E-Commerce Blog

In an era of Internet commerce, it?s an unsurprising phenomenon that we expect the vast majority of our interactions with customers to happen in an online environment. The expectation is that people will send an email, contact us through support forms or simply place an order. But it?s still an inevitability that things might not work just right!

The telephone is normally considered to be a powerful sales tool for every type of commerce. If you want to make your business available to your customers, you publish a phone number on your site. This gives your customers another way to contact you ? great for those who are less than entirely comfortable ordering online or who simply need a little more information.

But the telephone doesn?t serve much of a function for the hard-of-hearing. At least, it doesn?t serve them the same way it does the average person.

The traditional telecommunication method for the deaf used to be through a teletype (TTY or TDD,…

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Customer Service For The Hearing Impaired

To be honest, it was a little embarrassing to be the daughter of an entrepreneur who was trying to start up a mail order livestock supply business back in 1975.

Ruth Jeffers was a little girl when her dad, Dr. Keith Jeffers, decided to provide a higher level of service to his cattle clients around Springfield, Missouri, and launch a livestock supplies catalog.

?When by grandfather died we moved from St. Louis to the ranch in Southwest, Missouri,? Ruth explains. ?Dad started selling cattle. He was always hard working and extremely honest and he became the world?s largest cattle dealer. The he started selling livestock supplies out of our basement to the people who were buying cattle from us.?

That doesn?t seem to embarrassing. But there is more.

Jeffers: As kids my sister and I were totally embarrassed because we had to answer our home phone, ?Thank you for calling Jeffers, this is Ruth, may I help you.? We also had to collect empty boxes that we could use…

Dr. J?s Pet Project

English Habit is an ecommerce outlet for English equestrian products (horse riding stuff). The site appears to be built on one of GoDaddy?s pre-fab platforms, which isn?t necessarily bad, but worth noting. I don?t know much about horse riding, but it looks like a fun and interesting sport, and those English riding boots really get me going. Perhaps I?ll learn a little while evaluating the site. Let?s saddle up and take a look.

Home Page Content

The home page has some good quality textual content on it, though it doesn?t incorporate heading tags, which is a big missed opportunity. Words in heading tags are given more weight by search engines, offering the opportunity to stress keywords on a given page by the use of those tags. While the website?s categories are linked textually, allowing for search engine spiders to follow them into the site, an internal sitemap would be a good backup. A sitemap link in the footer not only helps search engines find all the sections…

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SEO Report Card: Englishhabit.com

Most pay-per-click advertisers are familiar by now with concept of the PPC Quality Score. Advertisers running on the major search engines may think that the variables that Google looks at are the same as those at Yahoo!. Both Google?s Quality Score and Yahoo!?s Quality Index aim to provide a richer user experience for searchers. But advertisers that optimize their Yahoo! Sponsored Search accounts apart from their Google accounts can reap the benefit of a lower minimum bid and a lower cost per click.

Quality Index, in the simplest sense, is Yahoo!?s relevancy measure of a sponsored search ad. Yahoo! assigns a Quality Index to each ad group and each text ad to determine your minimum bid and cost per click. While landing page quality and overall keyword competitiveness are factors in Yahoo!?s Quality Index, the most important factor is your ad?s click through rate (CTR). Here are some quick tips to improve your CTR and Yahoo! Quality Index:

Establish a market-to-message…

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Improving Your Yahoo! Quality Index Score

?Lessons Learned? is an occasional series where we ask seasoned ecommerce professionals about their mistakes and successes. For this installment, we?ve asked Byron Tabor, owner of Rooms Delivered, a company that sells sporting goods and camping equipment on its sites Practicalsports.com and Roomsdelivered.com. Rooms Delivered is based in Dallas, Texas and has been in business since 2006. Tabor is its only employee, and he works with his drop shippers selling over 400 unique products, although he hopes to have 1,000 by next December. Rooms Delivered has annual revenue of $42,000. Here we give you Tabor?s experiences and suggestions.

On general advice would you offer new ecommerce merchants


?You need to learn as much as possible before your start. Research your niche and set up a well thought out plan. Find the people and information that will help you succeed. This will help you make wise decisions. Keep learning, keep growing and keep moving forward. Keep your…

Lessons Learned: Practicalsports.com Owner Byron Tabor