempting to write css and doing it badly.

The worst part, though, is that any php page I edited in expression web ended up with these weird little characters on the page.

Not since Windows ME has microsoft struck out so badly.

The first new feature is that store owners may now offer “soft” (dowloadable) products in their 123 eCart stores.

The second really cool feature is that store owners may now set up user “inputs’ for any product in their catalog.

For example…let’s say that I am selling personalized t-shirts, and will print any slogan you wish on a t-shirt.

Obviously, I need to ask the buyer for the specific slogan to print.

You can now do this by setting up a “user input” for the t-shirts. When the buyer adds this product to his or her cart, he will be asked to provide the slogan he wants printed.

inputs can be set up in the options part of the admin control panel.

Just a quick note, too, about the user help files.

We’ve made a lot of improvements and changes over the last 3 months, and the user manual hasn’t really kept up with it all. we plan to re-write the manual very soon.

People buy the deal.

Let that burn into your psyche and repeat it to yourself every single morning.

People buy the deal.

My job, as an online vendor, is to put together the best deal possible, then sell the benefits of that deal.

What do I mean by the best deal? Do I mean the lowest price?

Not necessarily. Price is important, but the deal itself consists of all of the benefits which the customer receives as a result of buying my product or service. You don’t have to compete on price, at all, if you can give the customer more perceived benefits than your competitor.

Benefits can be tangible or intangible. The important thing is – how will purchasing this product or service enhances the purchaser’s life?

Let’s look at a real world example?

Let’s say that there are two espresso stands in my town.

Both offer identical lattes for identical prices.

The first stand is owned by a faceless corporation in Seattle.

The second espresso stand is owned by an enterprising young man named Jake who is using the income from his espresso venture to put himself through college.

Where do I buy my Latte?

Obviously, I go to Jakes place because he offers the better deal.

“Wait a second, Larry! Didn’t you say that the lattes are identical and the prices are identical?”

That’s right. But the deal is more than the price and the product. The deal is the sum of all of the benefits which I derive from the purchase.

The fact of the matter is that I like this kid, Jake, and receive a lot of satisfaction from knowing that I’m helping to put him through school. That sense of satisfaction is a huge benefit. In fact, I’d even pay slightly more for the Lattes at Jakes place, but don’t tell Jake that.

Because I receive more benefits from frequenting Jakes espresso stand, that’s the better deal.

People buy the deal.

The deal consists of the benefits I receive.

That being the case, doesn’t it make more sense to sell the benefits than to sell the product?

All too often, we try to sell the product, and spend all of our time talking about the features of the product or service we’re trying to sell, instead of talking about how this product or service will benefit the purchaser.

I fall into this trap all the time. Because I’m kind of a techie, and because 123 eCart has so many cool features, I sometimes slip up and begin selling the features.

Let me give you an example:

123 eCart has an affiliate program built right into the software. This feature allows you to launch your own affiliate program which is already integrated with your online store. For those who don’t know what an affiliate program is, it’s where I persuade website owners to place my ads on their site, and I’ll pay them a commission if anyone clicks through and makes a purchase. It’s a great way to drive traffic to my site without putting out a lot of upfront advertising dollars.

Now my tendency is to try to sell 123 ecart by pointing out this feature.

I might say something like:

“You should buy 123 eCart because it has an embedded affiliate program.”

See – that was selling the feature.

Instead, I should have pointed out how this feature will BENEFIT the purchaser. I should have said something more along these lines:

“Because your 123 eCart store has it’s own built-in affiliate program, you will be able to drive more traffic to your site, meaning more money in your pocket, and you won’t have to mess around with trying to integrate off the shelf affiliate software with your shopping cart. It’s already been done for you”.

Do you see the difference? I sold the benefits of more money and less hassle instead of the feature.

People buy The Deal, and the deal consists of all of the ways this benefits me.

Sell the benefits, not the product.

In the cubicle next to me was a big, loud and obnoxious fellow by the name of Jim. Jim incorporated his offensive and pushy personality right into his sales technique. I would often listen in absolute horror as Jim would outright demand that his prospect make a purchase, and refused to take no as an answer. I found myself wondering when they would fire Jim.

A couple of weeks into this job, I found out an amazing thing.

Jim, with all of his rudeness, obnoxiousness and offensiveness, was selling just as much as me.

I’ve thought about this a lot over the years, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that Jim’s technique appealed to some people, and my technique also appealed to a certain number of people. Jim made sells to the people who his techniques appealed to, and so did I. The people who bought from me would most likely not buy from Jim, and vice-versa.

That being the case, my job, as a sales person, is to find those people who are receptive to my personality and style. These are my people. I speak their language and will be most effective trying to sell to them.

In order to find them, I have to search through a sufficient number of people.

It’s all in the numbers.

Let’s apply this to our online sales effort.

Let’s suppose that I set up an online store to sell widgets. Being an intelligent person who is committed to success, I set up a 123 eCart storefront. I put in some time to make the store attractive, add articles and content, and display my widgets in a very attractive and enticing way.

A certain percentage of the people who visit my website will like what I’ve done with the site, and will be receptive to the notion of buying from me. Let’s arbitrarily say that this number is 20%. Of those who are receptive, I’m able to actually persuade half of them to make a sale.

This tells me that out of 100 people who visit my widget store, 10 of those people will purchase widgets. If I want to sale 100 widgets a day, I need to get 1000 visitors to my store each day. It’s all in the numbers. If only ten people visit, I’ll only sell one widget. This is what we call a conversion rate. If you’re talking to an Internet Marketing guru, and they ask what your conversion rate is, In this case you would answer that it’s ten percent.

There are ways to increase your conversion rate, and we’ll get into that a little later, but for now, I just want you to realize that with even a poor conversion rate, if you get sufficient numbers of people to your store front, you’ll still make sales.

That’s why it’s extremely important to promote your site as much as possible, and important to rank well in the search engines.

123 eCart will help you to do well in the search engines, because we’ve built features into the software which produce stores that typically show up higher in search results. The higher you show up in the search engines, the more traffic you’ll get. The more traffic - the more sales. It’s that easy.

The most important thing you can do to is to develop a trust relationship with your visitors.

Before I, as a prospective customer, will fork over my credit card number to you, I need to have a reasonable belief that you are a legitimate and trustworthy business.

Let me ask you a trick question:

What is the best way to get people to trust you?

The answer, of course, is to be trustworthy.

This actually eludes many people, but it’s really a no brainer. If I want people to believe that I’m an honest and ethical businessman…it would be a great start to actually be the honest and ethical person which I’m trying to portray.

Most people are really pretty bright, and won’t be fooled for long about who and what they are really dealing with. You might make a few big scores through dishonesty, but it’s not the way to build a lasting business.

Now, of course, if you are a legitimate and trustworthy business, you need to show it. There are a few ways to do this online.

A really simple way to do this is to put your street address and telephone number on the site. Crooks very seldom give you their address or phone number, but legitimate business people do, and folks know this.

Another thing you can do is to let the visitor get to know you. It’s not all about the product. Unless you are amazon.com or walmart.com, you’re visitor won’t have a clue who you are. Tell them. Use your About Us page, or your home page to let them get to know you a bit.

Another way to inspire trust is to write some articles about your area of expertise. This let’s you establish yourself as an expert in your field. People trust experts.

Yet another way to inspire confidence is through testimonials or product reviews.

123 eCart has both an article manager module and a product reviews module to help you implement these methods and gain the trust of your visitors. Trust means sales, and sales means money.

Before I get into the movie, I’d like to ask you something.

What is your reason for being in business? What is your overriding goal?

For me, the answer can vary from day to day. Some days my reason is to make enough money to support my family. Some days my reason is to serve other people, some days it’s simply because it’s warmer and drier than the back deck of a fishing boat.

In the move “Facing the Giants”, the football coach at a Christian high school deals with the frustration of coaching a perpetually losing team. Parents, players and fellow coaches begin to point a finger in his direction, citing his poor coaching as the cause of the losses.

In fear, and in frustration, the coach turns to The Lord. After a period of soul searching, the coach calls the team together, and asks them what they think the purpose of the football team is. One of the players suggests that winning football games is the purpose of the team. The coach explains that the real purpose of the team is to honor Jesus. The coaches and players were to honor Jesus by giving him their all, and leave the results up to Him. If they won, they would praise God, if they lost, they would also praise God. What was most important was to honor God in their effort.

This movie was a good reminder to me, that evry day needs to be about honoring and serving God. I can’t concern myself with the wins and losses, but must praise Him in either. The win isn’t nearly so important as the way I serve Him and my fellows.

Over two thousand years ago, Jesus told us to seek first the Kingdom of God, and that all of our needs would be taken care of.

That, is a really incredible promise, and flies in the face of conventional business wisdom.

However, most businesses fail within the first five years, so some unconventional wisdom might be just the ticket.

Incidentally, the coach in the movie ended up taking his team to the state championships that year.

Here’s to facing the giants!

Now what?

Well…you’ll need to get shoppers into your store. For that to happen, they’ll need to find you.

“Easy enough” you say. ” I’ll submit the site to the search engines”.

You submit, and you wait. You check your logs every day (sometimes every hour) to see if anyone has visited, but very few people have set foot on the premises.

The problem, most likely, is that your site is listed in the search engines, but is not showing up very high in the results returned.

To remedy this, an entire industry - the search engine optimization industry - has come into existence. The professionals in this industry are called SEO Consultants. They can charge a great deal of money, or be extremely reasonable. If you have the money, finding an SEO can be a great investment.

What if you don’t have the money? Well - there’s a wealth of information out there regarding how to optimize your own website. A little time on Google can get you up to speed rather quickly.

One issue that ecommerce store owners often encounter is that their shopping cart software  isn’t flexible enought to allow them to optimize their site correctly.

If you are a 123 eCart store owner, you’ll find the opposite to be true.

123 eCart allows you to insert your own meta tags on every category and product page, and builds the name of the product or category right into the page URL so as to make it easier for search engines to find specific products on your site.

With a little work and the proper tools - like those included in your 123 eCart Storefront - You should be quite successful.

As it relates to your online store, it’s simply this:

You have a website which collects sensitive data from customers. You have a duty to keep that data from falling into the wrong hands. Data like credit card numbers, personal info, etc. - may all be used by malicious characters to hurt your customers. If this happens, you will likely lose your customers, your business, your reputation, and maybe even held liable by the credit card companies.

So, where do we start.

Surely, ensuring that your site is hosted in a secure environment is important. There are thousands of potential vulnerabilities in web software which must be looked at… and we will.

But first, let’s address the biggest security vulnerability- YOU!

Believe it or not, the weakest link in this whole chain is usually the site owner and/ or their employees.

Luckily, implementing a few good practices will close this vulnerability tight as a drum.

Most shopping carts, whether installed on your own website, or hosted web stores, have an administrative area which you log into to configure the cart and retrieve orders. This area is usually password protected. If a bad guy were to discover your password, he could simply waltz right into your admin area and grab your clients data.

As fundamental as this may seem, selecting a good password is a big step towards securing your site and your business.

When selecting a password, avoid using names or dictionary words. Hackers often employ what is called a Brute Force Dictionary attack where they have a program attempt every word in the dictionary as well as common names.

The best password is a mixture of letters and numbers. To make it even better, use a mixture of uppercase and lowercase letters.

Once you have a good password, it’s important to safeguard it.

When logging into your storefront, use a secure login page. This is at an address which begins with https:// instead of http://

Take a look at your home or office network as well. Are you using cable to connect to the Internet? If so, anyone on your cable network can intercept your password if you are not sending it over a secure page. What about your wireless router? Is it secured? It better be.

Finally, change your password often. This makes it exponentially more difficult for a hacker to compromise your account.

As an online merchant, you should be particularly concerned with this topic. Accepting credit card information online confers a responsibility to handle that data with care. Nothing could be more embarrassing than explaining to your customers that their credit card number may have been compromised.

For a web store operator, there are quite a few areas to explore when it comes to security.

Over the next few weeks, we will be doing a series of articles, on The Shopping Cart Junkie, concerning shopping cart security.

Stay tuned…

Studies estimate that up to 75% of online transactions are abandoned before they are completed. That’s a lot of potential sales leads for someone who is willing to do a little follow up.

Online shoppers abandon carts for several reasons, and understanding those reasons will help you to recover some of those sales.

Many shopping carts are abandoned because the buyer got nervous, or had second thoughts. Maybe they decided to think about things for a while.

If you use a shopping cart which requires the shopper to sign up for an account before adding an item to their cart, you’re in luck. You should have the shoppers telephone number. Give them a call.

It might just be that a friendly phone call with a sincere effort to help complete the sale will calm any fears or give you an opportunity to answer any objections.

Having mentioned this, I want to point out that a shopping cart which forces a shopper to set up an account before adding an item to the cart can deter a fair number of shoppers as well.

If your cart allows a shopper to add items to a cart before giving contact info, you might think that there’s no way to contact the shopper, but that may not be the case. There is a company named Second Bite which contacts your shoppers who abandon carts, and use some pretty advanced technology to try to identify the shopper.

Another reason why orders are not completed is because of failed credit cart transactions. You might think it would be fruitless to follow up on these leads, but the truth is that providing a credit card number online confuses the heck out of some people. A lot of rejections are because they give the wrong address, or don’t understand how to find their security code. A friendly call from you might resolve the situation.

Even a declined transaction might be converted to a sale with a simple phone call. After all, just because the shopper doesn’t have funds today, this doesn’t mean he or she won’t have sufficient funds tomorrow.

Give it a try! You’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Larry Dozier is the Development Manager for 123 eCart - an online shopping cart service - and the owner of http://ecommerce-tutorials.com