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Whether you run a small or large online business, the same basic rule applies: keep your visitors happy.  After all, if you don’t, your competitors surely will.  It’s a jungle out there, but these six tips should go a long way in helping you achieve success with your e-commerce venture.

1.) Engage Your Audience

There are a number of features you can incorporate to encourage interaction amongst your visitors.  On today’s highly advanced internet, interactivity is key.  Combine this with original, quality content and you could have an e-commerce site that keeps your audience tuned in.  This is how to convert repeat visitor into long-term customers.

2.) Make Purchasing Simple

This should go without saying, but the large number of failed e-commerce sites leads us to believe otherwise.  Most internet users could do without the lengthy sales pitches, technical jargon, and all the bells and whistles that make it difficult to uncover hidden order pages.  After all this time, many online merchants still fail to cut to the chase and give their customers the options that make them feel comfortable making a purchase.  If want to drive home sales, get to the point, and do it quickly.

3.) Open the Doors to Communication

When doing business online, you should make your contact information easily accessible.  This includes email addresses, business addresses, toll-free phone numbers and fax number.  By doing so, you are demonstrating the credibility that will instill the confidence consumers need to feel to do business.  Potential customers will know that you are there to address their questions or concerns and by making various options available, you can target a larger market and their preferred communications channels.

4.) Post Information in Fulfillment and Return Policies

Before purchasing something online, most customers want to know how much an item costs, how it will get to them and when it will get to them.  Most importantly, they want to know that they are covered if the item should be defective or damaged during transit.  While publishing this information will not sell your products or services, if do not include these details, there is a great chance that you will end up losing sales.

5.) Travel the Low Road

Surviving in the realm of online business requires detailed planning and sound budgeting.  Therefore, it is important to consider all your low-cost budgeting endeavors before throwing money into most costly campaigns.  There is a lot you can do, including networking, building strong partnerships and designing a website that is optimized for search engine traffic.  Spend a little time researching some cost-effective avenues to promote your site and you will have a much better chance of coming out with your bottom line intact in the long run.

6) Price for Profits

Unreasonably low prices are great if you’re in the non-profit business, but not when you are trying to generate steady revenues and brand loyalty.  There are many ways to keep your customers around without sacrificing profits.  It is up to you to determine how to achieve this while keeping a competitive edge and making profits in the process.

Source: http://webhostinggeeks.com/blog/2009/08/13/six-essential-tips-towards-e-commerce-success/

Along with the web hosting industry comes a lot of unfamiliar terms and technical jargon.  While some are self explanatory and a bit easier to process, others are downright confusing, especially to the newcomer who knows little to nothing about the industry.  This article will introduce you to some of the more advanced terms and explain their meanings.

Availability

Often referred to as uptime, the availability of a system describes its accessibility and ability to provide a level of redundancy that works to prevent failure at any single point.  For instance, if only one server is responding to HTTP requests, the server qualifies as a single point of failure.  If there are two web servers in a load balancing scheme, then the load balancer itself is the single point of failure.  Most high availability systems are equipped with efficient fault-tolerance mechanisms to ensure the necessary redundancies.  Because 100% availability is costly and rather difficult to achieve, the industry standard in the web hosting business is at around 99.9%.

Load Balancing

Load balancing is a method web hosting providers employ to more evenly distribute the system load over a group of available servers.  This technology is used to ensure that all servers process their fair share of requests without being overworked and more susceptible to failing.  There are many types of load balancers and these mechanisms come in both software and hardware varieties.

Response time and Transaction Load

The performance of a server is associated with the response time of a given transaction load.  In regard to a website, it is measured by the time it takes to load web pages and process requests to the web server.  The performance of large, high traffic websites can be greatly enhanced by upgrading hardware, residing on a dedicated server or utilizing load balancing technology.  In many cases, fine tuning software packages such as MySQL and PHP can also increase response times.

Scalability

The scalability of a system generally refers to the property that enables it to service any given load by upgrading hardware or incorporating additional services in a predetermined manner.  It essentially describes an instance in which performance and throughput can still be maintained once the load increases.  Scalability is a great quality to have in a web hosting solution as it can support the growth and increasing needs of your website.

Session State

Session state is often needed to maintain the connection of a client program and a given server.  This typically needs to be done to accommodate a user who is logged into the system.  If the topology consists of multiple servers, maintaining session state is crucial and something that must be taken care.  Most load balancing software applications on the market provide facilities that enable this to done.  The most common methods are implementing cookies and rewriting URLs with the server details included.  load_balance.htm

Throughput

Though closely tied to performance, throughput is best described as the number of concurrent transactions the server is able to process.  The higher the throughput, the more processing power to the system.

Source: http://webhostinggeeks.com/blog/2009/07/31/advanced-web-hosting-technology/

Though often overshadowed by the market dominated Windows and Linux platform, Unix remains a widely used platform and a popular option for web hosting. This article will introduce you to seven features commonly found in Unix hosting plans. Though basic, these features are very important and should not be underestimated.

1.) POP3 Email Accounts – An example of a POP3 email account would be “yourname@yoursite.com“. Most hosting companies will provide you with a large number of email accounts to use for yourself or distribute to your employees.

2.) Webmail and SMTP – As soon as your website goes live, email will likely become your main source of communication. The tool you need to make this an easy process is a webmail program such as Horde or Squirrelmail. This process can be even faster when downloading your messages to email clients such as Microsoft Outlook or Eudora. However, in order for this to work, you need a Unix hosting solution that supports messaging protocols such as IMAP and SMTP.

3.) Spam Filter – It doesn’t matter who you are, no email user is immune to spam messages. In this day and age of the internet, having a reliable spam filter is a must. These applications are installed on the web server where your site resides and typically offer features such as blacklisting, whitelisting and greylisting to mitigate spam. The more flexible filters will allow you to make configurations to tag spam and have it delivered straight to a quarantine folder to keep it from cluttering your inbox.

4.) FTP Accounts – FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is a method that allows you to upload your files and maintain them on the server. A Unix host that supports this protocol usually provides the ability to create a certain number of FTP sub-accounts. This allows you to provide your clients and users with access to password-protected directories, which is very useful for sharing files in a more efficient and secure manner.

5.) Backup Utility – While most web hosts perform automated backups on a regular basis, you should never put the fate of your website in their hands. There are many ways to backup your website data, but the easiest way is with a utility specifically designed for this task. Most of today’s control panels come included with built-in utilities that allow you to easily backup your site in minutes.

6.) Web Stats – Analyzing your visitors and traffic can play a crucial role in the success of your site. Popular web stat software such as AwStats and Webalizer run on the back-end of the server and can provide you with detailed reports on your statistics. This can give you the knowledge to make the needed adjustments or additions that increase traffic and boost sales.

7.) PHP and MySQL – Similar to Linux, almost all Unix plans come with support for PHP server-side programming and the MySQL database server. These features are generally provided for no extra costs and can give you the power to create a dynamic, data-driven website.

Source: http://webhostinggeeks.com/blog/2009/08/06/seven-basic-ingredients-of-unix-hosting/