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What do you know about EmPwrOnline?

EmPwrOnline has been advertising seminars in the media in the last month or so and I recently attended one of them in Brighton. Rather than providing ‘the secrets of proven eBay selling success’, they offered some basic and insubstantial eBay selling knowledge and then pitched a scheme whereby eager attendees could give away free websites to apparently eager eBay sellers and receive a commission when sellers upgraded to a paid-for website. This scheme, claimed the presenter, netted him an annual ’six figure salary’ for a few hour’s work a day.

To find out more, attendees were encouraged to fork out £20 for a subsequent seminar and £10 monthly for access to a ‘portal’ that would help them promote the free websites they would be giving away on behalf of EmPwrOnline. My money stayed in my wallet and I certainly don’t advise anyone to waste their valuable time attending another of these seminars let alone shelling out for any of EmPwrOnline’s services.

I blogged about EmPwrOnline, and in just a short time there have been some interesting comments. But I’m keen to find out more: so I turn to TameBay’s illustrious community of readers. Have you had any dealings with EmPwrOnline? If so, please tell me about it.

Amazon UK: spend a fiver, get free delivery

Amazon UK have cut their threshold for free delivery from £15 to £5. “Super saver delivery” allows UK-based customers buying eligible products to elect a free-but-slow delivery service: eligible items are those purchased directly from Amazon, or shipped by them through the Fulfilled by Amazon service. The Telegraph reports that 90% of Amazon UK’s sales will now be delivered free of charge.

The MD of Amazon UK, Brian McBride, said the change was “to get people lifted for Christmas. Times are tough out there and this will come as a welcome bonus for people.” It will certainly raise the stakes for Amazon’s competitors in the run up to the holidays, and could make FbA a much more attractive proposition for many merchants too.

Last Call: Small Business 2.0

Small Business 2.0, the event for small businesses that want more from the web, is happening this Saturday and there are a few tickets still available. In a week that’s seen extraordinary economic events and, perhaps more importantly, seen many eBay sellers confused by changes to search, there’s never been a better time to explore the possibilities of the net.

On Saturday, at the New Connaught Rooms in London’s Covent Garden, attendees will have the opportunity to quiz eBay executives, meet folks from Amazon, Microsoft, PayPal and dozens of others. Needless to say, I’ll be there as well as TameBay’s very own Sue and Chris. If you’ve been wondering whether it’s time to diversify your ecommerce activities, improve your website or have a go at SEO, there’s something for you on the day.

You can register here. And if you enter this promo code, you won’t have to shell out: free.

And because it’s Saturday night,  we certainly can’t rule out a few nourishing beverages after the show. So come and join us for pint at the pub across the road.

Amazon to attend Small Business 2.0

Small Business 2.0, an event for small businesses and online retailers who want to get more from the web in London on October 11th, has recently revealed that Amazon will be joining eBay, Microsoft, BT, Royal Mail and many others and presenting to attendees. Amazon’s Matthew Henderson will be talking about how you can plug in to the fast-growing marketplace which is increasingly popular with disaffected eBay sellers.

New sessions have also been announced including an SEO panel discussion and an ‘eBay Surgery’ Q&A. The eBay panel will include Tamebay’s very own Chris and Sue (who have been too coy to mention it yet). Don’t forget that eBay’s Richard Ambrose and Rafael Orta will also be presenting earlier in the day.

We’re looking forward to a great day, and I hope to see you there. We’ve got a few tickets still left and in a special just for Tamebay readers enter FREE into the registration form and you can come along for nowt.

Facebook remove users with suspected fake names

Facebook users suspected of using fake names are being kicked off the site, reports The Sydney Morning Herald. The paper cites Elmo Keep - yes, it’s her real name - who was banned without warning from Facebook, until she sent in official proof of her identity. It says numerous others have been banned by Facebook’s name police, for using names ‘including “podcast”, “beaver”, “jelly”, “beer” and “duck”‘.

Facebook’s terms of use make a vague statement prohibiting “creat[ing] a false identity”. Their code of conduct goes a little further, telling members they may not “register for more than one account or use or attempt to use another’s account, service or system without authorization or create a false identity on the Service or the Site”.

The Sydney Morning Herald explains this as Facebook “making the web more credible” by preventing people from hiding behind pseudonyms and false identities. I prefer Valleywag’s interpretation, that this is Facebook’s guarantee to their advertisers that targetted ads are being aimed at the right demographics. You don’t want to pay to advertise to 20 year old women on Facebook, only to discover that half of them are actually 50 year old men in disguise.

Many eBay sellers and etailers I know have Facebook IDs that match their business names. From a branding point of view, this looks like a great idea: if you’re going to use Facebook to promote your online business, better to do it under your business name, right? But if you’re doing that, you’re risking having your Facebook account terminated.

The Normal Person’s Guide to WordPress Plugins

We’ve looked at how to install WordPress and how to make it pretty; today I want to look at making WP do more.

Plugins are additions to the basic WordPress functionality, which allow you make it do just about anything you can imagine, from adding polls to your posts to controlling banner ads. Find them in the official WordPress plugin directory. Like themes, they’re extremely easy to add to your WP install.

The least you need to know

• Download and unzip your chosen plugin
• Upload the plugin folder or single .php file to /wp-content/plugins/
• From your dashboard, click on ‘plugins’, and ‘activate’ your chosen plugins.
• Find where the plugin management is hiding, and make any customisations you need.

Managing and updating plugins

Most plugins will come with some kind of customisability or options that you can change to suit your particular requirements. The link to manage these options might appear under “manage” on your dashboard, or under “settings”. A few show up on the top of the plugin management page. Some even add their own top-level link to your dashboard. I think WordPress might do well to add a “plugin management” tab and have all plugins work from there, because as it stands, it can be rather confusing. Don’t be afraid to do a little searching about if your plugin management page doesn’t appear where you’re expecting first-off.

Like the core WordPress install, plugins change: new features are added, security is updated, incompatibilities are ironed out. WP will tell you when one of your plugins needs to be updated: just watch out for the bubble on your dashboard. Most plugins can be automatically updated from within WordPress: there’s no messing about with FTP here.

If it all goes wrong…

… don’t panic. Sometimes some plugins conflict with others you already have installed; even more rarely, they’re released prematurely and don’t work correctly. Normally, you can just go to Plugins on the dashboard and disable the guilty party. If you can’t get access to your dashboard, deleting the plugin file from /wp-content/plugins/ via FTP should resolve the problem.

And to give you a flavour of what can be done, here are ten of my ‘must-have’ plugins for any WP installation:

3 plugins to stop comment spam

I love blogging and I love WordPress. And so do comment spammers. If you’ve got a brand-new blog, you’ve probably got a month or so before the spam comments advertising everything from pharmaceuticals to porn start. Here’s how to keep them off your blog.

• Akismet looks at the content of comments left on your blog, and analyses their spamminess. Comments it believes are spam don’t appear on your site; instead, they’re moved to a ’spam queue’, where you can delete them all at once, or even let Akismet delete them automatically for you. Akismet ships with WP, though has to be activated before it will actually start to work. For small and new sites, it’s probably all you need, but as your blog grows more popular and becomes more visible to spammers, you’ll need to use additional plugins to keep spam under control.

  The problem with Akismet is the ‘false positive’: comments it thinks are spam, which in fact are legitimate. It’s always worth checking your spam queue for these before deleting it all, but if you have dozens or hundreds of spam comments every day, it becomes impossible. You need a couple more plugins to stop spammers before they even get to Akismet.

• Comment Timeout allows you to close posts to new comments after a set length of time. Comment spammers tend to target older posts, so by shutting off comments, you significantly reduce their opportunities to spam. The plugin has some neat configurable features, including the ability to leave comments on selected posts open indefinitely, and to designate posts with high numbers of comments as ‘popular’ and entitled to have comments left open for a longer period of time.
• Bad Behaviour… ah, what can I say about Bad Behaviour? It saved my sanity. Rather than looking at the comments themselves, BB looks at the thing trying to leave the comment, analysing if it’s a human, or a spam-bot. If it’s a spam-bot, it’s blocked from even accessing your site; not only does this block the spam, it also stops email address harvesting, and saves you bandwidth usage. If I could only pick one plugin to take to a desert island, it would be Bad Behaviour.

Using these three plugins together, TameBay has gone from receiving over 1000 spam comments per day, to almost zero: comments in our spam queue these days are more likely to be false-positive matches, than real spam.

3 plugins to help manage your blog

• WordPress DB Backup Back up. Back up often. We all know we should; this makes it easy, with full database backups which can even be emailed to you, at intervals of your choice. If your server melts down or is eaten by hackers, you’ll be glad you did.

• WordPress Automatic Upgrade means you can install the newest version of WordPress from within your dashboard in just a few clicks. It adds another nagging message to WP’s own “please upgrade”, which should mean your installation is always the newest and most secure.
• All In One SEO Pack It must be said that a vanilla install of WordPress is pretty search-engine friendly. Google likes blogs, for one thing. But AIOSEOP adds some useful tweaks to meta tags and page titles, allowing you more control over the information presented to search engines.

4 plugins to make your readers happier

• WP Ajax Edit Comments allows commenters to edit their comments for a specified length of time after posting them, and also allows blog admins to edit, delete and mark as spam from the blog page, without needing to go into the dashboard. It’s a courtesy to your readers, and will cut down the number of “oops, I meant…” follow-up comments, which don’t improve anything.
• Photo Dropper allows you to add free photos to illustrate your blog posts from within the WP interface. Photo Dropper imports pictures from Flickr which have been tagged by their photographers as available for public use under a Creative Commons licence. It will add the picture to your blog post and provide the appropriate links and acknowledgements without you having to write any HTML at all. If you’re running a commercial blog, the plugin will look only for pictures which aren’t marked for non-commercial use only.
• ShareThis is a great way to let your users share your posts on the social site of their choice, without cluttering up your blog with a million different icons. They support 36 different sites, including Facebook, Stumbleupon and Digg. ShareThis also offers reporting, so you can see just how your posts are being shared.
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (so named because there are a few plugins that do a similar job) shows a list of links to other posts on a similar topic on your single post pages. This is useful for stories or themes that run across more than one post, and generally to get readers to dig deeper into your site, highlighting older posts they might otherwise miss.

There you go: ten of my favourite plugins. If you’re running WP already, what else would you recommend? Leave us a comment.

20 one-minute jobs to improve your home page

When was the last time you looked at your website’s home page? I don’t mean clicked through on the way to checking your new stock’s displaying correctly: I mean, really looked at it, through the eyes of someone arriving there for the first time ever.

The homepage’s role is two-fold: firstly, to show visitors at a glance what your site is about, and secondly, to get them to move on, into your site, quickly. You have maybe a couple of seconds to convince a first-time visitor that your site’s what they’re looking for. So make it easy for them to find that, and get rid of everything else.

Here are twenty ideas, each of which can be done in a minute or less, to tidy up your home page.

Declutter

• Cut the hyperbole, and take in the welcome mat the UK’s best!, Europe’s biggest! Right. I saw someone recently claiming to be “the biggest online book shop in the UK”. They weren’t Jeff Bezos, so I didn’t believe them. Don’t make nonsensical claims just to fill up space. As for welcome to our website, do you need to say this? I don’t think so. You have crucial seconds to get your message across, so make all text meaningful.
• Cut out the homepage link If people are already on the home page, they don’t need a link to the home page: it’s confusing, and it’s clutter. Declutter.
• Get rid of the date If you have a news site, having the date visible is justifiable. If you have an ecommerce shop, it’s just clutter. Declutter.
• Get rid of hit counters Your buyers don’t care how many thousand other people hit your site, though they might have a good laugh if your hit counter is resolutely stuck in double figures. Hit counters, whether your own or built into your ecommerce software (OSCommerce has a particularly annoying version), just look amateur. At least make them invisible; better still, sign up for Google Analytics: it’s free.
• Get rid of credit card symbols Time was, you needed to put Visa and Mastercard symbols on the front of your website to show that you took online payments and people wouldn’t have to post you a cheque. Those days are gone, my friend; credit card symbols are just clutter. Declutter.

I just haven’t found what I’m looking for…

• Contact details visibility Make it easy for buyers and potential buyers to contact you. A phone number on the front page is great; if you can’t manage that, a prominant link to a ‘contact us’ form, email address or other details, gives your customers confidence you’ll be there for them.
• About us link Who are you? Where are you? What’s your VAT registration number? You have to give your customers all this information, so make it easy for them to find. If you don’t, you just look like you have something to hide.
• Link the shopping cart Make it easy for people to checkout. (Better still, show them what’s in their cart… though that might take more than a minute to organise.)
• Get your search box ‘above the fold’, that is, visible on the page without scrolling down. One of the first things many users do when they arrive on your site is to look for a search box: they want to go where *they* choose, not where your navigation wants to send them. Make it easy for them to search. And make that search box big enough too: usability expert Jakob Nielsen recommends a box at least 27 characters wide, to accomodate multiple-word searches.
• Link payment and shipping methods I want to pay with PayPal and I want to be able to select next day delivery: don’t make me wait until the end of the checkout process to find out if it’s possible. Make this information easy to find.

Textual healing

• Rationalise text formatting If you do a lot of home page tweaks over a period of time, it’s easy to end up with ten different fonts using seventeen different colours. Tidy this up: you should have no more than two or three of each. And pick your colours carefully: people have a tendency to ignore big red text.
• Consistent capitalisation Welcome to Widgets R Us, your One Stop Shop for Wonderful widgets. Our Widgets are the best in the World. We know you’ll love our wonderful Widgets No. If you’re capitalising your brand names, be consistent about it. Resist the temptation to capitalise everything else.
• Get rid of exclamation marks Hello! Welcome to our website!! We hope you’ll have a great time shopping here!!!! Unless you’re a 14 year old writing on Livejournal, get rid of the exclamation marks. They make you look like - well, a 14 year old.
• Edit your text for human readers You already thought about search engines, right? You’ve got keywords in there, lots of them… so does your home page look like a list of keywords? Make it meaningful for people too. also linkage

Really saying something

• Make the title meaningful One of the most important things you can do to help search engines find and index your site is to get the title of the home page right. Many ecommerce applications, however, will just spew out the “name” of your shop. Take another look at this, and get your crucial keywords in there in a way that search engines can recognise, but more importantly, that human beings will want to click on.
• Write a meaningful tagline Instead of beginning with the ubiquitous “welcome to our website”, write a one sentence tagline that expresses what your site is about, or what your company does. Any first-time visitor should be able to suss you out from this.
• Organise your shop categories by what your buyers might be looking for You know (or you ought to) how your buyers will want to browse: match your shop categories to that, not to how you organise your stock. I’ve seen a lot of sellers recently who categorise by manufacturer: this might be useful as an additional filter if you sell a lot of designer names, but - say - organising frilly knickers by whether they’re made by Ann Summers or Leg Avenue is not helpful to the buyer who just wants to browse your knickers. And check that the order in which your category list appears has some kind of logic to it: alphabetical is good, the order in which you created the categories is probably not.
• Sense-check You already spell-checked, right? Read your text again, or get someone else to do it for you: spell-checkers won’t spot missing words, or correctly-spelt howlers like the one I saw recently: “gift wear”.
• Make images meaningful Product images should never be just illustration. If it’s something you sell, make it clickable, and buyable. If it’s not something you sell, then replace it with a picture of something you do sell. Why waste space enticing potential customers with a luscious image of something you’re not selling?

The Normal Person’s Guide to WordPress Themes

Last week, we looked at installing WordPress’s blogging software. If you’re playing along, you should have a WordPress install that looks something like the screenshot on the left. As well as starting writing, one of the first things you’ll probably want to do is to change the look of your blog. This is done with something WP calls “themes”.

A theme is a collection of files which modify the appearance and layout of your blog. WordPress separates the files that make your blog pretty from the files that make it work - so that you can change the appearance easily and quickly without needing to rebuild the core functionality of the program.

The least you need to know

• Find a theme you like
• Download and unzip it
• Upload the theme folder to wp-content/themes/
• Activate it in the Design section of your dashboard.

What to look for in a theme

Choosing a theme can be a overwhelming process. There are literally thousands out there to choose from, so where do you start? Think about what you’ll need from a theme first:

• do you want a casual feel, or something more formal and business-like?
• do you have a specific image you want to portray - sporty, fashionable, healthy - or will you be more abstract?
• what colours do you like? does your blog theme need to match branding you have elsewhere?
• what content will you have other than blog posts? do you need space to pimp your eBay listings, your website, or for other advertising?
• do you need space to import content from Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, elsewhere?
• how do you want the header to look? do you need space for your logo? or photographs? or do you want a very minimal header that leads straight into the main content?
• are you picky about which side the sidebar(s) go?
• where do you want the navigation placed: across the top, down the side, a mixture of both?
• do you like fixed-width layouts, or fluid-width which stretch to the full width of the browser window?
• do you want a reverse-chronological theme where the newest post is always at the top, or something more magazine-like and organised by category?

Many people begin with their colour requirements - “I want a red theme” - but as colour is one of the easiest things to change, it makes sense to start with the more fixed elements, like layout, sidebars, space for advertising, first. Pick a few themes that might be what you want, and preview them all on your own blog (see below): it’s surprising how different a theme can look when it’s using your own content.

Finding themes

The official WP theme directory has just started up again; it’s a little thin right now, but expect to see it grow rapidly. In the meantime, there are dozens if not hundreds of lists of WP themes for your perusing pleasure: here are a few I like:

• Smashing Magazine’s top 100 list with lovely big preview graphics
• WP Themes 360 has some nice designs
• WordPress.pro has a few designs which seem to have business potential
• Brian Gardner’s themes which include Revolution, on which TameBay was built
• Pingable’s list of 20 free magazine themes, some of which were nearly TameBay

Premium and sponsored themes

Most WordPress themes are free, donated to the community by their creators. A few are “premium”, that is, paid-for themes. Although these have the disadvantage that you have to pony up some dough, they have two advantages: firstly, you’re unlikely to find as many people using them as the popular freebies, and secondly, you may get some form of support from the designer, which you’re less likely to do with free themes.

Sponsored themes are a little more invidious: they are supported by advertising links in the footer and/or sidebars. Some people object to this, and some don’t, but it’s something to be aware of: you should know what you’re advertising on your own blog.

Making your own theme

It’s outside the scope of this blog post, but if you’re reasonably confident in HTML, CSS and PHP, you can make your own blog theme . This can be particularly useful if you want your blog to fit the design of a larger site, for example if you’re integrating it with your ecommerce store. WordPress give some advice to those embarking on this path.

Installing a theme

• Download and unzip your chosen theme
• Upload the entire theme folder (not just its contents) to /wp-content/themes/
• Click the “Design” tab on your dashboard
• Click the thumbnail of your new theme to preview it with your blog
• If you’re happy, click the “Activate…” link from the top right

Just testing

It’s easy, so test out a few themes you might like:

Next week, we’ll be looking at WordPress plugins, essential add-ons to make your blog a better place to play.

The Normal Person’s Guide to Installing WordPress

because there are no dummies or complete idiots around here.

This post is for Lynne, and a lot of other people recently who’ve asked me how to install WordPress. I’ve assumed some basic knowledge of t’internet and web hosting here, including how zip files and FTP work. If anything needs more clarification, leave me a comment.

Why WordPress?

There are lots of blog management systems, and not all of them take effort to install like WordPress does. If you use BlogSpot, for example, you can be up and running in a minute or two. But WordPress more than pays off a little effort to get started:

• the content stays on your own server and can be backed up, by you, so you know it’s always going to be there,
• the sheer range of stuff you can do with WordPress is unmatched by any other BMS I’ve seen,
• the community around WP is a great place to be,
• and it’s free.

So lets get started.

The least you need to know

• Download the latest version of WordPress from wordpress.org.
• Edit wp-config-sample.php with your own database details, and save as wp-config.php
• Upload to your hosting
• Open /wp-admin/install.php in your browser, and follow the instructions from there.

Sounds easy, yes? Lets look at each stage in detail.

Hosting

You will need some web hosting to run WordPress. The up-to-date minimum requirements are available via WP’s site: they’re pretty basic, and most web hosting accounts will be adequate. If, for example, you’re already running your own ecommerce site, you can almost certainly run a WP blog on the same hosting. If you’re not sure, WP provide a handy email to copy to your hosts to check.

If you don’t have hosting yet, WP have a number of recommended hosts: they’re all in the US, but that largely doesn’t matter, and several of them offer one-click WP install. This can be an advantage getting started, but do check that the version you’re being offered is the most recent one, and remember you’ll have to keep it updated yourself when new releases come out.

Get the software

You can always find the latest release of WordPress via wordpress.org. If you downloaded it a while back but haven’t installed it yet, check that there isn’t a newer release before you go any further: new releases add security features as well as functionality, so it’s important to keep your WP install up to date.

Once downloaded to your computer, you’ll need to unzip the software. If this doesn’t happen automatically (and it should), there are any number of free utilities to do this for you. Save everything on your PC somewhere where you can find it again easily.

Edit wp-config-sample.php

This is the file that gives WordPress the specific information about your own database installation. You’ll need to edit the bits in red (be careful you don’t delete any inverted commas by mistake):

define('DB_NAME', 'putyourdbnamehere');    // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'usernamehere');     // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'yourpasswordhere'); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');    // 99% chance you won't need to change this value 

The bits after // on each line are comments to help you.

Where do you find this info?

• Your hosting package may come with a database already set up. Check your control panel or the welcome email you received when you opened your account.
• You may need to manually set up a database yourself; look on your control panel for something like database or MySQL management.
• If in doubt, your hosts will be able to give you the information.

In the same file, you’ll see three “secret key” phrases: change these to something long and nonsensical.

Use Notepad or another plain text editor, *not* Word, to edit PHP files. Save the edited file as wp-config.php (.php is the file extension: if your text editor tries to call it wp-config.php.txt or similar, override that).

Upload WordPress

You now have a folder on your PC called Wordpress, with all the WP files in it: you need to upload the *contents* of that folder to the directory on your server where you want the blog to appear.

So now you need to decide what you want the URL of your blog to look like.

• If your blog is part of a larger site, you might want it in its own directory, for example www.domain.com/blog: upload the WP package to that directory.
• If the entire domain *is* your blog, then upload to the root public HTML directory (which might even be called public_html, depending on your hosts).

Don’t upload the WordPress folder itself, only its contents, or you’ll end up with URLs that look like www.domain.com/blog/wordpress.

Once the upload is complete, open [your blog directory]/wp-admin/install.php in your browser, and follow the on-screen instructions. You’ll need to tell WordPress the title of your blog and your email address, and then it will install everything for you. At the end of the installation, you’ll be given an admin password. This should also be emailed to you, but make a note of it now - WP generates some fantastically random passwords, so I’d make the next thing you do…

Set up your admin user account and password

Click the “users” link from the top right, and then the “admin” user name. You can fill out some important details here including how you want your name to display on your posts (unless you want to be called “admin” forever), and also change your password to something you can remember.

Now would also be a good time to bookmark your admin dashboard: it lives at /wp-admin/ if you forget.

And we’re done!

You should now have a plain-vanilla install of WordPress, that looks something like the screen shot to the left. This is now functional, and you can start writing: click “Write” from the top of your admin dashboard to write a post. WordPress comes with one post and one comment “pre-installed”; you probably want to delete these, so go into “Manage” to remove them.

It’s worth taking a bit of time to look around the WordPress dashboard at this point: generally, things you might want to use often (Write, Manage, Comments) are the big links on the left, and things you’ll use less often are the smaller links on the right. It can look a little daunting at first, but once you get used to what lives where, it’s really pretty straightforward.

Next weekend, we’ll be looking at making things pretty with WordPress themes.

R.O.EYE to support eBay affiliates in the UK

eBay have appointed R.O.EYE, a specialist affiliate marketing agency, to support the eBay Partner Network (EPN).

EPN was launched by eBay on April 1st, after many years of running an external affiliate scheme managed by Commission Junction. The affiliate scheme pays publishers (website owners) for sending customers to eBay with rewards paid based on new accounts open and activity on eBay such as purchases.

R.O.EYE aim to support the existing EPN team acting in a supporting role for existing publishers to bring more publishers on board, especially within the UK.

They’re available to contact through the R.O.EYE website, or by emailing Chris Worthy at R.O.EYE. If you have a website or application that can send traffic to eBay, they can assist you in making money from the users who click through your site to eBay.

eBay, Facebook and statistics.

As every avid viewer of Yes Prime Minister remembers: “statistics can be used to prove anything. Even the truth.” And whilst the headline from Hitwise (respected ‘internet numbers’ people) is accurate, “Facebook overtakes eBay to become third most visited website,” it only tells half the story.

Facebook has enjoyed an irresistible rise in the past two years and in July overtook eBay.co.uk, with 2.75% of UK internet visits, to become the third most visited website in the UK. Google is #1 and so far in the lead that it’s (quite literally) off the chart. Microsoft’s ‘mail.live.com‘ domain (Hotmail, MSN etc. to the rest of us) has benefitted from consolidating URLs and remains firmly established in second place, with a just over 3% of net visits.

And what of eBay? As you can see, it’s been on a largely static course for the past 24 months (note the summer dips and the Nov/Dec peaks) and that’s no real cause for concern. As is pointed out, these are the visits for eBay.co.uk and visits from UK users to eBay motors or the eBay.com domain are not included. Would it make a difference if UK visits to all eBay domains were totted up? I reckon.

This is a good news story for eBay and eBay sellers. Internet visits are on the rise. Newcomers (like Facebook) are going to emerge and, in the face of those, it is remarkable to maintain such a strong percentage share of visits. In real terms, it would seem, eBay.co.uk is seeing more traffic than it did two years ago. Critics will remark that June 2008 was eBay.co.uk’s low water mark in the past two years and, frankly, only time will tell whether that’s a blip or the start of a trend. For the time being, eBay.co.uk remains the British ecommerce toppermost of the poppermost in terms of visits. Not ‘arf.

Dan Wilson is a writer and consultant and the bestselling author of ‘Make Serious Money on eBay UK’.

New price structure for US eBay affiliates

eBay are changing the way that payments are made to US affiliates who introduce new buyers. Currently, ACRUs are compensated at a fixed fee, which increases the more new members you introduce: it’s currently $25 per member if you bring in fewer than 49 people a month, up to $35 if you bring in 30,000 or more.

For new affiliates from 1st August and for everyone from 1st November, this will change:

Each publisher will be placed in a quality tier at the end of each month based on that month’s and historical traffic. The tiers will range from $0 to $50, and the higher the expected lifetime value of the customers a publisher sends, the higher the tier the publisher will receive.

(Emphasis mine.) New affiliates will be placed in the lowest, $0 tier to start with, “while the system calculates an appropriate tier”. What a great way to pull people into the program.

Existing affiliates will, in September, get access to a new report that tells them the quality of the traffic they have been sending eBay, so that they can see if they’re getting a pay cut or not. Forgive me for being cynical, but I don’t see anyone coming out of this any better off, except eBay.

But I am extremely impressed that eBay think they are able to predict a customer’s lifetime worth to them so early on in the relationship. Perhaps they would like to pick my lottery numbers this week?

Amazon, Etsy, eBay and the eCommerce Land Grab

With much doom and gloom pervading comment about eBay, it’s easy to forget that ecommerce is still a frontier. The IMRG forecasts year on year ecommerce growth (in Britain, Europe, America and Asia) all the way to 2012. And even the very real threat of recession in the UK and US doesn’t seem likely to dent that. Even though eBay is languishing, Amazon has proved that the old guard can still find accelerating growth. The ecommerce land grab is still underway and there’s everything to play for.

With that in mind, an article from Y Combinator (a respected venture capitalist firm) called ‘Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund‘ makes for interesting reading. Not only does the piece prove that there’s still money out there for winning ideas but the comments regarding online auctions will be familiar to eBay sellers:

“Online auctions have more potential than most people currently realize. Auctions seem boring now because EBay is doing a bad job, but is still powerful enough that they have a de facto monopoly. Result: stagnation. But I suspect eBay could now be attacked on its home territory, and that this territory would, in the hands of a successful invader, turn out to be more valuable than it currently appears. As with dating, however, a startup that wants to do this has to expend more effort on their strategy for cracking the monopoly than on how their auction site will work.”

Y Combinator thinks that eBay’s dominance can and should be challenged. But it’s the belief that only the monopoly stands in eBay’s favour that should be most disquieting. eBay doesn’t have brilliant marketing, a superior product or a vibrant culture of innovation to protect it from an onslaught, it would seem.

One company that certainly can’t be criticised for lacking innovation is the crafts marketplace etsy, which has been in the news this week. Chad Dickerson, a former Yahoo executive, is joining etsy as Chief Technical Officer. Much of the coverage, mindful of Yahoo’s current difficulties, make much of this being a blow to Yahoo. And while that’s true, it’s also a huge boost for etsy: they’ve hired a talented operator from a big firm and that can only a be a vote of confidence. Even before this, etsy has been encroaching onto eBay’s territory and doing it with style, inventiveness and generating not a little admiration.

What does all this mean? Whilst eBay is struggling to find a little bit of ecommerce growth, expending a great deal of energy tinkering with feedback, search and fees, Amazon is successfully taking a good chunk of the fixed price action and attracting professional eBay sellers. Auctions are, it seems, up for grabs and yet eBay isn’t defending this flank and is concentrating on the faster growing But It Now business. Critically, eBay seems to be losing the battle: Amazon is growing faster than ecommerce and eBay isn’t. As for etsy, they’re a shining example of a specialist site taking some of eBay’s action and looking at a bright future.

eBay Inc. might be enjoying great results from Skype and PayPal but meagre growth in the marketplace business should be sounding alarm bells. eBay’s challenge is not just defending existing territory but squaring up to the frontier again and aggressively joining the land grab. Regrettably nothing in the Q2 results, report or investor call suggested that was the plan.

Dan Wilson is a writer and consultant and the bestselling author of ‘Make Serious Money on eBay UK’.

Putting Flickr photos in your blog’s feed

I took a lot of photos of eBay Live (and even more of Chicago), and now of course I have the perennial problem of just what to do with those holiday pics. Sticking them in Flickr and forgetting about them is one option; publishing great long blog post galleries so that everyone has to suffer looking through them seems to be the alternative.

Feedburner has come to my rescue. They have a new trick called Photo Splicer, which allows me to pull in Flickr photographs as entries in my main blog RSS feed. It’s a neat way to bring together a personal blog with your photographs, or of course to show more product photos to subscribers to your business blog. You’ll find Photo Splicer under the Optimise tag.

There’s also Link Splicer which allows you to pull in bookmarks from del.icio.us, Furl, Bloglines, Digg and ma.gnolia (sadly the two I actually use, StumbleUpon and Google Reader’s shared items, are not available at the moment). Links can be spliced either individually as you bookmark them, or as a once-a-day summary.

For those wondering exactly what Feedburner is, it’s a way to distribute the RSS feed from your blog which provides all sorts of information for stats-obsessives (like me) about how your feed is being read, and all sorts of useful tricks for your subscribers, like being able to subscribe via email. If you have a blog, give it a go.

eBay.ebay? Yes, says ICANN

A major shakeup in the way that domain names are created has been approved by the organisation which oversees the system of web addresses. ICANN today approved a new way of creating domain names, which will see traditional suffixes like .com, .net and .co.uk joined by others such as .bank, .bet, .school, .shopping or .hotel.

As well as these generic TLDs, the owners of existing trademarks are expected to buy their own names: .ebay is expected to be just one such example. Cities such as New York and Berlin are said to be pursuing .nyc and .berlin. It will also be possible to create full domain names in alphabets other than our own Roman one.

However, if you’re planning to buy your own name as a vanity project - and I have to say, .sue has a certain ring to it; just think of all the lawyers I could sell it to - you might need to think again: the new domain names will cost at least $100,000.

The seven deadly sins of shopping carts

A PayPal survey of online shoppers reveals the reasons that buyers abandon their shopping carts. Nearly half blamed too-high shipping costs, whereas - unsurprisingly in a survey commissioned by PayPal - a fifth said that their preferred method of payment wasn’t available and they couldn’t be bothered to go and find a card to pay.

With more and more eBay sellers every day starting up their own websites, it’s essential to get your shopping cart right. Estimates are that two-thirds of shoppers abandon their carts with goods in them but unpaid for; more cheeringly, one third of shoppers may return to complete the transaction later. Here are some things to avoid if you want your customers to have a heavenly checkout experience.

1. Greed : “I’ll charge what I like for postage”

According to PayPal, 43% of abandoned carts are due to shipping charges being too high. 36% of those surveyed said that the total cost was too high, so we might guess that shipping charges played a part in this too. I’m very surprised not to see “no postage fees specified” on PayPal’s list too, because for me, having to go look elsewhere to find what shipping is going to cost me, is my number one reason for abandoning my own carts.

So be upfront about your shipping. If you have a complicated tariff and lots of international customers, consider at least putting in a link to shipping prices from the cart. Better still, show UK shipping by default and allow customers to alter that to their own country, so that they can see as they shop what extras they’re going to be charged.

2. Sloth : “it’ll be delivered when I feel like it”

We all know if you’re buying from the internet, you should allow plenty of time for delivery. We all know that doesn’t happen. Offering next day or other super-quick shipping, with details of how (courier, Special Delivery, etc.) and when (”order in the next 30 minutes for delivery tomorrow”) delivery will take place can clinch you those desperate last-minute orders. Displaying this as part of the shopping cart encourages buyers to check out sooner rather than later.

3. Wrath : “I hate PayPal!”

As merchants, some of us don’t like it, but PayPal’s reach into the ecommerce world grows ever longer and stronger. Your buyers like PayPal: they’ve been sold on the security aspect, but more importantly, they like not having to get off their bottoms and find their credit card. You like that too: PayPal keeps them at the computer, paying you, instead of wandering off and getting distracted. Other shoppers, of course, don’t or won’t have a PayPal account. Offer both PayPal and a direct credit card payment options; that way, you keep everyone happy.

4. Lust : “I want your email address”

Though you might have good reasons for it, don’t force your shoppers to create an account before they can check out. The more steps you introduce into your checkout flow, the more chance your shoppers have to quit. Don’t take them out of that flow to create an account. Worse still, don’t create an account for them, and then require them to remember the details next time they shop: 14% of PayPal’s survey respondants stopped shopping because they couldn’t remember their user names and passwords on the merchant’s site.

5. Gluttony : “my shopping cart ate your shopping”

French clothing site La Redoute is the worst sinner I know here; if you’re not signed into your account, their shopping cart forgets its contents within the hour. When I go shopping, I’m not thinking about signing into my account; I’m thinking about shoes. So have your shopping cart remember what’s put into it. With a third of shoppers returning hours or even days later to complete their purchase, it pays to allow shoppers to leave items in their carts.

6. Envy : “I’ll keep my information to myself”

According to PayPal, 16% of shoppers abandoned their shopping because they couldn’t contact customer support. Be reassuring. Your shopping cart page should have links to FAQs, shipping details (tariffs and details of services used) and most importantly, how to contact you in case of a question: a phone number as well as email contact could make all the difference here.

7. Pride : sometimes, you have to let it go

A couple of wholesalers I use have an annoying new feature on their shopping carts: they email you if you’ve abandoned them. If that isn’t bad enough, I once had a phonecall, from India, “did you know you haven’t paid for what’s in your shopping cart?” Er, yes, and I doubt I will do now. Make it easy for your customers to pay, but for goodness’ sake, don’t try and annoy them into buying.

What have you done with the shopping cart on your website to make sure your customers complete their purchase? Leave us a comment.

eBay Partner Network partners with Pepperjam

The eBay Partner Network, eBay’s in-house affliate scheme, is to partner with affiliate network Pepperjam to bring EPN to more affiliate marketers. The move comes just months after eBay left Commission Junction, which won’t do the acrimonious relationship between the two networks any good.

Via Affiliate Tip.

eBay affiliates’ deadline extended

The eBay Partner Network has given affiliates an extra month to move their links from Commission Junction to the new network. CJ links will now cease to be valid on 31st May. This applies to Half.com and all eBay countries except Belgium, Netherlands, Hong Kong, and Singapore, which will still switch on 30th April.

eBay say that more than two-thirds of traffic has already moved to the new system. However, switching earlier rather than later should benefit affiliates, because clicks on the CJ system during May which convert into purchases or registrations in June will *not* be paid out. Dull though it is, don’t put off changing your links til the end of next month!

Blog 101 : getting started

Sometimes you get asked the same question over and over again. Starting blogging has been one of those questions for me recently, so I thought over the weekends, when there isn’t much eBay news, we’d take a look at getting started on a blog of your own.

One of the reasons blogging has taken the internet by storm is that it’s so easy to get started. All you need is a bit of software, plus something to say. I’ll assume for the moment you can supply the something to say yourself; if not, you might want to reconsider whether a blog is what you really want.

Today I’m going to consider two of the biggest blog management systems, Blogger’s Blogspot and Wordpress. Not because they’re the biggest, but because they represent the main choice you have to make: quick and easy and absolutely free, versus good.

Blogspot

Blogger is one of the longest established blogging services there is. They’re currently owned by Google, and Blogspot is their free hosting service. Getting started with Blogspot is incredibly simple: a few clicks, select the name of your blog, pick from one of a dozen or so free styles, and you can start posting. It costs nothing and you don’t need to sign up for any web hosting: you can literally have a blog up and running in a couple of minutes.

Blogspot is amazingly easy to use, but it has two huge disadvantages. Firstly, the commenting system is a nightmare. Click on the “leave a comment” system on any Blogger blog and you’re taken off the blog you’re on, and onto a Blogger branded page. The original post you’re commenting on has disappeared, and you have a tiny little window to type into. It’s not pretty, and you can’t *make* it pretty.

Perhaps even more importantly, with Blogspot, I’m always aware that my content is at the mercy of Google. I don’t know that they’ve ever lost content, but if I’ve put effort into writing the words, I want to know they’re safe. That means keeping them on my server, and backing them up on my PC, neither of which Blogger wants to let me do.

WordPress

WordPress, on the other hand, takes a little more effort to get started. You need to download the software from their website, and upload it to your own web host. Then you need to install it. If you’ve done this kind of thing before, perhaps with forum software, it’s not difficult, but for the resolutely non-techy, it can be daunting. (WordPress do offer a hosted service too, but I am assuming for most of our readers, this will of no use as you are not allowed to post any commercial content.)

Is it worth the effort? Absolutely. Blogspot does exactly what it says on the tin: it takes your posts, and it publishes them. But if you want to go beyond that, I cannot recommend WordPress highly enough. Want comments that live on your blog? WordPress does that. Want to back up your blog on your own computer? WP can do that. Want polls in your posts? Built-in “about me” or other static pages? built-in stats? clickable smilies? galleries of pictures in your posts? WordPress can do all of that, and much, much more.

So which to choose?

For me, the choice is pretty straightforward. If

• you’re new to this whole blogging malarky and don’t know if you’re really going to stick with it
• you’re terrified of anything technical
• you’re really, really skint and can’t afford even the cheapest web hosting

and your blog is only going to be about you talking - perhaps a “new products and special offers” section on your website, or just a personal diary where you don’t even want any interaction - then Blogspot will do.

But if

• you want real interaction with your readers by way of commenting and more
• you want more than just a list of posts
• you want to own and keep your own words

then for me, WordPress is the only way to go.

How about you? If you have a blog, what does it run on? Are you happy with that? Leave us a comment - and a link.

• Recent Comments

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