Because we do a lot of redesigns and offline development, our customers usually have at least two stores operational at one time - the live store and a development platform. Sometimes that makes it hard to test, though, if links from the development site link back to the live site half of the time. You don't always notice when you navigate away from the development site.

The sessionurl and secure_sessionurl variables in Miva Merchant will automatically pick up the right domain. But any hardcoded URLs, if they are using absolute paths (and in most cases, they should) will not be as easy to manage. And if you use shortened SEO-friendly urls, you may have even more widespread URLs to manage.

Here's an easy tip for Miva Merchant users who have more than one environment: set a variable in your store that references your domain name, and then build your URLs around that. This is easy if you use the Toolkit module from Emporium Plus. Go into Miva Merchant, click the name of your store within the left frame, and then on the right side, click HTML Profile. The great thing about this field is that it's usually the first field referenced by the store's page templates. (If your site doesn't use the HTML profile, or if you are running Miva Merchant 5.0 instead of 5.5, use the head tag insert field.)

At the bottom of this box, enter the following code:

Then to change the variables for a particular environment, you just have two variables to change. Still too much work? You can use the toolkit to extra the url from your domain settlings instead:

After that, you can build your URLs using this "basedomain" global variable, and when you copy code from one site to the other, the links should still work. Here's an example link to the shopping cart page:

This little bit of work can make your life much simpler down the road!

Until 2006, Glynn Gallagher's life was "really, really hectic to say the least.". She started work every morning at 8 am, printing out her previous day's orders from her website LockPickShop.com, along with a picklist, and trudged out to the makeshift warehouse building in her backyard. The rest of the day was spent answering customer service calls, packing orders for shipment, and handling returns. She skipped breakfast and allotted herself a 20-minute lunch break. After repeating the process in the afternoon for all the morning orders, she loaded all the boxes in her car and drove to the post office, waited for them to process her orders, and then drove to the UPS Store and did the same thing. She came home and dealt with emails and her website until midnight each night.

Finally, she started to wonder why she was working for herself when life was this hectic. So she started researching the possibility of moving to a fulfillment company.

A fulfillment company offers basic services such as inventory storage, picking of items and packing them for shipping, and transfer of data to and from the retailer. Some fulfillment companies may offer additional services, such as assembly or kitting, and call center phone support for the end customer. Costs are determined from a number of factors, which may include the number of individual product skus, the volume of product being stored, the order volume, and the cost of extra services such as kitting.

Fulfillment companies that cater to online retailers typically have excellent technological resources that facilitate communication between the fulfillment house and the retailer. Retailers utilize two-way data exchange, where orders are submitted from the retailer to the fulfillment company, and shipment status and tracking information is later transmitted back to the retailer. "This data exchange capability enables us to perform as if we are in the room adjacent to our client's office instead of some distance from them (In some cases, our client is half way around the globe)," says Kevin Kelly of Alternative Logistics, Inc., a fulfillment company in Nashau, New Hampshire, and which is the same company that Gallagher uses for her company's fulfillment needs.

Outsourcing the fulfillment process is not for everyone. Some merchants may prefer the control and personal touch of being able to pack shipments in-house. However, for many retailers, the benefit of using a fulfillment company is that it frees up the retailer's time and resources to focus on product development and sourcing, marketing, and customer service. Kelly lists a few other criteria: "The higher the order value, the easier it will be to support the costs associated with storing, fulfilling, and shipping orders." He also states that the product itself may dictate the suitability of fulfillment services; items that are hazardous, particularly fragile, or that require refrigeration need special handling that a fulfillment company may not be able to offer.

Gallagher credits her decision to use a fulfillment company with restoring her quality of life, and allowing her to return to what she does best - managing her business, not a warehouse. However, Dale Carlson of Mad Cat Toys had a much different experience. When he first opened his doors, he used EFulfillment Service. "EFulfillment serves small businesses which made it a good provider for Mad Cat. Most fulfillment services are interested only in much larger accounts. But EFulfillment needs to keep its best and largest customers happy, so Mad Cat Toys often suffered from shipping delays and other service problems while it served its largest customers. Issues like this were especially a problem during the holiday season. Mad Cat Toys offers items that are delicate or require special packaging, and this type of custom service was expensive and difficult to control at EFulfillment."

The factor that led Carlson to finally end his use of a fulfillment service was the monthly costs for storage. His site serves a small niche of high-end toy collectors, and his storage fees exceeded the actual costs for shipping orders. He began looking for a new fulfillment company, and was about to sign up with iFulfill when the company failed (see Blogging as You Go Belly Up at BusinessWeek.com). It was at that point that Carlson decided it would be in his company's best interests to move order fulfillment in-house.

Carlson lists some advantages and disadvantages to using a fulfillment company based on his experiences. The disadvantages he notes are:

• Mad Cat Toys' shipping location moved from Michigan to Seattle, so the average cost to ship an order increased
• He lost the time that had previous been saved by delegating fulfillment to an outside company
• The internal inventory-control system is not as accurate as the fulfillment house's system
• The cost of shipping boxes is much higher as the fulfillment house benefits from buying huge quantities

However he also notes some important benefits to packing orders himself:

• Special items can be packed carefully
• It is now possible to provide customer service relating to individual orders and shipments
• He gained better control of shipping schedule — we can assure most orders ship same-day and we know when they have been shipped

If you are considering a move to a fulfillment company, it helps to do your homework - thoroughly. Carlson suggests being very clear in your understanding of fulfillment and storage costs, and to find out about the time between order receipt and shipping. He also recommends previewing the fulfillment company's online account administration interface, to make sure you are comfortable with its use, and that your systems can properly interact with the fulfillment companies systems.

Bonus! Download our Fulfillment Company Questionnaire and Checklist Worksheet

The great thing about having a blog for your business is that it gives customers and search engines new content to view. It can increase sales by convincing customers of your product's benefits, or teaching them how to use it, or giving them ideas for incorporating the product into the lives.

But it's essential to integrate the weblog with your storefront. If customers can't go back-and-forth between your store and your weblog, the impact of your blog is going to be less than optimal. If you are using Miva Merchant 5 and Wordpress, however, one of the simplest ways to integrate the two is to include recent blog posts right on your homepage.

To start out, you need a template that can display a very simple HTML page - one that, in this example, is no more than the title of each post, linked to the full post itself. This can be done by modifying the index.php file within your Wordpress template (located in wp-content/themes/your-theme-name). Just add this code at the top of your index.php file:

The rest of your original index.php should follow this code. Then at the very bottom, close your "if" statement like this:

At this point, you should be able to see your recent posts by going to the following URL. Be sure to replace "domain.com" with your website domain name, and replace "weblog" with the correct directory for your Wordpress installation:

At this point, you're ready to begin working in Miva Merchant. You'll need Emporium Plus's Toolkit module installed. Then, inside Miva Merchant, go to Pages and edit your Storefront (SFNT) page or your Storefront Welcome Message (under Messages). Add the following code (again, replacing the appropriate parts of the URL as specific to your site):

This will print out the list of recent posts from your weblog right on your Miva Merchant storefront.

Nothing looks less professional than an ecommerce site full of broken images! However, if you're running a site with a lot of products, it's bound to happen every now and then. Here's how to stop it from happening.

Most ecommerce sites use images to provide a visual representation of their product line. Product images are usually set in one of two ways - either specified in a database field provided by the shopping cart package, or specified in a template by using a file naming convention (for example, /images/PRODUCTCODE.jpg where PRODUCTCODE is replaced with the actual code for each product). Either is a convenient way for specifying product images. However, because the HTML code produced is always dependent on the existance of an image on the filesystem. there is a possibility that your site will display the dreaded "red X" or broken image icons - or in some browsers, such as Firefox, the image's alternate text.

Although it's always best to have images for every single product, it's also a good practice to configure fallback images. These are images that display whenever the specified image in the HTML output cannot be found on the server. We do this by using mod_rewrite rules in our .htaccess file.

A .htaccess file (note the dot in the front) is a method offered by Apache for setting up configuration parameters for the web site. We start by adding the following line to enable mod_rewrite if it does not already exist:

The next set of code looks for any requested files that do not exist, and if the URL has the extension .jpg and resides in the images directory, it is replaced with the image "comingsoon.jpg" located in the images directory. The browser still sees the URL specified in the HTML, but the server delivers the comingsoon.jpg image instead:

Of course, make sure you actually have an image named "comingsoon.jpg" in your /images/ directory!

This method will deliver a fallback image, one that might say "Photo Coming Soon", in place of any missing images. No more broken image links.

If your site uses multiple-sized images, such as thumbnails and full-sized images, you can have multiple copies of this code in your .htaccess file, with the appropriate changes to manipulate files in different directories or with different naming structures. Below is an example from one of our clients, whose site displays 4 sizes of images, with each size residing in a different directory:

Many e-commerce packages available today provide some search capability out of the box. These out-of-the-box search utilities typically are good for searching through product names and description. Some even provide advanced capabilities to search other fields or order the data in some unified fashion - like showing you categories of interest, related products, and more.

While these were acceptable solutions 3-4 years ago, nowadays shoppers are a lot more sophisticated about searching for products they want to buy. If they can't find the product they want quickly and easily, you're not likely to close that sale, let alone keep that visitor.

Is there a solution?

Thankfully, the answer is yes, there are options to enhance your search capability on your website. As you can expect, there are price points all over the map. When investigating the options available today, a storeowner can quickly become overwhelmed with all the options available. So, the very first and most important task to accomplish is to assess what your shoppers' search needs are. Doing this before you look at the search solutions will help you quickly narrow your list of potential solutions. If you start looking at products first, you might find yourself becoming a search tool expert and unless that's part of your business model, it's probably not the best use of your time as a business owner.

Below we have provided some details about three of the leading industry solutions. There are many other options that may be more pertinent to your business, but we've outlined these three because of our direct experience with them (e.g. our confirmation that they actually do what they say they can do) and our own customers feedback about the usefulness of their new search solutions.

• SearchSpring - SearchSpring (www.searchspring.net) is a relatively new entry to the enhanced search marketplace with solid entry level price points.But that shouldn't make you think it's a simple or incomplete offering. SearchSpring provides fast and accurate search results with added capability to boost certain fields or make others more or less fuzzy, such as product name or description. Customers can drill down into search results by selecting from any additional fields (such as price ranges, brands, or features) in a process known as "faceting". SearchSpring provides synonym-searching, a feature to provide keywords that can map to your products that may not necessarily be part of the product's description/name itself. SearchSpring also provides a web-based administrative interface for managing your feed data, search facets and overall results of your search service.

  While SearchSpring is a relatively new entrant - being released just in 2008 - we have implemented this solution on several stores. The SearchSpring staff has been very helpful and responsive in addressing our needs, as well as taking our suggestions to make the product even more useful.

  A few of our client sites where you can see SearchSpring in action: CPAPXchange (www.cpapxchange.com) is using the search to enhance their product display results, allow users to better sort the results data and ultimately is interested in driving customers to products without making them have to refine results per se. PennState Industries (www.pennstateind.com) would be on the opposite end of that spectrum. PSI has created a very advanced faceted search that allows shoppers to zero in on the exact product details they are interested in. The value of SearchSpring is in its tightly coupled nature with Miva Merchant and its flexibility in enhancing the displays of results.

• Nextopia - The Nextopia product suite provides a plethora of offerings outside the hosted search capability; however, to keep this an apples to apples comparison, we're only going to focus on the search service.

  Nextopia's offering - eComm|Search - is, like SearchSpring, a faceted-search - they refer to them as refinables instead of facets. (If there's one constant in the software marketplace, it's that no two software solution providers will refer to their features in the same manner). Nextopia provides similar breakdowns for sorting products as the SearchSpring solution, including a fuzzy search capability to enhance or widen the search terms, so that if you put in the word "soffa", you'd still get sofas back. The Nextopia search solution's base price is $1k/year for listing up to 10,000 SKUs. If you have a higher number of store items, they can provide you with a custom quote.

  We have implemented this search solution on a number of sites as well. WonderBrains (www.wonderbrains.com) has seen definitive sales increases as a result of implementing this solution as most of their products used very similar feature sets - such as grouping products by activity, or age of a child. On Katom's (www.katom.com) site, the refineables are making all the difference in the right products getting to the top of the search results page. Both clients are very happy with their implementations, especially the conversions rate increase for customers using the search tool.

• SLI Systems - If there's a purported Cadillac in this group, it would have to be the SLI Systems solution - Site Search. Site Search provides the faceted search features we have described above, but adds a new wrinkle - Learning Navigation. A site search that learns (yes, it sounds very HAL9000 to me as well, or maybe WOPR in War Games, but I digress) the Learning Navigation feature "learns" from previous site visitors' search activity. It will track search queries and click-throughs and uses those results to deliver better search results based on popularity. In other words, it creates an affinity between the search term, "sofa" and the sofa products that were clicked, so the next user to enter sofa is going to see those same results. SLI says, "Learning Search delivers the results people are looking for on the first page 95% of the time, which means more satisfied, and potentially more loyal customers". You're going to have to be the judge of course if this is true or not, but conceptually it's a nice feature.

  SLI Systems provides an ecommerce merchandising offering that includes a "related search" feature, targeted promotional banners, custom landing pages and an up/cross-sell capability to push your customers through the buying process. Some or all of these features may be of interest to you, but again unless you're REALLY looking for a Cadillac, either of the other offerings is probably sufficient for most e-commerce sites.

  We are currently implementing our first SLI solution at time of this writing and so far, it's going well. Once we're finished, I'll add a comment to this entry in order to complete our assessment of all three solutions.

Keep in mind, I've discussed three solutions in this space to present a range of currently-offered tools. If I were trying to do an exhaustive article on this topic, it would be a book and by the time I was done, most of the players would likely have changed by then, so take it for what it's worth - a snapshot of an upcoming software market where we're sure to see many more challengers before we settle into a true landscape of solution providers. Keep that in mind, when deciding on a solution.

So, where do I go from here?

Ultimately, as a storeowner, you will need to assess the cost/benefit of implementing an enhanced site search tool. We have found that the enhanced search tool capability brings shoppers to products that interest them much faster than casual clicking can, and if you have shoppers that don't like to "browse" online, then the fewer clicks you give them, the more likely you'll close a sale and see your conversion rates improve.

For web development purists, the holy grail of coding an ecommerce site using an off-the-shelf package is the ability to write a fully standards-compliant site. The upcoming Miva Merchant 5.5 release brings this desire into full reality for Miva Merchant developers. Version 5.5 offers a completely-open page templating system, where all aspects of the site are fully customizable at the HTML and CSS code level.

Historically it was much more difficult to code a Miva Merchant site with XHTML and CSS. We pioneered the effort, using a variety of add-on modules such as OpenUI and OpenUI Supermod templates to provide access to the code around the page elements. But the method also involved a couple of hacks of the core Miva Merchant files, to add a doctype declaration and to change the <HTML> tags from upper-case to lower-case. OpenUI Supermod templates were slow, so we often added Merchant Optimizer to speed up the site. It worked well, but building a site in this manner was akin to applying band-aid upon band-aid to force a system, never intended to allow standards-compliant code, to produce the desired effect.

The release of Miva Merchant 5.0 provided a huge step forward. With the addition of pages that can be templatized nearly from start to finish using Miva Merchant's Store Morph Technology, developers now had the ability to code almost the entire site according to modern standards for markup and layout. A few third-party modules were still needed, to gain access to "black box" code areas such as the category tree. But Miva Merchant 5.0 was already much faster, thanks to the ability to run the shopping cart on a MySQL database (instead of the older DBF files). And with native templating support, which renders quickly due to its compiled nature, several layers of complexity (and those "band-aids") were removed.

Miva Merchant 5.5 brings this all into fruition, as developers can now access all of the code that builds the site. To get started, the first thing to do is to make sure every page in the site conforms to the proper doctype. I prefer XHTML 1.0 Strict, though we've sometimes used Transitional for various reasons. A doctype paves the way for CSS positioning by bringing Internet Explorer out of quirks mode, allowing the site to look very similar in all modern browsers, when designed properly.

Next, all the tables should be removed from the pages, except when used to display actual tabular data. XHTML and CSS websites rely on CSS positioning to define their layouts, instead of putting images and content within the cells of HTML tables. Typically the only table we use on a CSS-based Miva Merchant site is the layout of the basket contents, since that is tabular data by nature. Instead of using tables, content is placed within other elements according to the nature of the content - <div> tags for block-level elements; <span> tags for inline content, <p> tags for paragraphs, etc. Elements can be assigned a class or an id so that they can be styled via the CSS stylesheet.

Larger Miva Merchant sites often need to consider the fact that the site may also include other packages or custom-coded sections that reside outside of the Miva Merchant framework. To reduce the load on the filesystem and to keep the assets organized - as well as to make it easy to switch between one client and another - we try to standardize the location of the site's assets. For example, all site-wide graphic files are stored in a /images/ path, just off the document root, and not within the /mm5/ directory tree created by Miva Merchant. (This /images/ folder may be further subdivided into subfolders such as /images/buttons/ as needed.) JavaScript code is placed in external .js files located in a /js/ directory. And the stylesheet(s) are stored in /style/, with the main site stylesheet being named style.css. Additional CSS files may be added for popup windows, printing a page, or page-specific elements, but are almost always stored in the same directory.

Once the CSS file has been created, it can be linked into Miva Merchant by adding a <style> tag into the head section of the site. This can be done on each individual page, but for a site-wide stylesheet, the easiest way to manage it is to add the style tag into the HEAD Tag Content found in the Miva Merchant administration by clicking the name of the store on the left side. The tag looks like this:

Probably the most difficult part of building a Miva Merchant website using XHTML and CSS is the addition of features from third-party modules that don't support XHTML and/or CSS. This can be hard to ascertain while shopping for modules, so one often has to ask the developer whether it can be done. If not, certain sections of the site may simply not conform to the standards in use, which occasionally causes rendering problems in some browsers, but often has no effect other than generating errors when validating a site against the doctype. However, some developers are now starting to see the benefit in allowing this, and offer more granular components that allow developers to include the data within their own HTML - for example, by providing the price breaks in a volume pricing module in an array, for display in any manner desired.

The benefits of using XHTML and CSS, and moving away from using tables for layout, is reduced code bloat and, arguably, better on-site optimization for SEO purposes. It also allows site changes to be applied to the site globally, by updating the stylesheet - one file - instead of hundreds of table and font tags across multiple pages. Although the transition to CSS-based design involves a sizeable learning curve, it's one well worth the effort.

URL Rewriting is a way of changing the URLs within a website to a more logical and/or more search engine-friendly format. The default URLs within a Miva Merchant site are long and full of querystring variables, and can easily be rewritten to cleaner formats, as described below. To find out if this is available for your website, check with your web host.

History

URL Rewriting first became popular among Miva Merchant sites when Copernicus released their Search Friendly Links module, long before the advent of Miva Merchant 5.0. At the time, Google favored URL structures that had, at most, a single name-value pair in the querystring. To understand this, one must look at the structure of a URL. A URL begins with either http:// or https://, followed by the domain name (such as www.google.com). After that comes another slash, zero or more directories separated by slashes, and a filename. For example:

In this example, www.site.com is the domain name, mm5 is a directory, and merchant.mvc is the name of the file within the mm5 directory that is being called. A querystring is appended to the URL by adding a question mark, and then one or more name-value pairs separated by ampersands. This can be seen throughout Miva Merchant, such as the URLs that define a product page:

In the above example, the querystring contains three name-value pairs: Screen=PROD, Product_Code=ABC123, and Category_Code=flowers. At the time that the Search Friendly Links module was released, since Google was devaluing links with more than one name-value pair, this type of URL clearly did a disservice to Miva Merchant site owners. Search Friendly Links changed the above URL to a directory structure:

Mod_rewrite

The mechanism that allows this to work is built into Apache, the webserver commonly used on *nix servers, and is called mod_rewrite. To turn on mod_rewrite for your site, you need to edit (or add) the .htaccess file in your root directory. Note that on *nix servers, files that begin with a period ("dot files") are hidden by default, so you may need to set your FTP client to show hidden files or dot files in order to see the .htaccess file in the list. Within the .htaccess file, add this command above any rewrite rules:

This command turns on the rewriting engine. Specific rewrite rules can be added based on the format chosen below.

"Supershort" or "Jedi-style" Links

Although Search Friendly Links is no longer needed with Miva Merchant 5.0 and above, mod_rewrite can still be used to generate shorter URLs that offer an advantage among the search engines, and offer the customer a more logical set of URLs for the website.

One common URL format is to add a "c-" to designate category page URLs, and a "p-" to distinguish product page URLs. Using our example above, these URLs would become:

The URLs within the pages inside of Miva Merchant 5 can be changed to this format in the following manner:

And to allow these URLs to work, the following Rewrite Rules should be added to the .htaccess file below the "RewriteEngine On" line:

"Store" directory - Miva Merchant within a larger site

Sites that include a Miva Merchant store within a larger framework of pages or applications might want all shopping cart pages to appear in the /store/ directory, for example. Using this in combination with the "supershort" link format above produces:

The SMT code looks like this:

And the rewrite rules might look something like this:

Smart Links - The Shortest Possible Links

By adding the Smart Links for SEO™ module, it is also possible to create even shorter links. This module takes the string after the domain name, and looks within the Miva Merchant database to determine whether the string represents a category code, a product code, or a page code. (Note that when using this module, a store should NOT have product codes, category codes, and screen codes that overlap each other; they should all be unique.) This module allows a store to display these type of URLs:

In the first URL, "flowers" refers to a category code. In the second one, "ABC123" refers to a product, and in the final URL, "aboutus" is the code for a custom page. The rewrite rule for this format is simple, as it redirects the user to a single URL controlled by the Smart Links for SEO module. The rule looks like this:

Summary

No matter which rewriting method you choose, be consistent with your URLs. Google in particular frowns on duplicate content, and although they are great at determining canonical URLs (the primary URL to reach a given page), you don't want to take any chances. And just in case, it might be a good idea to block robots from your /mm5/ directory using your robots.txt file. Do your planning up front, so you don't have to change your URL format down the road (which might cause your search engine rankings to drop). Figure out how you intend to optimize your URLs, formulate a plan, and stick with it, for ultimate success.

To get sales, your website has to get visitors. And one of the best ways to get visitors to your website is to rank well within the search engines. That is an entirely different subject, but one of the easiest things to consider is implementing a weblog for your business.

Originally, back around 1998, weblogs (aka "blogs") were mainly online diaries. Bloggers wrote entries about their lives, their families, posted photos, and more. By 2001, weblogs were becoming more mainstream, as political weblogs appeared and gained popularity. It still took awhile before blogs caught on for businesses, but in 2005, the publication Business.com published an article entitled "Blogs Will Change Your Business", that is still popular today. (For a more in-depth history of blogging, see Wikipedia.)

So why would you want a weblog for your business? A common reason is to attract search engines, and as a result, to gain new visitors to your website. Well-written, unique content is one of the tenets of search engine optimization, and a weblog is a relatively easy-to-implement tool for publishing content.

It doesn't hurt that Google loves weblogs, both directly and indirectly. For example, many weblog tools will ping Google when a new post is made. In fact, on one of my weblogs, I have an alert set up for the domain name, and whenever a new post is made, I get an alert about the post within 2 hours, often less! That's pretty quick for Google to get information from my site out to customers.

Second, weblogs encourage links. Most bloggers maintain a "blogroll", which is a list of other blogs they recommend. When a blogger comments on a website, often other bloggers pick it up and add their own posts on the subject, linking to the same website. And weblog software manages things called "trackbacks", which is a mechanism for weblogs to notify each other about posts. (For a good basic description, see the post How Trackback Works.)

Here are some tips for integrating a weblog with your ecommerce site:

1. Decide on a Blogging Platform - There are tons of options when it comes to weblog software. Remember the cardinal rule of software: the more options it has, the harder it is to learn. Find the one that suits your style - quick and easy, complex and robust, or somewhere in the middle. Some of the common platforms are Wordpress, Typepad, and Blogger.
2. Where to Locate your Blog - You can host your weblog on a server provide by some of the software options (such as Blogspot.com for Blogger), but for a business weblog, you're better off using your own domain. For one thing, it looks more professional. For another, it's under your control. You can either dedicate a subdomain to your weblog (blog.mysite.com) or just a folder (www.mysite.com/blog). For more discussion on the pros and cons of these choices, see at "How Changes To The Way Google Handles Subdomains Impact SEO" at SearchEngineLand.com.
3. Integrate your Blog with your Website - Make sure readers can get from your weblog to your store, and vice versa. Your sitewide navigation should allow for moving back and forth. Even better, when possible, link from your posts into products or categories in your store.
4. Pick a Design - whether you choose to go with a premade template, or design your own, pick a look and stick with it. Don't change to a new template every week, or your visitors will have to re-learn how to navigate your blog. Your weblog can have the same layout as your store, or it can be different, but it should be clear that both parts of your site belong together.
5. Find Your Voice - Stary by identifying your audience - both your current site visitors, and any new segments you are trying to attract. Then make sure your content and your voice appeal to your visitors. You need to find the balance between being professional, and engaging the audience. Choose whether to use "I" or "we", and try to be consistent. A weblog about manufacturing, with an audience of professionals, may use "we" and a more formal tone; a blog about children's products might use "I", be informal, and refer to more personal anecdotes, to attract parents.
6. Commit to It - To encourage repeat readers, you need to establish a routine and stick with it. For business blogs, you should probably post a minimum of twice a week...daily, if you can swing it. Make sure your posts are related to your business; don't meander from topic to topic. If necessary, focus on frequent, short posts, instead of sporadic, longer ones. Also, take the time to proofread. Nothing screams unreliable like misspellings and grammatical errors.

As ecommerce stores grow, the process of filling orders becomes increasingly tedious without software to help. Some shopping carts have some of the features needed to fill orders, such as the ability to print packing slips, track order history as well as packages, and so forth. But bringing an order management package online is often one of the best things a business owner can do to streamline this process.

At its heart, order management software allows a company to review, alter, and track the status of orders received via the website. It usually allows you to print forms, enter manual orders, and purchase and print shipping labels. In a nutshell, order management software takes over where the website leaves off, and ends when your carrier picks up a package for delivery.

Order management software usually offers tools to accomplish a variety of post-sale tasks, including:

• Downloading of order data from the website
• Reviewing the order contents, address, and payment details
• Assigning a status to the order (pending, shipped, backordered, cancelled) and even individual items
• Printing order forms, such as packing slips or invoices
• Accumulating certain order data into reports for business intelligence
• Exporting data to financial software
• Generating shipping labels, whether simple address-only labels, or prepaid shipping labels from UPS, FedEx, and others
• Transmitting status and tracking information to the customer
• Altering an order, such as editing the address, or adding or removing products

Options in order management software are varied, and offer different levels of functionality and price. Some of the more common ones are Shipworks by Interapptive, Order Manager by Stone Edge, and Mail Order Manager by Dydacomp.

There's no doubt that, on the web, a thousand words is worth quite a bit more than a picture! At least, that maxim holds true when one things of search engine optimization. While shoppers love images, search engines love words. The problem is that writing good product copy is time-consuming, and, for some of us, downright difficult.

Many of us sell products that aren't unique to our website. The products you sell - toys, kitchen supplies, home decor, etc. - may also be carried by a number of other retailers. Often, the manufacturers of these products offer canned product descriptions for use on the web. Although the quality of the writing of these descriptions may range from poor to excellent, keep in mind that even the most well-written descriptions, if used by other sites, may have less value to the search engines than copywriting that is both unique and compelling.

Remember that the best product descriptions have the following values:

1. They are unique to your website
2. They are keyword-dense for SEO purposes, but above all, read well for human visitors
3. They are long enough to convey the information needed to make a purchase decision
4. They are simple enough for people to understand without thinking too hard

One of the resources we love is 73 Ways to Describe a Widget. This ebook helps jump-start your brain when you need to figure out how to describe what you're selling. For example:

• What occasion is the item appropriate for?
• How will the buyer feel when using your product?
• How long has this item been selling selling?

Another website that has a lot of useful information about copywriting is Marketing Words. In fact, that's how I found out about the 73 widgets ebook. There's also a nice article at Vitamin.

However, it helps to also keep it simple. Don't forget the basics: color, size, weight, texture, materials, skills required to use the product, advantages, and uses. Remember that it's the words on your site that attract the search engines and also convince users to make a purchase.