Friday, 13th December, 2013 – what should have been a nice ordinary day turned into a real nightmare and a day I will remember for quite some time, all thanks to HostGator.

The first week of December, I was already in the Christmas mood, looking forward to enjoying the weekend with my family. But oh boy, what a weekend it turned out to be!

But let’s start from the beginning:

In the morning I noticed that my blog was down. I use a website up-time monitoring service from Pingdom which sends me a text message whenever my website goes down (or up). Usually it only happens once every few months, when there are server upgrades etc. These downtimes are damaging but there’s not much you can do about them – it’s just part of doing business online. Sometimes they last for just a few minutes, sometimes it can be for up to an hour.

This time it was different.

When I saw that after an hour my blog was still down, I knew something was going on. So I went onto HostGator’s website to chat with a live rep. Wait time was 30-40 minutes but I had no choice.

To get to the point; HostGator had put my blog on hold because of increased traffic. Thursdays are generally the busiest days on my blog and that week indeed, Thursday set yet another new record in unique visitors. Read More…

This is another never ending debate you see online – whether to go with Hosted or Self-Hosted shopping carts. Some people see no point in the monthly payment while others swear by the advantages hosted shopping carts offer. So what’s the truth? Probably somewhere in the middle but I personally only use hosted carts for the reasons I’ll outline in this blog post.

Here are the most popular types of shopping carts:

Paid Shopping Carts:

• Hosted
• Self-Hosted

Free Shopping Carts:

• Self Hosted

With free carts you don’t have any other option than to go with your own, self-hosted set up (as no one will host a free shopping cart for free). Paid shopping carts can be divided into two large groups – hosted and self-hosted. What does this mean?

Hosted Shopping carts – when I use this term, I’m referring to shopping carts that are hosted on the shopping cart company’s servers. Hosted shopping carts usually have a monthly fee that covers the software licence, hosting, support and updates.

Self-Hosted shopping carts – these are free and paid carts that you host on your own hosting account. For example, you download the free Open Cart software and install it on your Host Gator hosting account. This would be a self-hosted set-up as you’re hosting the cart on your own account.

What are the major advantages and disadvantages to each? Read More…

There’s a misconception out there that these two business models – physical products and information (info) products – should be run separately. Well, let me tell you now – that’s absolutely NOT TRUE! You can take the best of both worlds and run them simultaneously.

And actually, adding some info products to a physical products business can be a fast and easy way to increase your sales and profit. In this blog post I’ll show you exactly how to do this.

If we abstract ourselves from the myths surrounding info products, we can come up with 3 business models that involve incorporating both physical products and information products:

1) Mixed – you sell both physical and info products and they generate equal profit in your business. A classic example of this would be a shop selling beauty or craft items but also offering classes/courses or selling home-study materials on the topic.

2) Info product led – you sell mostly information products with some occasional physical products. For example Beachbody.com, their primary income comes from selling various fitness info products (DVDs etc.) but they also sell fitness equipment and supplements.

3) Physical product led – you sell mostly physical products and use info products as a lead generation tool or even sell an eBook, service or how to guide along with your physical products. An example of such a business model would be Amazon! The majority of their income comes from physical products but they also sell digital products such as music, eBooks and videos.

The last model will apply to most eCommerce Shop owners and is by far the easiest to integrate! You already have a shop (or plan to build one), physical products to sell and all you need to do to increase your profit is add some sort of highly valued information product you can make massive profit on.

I’m talking about strategies like: Read More…

That’s a good question and one that requires an in-depth answer. In today’s post I’ll cover my story on how I ended up with Big Commerce after trialling more than 30 shopping carts!

When I first started out in eCommerce, my cart of choice was Open Cart. It was simple to use, completely free and has a big community built around it… but I soon realised that function and feature wise, it’s very limited. And even though you can get hundreds of plugins, both free and paid ones, to work with Open Cart, in essence that just creates even bigger compatibility issues…

So I started to look for something more robust and feature-rich.

I knew that I wanted to go with a hosted shopping cart as I simply don’t have enough time to deal with all the technical problems that come with self-hosted carts. There are many advantages hosted carts offer over traditional, self-hosted solutions like:

Super-fast page loading times.

Most modern hosted carts use high speed, professional hosting and something called content delivery network (CDN). CDN is a way of distributing photos and other files from your shop to data centres all around the world. This means your shop loads fast no matter where your site visitors are and that’s hugely important for an eCommerce store, where you can get loads of international traffic and sales.

On-going support.

Live chat, email and phone support – I know that if something goes wrong with my shop, there will be professionals working 24/7 to help me fix it. I don’t want to have to rely on forums to help me find out what’s going on! I want to get professional help QUICKLY! And this is something most hosted carts offer.

On-going, hassle free updates.

This is what I love most about hosted carts – they do all the hard work for you in the background and just keep working on new features. We all know how fast eCommerce changes nowadays – there are new tools and marketing channels popping up every year – with hosted carts we don’t have to worry about making manual updates or compatibility issues as everything is taken care of for us.

Security, PCI compliance.

To take direct card payments on your shop, it must be PCI compliant. Now, to do this by yourself, with your own website, takes a lot of money and time plus you always have to stay updated with the latest changes. Hosted carts do this for you so you can spend your time on what matters most – traffic generation and sales. 

Security of your site is another issue. Sure, you can pay a £1000+ per year on Mc Affee services (or similar) to secure your site but why do that when you can get almost the same service practically for free? Read More…

The concept of using Fulfilment Houses for an eCommerce business may not be new BUT after the Royal Mail price update on 2nd April this year, using a Fulfilment House may be the ONLY way to survive for many small time eBay sellers.

My Hermes is already a good alternative to Royal Mail and cheaper in many price ranges but what if you still want to offer TRUE Courier delivery service for your customers?

Royal Mail’s new prices for packages are not competitive at all. For many eBay traders this can be a business killer especially in Autumn, when new TRS requirements kick in asking you to provide at least one FREE shipping option.

That’s why this is a perfect time to look for Royal Mail alternatives. I have briefly covered the concept of Fulfilment Houses in one of my previous blog posts but today, I invited Scott McGinley (scott.mcginley@dalepak.ltd.uk) from Dalepak Ltd., to share his story and explain what benefits small time eBay traders can expect from services provided by Dalepak Ltd.:

Scott McGinley, Dalepak Ltd.

At the end of 2012 I left play.com to join Dalepak Logistics, one of things I noticed when at play was that Merchants have thriving businesses but their Supply Chain and Logistics can hinder growth, I also saw that with the services and costs that companies like Amazon enjoy that the smaller business was struggling to compete broadly and were being confined to mostly a Niche market. Read More…

One of the first things you face when starting an eBay business is where and how to store the goods you plan to sell. Most people don’t have access to a warehouse, so they have to set up their own goods storage system. In this blog post I’ll try to cover the warehouse set up options available to small-time online traders.

If you don’t want to store and dispatch goods on your own, you can always take a look at fulfilment houses and the services they offer.

But in most cases, when you are just starting out and want to save every penny, having a storage system in-house is the best way to go.

The best, most suitable set up will depend on what type of goods you’re selling.

For small items (like jewellery, craft supplies and similar), these would be the most suitable options:

1) Linbins – one of the most popular and oldest ways to store small items. Linbins are affordable, come in a variety of sizes and can be stacked on top of each other or attached to special wall panels to create gigantic storage units. The downside of Linbins is that they don’t close so expect dust to get onto products in the long run. You can protect your products from getting dirty by placing them in plastic bags first.

Linbins from Plastor.co.uk

2) Storage bins with cabinets – these will be more expensive, but they close fully so no dust problem here. These storage bins are very durable but the downside is the cost – they’re really quite expensive.

Storage Bins from from Plastor.co.uk

Read More…

When you start a brand new online business, one of the first tasks you face is coming up with a name for your company. Be it an online shop, eBay account or Amazon shop – you need a name for your business. This also means that you want to register a domain name to create e-mail accounts and set-up a website.

Back in 1995 it was an easy task as there were only 71 000 domains registered! Fast forward to year 2012 and you’re facing a real battle as most common names are already registered, especially if we talk about .com domains. With more than 200 million domain names already registered, you really have to be creative to come up with something unique and suitable for your business.

Even if you start selling only on eBay ALWAYS register a domain name for your eBay business! First of all, this will give you opportunity to use a professional e-mail address (e.g. info@yourcompany.com), secondly – you want to secure your future business plans, launching an online shop, or at least a blog to stay connected with your customers.

Here are my TOP 9 ways to come up with a perfect domain name for your new business: Read More…

Hey Everyone!

After last week’s post about how to start from scratch, I’m back with a new and quite lengthy post about fulfilment houses – something every online shop owner should consider using (if it’s suitable for the business model of course).

Just what exactly are fulfilment houses?

Fulfilment houses such as Shipwire and Amazon Fulfilment Web Service are third party services that take care of fulfilling client orders on the business owner’s behalf. Fulfilment houses take charge of receiving the products from the supplier, housing the said inventory, receiving the orders from the business owner’s clients, and packaging and shipping said orders to the latter.

And depending upon the agreement between the business owner and the fulfilment house, the latter can very well take care of processing payments and the after-sale support such as handling customer complaints and accepting, even re-stocking, of undamaged return items as well.

The Good

Fulfilment houses certainly offer a lot of advantages for the small business owner: Read More…

With shopping carts it really is – You Get What You Pay For.

Free or open source shopping carts will never offer you range of tools and features more sophisticated, hosted solutions offer for a reasonable monthly fee. Even then, how to know, which cart is best for your situation?

What you expect a shopping cart will do for you? This will be a unique list, based on your business specifics, size, location etc. There are hundreds of functions to think about. However, I believe these 13 are crucial to ANY online shop:

http://eCommerceMagnates.com/13-must-have-shopping-cart-features/

In this month’s eCommerce Magnates video newsletter I undercover 13, must have shopping cart features! Yes, there should be 23 or even 33 but we have to start somewhere, right? If your shopping cart lacks any of these 13, you should seriously consider alternative shopping carts.

Enjoy your Bank Holiday Weekend!!!

Thanks,
Andrew