Online shopping is the process consumers go through to purchase products or services over the internet. It is the perfect meeting point through Internet between buyers and sellers and an electronic application used for B2B (Business to business) and B2C (Business to consumers).

Just as renting shops in the street, it is another form of buying and selling through internet in a simplest way: the sellers without facing any trouble of having any shops can sell their items and the buyers with no hassle of going to the shops in person can buy the products.

The sellers have to select the size of the shop. The items appear on the main site listing as well as in the shop. Customers longing to buy the goods contact the sellers, by email, and the sellers arrange for payment and delivery of the products.

Nearly every item can be bought and sold in this way: baby accessories, cars, boys clothing, mobility scooter, sound systems, motor spare parts, boating accessories, books, jewelleries, toys and games, etc.

Here the shop owner will have a chance to possess separate shop name, logo, short description, unique web address and can do advertisements regarding the products in the main listing as well as in that specific product category. This advertising system works more than a window display does. Here the buyers can get a synopsis of the product itself.

The buyers also can enjoy several advantages.

They can save their time: they barely have to invest time to find their desired stuffs. They only need to browse in the search option or else they can find their ultimate products in the respective product category option.

Even when they do not possess money, they can easily do the shopping by simply filling in the credit card number. Thus it is very much convenient for the buyers to purchase any product, online.

Buyers are just one click away to another seller. Like the non-electronic shopping, here too lies a stiff competition. So there is the least possibility, that the buyers can be deceived. Once they feel swindled, they just click on to another seller.

The sellers too can reap the advantages by not holding a shop to keep their stock.

There are some disadvantages too: the security of the saleable product and personal buyer-to-seller interaction which so many marketing pundits still today term the best criteria without which shopping can not stand. Steps are taken to erase these problems, also.

The advantages really do outweigh the disadvantages in many respects and in today’s busy world, it is very much required to have online shopping for its feasibility on the sellers’ parts to sell stuffs and on the buyers viewpoint to purchase them, in a simplest way.

Internet business services are booming. With more and more people going on line, it is now profitable to deliver business services through the web.

Internet business services require less overhead—you no longer need a brick and mortar store—and it also allows you to provide niche business services and products that may have gathered dust in traditional locations. Plus, internet business services give you the advantage of being able to work at home!

However, not all business services succeed. Before you invest in your business services, you have to determine if your business services will attract enough customers to generate a profit.

And the only way to determine if your internet business services has potential is to conduct research. Use solid facts to serve as the foundation of your business services. One thing you have to find out is if there is a sufficient demand for your internet business services.

Let’s say your business services involve selling diet pills in the Philippines. How much does the average person make, what price points would they be open to, and does the majority of their population fall under the age group and income bracket that your business service will cater to? If there aren’t enough consumers, then no amount of marketing will help.

You also have to look at the competition. What are other business services meet the same need? There may not be that many business services supplying diet pills, but if there are a number of diet teas then they will be eating into the market. Better find another niche with less competition.

You should also look at your revenue streams. How can your business services earn? Will you be getting your income from online sales, affiliate commission revenue, advertising revenue, email marketing?

Once you’ve determined that you have potentially successful business services, work on creating a unique, interesting and useful website. Launch it—and let the sales roll in!

Setting up an online store

It is said that ebay is the very opposite to a physical company or career, such as brick and mortar. It is also said that ebay can significantly increase the odds of selling what you are intending to get rid of. Gaining profit is as easy as 123 on an online sales and auction block. An online ebay store is a very simple and effective method of building a profitable and successful business. By having an ebay store of your own, you make it possible for everyone to view what you are dealing with all in one convenient place. When everything you are selling is grouped on one site, you then manage to obtain a larger audience, and cover your demographics.

This not only entices multiple purchases, but also looks professional in the process. This again will drive more business your way. By having a larger stock and inventory, then you may feel you need, will allow you to cross-reference as well. Whenever you have an ebay icon in your seller box, ebay in turn supports the operator, and gives many promotions for their business. The ebay directory is set up to promote all stores within association, and you will have your own address on the web. It is now very easy for you to get information to your buyers such as, product promotions and or sales, by way of the ebay e-mail marketing tools. These tools are available to anyone associated with ebay. This e-mail service is another great way to generate further, or repeat sales for the clients. Is makes for a very strong networking tool.

It is not hard to set up an ebay store, in fact once you do set one up you will ask yourself why you have not done it sooner. You will need a Pay Pal account that is in good standing, store prices and levels, and a feedback level of 20 or above. The cost of an ebay store can vary; it can be very cheap all the way up to near bank breaking, depending on the actions of the account. It is totally up to you and your business to set the cost for the store. There are three levels of ebay store accounts, basic being a very simple account that primarily caters to the small business person. The second account is the featured account. This account is for medium growth sellers that are looking to expand in the near future. Finally the anchor account, this is for the sellers that have extremely high volumes of traffic and sales. What this all boils down to is, the more you spend on your account the more traffic you can expect to your product. This however does not ensure more sales. To obtain more sales to relate to the traffic you will need the drive to succeed.

Every website owner has a somewhat unhealthy obsession with driving more traffic to their site. We all want more traffic, if for nothing else to be able to brag to others how many unique visitors we've received. Competition among web owners aside, actually doing something with that traffic is equally as important as getting it. Yet for some reason, most site owners make the mistake of focusing most of their time on getting more traffic and rarely, if ever, focus on improving their conversion rate.

What is a conversion?

A conversion happens whenever a visitor to your site performs a desired action. It might be purchasing a product, signing up for a newsletter, signing up for an account, or even clicking on an advertisement (although I'd advise against making the goal of your site to have someone click away from it). One way or another, if you have a site, you've got a desired action that you want the user to perform.

How big of a difference can it make?

Consider Company A and Company B. Both sell online subscriptions to their news services for a one-time fee of $100. They each attract 1000 unique visitors per day. Company A converts 2% of their visitors whereas Company B converts 5%. Big deal right? How much does 3% really matter? Well, Company A sells 20 subscriptions per day, or 7,300 per year for $730,000 of revenue. Not bad. But Company B sells 50 subscriptions per day, or 18,250 per year for $1,825,000 of revenue!

Without any variation in traffic, you can improve conversion rate on your site and drastically increase revenue. Now, is increasing from 2% to 5% going be a challenge? Certainly, but it is by no means impossible and in most cases is probably easier than you think.

What's a good conversion rate?

Some people will tell you that an “average” conversion rate is 2%-5% and an “amazing” conversion rate is 10%-15%. To me, that's a broad statement. I'm not saying that you should completely ignore those numbers, just that you should understand where they are coming from. Those numbers tend to apply to e-commerce sites selling to consumers. They also don't factor in where traffic is coming from, product pricing, and about a hundred other potential factors that could affect your conversion rate.

There are times when a 2% conversion rate is phenomenal. For example, if you are selling software licenses for $20,000, converting 1 in 50 visitors is pretty exemplary. On the flip side, if your goal is to have people sign up for a football newsletter and all of your traffic is coming from an ad you placed on NFL.com, 15% might be considered really poor.

My answer to “what's a good conversion rate” is any conversion rate that's better than your current one.

Start by doing a self-evaluation and set a baseline

Before you can even think about trying to increase your conversion rate, you need to have a system in place to track your current conversions. In its simplest form, conversion rate can be calculated by dividing the number of conversions into the number of visitors to your site for a specified time period. Most site owners will want more in depth statistics (such as what page visitors came from and what pages potential customers left their site from) so I would recommend a web analytics program like the free Google Analytics that provides in-depth reporting and can calculate your conversion rates for you.

How will I know if my changes worked?

In my mind, the only way to think about conversion rate is to start at your current rate and start striving to convert 100% of the visitors to your site. Is that ever going to happen? Probably not, but as Les Brown said - “shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.” Shoot for 100% conversion rate and even if you don't get there, in attempting to do so you'll be instilling the necessary qualities for amazing improvements.

With that in mind, you should begin the process of trying to improve your conversion rate from your baseline. The bad news when it comes to increasing conversion rate is that there is no “one thing” that every site owner can do to increase it. The good news is that there are literally thousands of things that you can try that might increase it. Each one of those things might help, or each might hurt.

And therein lies the key to success in increasing conversion rate – testing, evaluating, and then testing and evaluating some more. Each time you should be striving to “beat your previous best.” If you went from 2% to 2.2%, keep the change and try for 2.5% with your next change. If you went from 2% to 1.5%, undo the change and try to get back over 2% with your next change. In general, you should give a sufficient amount of time to evaluate a change – I generally use one month as a rule of thumb, but you should factor in how much traffic you get and how large the change is when determining how long collect data for before evaluating a change.

What type of changes should I make?

As I mentioned before, there are thousands of things that you can change that can affect conversion rates. So where should you start? Start by walking in the shoes of your customer. Using the example of an e-commerce site, there are several types of customers that find your site. For the customer looking to buy immediately, is it easy to find the “buy” button or do you have to look around for it? For the customer wanting more information (product info, shipping info, or info about your business), is that easy to find? And for customers just browsing, do you have a way to entice them to buy, or at least entice them to sign up for a newsletter so that you can try to convert them at a later time?

Asking yourself those questions should result in several subtle changes and probably a few not-so-subtle changes that you can make. In addition, ask yourself whether or not the design of your site - logo, layout, colors, and font - appeal to senses and make it easy for people to find what they're looking for.

You should also seriously consider the content of your text. Is it possible that some people don't understand what your product or service does? Could international users interpret your phrases differently than domestic users, and if so, is there a way you could re-word your copy to avoid confusion? Ad copy is a funny thing – a subtle word change can often drastically affect conversion rates. The only way to know is to test.

Remember, you should only make one change at a time to be able to properly evaluate it. Each change will help point you in the right direction of the next change. Much like SEO, increasing conversion rate is not a one time event, it is an improvement process that you facilitate over the life of your site. That said, it is not an extremely difficult process, and when used in conjunction with sound SEO it can bring results to your site that you could have never imagined.

You've spent time, energy and money promoting your business. Paying customers are beginning to notice you. Any second now, you will make your first sale! The concept is exciting! And frightening! Most new business owners have few customers, and although their marketing efforts are beginning to pay off, it is necessary to make the most of every customer, especially the ones that buy something.

The techniques I'm about to share with you are time tested and proven to be effective, however, they are often overlooked by business owners. They are basic ways to add additional profit to every transaction.

Follow up. This little gem has been used by merchants since the time of the pharaohs. When you make your first sale, you MUST follow-up with the customer. Send them a "thank you" email and include an advertisement for other products you sell. Also, don't let the relationship end! Follow-up at regular intervals; once every few weeks, or once a month. Add them to a mailing list. You could even automate this with the use of an email autoresponder. Isn't technology wonderful?

Upsell! Think about it. If you went to a department store to buy a transistor radio, you are also going to need batteries. You might even need an earpiece. You can upsell to your internet customers the same way. When they're at your order page, tell them about a few extra related products you have for sale. Offer to add to add it to their original order as a convenience to them.

Referrals. You know your customer is going to love whatever you're selling them. They're going to tell their friends about it. Tell your customer if they refer four customers to your web site, they will receive a full rebate of their purchase price. You get the customers money up front and they will send you four more customers. This will effectively multiply your original profit by a factor of three!

Affiliate Programs. Related to the technique above, but with subtle differences. When you sell a product, give your customers the option of joining an affiliate program so they can make commissions selling your product. This will multiply the sale you just made and provide you with a residual source of new customers.

Sell the reprint/reproduction rights to your products. This is VERY profitable when selling Information products, but could work in other areas as well. Include your ad inside the product for other products you sell. You could make sales for the reproduction rights AND sales on the products advertised inside. This is sometimes referred to as "viral Marketing"; because the person to whom you sold the reprint rights will distribute their product widely with your offers inside.

Joint Ventures. This is the old "two heads are better than one" scenario modified for internet profit! Cross promote your product with other businesses' products in a package deal. You can include ad copy for other products you sell and have other businesses selling for you.

Coupons. Here's another classic easily adapted to online sales. When you ship out or deliver your product, include a coupon good for a discount on other related products you sell in the package. You are rewarding your customer for the business and it will dramatically increase the odds that they will buy more products from you.

Send a catalog. If you think the internet has replaced the paper catalogs of old, then think again! Catalog marketing is very effective, even today. Send your customers a catalog of add-on products for the original product they purchased. This could be upgrades, special services, attachments, etc. If they enjoy your product they will buy the extra add-ons.

Gift Certificates. It's getting more and more difficult to give gifts these days. Solution? Gift certificates! When you sell a gift certificate, you've solved a problem for your customer, plus you'll make sales from the purchase of the gift certificate. When the recipient cashes it in, you have the opportunity to upsell.

Free Bonuses. People LOVE freebies! Send your customers free gifts with their product package. The freebies should have your ad printed on them. For businesses selling physical goods, It could be bumper stickers, ball caps, t-shirts etc. This will allow other people to see your ad and order. If your product is electronic or digital, it's even easier, because the giveaway will usually cost you less.

There are countless other ways to maximize your sales. The purpose of this article is merely to open your eyes to the fact that the quality of the relationship you build with your customer is what increases your profit. The underlying idea is to build trust. If your customer considers you a valuable and trusted resource, you will be rewarded with more profits!

Over 35 million people in the United States have opted for the use of contact lenses, over other means of vision correction - the main reason being the advantage in terms of vision improvement and convenience of wear. The problem, however, is where to purchase them from, as it is not very easy to do so. Of late, more and more people are turning towards online sources for their purchase of contact lenses. One of the major advantages of buying contact lenses on the Internet is the ease with which you can source your requirements from the comforts of your home.

The Convenience Of Buying Online
No more, the inconvenience of making that trip to the local pharmacy, every time you need to replace your contact lenses. With the type of busy lifestyles that many people have, they may not find it convenient to repeatedly visit the local pharmacy or a merchandiser, every time they need their contact lenses replaced, especially as most contact lenses available today are disposables, whether one day disposables, 1 to 2 week disposables, or 30 day disposable contact lenses.

With the kind of premium many place on their time, online buying saves them time, as it takes a few minutes to reorder their lenses, once they have their prescription. Through the Internet, you have the advantage of gathering price and other information from a variety of online sources, comparing the same, and taking your pick of the best offer. You can compare price, shipping costs, delivery times, and quantity discounts, in addition to rebates and special offers, if any, among other information, from the reputed online contact lenses sources.

There are many other advantages of buying contact lenses on the Internet. Let us look at some of the advantages that online purchasing offers.

Buying Less Expensive Contact Lenses
Other than the convenience of buying from the comforts of your home, through the Internet you can source contact lenses from a multitude of suppliers and buy from the least expensive source.

However, keep in mind the subtle difference between contact lenses being ‘less expensive’ and ‘value’ of the contact lenses. To get the better value, look to buy contact lenses from reputable online sources. Reputed manufacturers of contact lenses will allow reputable online websites to display their brand logo. If you are still looking for further less expensive contact lenses, go for generic options available, in place of branded products.

According to a March 2004 report from the Federal Trade Commission, their survey “ . . . indicates that there is not a significant difference in price between mass merchandisers and Internet lens sellers, online sales may have a significant convenience advantage for some consumers.”

Buying online saves you the multiple trips to a ‘mass merchandiser,’ if your prescription is not available on your first visit, and you may have to wait in line, too.

Discount Contact Lenses
Through the Internet, it becomes easy for you to search for contact lenses websites that supply most brands of reputed contact lenses, at highly discounted prices. When compared to the prices you can buy them at from the shops in your neighborhood, you will find that the price difference is as much as 50 percent to 70 percent. These websites can afford to sell at such discounted prices as they, on an average, sell tens of thousands of a variety of contact lenses globally, each month.

Daily disposable contact lenses, bifocal lenses, contact lenses for astigmatism, special effect contact lenses for special occasions - such as Halloween or Valentine’s Day – and a variety of other contact lenses from a myriad of manufacturers, including reputed manufacturers, such as Acuvue, or CIBA Vision, can be purchased at heavily discounted prices.

Even after considering the shipping costs involved, buying contact lenses on the Internet is always a bargain, though in most cases shipping is free, and the delivery is efficient. The main reason why online contact lens sellers are able to offer you such unbeatable prices is that they hardly have any overhead. Every time you make a purchase on the Internet you save quite a bundle, and with the number of times you need to fill your prescription for disposable contact lenses, your savings can be tremendous.

The Choice From A Large Selection
When buying your contact lenses from conventional sources, your choice for selection is very limited. Most merchandisers will have limited stocks from limited suppliers, limiting your choice.

The Internet offers you a variety that is endless. You have the convenience of selecting from all the major manufacturers of contact lenses, and comparing their various features. If you are shopping for non-prescription, costume contact lenses with no corrective power, the choice for selection can be mind-boggling. There is never a question of your ‘choice’ being out of stock, as you can always find it at any of the many online stores.

If you are looking for branded color contact lenses, such as from Acuvue, or CIBA Vision, they are always available, and you can have your selection delivered to you in a matter of days.

Even with your prescription contact lenses, the selection is wide enough for you to fill your prescription with ease. Get yourself a prescription from your optometrist, go online, browse through the various websites, select the contact lenses that you like, and hit the button. That is all it takes.

A Word Of Caution
More and more wearers are seeing the advantages of buying contact lenses on the Internet. Still you need to approach the online sources with a bit of caution. Ensure that you are buying online only from reputed sources, and not from some ‘fly-by-night’ operation. You may be getting ‘cheaper’ contact lenses from some sources, but ensure that they are legal and above board.

When you visit a website selling contact lenses, look for that Verisign logo. This will ensure that your personal information -including credit card information, among other forms of payment - cannot be intercepted by any third party.

Use the same common sense you would use when buying anything from online sources for a great online shopping experience.