I came across this article on developing a shopping cart by a guy who makes and sells custom bingo card creator software. He spent a great deal of time examining his shopping cart from the customer’s viewpoint. He does get into some code, but the discussion beforehand is very useful. Basically, you want to take the customer from the decision to buy (checkout) to payment as quickly as possible. You must make it easy for them to buy from you – ask them for anything not essential and it will kill your conversion rate.
If you’re going to commit a crime (or at least do something fraudulent), you might want to consider the evidence you’ve left all over the internet.
Yesterday a popular internet marketer and blogger announced he was suing a Google employee for fraudulent use of a trademarked name and suspected use of proprietary account information.
Jeremy Schoemaker is well-known on the internet as Shoemoney – a name he has trademarked. Several months ago he noticed that someone was running ads on Google’s AdWords ad service using his trademarked name.
Apparently he contacted Google’s Adwords team to report the violation, but did not get anywhere. He next was able to get a court order that required the person’s webhost to reveal the person’s identity.
He then contacted the person and asked them to stop. They did not.
Now we get to the good part.
Google’s Webmaster Guidelines provide a great starting point on how to optimize your site for Google. However, it fails to mention one aspect of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that has recently become much more important in getting your site to rank well – Branding.
On January 18th, 2009, Google updated its search engine to put a much higher emphasis on name brands. This was not entirely unexpected – last year, Google CEO Eric Schmidt made some comments about branding and how it can be used by Google to help filter out sites of low value.
Not long ago, a client called me about some domain names he had tried to register. He said that a few domains he had checked on several days earlier ago were no longer available, but had been available when he first checked on them. He thought it was odd that this had happened for several domains and wondered if it was just a coincidence.
I told him this was a real problem and that he was not just imagining things. Although I this had not ever happened to me, I did know about this problem.
I asked him how he was checking on the availability of the names and he had been on a website I had not heard of before, which supposedly let you search for available domains. I told him this website was likely logging the domains being searched for and were registering ones they thought might be valuable before the searcher could register them.
Back in October of 2007, the ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee issued an advisory on Domain Name Front Running, a practice of registering a domain name that someone has checked on before the searcher can register it themselves.
This practice is usually done as part of a Domain Tasting operation. Domain Tasting involves testing to see whether or not a domain is valuable in terms of search engine traffic.
The advisory was issued mostly as a warning because hard evidence of it happening has been very hard to get. (I guess it’s hard to get anyone to admit to being sleazy).
In the rest of this article, I will give you some ways to avoid this problem…read on for the details.
In New York, as in most states, when you make a purchase online from an out of state vendor, you are supposed to pay sales tax on those products directly to your state, assuming you took delivery of the items in your state. Of course nobody does this – I doubt most people even know you are required to. It’s also nearly impossible to enforce since companies do not have to collect sales tax for states in which they do not have a physical presence.
Until now…
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Seth Godin has a great post regarding marketing lessons you can learn from the U.S. Presidential Election.
Read Seth’s thoughts on the marketing involved in the election.
