How to improve my site?

[henrycao8]

My site is www.HenrysElectronic.com

I have a few questions and hope some RFDers can help me out.

1. I currently use Paypal to accept credit cards. It charges about 3-6% of total sales price. Are there other third party you guys would recommend that can help me to reduce credit card fees?

2. I currently post on several forums (RFD, Kijiji, Craglist, eBay, Google...) to promote my sites. What other sites should I consider? Maybe amazon.com?

3. I am currently using Freewebs.com as my host. Its software is very user friendly and I was able to establish my site with absolutely no coding knowledge. But I am looking to further expand my site. What type of softwares do you think I should look into? Maybe photoshop or CCS?

Any comment and suggestions would be recommended. Thank you. I appreciate all the help.

[matdwyer]

It is a considerable investment to get a decent credit card authoring system for your store, so you have to gauge if the PayPal fees are really worth the extras you'd be spending. For example, 2checkout (an alright choice is 5.5% + $0.45), which looks more professional than paypal, but costs more.

Authorize.net is another popular choice, here is one of their resellers with what looks like a good plan:
http://www.merchantexpress.com

Internet Discount Rate 2.33%
Internet Transaction/Batch Fee 24 ¢
Address Verification Fee 5 ¢
Monthly Service/Support/Statement Fee $5.00
+ it appears to be a $19.99/month charge

(time to bust out the big boy math on this one to calculate your break even point)

American prices - I'm not sure if they do Canadian as well.

Regardless, you'll still either be paying a high monthly fee or a high percentage. You'll also need to get the proper module for including it in your website.

It will come down to if the profit you're loosing to paypal is significant enough to invest in new technology, so you'll have to be the decider on that one.

2. That seems solid, the more forums you do the better. Maybe article marketing, although that may not give you great results. Local marketing is also an option.

3. Try mastering a content management system and go from there - PHP, HTML and CSS will all be beneficial to you, but you wont learn them in a day. It is also very cheap to outsource jobs like this to third world countries (i.e. a simple php script could be less than $15).

Hope that helps... in all honesty I wouldn't buy at your store because the background and the header look like "freewebs" type of graphics. On that note, having a business at a place called freewebs is likely a bad idea.

[cdnNick]

1) Last time I checked Authorize.net didn't support Canadian based companies, although that might have changed. I used psiGate in the past and they were solid and had good support. You can also look into paypal's webpayments PRO service it's around the same cost as the other payment processors.

2) Have you tried any local papers? Lots of them have online advertising as well as in the paper.

3) You can spend $1000+ on software to create a new site plus the time it would take to learn all the software and then learn how to code the site you would be better off just hiring someone to do that for you and focus on generating more sales.

Not sure I would trust my business to a free webhost.

[matdwyer]

1) Last time I checked Authorize.net didn't support Canadian based companies, although that might have changed. I used psiGate in the past and they were solid and had good support. You can also look into paypal's webpayments PRO service it's around the same cost as the other payment processors.


Ahh, you might be right on that - I used them with an american company/site.

[henrycao8]

I am a business student in UTSC, so I feel it makes sense for me to invest some of my time to improve my "technical side".

Right now, I have very basic HTML knowledge but I am looking to expand my e-commerce ability. What should I focus on? I am looking to learn something that is (1) useful for my site (2) practical.

[cdnNick]

First what do you mean by expand your site, what are you looking to add to it? What doesn't your site do that you want to do with it?

Do you want to setup a full blown shopping cart with multiple payment options etc like any of these: www.zencart.com www.cubecart.com www.oscommerce.com


Basics would be html/css and some knowledge of php. The graphical element is a whole other ballgame.

[imie]

Want to improve it?

I would say, get it done professionally... with some good content...

[Snicla]

I didn't spend too much time on your site, but it looks pretty good for what you are using it for. I doubt that flash would really do anything except frustrate people. It's nice when a website loads reasonably fast. The only thing that I would change would be the background image. The faux wood doesn't do it for me. Stick with a neutral pastel colour.

As far as learning how to create websites yourself, I would suggest CSS/HTML/XML. You can learn it yourself through books. I find that the O'Reilly books are very informative. I have the Web Design in a Nutshell which is perfect for beginners. You can get these books over torrents so you don't even need to buy them.

[baz5]

Want to improve it?

I would say, get it done professionally... with some good content...

+1

If you want to learn how to do it yourself, put up a dummy site, and don't ruin your site's reputation with your poor design. 2checkout.com is an option to paypal. (just scrolled and seen it was also mentioned)

[ali123]

your logo and the image in your header makes your site look bad

Edit: plus the background makes it look like something related to furniture, you need to change that too or just leave it white

Edit 2: Also remove the shadow from the order phone number

[Lemur Autovision]

Beyond making your site a little nicer to surf, I think it might bode well to get some buying traffic to your site. Here is my two bits, and this will cost you nothing to implement.

I notice you have a specific section on Iphone or Itouch unlocking. Pretty good niche market. Sounded pretty intriguing, so I googled it.

WOW over 4 million page listings when you search "iphone unlock"

Now, Google this "allintitle: iphone unlock" It'll show you the number of web sites (top right side highlighted) that have "iphone unlock" term in their page titles. That is, the top line on each page on their web site. It is one of the primary search functions in Google.

The number of site is 154,000. That means 154,000 web sites have the term iphone unlock in the title of one of their web pages. That is quite a low number considering the total number of web sites for the keyword search - over 4 million. To put it in perspective, similar Ipod Iphone title searches reveal over 20 million web sites. You do not want to be trying to sell IPODS online.

If you also type in this "allintitle: ipod itouch unlock" search reveals only 163 site. That is amazingly low.

Simimarly IPOD unlocking has 2880 title sites but over 1 million pages. This means there are very few sites targeting this niche.

A very cheap way to pomote your website pages is to put appropriate keyword phrases, like these (Ipod unlocking), in your page titles. Google will eventually spider your site, and when people specifically search those terms, your site will promote to the first page.

Mix this with a google adwords campaign, and compete for the keywords that would attract people like "Ipod unlocking", to your site.

Want proof - search for this in Google "safe driving monitor". Because I have this term in my web page title, it shows as the number 1 search for that term out of half a million pages.

It works!