CubeCart Review Update
After using CubeCart on two sites for about a year I can definitely say the honeymoon is over. I was perhaps hasty in giving it the glowing recommendation I did, after only using it a short period of time. I really can’t recommend it to anyone anymore, it isn’t pay cart quality, it is free cart quality. I would not pay for it again nor recommend anyone else do the same.
The small bugs I mentioned in my above review are still not fixed, and that is just indicative of an overall culture of incompetence on behalf of the CubeCart developers. They remind me of building contracts who do just the bare minimum to get by. Far too many commonly desired features, needed features, features that would be standard in other carts, are passed off to third party developers. A common excuse given on CubeCart’s official forums is that such-and-such feature exists as a third party hack and so doesn’t need to be a part of the official core or supported as such. Unless you pay more for it, official support is all but absent, it is nearly impossible to get a word from a developer. Contrast that with vBulletin (which is in my opinion the best produced software in this class), which has rampant official support on their forums, ticket system, and otherwise.
The backend system, which initially seemed nicely designed, is anything but. When you actually start needing to do work on it, you often have to play “guess the file” to figure out which file controls which feature. Asking a developer which file it is so you could do the fix yourself would be a simple question for them to answer, but they do not. Another annoyance is their official site requires no less than 4 separate logins for 4 separate systems to use fully. I kid you not.
Then there are all the little annoyances. They give you the option to put a captcha on everything, or nothing, with no middle ground. So you can choose to not have a captcha on user reviews, email to a friend features, and email contract forms, or you can choose to have a captcha in all those places that need one, but also in the checkout form just so you can be sure that no less-than-savvy perhaps-elderly person ever buys a product from you, and of course all those spam bots with credit cards don’t buy Christmas presents through your site. What does a spam bot want for Christmas? I don’t know, but apparently the developers at CubeCart wanted to be sure that they couldn’t buy from you! (note, no other cart does this).
Then there are the emails, the email confirming an order before an order is complete is both annoying, and confusing, and can cost you money. One of the most popular third party modules out there turns this off. Does CubeCart consider adding a simple admin option in an update to turn it off? No, because their culture of incompetence means that if a third party individual provides a hack, let their customers mess with it, they don’t need to include that feature. Also consequently stock levels are decreased by these incomplete orders, which makes their stock management nearly worthless.
There are many minor issues and bugs that if I were hiring someone to code this for me custom, I would not have released final payment yet because they aren’t fixed, really simple fixes that just go ignored.
They also do not provide an easy way to add new order statuses outside of the default. Many times a store owner will be able to do this from the admin area of the cart, but not with CubeCart. You need to edit at least two files, I say at least two because I’ve found one and made edits but it hasn’t stuck, so there must be another, which I’ve been unable to find, and yes, I’ve asked for help. No such luck there. If this were a forum script it would be equivalent to not allowing the creation, edit, or deletion of usergroups in the admin backend.
All told the admin options of CubeCart are probably the weakest of any cart I’ve seen. Usually most software in this class has pages of admin options, CubeCart has a page. When you just install it with default settings this doesn’t matter, but as you use the software for a longer period of time and start to want to change things, this is a huge roadblock you run into.
Order management is also lacking. The inability to search for orders by customer name is a real hassle. You can search for customers, and then view orders for that customer, but it is very easy to cut those steps in half, and most shopping carts do that. Then the way they display order information means that if a customer has a longer name or address all of it is not available on the screen at one time, you literally have to scroll multiple text boxes to view it all, which increased the labor needed to process each order for shipping. Finally, they need to offer more control on order-page-based email communications with customers.
I’ve been asked by the developers of both X-Cart and Interspire to review their carts, and I plan to do so in the coming months. Whichever one I like more I’ll likely switch my CubeCart sites to, and recommend instead. I’ve already used Interspire (started my testing of it) and their admin area is awesome, except for one issue, which I’ve informed the CEO about, and he has told me they will fix it in the next version. I’ve not yet started testing the brand new version of X-Cart, but the press release lists some new features that make me drool. Interspire is a lot more expensive, but X-Cart is on parity with CubeCart price wise, and so if you need a cart to use right now and can’t wait for my reviews, perhaps try one of these.
Save 25% at Best of the Web with Coupon
Best of the Web What I consider the #3 Internet directory (and surely, miles ahead of any #4) is running a 25% off coupon. This is the largest discount I’ve ever seen them run and can save you a big chunk of change on directory submissions. The coupon code is “BLIZZARD” and it expires on January 10th.
Their cost for a one time submission is $250, so 25% off is about $60. Nice savings that. I wish I had a few projects I’m working on done so that I could take advantage of this coupon, alas I do not. I think perhaps in the future what I’ll do is not submit anything until they have a sale, I don’t think I’ll see 25% off again, but they do run other coupons a couple times a year.
Hi this is Daren from Netbiz and I’m actually calling on behalf of Google
There is this company called “Netbiz” that has been sending me phone spam more or less every day, despite me being verbally abusive to them on the phone when they call.
They say they’re calling “from Google” or “on behalf of Google” and that they have started a new feature for whatever topic your site covers. Then they go into a sales pitch about getting you to the top page of Google with this program.
This, is obviously, misleading. Netbiz works with Google the same way hundreds of thousands of businesses work with Google, through their Google Adwords program. To get to the top of Google all you need to do is signup at Google Adwords and place an advertisement. It is easy, you do not need some company to do it for you. This type of predatory sales pitch is fairly common and Google severely frowns on the companies doing it. It may even be fraud the way they say they’re calling on behalf of Google, that is merely my opinion though.
Also, please note, these results are NOT actually organic search results, these are ads. The way to get to the top of the organic search results is through organic SEO, which you can read more about in my seo guide.
After getting yet another call from these people I Googled them and didn’t find any other warnings so I thought I’d make one, to let the less-than-Google-savvy small business owners out there know that they do not need a company to place Adwords ads for them, they can do it themselves.
Peel Away Ads
How often do we find something new that we think can be a game changer? Not often, but it can still happen.
For instance, today I saw my first peel away ad, and I was very impressed. You should see one at the top right of this page.
The example one they provided for me here is a little obnoxious, I’ll admit, with the blinking “Check this Out” but others I’ve seen do not have such text, and otherwise give no indication of what is “underneath” except to show that actual corner of the “underneath” content.
What do I like about these? Well, they’re engaging without being intrusive. But mostly I like them for some of the same reasons I like interstitials. They really don’t take up any screen real estate (how many of us have something important in a corner?) and they’re harder to block with ad blockers.
Really what gets me excited is the screen real estate thing. This is a great way to add new advertisements to your site without actually messing with your layout at all. You could use it to promote a third party ad or an affiliate offer, or even use it to promote content within your own site such as subscription tier or a newsletter. Ecommerce sites could use it to promote current sales or clearance products. The possibilities are endless… and, integration is a snap. No matter what kind of software you use on your site, it is just a javascript include, so it is as easy to ad as Google Analytics tracking code.
I honestly just saw this for the first time about an hour ago (maybe I’m a little behind, in Googling around I see it is at least 1 year old) and I can’t stop thinking of ways to use this on almost all of my existing sites.
I’ve Googled around and noticed that a few places sell scripts that do this, I’m linking to the most popular and one of the cheaper versions (one was like $300). If the example ad on this page isn’t working for you, this text link will. They have one of those obtuse sales pages that I loathe, but they’re selling an unlimited use license of the script for $37, which seems like a good deal. Buy it once and use it on all your sites.
If you think of a good way to implement these, please come back and post a comment or a reply to the forum post here on this topic. I think it’ll be nice to see how others are using them and do a little group brainstorming in that way.
Avactis Shopping Cart Review
I had been hearing a lot about Avactis on various forums and I had seen how active the developers were on webmaster forums and so I decided to give it a try for my next ecommerce project.
Unfortunately, I can sum up the software in one word, amateurish.
Installation is a little abnormal as they really want you to turn on full 777 permissions for various different folders so that files can be written. Why do it this way? I don’t know, but then of course Apache ends up being the owner of said files and I had to go in through SSH as root to reassign ownership back to the user account so that I could use it to edit files, all told, that’s much more complicated than say Wordpress or vBulletin, which are the standards (in my opinion) to which all other programs should hold themselves.
Once installed I opened up a file to check it out and start skinning the store, and my eyes were blasted by HTML I have not seen since the 90s, honest. All tags are capitalized, there is copious use of <CENTER> and <FONT> and nested tables galore.
Adding insult to injury the developers, for whatever reason, failed to design their software using includes for the header. Seriously, there is no header include for this software. If you want to edit the code that makes up the header you must in fact edit every file. Even the <title> tag must be individually edited in every file.
This all makes me wonder, there is a menu include, and a footer include. Additionally there is a tag system whereby content can be inserts into the design much like Wordpress, and yet for some very basic parts of the site these features were not used.
Which is how I’ve come to the word amateurish. It isn’t that the software is wholly old fashioned, out of date, or obsolete, it is that it was built seemingly in an amateurish way, ie, not professional.
I almost at this point decided to just give in and use CubeCart for my next ecommerce project, but I got this Avactis license for free, and so I thought I might as well make the best of it. Plus I felt that to write a good and honest review I really needed to see the software through.
My main worry of course was that the amateurish markup would permeate the rest of the code and result in other problems, I wish I could say my worry was unfounded.
Proceeding to skin their tagging system for doing the templating was cumbersome and unintuitive. It is as if they tried to make up for the lack of a basic header include with extraneous includes elsewhere. For instance the main menu is made up of no less than 9 templates that I can find, the actual functions to print the links themselves are buried elsewhere, and I couldn’t find them. A seasoned developer might say that to change a link to indicate a current location one could just change a CSS class, but not this software, they need an extra template for each individual menu link status.
I ran into this same problem when dealing with images. I was going to do the typical thing I do and just upload larger or irregularly sized images and in the code set a maximum width that would then make them all line up or otherwise be the same size. Where would one expect to find the code that outputs an image on the product page? Well could it be in avactis-templates/catalog/product-info/default/product-info.tpl.html? You’d think so, but no, it isn’t. <?php ProductSmallImage(); ?> is all you get. There are no other applicable templates in that directory. So next I checked all the templates in the avactis-templates/catalog/product-images/default/ directory. No go there either. I looked all over for it, in the files that you get with the zip, in the files the program creates on your server during install, I couldn’t find it. I shouldn’t have to work that hard to find it.
See, in my opinion the developers of Avactis don’t quite understand what exactly they’re trying to do. Everyone hates OScommerce because the layout is not separate from the programming, making it a pain to skin. Avactis sells itself as a cart that does have separation but, really, they don’t. They’re using a function buried somewhere to print an IMG tag, that is layout, not programming.
This is not an isolated example, this is indicative of the software as a whole. They’re way overusing their tagging system or whatever they want to call it and it doesn’t work well.
Moving on, the admin area has some good parts and bad parts. The available store settings are sparse, there are some weird defaults you must get rid of yourself. I like, overall, the product & category management, but much of it is done with popup windows, which are annoying. I know the developers know how to do layer based DHTML popups, which are much better to use. I know they know how to use those because some of the neatest features of the admin backend use them, so why not use them to replace the standard popups? I don’t know.
They have a feature I’ve not seen elsewhere that I like that allows you to specify product types, meaning you can set some standard features for a single type of product and then when adding a new product you select that type and the defaults get populated. But here is the thing, when adding a new product if you don’t select a type it doesn’t let you add the product, and there is no such thing as a default product type. So, every time you add a product a popup window opens, then you select the product type, and the page reloads, every time. Even if you only have 1 product type, you have to jump through this extra hoop every time you add a product. Obviously the intuitive thing would be to set a default that automatically loads, saving you an unnecessary step.
The supported payment and shipping options is below average for a shopping cart, though the big ones are provided. There is also less flexibility in customizing the couple such modules that I used as opposed to what I’ve gotten in OScommerce and CubeCart.
After I thought I was done I decided to test the checkout, which, unfortunately, is cumbersome. The person has to click fully far too much to check out. You hit checkout and you get a cart summary and a billing & shipping address field. Pretty standard. Then you hit a button at the bottom called “Place Order.” Okay, you click that, and your order is not placed, maybe the button should say something else? The next page is for picking shipping & payment method. Then again, a “Place Order” button. This time my order must really be getting placed right? Nope, next page is an order confirmation screen, this time the button at the bottom says “Confirm Order” so really, this time it must be done? Nope. You click confirm order and your order gets entered into the database & you get an email thanking you for your order… but it isn’t placed, because you haven’t paid for it yet, you’ve picked your payment method, but not made payment. How many customers get confused because of that? CubeCart does it too, but there is a free community contribution to turn it off.
Now, this unmodded unhacked installation also threw me bugs when I tried to turn on a check payment method. Additionally the email sent to thank you for your non-paid-for order, that, by the way, says nothing about the order needing to be paid for still, has a few typos in it. Which brings me back to amateurish.
Now, look at the order summary too:
Subtotal of Items: $49.95
Global Discount: $0.00
Promo Code Discount: $0.00
Quantity Discount: $0.00
Discounted Subtotal: $49.95
Shipping & Handling: $13.81
One thing Avactis isn’t shy on is providing you ways to provide discounts, lots of functionality for automatic discounts… which I do not want to use, and if I’m not using them perhaps you don’t need to let my customer know how much of a miser I am?
There are other shortcomings as well, but this review is getting long enough, suffice it to say Avactis is no CubeCart, it isn’t even OScommerce. Unless someone comes by offering me another free cart that I haven’t tried yet, I’ll be going back to CubeCart 4 for my next ecommerce project, and I recommend you do as well.
Backup Your Data
The world recently conspired against me to make my hard drive on my primary computer fail, and fail big time.
Thankfully, I had backups… my backups weren’t as extensive as I would have liked and I did lose some stuff, but overall, my most important stuff was backed up and secure.
How horrible would it have been if I didn’t have the backups? I cringe to even think about it.
There is really no excuse to not run backups. External hard drives are really cheap now, you can get half a terabyte for around $100. The software to do the backup sometimes comes with the drive, or it isn’t expensive if you need to buy it.
I recommend doing both local and remote backups. A local backup will protect you if your hard drive fails, a remote backup will protect you if your house or office burns down.
I don’t yet do remote backups myself, not recently or automated anyways, I need to start. There are great services nowadays that allow you to easily do off site backups, for relatively little money. It is worthwhile to set these things up.
Additionally, be sure to backup your MySQL databases on your servers, as losing those would be equally or perhaps more catastrophic. I wrote a tutorial today on doing it, which you may find through the above link.
Deepen your site for fun and profit
The depth of your site refers to how many clicks it takes to get from your homepage to the furthest reaches of your site. With each click representing, of course, another page, another level of organization, for your site.
I think, with that definition, having a deep site means having a site with many pages. Since having many pages is directly related to your SEO success, specifically what I call brute force SEO (making so many pages, so much content, that you can’t help but get traffic), having a deep site is directly related to your SEO success.
So, since we’ve established a deep site is good, how do we make your site deeper? Well, there are a couple techniques that I want to call content lengtheners that will do it for you, easily, with almost the flip of a switch.
Scenario 1.
Say you have a directory, any topic or type will do. Typically the deepest level on a directory is the category level. You start at the top, and browse down from general categories until more specific categories. Adding more content means adding more categories. DMOZ is like this, Yahoo is like this, most directory scripts are like this. It is very common.
What if you could double your content in an instant? Well, you can, you just add one more level of depth, at the very bottom. You make site profiles the lowest level of depth on your site. So now you start with general categories, browse down until the most specific category, and then click on a listing to get the listing page, which has additional details and perhaps user comments or reviews on that listing.
You have now added 1 page to your site, a page targeted to a specific listing (good keywords there if someone searches for that business/product/thing whatever your directory is of), for each listing in your directory. If your directory had 10,000 listings, you’ve now added 10,000 new pages to your site, nice huh?
Scenario 2.
Say you run a system for user feedback/comments. That is a great idea, allowing user comments such as in blogs is a great way to get free content for your site. However, why not take it a step further and promote discussions?
Let people reply to comments posted by other people, make those replies, and the original comment, a thread, let the thread be shown on a separate page.
Now, instead of just having all user submitted content be on the one page of your site, you’re letting user submitted content become new pages on your site (like a forum of course) which is even better.
Scenario 3.
Combine the first two. With your directory go down one more level to the site level. Then allow threaded comments so that each comment that gets a reply generates a new page on your site. If again you have 10,000 listings and each listing gets an average of 3 comments that is an additional 30,000 pages of content from your comment system, on top of the additional 10,000 pages from your lengthening of the depth of your directory.
The overall point of this concept is to get the most possible content pages out of your databases. More content equals more traffic, more traffic equals more money. When I recently did this, scenario 1 only, I doubled the traffic of the directory.
The Case Against Link Exchanges
I have never liked link exchanges, you won’t find a “links” page on any of my sites, nor have I ever recommended doing traditional ones, in fact I have often said I can count the number of traditional link exchanges I have done on one hand.
There are a few reasons I do not like traditional link exchanges. I don’t like links pages, I prefer to focus on getting one-way links, and I have always felt the context available for the links gained in a traditional link exchange is on the poor side.
However, untraditional link exchanges I do find attractive. By those I mean in content features or swaps. You write an article about me, I write a review about you. You link to me in this article, I link to you in that one. Links made with trusted people where each link is carefully placed on both sites in a way that makes it appear as natural as possible.
That being said, I did have one normal site-wide link exchange for quite a few years, no longer though.
My wilderness survival site was launched in May of 2001 and ended up getting to the #1 position on “wilderness survival” in Google (and all major search engines) after only 4 or so months, it has held that position since. It got ranked decently on “survival” as well, but not #1, eventually setting to 3 or 4 and staying constant there for a couple years.
Then I did a site-wide footer link exchange with my friend Kyle, whom many of you know, who runs Survive Outdoors. This seemed like a perfect idea. Our sites were related, though with different focuses, and both had good link weight to share. The first update after we instituted the link exchange I went up to #1 on survival and stayed there for a few years, dominant, entrenched.
This was until a year or so ago, when I started dropping, hard. Even down to the second page eventually. I didn’t know what was going on, to be #1 for 3 or 4 years, stable, and then to drop so suddenly.
My first suspects were my other related sites I had cross linked with my survival site. So I made all those links “nofollow” to see if that helped, nothing.
So then I asked Kyle about suspending our link exchange and shortly after we did that I recovered half way, then about 6 weeks later I was back up to #2, where I am now.
So it would seem the link exchange is what was doing it.
I’m not sure why Google would have penalized that behavior. It could be that Kyle’s site had some negative baggage associated with it and I was being penalized for linking to it on every page. Or it could be that they merely frowned on the every page linking we were doing. Regardless, my positions improved after we removed the links, and that is the important thing.
Ode to a Forum
I love forums, they are excellent tools for website publishers with almost no downside and tremendous upside. If you have a site that you think would benefit from a forum, wait not another day, and get it done now.
Why are forums good? Well, there are many reasons, lets start first with how they provide a stable core of traffic for your site. If you have a popular, vibrant, growing forum with a critical mass of active users, even if all your search engine rankings were to evaporate your site would likely still survive as the forum would continue to grow. All your forum members would be telling their friends about it, linking to it from their Facebook profiles, and everything else. Forums provide a stabilizing affect on your traffic that helps your site weather swings and shifts in other traffic sources.
Of course, forums also help your search engine traffic by providing a treasure trove of content that search engines can index and list. Try making a content site that doesn’t rely on user submitted content and try to reach the sheer page count possible with a forum. You might have hundreds, even thousands, of articles on a website and yet a forum will almost always dwarf that with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of posts.
A forum can even help prevent losses in search engine traffic. When I, and many of you I’m sure, started in this business it was quite different, there was less competition, and overall less people knew that you could make money online. The bubble burst of 1999 and 2000 made most people think the Internet was money poison, a few of us knew that by staying small, and keeping costs low, you could make really good money.
Now, however, things have changed. The mainstream media has reported dozens and dozens of human interest stories of average people making large incomes by running websites out of their homes or small offices. This perception of easy money has attracted people who look for get rich quick schemes, people who do not quite understand how to program, market, design, or otherwise put out a good website. They rely on stolen content, stolen ideas, gibberish, spam, and other things. But they do know enough to at least make their website look real enough to a machine.
This is where human reviewers come in, search engines employ human reviewers in a quality control capacity for reviewing their search results. Additionally we’ve had human reviewers, in the form of link popularity algorithms, for a long time. As such it is vitally important that your site come off well to humans, and there are certain things you can do to accomplish that. One of them is bragging about your content, but additionally having a forum will help. The Google Human Reviewer handbook specifically has a section about how an active forum is a huge vote against labeling a site as spam. So when you want to be sure your site passes muster when reviewed by a human, a forum is a huge help.
Forums, are of course, just one form of user generated content, but thanks to sophisticated software, you can use your forum to handle all sorts of such content. The most recent version of vBulletin (3.7) has many social networking like features, it also has a robust plugin system and can integrate with blog, gallery, and review products. It is also easy to appropriate vBulletin’s user authentication system to power custom sections of your own site, saving you programming time and allowing your users to have just one login for your whole site.
For any site that is going to be built around user submitted content it will be hard to find a better CMS that a properly modded vBulletin forum.
Finally, forums are amazing tools for promoting other sites. You can market your other sites or products to your forum members and build sales and traffic that way. Additionally, you can use a tool like the vbGeek Autolinker to turn your forum into a link popularity machine. What the script does it turn select words into predefined links to help you build link popularity. For instance if you own a forum about widgets and a site that sells widgets you could have the word “purple widget” turned into a link to your page about purple widgets in any post that uses the word. I’ve used this technique to get great rankings for some of my ecommerce sites, in addition to the direct traffic it provides.
So, buy a forum, or build a forum, but get one, don’t wait any longer. It may take awhile to grow, or it may shoot up instantly, but almost all forums eventually become successful.
Here are some related articles that may be of interest:
The Ultimate vBulletin Optimization Guide
Should You Pay for Posts? Forum Posting Services Reviewed
Your .Community - A Guide
One Product eCommerce, One Year Later
This blog post will be part rant. I get frustrated sometimes. I don’t necessarily think I’m anything special, what I do does not seem special to me, and yet examples repeatedly crop up and make me think I must be a genius compared to so many other people. Namely the fact that I can walk down the street and think of new original website ideas, and other people apparently only are able to copy the ideas from others.
Is it really so hard to think of an original idea or angle? Apparently so, for what I had feared did come to pass. As you may recall in my original introduction to this site I said that while I was going to be upfront with everything about it, I hoped that no one would decide to merely copy me, and instead use my method as inspiration to come up with their own angle or product.
Yet, one loser did copy my site, and not only did he copy it, he asked for advice on it here in the forums, he spammed my blog to promote it, and on other forums he more or less assumed my identity by appropriating my gardening inspiration for making the site, and my webmaster inspiration for making the site. He was so dishonest he could not even admit on a money making forum that he stole the idea, and instead had to copy elements from my initial blog post to tell to others to talk up his own ego. Then, on a gardening forum, he also copied elements from my initial blog post explaining how he was looking for a tumbler for his own garden. This type of blatant dishonesty is so extremely annoying and it really ground my gears.
This episode has also really been the last straw for me on two fronts. I had always considered officially registering the copyrights to my sites, but it was always something I put off. No longer, had I registered the copyright to my compost tumbler site I could have bullied this weasel for what is likely all his cash, when you officially register your copyrights you can get statutory damages, the threat of which is usually enough to get a fat settlement check from the fool dumb enough to copy your intellectual property. Ask anyone who had stolen images from Corbis. Without an official registration you can only get actual damages (his pitiful profits) and an injunction (aka, get his website taken down, which is something I accomplished with DMCA notices anyways). I will be writing a long article on copyrights and registrations soon, based on what I learned in this process.
The second thing is I do not think I will share any more new sites publicly again, everything just ends up being copied. Probably one of the biggest mistakes I made was sharing the money making potential of my coupon site (which I had stumbled across through revenue experimentation on another of my sites). When I did so there were less than 10 main sites out there competing, afterwards it blossomed into hundreds, I had one Indian group rip off multiple of my sites to copy my cross linking methods. The competition surely hit my rankings and my income. I will of course continue to share things in the private area of Website Publisher’s forums, but not publicly in blogs and what not.
However, I did say I would share information from my one product ecommerce site, and so, here I am, one year later.
The site has been a tremendous success. Surprisingly enough it hasn’t even been seasonal, I figured mostly lots of sales in the Spring, and not much the rest of the year. I was wrong. In fact December has been one of my highest sales months so far (apparently, all the cool gardeners want compost tumblers for Christmas).
Since it started just a year and a week ago (more or less) I’ve had over 340 sales. That averages just under 1 a day, and for most of the year I had poor search engine rankings. My rankings have really started coming on strong since January though, and I’m now #1 on MSN for my target keywords, and on Google I keep bouncing between 4 and 7. I’m not getting much love from Yahoo, so I do fear an MS/Yahoo merger that could result in MSN ending up with Yahoo algorithm.
Anyways, profit margins are slim on the product which means credit card processing fees hurt my overall margins (the fee of probably around 3% aggregate is on the total cost, not my profit, which is only around 20%. So on a $200 item, the fee is $6, my margin is $40, so the fee is 15% of my margin, yikes!) but what can you do? Still, the site is very profitable for me.
Since the search engine rankings have improved I’ve been doing at least 3 sales a day, some days as high as 5 or 6, and it is still just April, much of the country is too cold to do much gardening yet.
My marketing plan has worked well. PPC advertising was profitable and helped keep the sales coming in before my organic SEO started paying off, then of course the plan to reach out to bloggers for reviews has to have contributed to my SEO success, I’ve gotten lots of nice incoming links from blogs (without spamming comments). I’m doing another set of blogger reviews this Spring, which should hopefully help cement my position in the top three of Google.
One thing I regret not doing earlier is to offer a mail order form on the site. Some people prefer to send checks rather than use credit cards online, and when they do so I have zero risk of a chargeback and don’t have to pay any credit card processing fees. Really, a mail order form is a great idea.
Perhaps the most surprising thing is that for March (and surely for April) the compost tumbler site beat my sword ecommerce business in total revenue (if not total profit), I really never expected that (though it won’t last, my sword business has new developments that will take off this year). When I made the site I was just hoping for profitability, maybe one sale a day, and averaging three now it is very nice. I’m guessing through the summer, especially if I improve my SERP positions even more, I’ll get up to averaging 5 a day.
Let me take this time now to, yet again, recommend ecommerce. You don’t need a big operation, a small operation selling just one product can work well, especially if you’ve got related content sites for cross promotion. Think of a product or something that would compliment your content sites well, and read the other blog posts and articles I’ve written on the subject. Just don’t copy my sites, please.
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