Sell safely online.

With the Internet becoming an ever more popular place to shop, we’re looking at ways to make that experience as safe as possible. In last months issue we looked at points to note to make it safer for you when you purchase items on line. This month we look at how to make the selling process safer.

Taking the step to sell online is a big decision for most companies. Cost is usually the biggest factor - although getting a professional and reliable web-based shop is, by far, the cheapest way to get a 24/7 presence - and security the next.

In addition to a website, you’ll need an online merchant account and a payment gateway before you can sell online. The merchant account allows you to get the cash into your business and the payment gateway manages the card verification process. Some services like Paypal offer an integrated account but fees can be higher than separate accounts so you’ll need to look at your product ‘ticket prices’ and the number of transaction and then work out the best arrangement for your business.

For the vast majority of businesses, selling safely online means reducing your risk of taking a payment from a fraudulent (generally stolen) credit card. If you are a very large company that has thousands of client records saved on your severs, you will also need to take precautions against identity theft as personal details are of great value to online fraudsters.

A purchase fraud against a vendor invariably involves using a stolen credit card to get a product shipped to the fraudster for them to then subsequently on-sell for cash. The vendor will, at some point, need to refund the fraudulent transaction and will have already shipped the product, therefore losing out on the cost of the shipped product.

Knowing the type of fraud you can expect can help you take the appropriate precautions for your business.

The first stage is to correctly set up your payment gateway to reduce the risk of accepting fraudulent cards. In general, the tighter the security checks you specify, the lower your risk of getting a fraudulent transaction. However, the tightest levels can also risk you rejecting valid cards and losing a sale. The biggest issue here is 3D secure. Payment gateways recommend that this protection is enabled but few customers either have this enabled or can remember their password.

When you have received a sale, the most important factor in protecting you business is to be vigilant. If it’s only one person running your website, this is relatively simple, if it’s a team, make sure that they are all trained to notice the obvious signs and to be wary of strange looking orders. The top points to look out for are:

Buyer location. Some Payment gateways identify the physical location of the buyer at the point the transaction was completed, often referred to as ‘IP address location’. If this is not the UK and you are only shipping to the UK, then beware the transaction.

Delivery and billing address: Fraudsters will not get a product shipped to a card holders home so if these addresses are different, there maybe an issue (there may also be legitimate reasons for this such as shipping to a second home).

Unusual order. If an order is an unusual mix of products or sale value, think before you ship.

If you do suspect that a transaction is fraudulent, don’t panic; You’re very unlikely to lose anything until a product is shipped. Contact the card issuer to see if the card has been reported stolen and also your payment gateway provider to check if there have been any other occurrences of the card being fraudulently used.

Ultimately, selling online need not be any more open to fraud than selling through a traditional shop. Remain vigilant and aware and keep up-to-date with notices provided by the banks and police. If you are ever in doubt, ask advice.

Are you a Twit?

... we're referring, of course, to the colloquial name for those who Tweet on Twitter.

We've been doing some playing and testing on twitter and can today announce that we too can be followed on twitter.com.

Twitter is a kind of micro-blog and a great way to share snippets of information (tweets) with your customers. As well as posting tweets through being logged into your account, you can text and email updates and can even post photographs through services like tweetpic.

Go and check it out and, if you need more information, follow our tweets or get in touch.

Google Chrome taking hold

Although Internet browsing experience is dominated by Internet Explorer and Firefox, Google Chrome is showing signs of starting to take hold. If you have a pc and want to try a different browsing experience, go and download your free copy of Google Chrome.

There are some neat features including an integrated url and search box. If you browse web pages with a lot of Java script, Chrome also makes the experience super fast. Some early stats are showing that as many as 1.5% of users now use Chrome. Go and take a look..

How Search Engines Work

When it comes to finding information, and promoting your business, Search engines are the most important aspect of the Internet. The best-known, and most frequently used, search engines are Google, Yahoo! and MSN and, in the English speaking world, these account for around 95% of the monthly searches.

Search engines allow you to find documents and resources on the web by matching your search keywords with the closest, and most important, matches in their database.

The easiest way to visualise a search engine is to think of it as a traditional card index system where records are kept alphabetically. All search engines work in much the same way and they are based on three main pieces of software

1. The Spider
The spider ‘crawls’ the Internet, moving from site to site, collecting information about each and every page that it visits. Spiders have to visit billions of web-pages every hour so they tend not to spend too long on each site. They collect information about the content of each page – words and pictures, which sites link to each page and to where each page links.

2. The Index
The Index organises all the content that the spiders collect and files it into some structure so that it can then be easily retrieved. The more information The Spider can collect about a certain web-page, the more chance The Index has of correctly filing that page. Search engine indices are massive with the Google index alone containing an estimated 25 billion pages.

3. The Search
The Search is the consumer facing interface that all Internet users are familiar with. It’s the simple looking rectangular box where you type your search query and then ‘web search’. The Search function matches your search query against pages listed within the search engines index, ranking the most appropriate phrase first, the next second etc.

There is a further search engine functions that is responsible for the growth in Google from being a small search engine started by two mathematicians to being a Fortune 100 company in less than 10 years. This function is the Pay Per Click search where you can pay to be at the top of search results for your chosen key search words. We’ll take a look at Pay Per Click in more detail in a future article,

This explanation is a massive simplification of a hugely complex machine that processes billions of web pages in a fraction of a second every time you do a search. If you run a business, getting towards the top of search results for your search terms can mean the difference between make or break.

Great Quote

We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others - Blaise Pascal

Get Found, Be Seen

The old saying ‘you have to be in it, to win it’ has never been so appropriate as when referring to wining the search engine game. With typically 80% of the visitors to any website coming from search engine referrals, if your website is not ‘in’ their index, you won’t get those crucial referrals.

Building your website so that it is search engine friendly is a specialist skill and you should talk to your web-developer about it to make sure that they have done the best they can for your website. For reference, the process of making your site as attractive as possible is called Search Engine Optimisation, often abbreviated to SEO.

Once your site has been correctly constructed, you can help a lot by writing interesting and unique content for your website, and then regularly updating it. The more relevant, unique and changing your website is to your project or business, the more interesting it is to search engines to have in their index. Then you are more likely to get referrals from them with people looking for the service or product you are providing.

You can also help yourself by getting other people to link to your site. Links from other sites to yours act as a positive vote in your favour and, the more votes you get, the better your chance of winning.

These activities will help your website appear in natural or organic search engine results listings – the list of results you see when you do a search. The more you can do to keep your site fresh and to get large number of links from other sites, the better your chance of appearing towards the top of these results.

Optimising your site is a process that can take many months to achieve and a lot of effort to retain. In the interim, there is another option that you have; buy your way to the top.

You’ll notice within search engine results that there is a narrow right hand column next to the main left hand column. These are paid for listings and you can place your business in these positions for phrases that are relevant to your business.

It costs nothing do be on the list and you only pay when someone clicks on your advert, hence the term Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. This method can be a cost effective way of buying visitors to your website and you only get visitors for the searches that you want to be found for. You specify the words that you want to appear for (keywords) and the amount you are prepared to pay for a click (click bid value).

Let’s look at an example. Say your business sells pet accessories; you may want to get some visitors looking for a ‘brown leather dog collar’ and you’d be prepared to pay 20p per visitor (much cheaper than the cost of a stamp and brochure). When someone types the phrase ‘brown leather dog collar’ into search engines, your advert will appear and, if they then click on your advert to visit your website, the maximum you’ll pay is 20p. As you can specify which keywords you want to appear for and the budget you want to spend, you have complete control over the type of visitor you attract.

Getting found in search engine listings is crucial to the success of running an online business. An effective online campaign will have a mix of optimised searches and PPC advertising. One thing is sure, the more effort you put in, the more you’ll get back: another old adage that still applies in the digital age.

(Article originally written for Out and Out Magazine)

Happy Birthday Apple Mac

The Apple Mac was first shown to the world 25 years ago today and a computing revolution began.

There's always the debate amongst 'techies' as to which pc systems is the best; Microsoft based or Apple based. Whichever camp you're in, there's no doubting the simplicity of operation of a Mac, the reliability of the applications and the fun element associated with them.

The Mac converts amongst us will never go back. We love our Macs, in all their shapes and forms and we wish you a very happy birthday.