Author: DESMOND K

Why You Should Start An Online Clothing Business Today

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The multi-billion dollar clothing and footwear industry seems to have survived the economic turmoil although exercise apparel and designer clothing have taken a bit of a hit this past year or so. However, you’d be hard-pressed to notice with celebrities still showing up in droves at movie premieres, wearing the hottest names in fashion. All in all, it’s back to business as usual for arguably the most glamorous of industries.

What does this mean to you? Well, now is perhaps the perfect time to start an online clothing business.

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Unusual Small Business Opportunities Online – Lucrative Possibilities

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Businesses are getting more and more creative when it comes to marketing their products and services over the Internet. Every day, we see more unusual small business opportunities cropping up all over. There are tons of web stores selling shoes, apparels, pharmaceuticals and electronics but now traditional offline businesses are making their presence felt as well. We’re talking about laundromats, mattress cleaning businesses and even photo studios.

Businesses cannot afford not to be online nowadays. It does not make sense to be online for the sake of merely having a web presence, of course. Going online is a chance to promote your brand even further and make more money in the process.

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Retain Customers With Reward Points

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Ecommerce statistcs and starting a new business gurus constantly state that customer retention is an important factor in the survival and growth of a company. It does not matter if you are a manufacturer specializing in the production of specialized instruments with two or three clients or an online web store with thousands of customers — every customer is important. Remember that one bad remark can go a long way towards destroying a company’s credibility and eliminating a customer base regardless of its size.

In this article we will explore the use of reward points (a feature available with InstanteStore’s shopping cart service) in retaining customers as well as improving sales conversions for new visitors.

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Take Your Retail Store Online And Make More Money

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Are stores with dotcoms in their names slowly eating away at your offline retail business? Do you know you can actually do something about this without having to fork out very much?

Every day, more conventional offline retail businesses join the click-and-mortar bandwagon. This way, traditional retail stores can enjoy the best of both worlds. Traditional retail outlets already have invaluable customer service experience, established rapport with reliable suppliers, marketing planning insights and brand names that have seen years of PR investment. Steps to starting an Internet business for a traditional brick-and-mortar company aren’t rocket science. By taking their brands online, companies can look forward to widening their market, increasing their brand awareness, improving their economies of scale and making more money in the process. And companies can achieve this without having to rely on heavy financing.

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The Art Of Choosing Domain Names

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In order to start on online business you need a good domain name. Choosing an appropriate domain name should be right up there near the top of your business start up checklist. Many people have little or no idea of the importance that domain names (as well as business or site names) have on the SEO aspects of sites.

There are cases such as “dell.com”, for example, where the domain name in itself does not give any indication as to what the company is all about. If you didn’t know anything about computers or had been living in a cave for the last 15 or so years, then you probably wouldn’t know what sort of business Dell is. But since we do know that dell.com is the company site for the computer company Dell, and since Dell is in itself an extremely well-known brand name, they definitely don’t have any trouble with name recognition. However, having a site name that is “non-descriptive” is the exception rather than the rule.

In this article, we continue our series of tips on starting your own business by looking at ways of choosing good domain names for your online business. We’ll also suggest how you should go about exploring alternatives if you cannot get the exact domain name of your choice.

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Leverage On The Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing

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We covered affiliate marketing from a publisher’s (resource sites, blogs) perspective in a previous article. Loads of people around the world earn additional income with the help of affiliate marketing while a number of others earn a hefty amount by doing it full time, making it one of the top ways to earn extra income.

Affiliate marketing is also one of the top ways to earn extra income for merchants as well. In this article we will look at how merchants can make full use of affiliate marketing to improve sales. This method is especially beneficial for new web stores which need to get out there and into the action fast. Marketing your products properly by making use of an existing web of affiliate marketing sites will result in higher targeted traffic and thus better conversion rates.

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Affiliate Marketing – Myths, Mistakes And Money Making

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Affiliate marketing is a great way to make extra money online by promoting someone else’s products or services. It is definitely a home based online business opportunity that’s been around for a while now which can be potentially very lucrative.

Now making money from affiliate marketing may sound like easy pickings, but it’s not. Don’t get us wrong – we don’t intend to ruin anyone’s dreams of making money via affiliate marketing – but what we do want to do with this article is give our readers a clearer picture about what affiliate marketing is all about and how to go about doing it properly (via marketing tips for websites, for instance).

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Merchant Account – Getting Started

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There are many things that go on behind the scenes of ecommerce shopping cart software storefronts so that everything runs smoothly. We have already mentioned quite a few of these goings-on in our articles on starting your own business, specially tailored towards home business start up newbies.

If you intend to operate a web store or a few ecommerce shopping cart software storefronts, the main mode of payment for your customers would likely be credit cards. One way to go about receiving funds via credit cards is through a merchant account. As mentioned in an earlier article, you can apply for a merchant account through merchant service providers (MSPs) such as banks or via independent service organizations (ISOs), third party organizations that enable registered merchants to accept charge or credit cards.

However, the application process can be cumbersome at times. In this article, we will examine the requirements necessary for a merchant account application to be given the green light.

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A Brief Insight Into Payment Gateways

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If your store is doing really well and getting orders day and night, there’s no way that you’re going to able to stay awake perpetually to process orders even if you’re an insomniac. Thankfully, there is a solution that enables payment to be processed 24/7 while allowing e-store owners around the world to get a good night’s rest. Needless to say, our solution has this good free shopping cart software feature.

Enter Payment Gateways. A payment gateway is like a point-of-sale terminal at conventional retail outlets. It processes credit card orders and authorizes payments in real-time while keeping all transaction information safe and secure. Payment gateway integration is one of the first shopping cart features merchants usually look for and, as mentioned before, this good free shopping cart software feature is available (for major gateways) at InstanteStore. There are actually two main types of payment gateway, as we’ve mentioned in a previous article. In this article we will go a bit deeper and explore the differences between the two, and how particular aspects of each might affect merchants.

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What Should You Look For In A Payment Gateway?

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The InstanteStore ecommerce solution, which comes complete with online shopping cart checkout website design, supports many payment gateways. There is the popular shopping cart Authorize Net, 2Checkout, PayPal Website Payments Pro and LinkPoint International, to name a few. Many ecommerce software packages are now integrated with echeck ecommerce shopping cart solutions as well.

When looking for a payment gateway, many merchants simply search for the most popular ones and select the one at the top of the list. Some will do a bit of homework to check out the features of particular gateways and compare rates but many do not even know what to look out for. Always select a payment gateway or payment gateways that can best serve your needs before making a decision.

In this article we hope to share a few insights on the characteristics of payment gateways that budding online entrepreneurs should look out for. Mind you, if you are looking for a perfect solution, you will not find it. That said, quite a few gateways out there have served many merchants well over the years.

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