Ebay has been a victim of phishing emails since the conception of the idea I bet! With hundreds of new users flooding to eBay all the time, phishing emails have become a common occurrence. In my personal inbox I get at least 3 or 4 eBay phishing emails a day, which are getting ever more convincing. eBay have worked hard to beat the ‘phishers’ by trying to educate its members. They even have a tutorial on how to spot a spoof emails and the eBay toolbar is a must for eBay users. Symantec have been following the scam of Trojan.Bayrob – Buying a Fake Jeep In order to attract potential victims the scammers first list cars for sale on various… Read more »
Be sensible about security – Get Safe Online Week
This week (12th to the 16th November) is Get Safe Online Week 2007 and Get Safe Online is sponsored by the government to offer independent, expert advice on how you can stay safe and secure when using the internet. With online fraud and identity theft are on the rise, it is imperative that internet shoppers protect themselves from their PC upwards. 1. Use a firewall. A firewall is a first line defence against hackers and virus attacks. It acts as a barrier between the public network and yourselves. Windows does have its own firewall (I would only recommend Windows XP and Vista, as the older versions of windows are now obsolete in security terms) Firewalls are not sufficient on their… Read more »
Getting your images from your channeladvisor account!
Unfortunately, there is not an easy way to do this but it can be done. Here is an outline of the steps that you will need to take to get the images from your account: 1. Go to the Tools > Images view. 2. Expand the view to 500 items. 3. click on the “Select” column header to select all 500 images. 4. click on the “View URLs” button 5. Here, you will see two boxes, one that says image URLs and one that says HTML. You will want to copy everything out of the HTML box. 6. Paste the HTML box contents into notepad (TextPad is another text editor that is usually not a default. You may need to… Read more »
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Useful Tools..
OK, so over the last couple of years, I’ve been asked many times what our clients can do to further optimise eBay Stores and listings, as well as their existing e-commerce websites and blogs. I found myself giving out the same websites and useful tools over and over. I realised there wasn’t an up-to-date list out there to suit this purpose, so decided I’d start one here… What is it? “A tool to check at-a-glance the link popularity of any site based on its ranking (Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati etc.), social bookmarks (del.icio.us, etc), subscribers (Bloglines, etc) and more!” OK, so why would I use it? I like this site as it’s very fast at giving you an overall… Read more »
Google Analytics v2.0 – more function, less hassle..
OK, so it looks like Google are to roll out some new features and functionality to their superb Google Analytics package (free of charge for all you folks that haven’t currently implemented this with your CA Stores or stand-alone Websites). Over the next several weeks Google are set to migrate all accounts to the new interface, so worry not if your account looks no different. OK, so onto the features.. Customizable Dashboard so one of the major features – in my eyes anyway – is the option to customize your dashboard (with drag & drop functionality). Every time I use G.A, I find myself viewing the same key data reports, no matter what the site, and even though it’s not… Read more »
eBay as part of an on-going e-commerce business strategy
Do businesses really appreciate how important an eBay presence is to their e-commerce strategy? The answer, until recently, has been no. But times are changing. Corporates, SME and sole traders alike are embracing eBay, accessing not only the 14 or so million active buyers in the UK, but also a massive international market. The real problem up until now has been to do with skills, cost, and time. Has anyone really got resources to throw at setting up an entire business unit specifically for eBay? The answer generally is no. Most businesses will “dip their toes” first. Often it rapidly becomes clear that eBay represents a vast revenue stream. So where next? Well, to grow and scale really are the… Read more »
The Changing Retail Landscape
The online retail world is barely a decade old but has changed drastically in that short time. In contrast, the High Street, which has evolved slowly over hundreds of years has barely changed, but, has in fact drastically over that same decade. What’s happening? In my brief lifetime, the face of the High Street has changed drastically. The High Street was once where all retail took place. Before out-of-town retail parks and the ubiquitous hypermarket cities sprung up. Each shop specialised in its own fare; the baker, the butcher, the hardware store, the post office, the bank and the sweet shop. Shopping was conducted in a very traditional way, as it had been for generations. These were the days when… Read more »
DNS Changes and Cname with 123-reg
As a support consultant we advise our customers use the Cname function with their ChannelAdvisor store to improve search engine optimisation. This is an example of a Cnamed Channeladvisor store : Bling Bling Online. As you can see by clicking on the categories how the URLs seem to be coming from the domain name and not a ChannelAdvisor storefront URL. The domain name registrar (who you brought your domain name from) governs the process of the DNS changes and as I come across the different hosts I will post a simple guide on how to cname using that host. My first guide is going to be about 123-reg.co.uk. I always recommend this company as they will also host your emails… Read more »
Blogging for customers!
The buzz word of 2006 was web 2.0. ‘Oh its so Web 2.0’ you might hear at conferences and seminars. My take on web 2.0 is building a community for your buyers based on the product type on offer. Your customers are moving to on-line sales but they need your advice. Truthful, simple advice without the hard sell. First magazines, gossip columns and newspapers caught onto the blog wave, but now product sellers are paving the way to help the customer make the right purchase. Adverts may be boring and invasive at times but Blogs are not, take ‘Innocent smoothies‘ they have a web log that provides an interesting insight to their origins, ethics and the people in the company.… Read more »
Google Analytics to increase your e-commerce performance..
Matt Cutts, A Google employee currently heading up Google’s WebSpam team, has recently posted a good article on Google Analytics, giving you a sample of the depth of information you can access using this free web based service from Google. This data is interesting to look at for sure, but for those of you who run an e-commerce business, knowing your statistics (top keywords, referring URLs, traffic trends, etc) can help you to save time and money. For example, Google Adwords is implemented within Google Analytics, so finding what your top keywords based on your site data, and implementing these into your Google Adwords campaigns in order to increase performance is a much more straight forward process. You could also… Read more »
