Olark.com Live Chat
April 1, 2010 by Efficient Entrepreneur
Filed under E-Commerce
Customers are demanding more and more from their online shopping experience. And more and more typically brick-and-mortat customers are looking to have a similar experience in an online environment. Hence the increasing demand by online window-shoppers to be able to talk to someone now. The demand for immediate gratification is not just when purchasing, but also now when looking for information about maybe, possibly purchasing.
The solution. Live Chat. Rather than wasting hours a day on the phone with customer after customer or potentially losing the sale by having a delay in email response, you can use Live Chat to quickly and efficiently balance multiple customer questions and seeemingly be giving one-on-one support. Many shopping carts now offer Live Chat as a free addition to their paid hosting plans, but if your cart doesn’t or you’re looking for something with a few more bells and whistles, Olark.com is your answer.
Olark.com is a live chat software program that easily integrates into any html or php-base site. They have a Free Plan that lets you chat with up to 20 customers per month to help you get comfortable with the software. This isn’t a free tiral people, its endlessly free as long as you don’t have more than 20 people try to chat with you in a month. As the popularity of your online chat grows, you can upgrade to their monthly pay plans ranging from $9 to $69, based on how many operators you want on your side. And all these plans come with a 14-day free trial as well.
If you have a team that’s constantly on the go, Olark will let you integrate their live chat with your iPhone, Blackberry and any current chat platform you and your team uses. That’s right. You’re on iChat all day taliking to your fantasy football buddies, and you can be answering customer questions without overcrowding your screen with multiple chat applications. Or if you’re salesman is out in the field, he can answer live chat questions from your site on his Blackberry in between sales calls.
All in all, your company needs to stay ahead of the competition and needs to cater to the whims of customers with questions. In this economy you can’t afford not to grab your potential leads and turn them into customers. Olark.com also has a shopping cart abandonment feature for an extra $30 per month that has a live chat window pop up when your customer is about to abandon his or her shopping cart. In this economy it never hurts to be extra helpful and offer customers lots of opportunities to realize you’re a real person, not just a faceless internet page.
Finding stuff to sell online, while avoiding the scammers
January 30, 2009 by Efficient Entrepreneur
Filed under Other Resources
You know what you want to sell, But you don’t know where to get it.
Finding a wholesaler is a key component to ensuring that your goal of selling online. But being a wholesaler “middleman” can be a profitable business, which gives anyone an incentive to attract newbie entrepreneurs. It’s important to keep an eye out for these scams….or to subscribe to a reliable source that will do all that investigating for you.
Enter Worldwide Brands, The Product Sourcing Experts.
WorldWide Brands 5% Fluff, 90% Meat, 5% Gold
Meat and Potatoes: 90%. Worldwide Brands has a wealth of company information separated to cater to the major types of e-commerce business: Dropshipping, Light Bulk, Liquidation and Wholesalers. Every entry in their database is double-checked to ensure that you are speaking to the actual wholesaler rather than someone posing as the wholesaler and marking up the products you’d be buying from them. The database is easily searchable based on the products you are looking to sell in your store. Search for specific goods like Mikasa dishes or general arenas like baseball bats.
Gold: 5% It’s well worth the money invested. Not only do you get lifetime access to the constantly updated database for one price, but they also include market data and research. So if your first shop takes off and is doing well, and then you decide that you may be interested in seeing if another arena would be profitable, WorldwideBrands will give you a clearer image of the marketplace and your chances of success.
Fluff: 5% Some saleable items come up with a lot of different options from dropshipping through wholesale, but some come up short. This really isn’t Worldwide Brands fault, as it just the reality of the market. Some industries simply do not drop ship and some industries only have one or two major wholesalers and you’ll have to play by their rules. This may not be the right investment for you if you’re not willing to be diligent and committed to making your market work, or to know when it’s time to back out and try a more easily accessible one.
WorldWide Brands is a unique resource, run by people committed to the success of online businesses and (like Efficient Entrepreneur) to exposing scams and teaching business people which strategies will work best for their longterm goals. If you already run an online business, this directory can be a great asset to expand your current e-commerce offerings. And since you only pay a one-time lifetime fee, you can so it at your own pace. Worldwide Brands is also well-respected in the e-commerce world, and that says a lot.
At the time of this article, $299 for a lifetime membership
Free Credit Card Processing from Google?!
January 5, 2009 by Efficient Entrepreneur
Filed under Other Resources
Google is pairing AdWords with Checkout to offer you FREE CREDIT CARD PROCESSING!
The latest move from Google to encourage merchants to use Google Checkout will revolutionize your advertising and payment strategies for your business.
Google AdWords, the program that lets you pay as little as 5 cents per click to get listed on the top of Google for search terms, is being combined with Google Checkout to offset the normal credit card processing fees your company faces everyday. If your site is accepting credit cards right now, you are probably paying a monthly minimum (average $15), a gateway fee (at least $8.95), and a per-transaction fee (usually 2 cents plus 2%). You’re paying more than 2% if your customers are using a “Rewards” card…who do you think is paying for the rewards?! Certainly not Mastercard. And if your sales are slow, some credit card processors will even charge you a “low sales fee” of around $20 if you told them you’d be averaging x amount of sales per month and you haven’t met it in the last two months.
Google has a solution. Why not use the money you spend advertising to offset the credit card processing fees? Read more about it at the Official Blog of Google Checkout. “Free transaction processing enables you to process $10 of Google Checkout sales at no cost for every $1 you spend on AdWords. For example, if you spent $1,000 on AdWords last month, this month you could process $10,000 in Google Checkout sales for free.” And when people search for your products, a Google Checkout logo will popup next to your site name, which might attract more buyers.
All-in-all something to consider when you’re looking to update your credit card processing.
So sign up for Google Checkout and then Google AdWords, but before you start your first ad campaign check out Perry Marshall, the King of AdWords for some great investment-optimizing tips!
Zen-Cart
December 15, 2008 by Efficient Entrepreneur
Filed under Free, Other Resources, Shopping Carts
Zen-Cart Ranking: 5 percent Fluff, 80 percent Meat and Potatoes, 15 percent Gold
Zen-cart is one of my favorite shopping carts available on the free market. It’s a Free shopping cart that you need to have loaded on your server. This shopping cart was started almost 5 and a half years ago by a few dedicated programmers who wanted to take the previous master of free shopping cart, OsCommerce and bump it up a notch.
Zen-Cart’s Meat and Potatoes: Zen-Cart offers an easy-to-use yet very effective shopping cart. The installation is simple and straight-forward. The cart works out of the box, but even a minimal knowledge of coding can really make this cart an ace.
- Use Paypal or Authorize.net to accept Credit Card Payments: Paypal and Authorize.net are the 2 most trusted payment processors available on internet today.
- Simple item addition, shipping selection, category creation, sell downloadable products,
- Lots of cool features like: # of guests & members online, Newsletter integrated into the cart, Customer testimonials and specific product reviews, contact us form and more.
Zen-Cart’s Gold: A huge community that not only provides a useful forum that helps you work through all your programming dreams and hick-ups, but also supplies some great add-ons and templates. Easily incorporate all the coolest aspects of the most professional shopping carts. These are some of my personal favorite add-ons: Google Checkout, Live Chat, Easily import all your stock with an Excel file, Tell a friend and an Order Exporter designed for drop-ship shop owners.
But the aspect that really stands out at Zen-Cart’s most amazing feature is called “Developers Toolbox”. I don’t know why every open-source product out there doesn’t include this tool. This tool alone is your flashlight in the darkness that is coding. Anything funny happening on your site, like random text that you want to get rid of, is found instantly in the code. Developers Toolkit then gives you the exact path to the file. You then download it, edit it in a text editor, re-upload it and your problem is solved. Brilliant aspect, and this is the only open-source program I’ve found that has this feature.
Zen-Cart’s Fluff: Zen-Cart seems to have been originally designed for someone looking to distribute music, so there are a few features that just take up space if (like the hundreds of users) you are not selling music.
