Celebrate Labor Day and welcome relaxation with new September homepage graphics, created just for you by our design team. Show site visitors your support for the month that honors the working man and woman.

To save a graphic for uploading, right click on the image and hit Save Image As.

Uploading your New Homepage Graphic
From the admin area of your site, click Design and then click on Website Text. Under Home/Welcome Pages, find Article 2 (Default.asp). Click on the number 2, and then upload the image via the Easy Editor tool. Click “Copy HTML to Parent Window”, save your changes and now your new graphic should be on your homepage.

These copyrighted graphics are intended for the sole use of Volusion clients only. Use of these graphics by other sites or competitors is strictly prohibited and can result in legal action against the offending parties.

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You realize that relationships are give/take, and in this one, you’ve realized you are giving much more than you should be. It started off so great though. As time wore on, you found more and more demands made of you with so much less in return. Honestly, how much more can you really take?

It’s time to end your long relationship selling on eBay and create your own store.

Between listing fees, commission fees, and the other random fees that eBay manages to squeeze out of its sellers, deciphering an eBay seller’s invoice is about as easy as figuring out federal tax codes. As difficult as it is to figure out exactly how much it costs to sell on eBay, it is not difficult to see that sellers’ fees are higher on eBay than they have ever been. There is also no way to know when eBay plans to raise fees again.

As irritating as higher fees can be, coming into ecommerce from eBay can be intimidating. eBay hovers in the top 20 most visited sites on the web and doesn’t show signs of stopping. eBay sellers depend on this kind of traffic, but taking proactive steps to create your own traffic can make all the difference.

Here are a few steps you can take to ease the transition into your own store.

1.) Don’t quit eBay “cold turkey.” Building a strong presence online takes time. There aren’t many ways around that and stores that flourish immediately truly are the exception. Accept this and keep up your eBay store to get some sales. This will give you the time to start building up your store.

2.) Go after the easiest customers to reach—your own. Send an email to all of your existing customers to tell them about your new store. You might want to give them a coupon or exclusive offer to entice them to visit.

3.) Get an online presence outside your store as well. Post to forums and ezines in your industry. Create your own blog. Exchange links with related sites. (See: Using Link Sharing to Boost Search Engine Results). This will allow you to build up back links which will only help your site with search engines.

4.) Use an affiliate program to gain traffic from other sources. Find sites in your industry and pay them a small fee in exchange for sales coming from their site.

5.) Start a pay-per-click campaign. Pay-per-click ads can become expensive, but they also direct leads to your site that wouldn’t be there in the first place. Getting an initial customer base can make it worth the expense. Looking for an effective pay-per-click campaign? Sign up for a Fast Traffic campaign and let us take care of it for you.

So go ahead and make the change. After all, you deserve to get more out of selling online.

-Michelle Greer, Volusion eCommerce Consultant

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When asked the question, “What is Web 2.0?” perhaps you can offer more insight to the term other than “It’s the word with 580 million listings in Google*”. Any knowledge about the phrase may place you above the norm, as most internet users are still perplexed at its mention. The actual origin and definition of Web 2.0 is an issue that has received much debate, enough so to have its own Criticism section on its Wikipedia page. The term has been called everything from “overly complicated” to a “social phenomenon” to simply a “marketing buzzword”. Amongst the hype and criticism, however, are some valid explanations that may help to reach the heart of what Web 2.0 truly means.

Defining Web 2.0
If you Google Web 2.0 you’ll find the following definition, “Web 2.0 is a term often applied to a perceived ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websites to a full-fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users. Ultimately Web 2.0 services are expected to replace desktop computing applications for many purposes.”

This definition links to Wikipedia’s Web 2.0 page, that further explains the term in more layman’s terms as “a perceived second-generation of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites (wikis and folksonomies) which aim to facilitate collaboration and sharing between users.”

In regards to its origin, Wikipedia states that the term’s popularity arose from the first O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference held in 2004. Oreilynet.com gives some insight into the brainstorming session that hatched the conference, and offers a more in-depth definition for Web 2.0 in their online article, “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software“. Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Media, refers to Web 2.0 as “business embracing the web as a platform and utilising its strengths”, stating that “Eric Schmidt’s abridged slogan, don’t fight the Internet, encompasses the essence of Web 2.0- building applications and services around the unique features of the Internet, as opposed to building applications and expecting the Internet to suit as a platform.”

As online store owners, perhaps you’ve already embraced your own definition of Web 2.0 with anything ranging from an online store Blog, to your business’s MySpace page. In doing so, you are taking the word founder’s advice in embracing, not fighting, the ever-changing internet and the way in which it’s used today- and the different way it may be used tomorrow!

-Stacie Leonard, Ecommerce Marketing/Copywriting

*As of August 24, 2007. In O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 article written on September 30, 2005, he noted “more than 9.5 million citations in Google” for the term.

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Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center recently became the first hospital in North Carolina to sell items from its gift shop online. As an article by JournalNow.com notes, “computer users can browse the hospital’s gift items, make credit-card purchases and arrange to have those items delivered by hospital volunteers to employees and patients throughout the medical center”. This can all be done via its online store www.NCBHGiftshop.com. It’s a great way to connect patients with items from friends, family and loved ones and we’re happy to have them on board. For the full article visit, “Connecting: Hospital gift shop goes online, so you can say, ‘Get well’ now”.

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Bandwidth Definition
Bandwidth is a measurement of data transfer rate expressed as a unit of digital information divided by a unit of time, such as 200 bits per second (a bit is a single digit — either a 0 or a 1 — in binary code). If you own an ecommerce business, the data for the front and back ends of your shopping cart must be stored (hosted) on a server. As you and your customers request specific pages associated with your site, the server transmits the data to your web browsers; this data transfer consumes bandwidth. It is vital to remember that a server’s bandwidth capacity is dictated by the physical properties of its network connection cables (think of them as water lines, which cannot pump water beyond a specific maximum rate). This means that bandwidth is a finite — and valuable — resource. When a server receives more requests than it can fulfill at once, it must slow down, delay, or deny some requests. And, yes, even hosting that offers “unlimited” bandwidth is not exempt from these basic limitations.

Since most hosting companies assign multiple clients to a single server, any individual client’s bandwidth consumption can affect all other clients sharing the server (think of water pressure dropping when too many faucets try to draw from the same water line at once). Therefore, the hosting company must allocate a certain acceptable amount of the server’s total bandwidth capacity to each client, usually a monthly rate specification. This allocation is based on the client’s level of financial commitment, which in turn is based on the client’s anticipated needs. If you use more than this agreed-upon bandwidth allotment, you can expect to pay overage fees.

Here are some conversions that will help you anticipate how much bandwidth you can expect your site to consume:
1 Byte = 8 bits
1 KB = 1024 Bytes
1 MB = 1024 KB (1,048,576 Bytes)
1 GB = 1024 MB (1,048,576 KB / 1,073,741,824 Bytes)

Bandwidth Management
If your site is a bandwidth guzzler, keep four factors in mind: file size, number of files per page, pages viewed per visit, and monthly number of visits. While reducing the value of any one of these factors can reduce total bandwidth consumption, some are easier (and more desirable) to control than others. Obviously you want lots of visits, but you don’t necessarily want each visitor loading tons of images and graphics, especially if the file sizes are large. You can always reduce the number of image files on any given page, and you can always resize the ones you choose to keep with a program like Photoshop. If your site offers file downloads, a compression tool will help alleviate excessive bandwidth usage. If you use JavaScript, call it up externally whenever possible rather than embedding it within each page. And if you’re thinking of including audio, video, or large flash files, ask yourself if they’re necessary. They may very well end up costing you more money than they bring in.

-David Yakubik, Volusion Customer Care Specialist

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