Posts Tagged ‘Auctions’

Safe Online Shopping

Saturday, August 6th, 2011

What is safe online shopping? The amount of money spent with online shops is increasing at an outstanding rate due to the convenience, choice and low prices that can be found. This is all great but how do you know that you are spending with a reputable website? It is important to understand what safe online shopping is, what to look for and what to avoid.

How is online shopping made safe? Safe online shops use technology that protects the personal information you provide when making a purchase online, your credit card details are ‘scrambled’ so that they cannot be captured by “identity thieves” who aim to capture credit card or bank account details in order buy goods or get loans in your name. Scrambling this personal information means that it cannot be read or captured by anyone else.

How can I tell if the online shop I am shopping on is safe? To ensure that the online shop where you are shopping is safe you should check for the following:

An unbroken key or closed lock in your browser window. Each of these icons show that the online shop is safe. If the key is broken or the lock open the online shop is not safe. Check that the online shop website address begins with “https” instead of “http” when you are providing personal information, such as credit card details. This shows that you are in a secure area of the online shop. If you see the words “Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)”, sometimes in a pop-up window, you know you are shopping at a secure and safe online shop.

How well do I know the brand of the online shop? Another thing to consider is how well you know the brand that runs the online shop? The chances are you will be more confident of shopping at Amazon than many other online brands because they are well established and have a reputation for good customer service.

How quickly will I get my goods? It is well worth delving into the online shop’s customer service section to find out when and how your goods will be delivered. Does the online shop allow you to specify delivery dates and times or an alternative delivery address.

Does the online shop offer me a contact number in case anything goes wrong? If anything does go wrong with your order it is good to have a direct customer service telephone number to call to express your concerns, if not, many online shops provide a customer service email with a guaranteed response time so you can air your queries about your order.

Does the online shop make all charges involved clear? During the sale the online shop should explicitly advise you of all charges involved in the purchase including delivery charges, taxation and minimum purchase limits. These charges will be outlined when you reach the shopping cart stage of the purchase where you can see the items you have purchased and all related charges. From the shopping cart (or basket) you will move to the checkout stage where you safely complete the transaction from a secure server. DO NOT enter you credit card details unless you are sure that the checkout is on a secure server – see How can I tell if the online shop I am shopping on is safe?

Shopping online is a convenient way to get access to a wide array of products from around the world and if all the points above are in place with the online shop you have chosen you can be confident that your purchase is being made safely and you can look forward to receiving your product. millimart.com  provide all the information you need about safe online shopping.

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One Stop Shopping – Gifts For All Occasions

Tuesday, April 26th, 2011

The beauty of the Internet is that you can find gifts for all occasions without ever leaving your home. You know you’ve hit the bonanza, though, when you can find one single website that offers a huge variety of items. When you encounter a website that offers everything from jewelry and electronics to leather goods and lingerie, you know you have a winner.

This kind of one stop stopping saves an incredible amount of time and hassle. When you shop for gifts at multiple sites, you have to print out a multitude of order forms and tracking numbers. Plus, you end up paying an inordinate number of shipping charges. When you can find everything you need, however, at one site, ordering and keeping track of your order becomes hassle-free.

The best kind of one stop shopping site not only offers gifts for all occasions, but also has a real-time inventory tracking system that lets you know that the gifts you want are in stock. There’s nothing more frustrating that going through a site, carefully narrowing your choices, then clicking and adding an item to your shopping cart and discovering that the item is out of stock.

Great one stop shopping sites often offer wholesale prices and the bonus of having items dropship from the manufacturer or distributor. In essence, you’re cutting out the middleman and getting bargain prices for the gifts you’re buying, whether they’re toys, knives, or the latest electronic gizmo. Plus, shipping times are often cut in half, since your packages originate from the source rather than from an intermediary.

The most economical way to shop for gifts – in terms of saving both time and money – is to buy gifts for all occasions at the same time. It’s easy to do this when you’ve done your homework. In other words, keep a running list of weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, holidays, and other special occasions for which you’ll need gifts. When you overhear a friend, spouse, child, or other family member say they wish they had a (fill in the blank), jot it down on your list. Over time, you’ll get a good sense of what each person on your gift list wants, and what types of gifts will bring smiles to their faces.

When you sit down to do your one stop gift shopping, you’ll have your list ready, and you won’t have to spend time wracking your brain trying to come up with gift ideas. At that point, it’s just a matter of selecting the gift that’s most appropriate for each of your recipients, clicking the mouse a few times, and making your purchases. In no time at all, you’ll have gifts for all occasions sitting on your doorstep.

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Choosing the Right Online Shopping Cart

Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

Are you a website owner or a web designer/developer? If either applies, I would venture to say that eventually you’ll need an online shopping cart for one of your websites. In fact, almost all new websites today need some sort of ecommerce built-in, for the purpose of selling goods and services in the online marketplace.

The greatest challenge is to find the perfect ecommerce shopping cart solution for yourself and/or your client. This task can be very overwhelming, considering, if you type ‘shopping cart’ into Google.com, this search alone returns over 14.4 million hits! Most of us don’t have the time to sift through more than a few pages of a search engine to find what we’re looking for.

For the last 3 months, much of my time has been devoted to researching as much shopping cart technology as I could get my hands on. In general, shopping cart software ranges in price from free to over $2000 for a single license and web hosted carts range from $5 to hundreds of dollars per month. The studied carts cover the spectrum of all web programming languages (ASP, ASP.NET, Cold Fusion, Flash, Java, JavaScript & Perl shopping carts) and provide limitless features as a whole. The problem is that locating YOUR perfect cart with YOUR specific features can be a big task.

But no fear, just follow this guaranteed step-by-step guide to locate it:

The Top 10 Steps to Finding the Best Online Shopping Cart

Cost

How much money do you have to spend on an internet shopping cart? The nice advantage is that there are shopping carts with hundreds of features and they don’t cost you a dime. They are generally open source products. The only problem is that these same “free shopping carts” can take hours of installation time and be fairly difficult to configure. For a monthly fee, web hosting shopping carts are made for users with little programming experience and allows them to have an online storefront presence in no time.

Hosting vs. Software

There are two options in selecting your overall shopping cart solution. Either you get shopping cart software, download it, install it on your web server, then configure the shopping cart OR you get an online storefront (aka a hosted shopping cart) where the configuration is very basic and the required setup time is minimal. If you have some programming skills, I recommend buying a script and installing it on your own. The nice thing is that you pay a one-time fee for shopping cart software and the license is good for a lifetime. It’s approximately the same price to have a hosted solution for a year compared to most one time shopping cart license fees.

Supported Gateways

What do I mean by gateways? Gateways give shopping carts the ability to connect and securely process credit card orders in real-time. Not all shopping carts are created equal. Make sure that your client’s merchant account is supported by the cart you select. I have found that almost all carts support the larger online payment processing companies, such as Authorize.net, PayPal and Verisign.

Shipping Options

Will you be shipping physical products? If so, there are shopping carts that have built-in real-time shipping options through DHL, UPS And USPS. Often times, the cart gives the user the ability to view tracking orders and order status all from within your secure shopping cart web interface. Also, there are shopping carts with options to ship digital goods as well (files, programs, pictures, music and others).

Technical Support

What kind of technical support does your shopping cart offer? If you choose to purchase a script, be sure to also subscribe to the shopping cart creator’s newsletter, so that you can stay on top of future updates to the software. Be aware that technical support is generally available on a pay-per-incident basis, as a yearly fee or in the rare case, free. Be sure to know what kind of customer support guarantee the shopping cart comes with.

Security

Please, only buy a shopping cart if it supports SSL (secure socket layer), with 128-bit encryption. As an online storefront, remember that you are responsible for the safe transfer of sensitive information (credit card and bank account information) that is processed through your store. If any of the sensitive information is accessible (stolen) from your website, you could be liable. Be sure that you’re purchasing a secure shopping cart solution. Ask the creator’s of the shopping cart what they do specifically to protect the secure transfer of sensitive information.

Style Compatibility

Can you customize your shopping cart to look like your website? There needs to be a seamless transition between your website and your shopping storefront or your customers might get hesitant in purchasing your products. There should be similar colors and style layout to look professional and believable.

Extra Features

I just wanted to mention some of the other features that I have discovered, which might be a critical point in determining the shopping cart you want.

Affiliate Program – Offer your own customized affiliate program through your shopping cart software. Quickbooks Integration – Many carts allow direct integration with Quickbooks.

Newsletter & Mailing Letter Managers - The ability to stay in touch with your current customers and keep them returning to your online store.

Custom Taxing Options – Create taxable or tax-free products and have the ability to add various global tax options at checkout.

World Languages & Currencies – Shopping cart language translation and support for world currency might be a necessary feature for your cart.

Error Free

You mean shopping carts can have errors? Of course. A private UK-based web testing firm found the following, after studying a large group of UK online shopping carts for a period of one month (24/7):”The majority of UK web sites are guilty of leaving e-consumers stranded at the checkout empty handed, once they have already spent valuable time browsing and selecting goods to purchase. This is due to erratic functionality within shopping carts, at a critical step in the online purchasing process.”

“E-consumers are prevented from making purchases on UK web sites for 9 hours and 30 minutes a month on average, (115 hours a year).” “80 per cent of web sites perform inconsistently with widely varying response times, timeouts and errors – leaving consumers at best wondering what to do next and at worst unable to complete their purchase successfully. This is potentially costing e-retailers millions in lost sales from consumer frustrations.”

 

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