Even though I create shopping cart software, I consider myself a merchant as well. And just like any merchant, I once had a “first sale.” Brick and mortar merchants often frame their first dollar, but for online merchants it’s not quite as exciting to frame an electronic bank statement. Still, my first sale was exciting enough that I still remember it.

In 2001 I spent six months creating a shopping cart platform called BV Commerce.  BV stood for “Best Value.” And I named it that largely because I wanted to be near the top of Yahoo’s list of ecommerce software. (This was back when Yahoo was still THE search engine and alphabetical order actually counted for something.)

BV Commerce was the first commercial asp.net ecommerce application, and it was simple but good. Everything worked well, and I thought that because it was good sales would magically appear.

Luckily, I had a friend who owned a local hosting company who I’d done consulting work for in the past, and he decided to take a chance on me and use my software. He knew what I was working on and respected that even though I didn’t have all the features of the competition, reliability in shopping cart software was more important. He had a client who was having a really difficult time with an old ASP cart and put in a good word for me. That was the first copy of BV Commerce sold.

It’s hard to describe the excitement I felt when I saw that first store go live. My software had helped create that site. It was kind of like my kid—a boxy, pixilated kid. It got me hooked on entrepreneurship and software craftsmanship. And 11 years later, I still have the bug to create good software that helps people follow their own dreams.

What your first sale story? Was it exciting? Scary? Sad? Share your experience with other merchants, designers and developers.

Online marketing copy specialist, Usha Sliva, blogs about the relevance of web metrics and social media for business owners.

As an ecommerce store owner, there are plenty of ways you measure your store’s success -the decisive measurement is probably the amount of revenue it generates. Profits are certainly your best friend, but reaching them can take you through a variety of strategies, all which need to be defined and measured.

Enter in Key performance indicators (KPI). KPI’s form an integral part of your ecommerce success strategy, whether you recognize them or not. They’re described as web metrics used to help an online publisher define and measure progress toward achieving business, marketing, and communication goals.

In other words, they are those criteria you attach to your business in order for it to succeed. They translate complex measures into a simple indicator that allow you to assess the current situation and act quickly.

KPI’s are invaluable in helping your increase your website’s conversion rates. However for them to be effective they need to be actionable –they should report on the metrics that matter the most for your organization. So what should you monitor? Traffic, visitors, and revenue –yes. But in addition, you may have a lot more categories depending on what kind of website you have and what your business objectives are.

Let’s take as examples simple objectives that would apply to any ecommerce store:

In an ecommerce store, the goal is to get visitors to buy goods and services online. Examples of these stores include Amazon, Zappos, Shopflick, and Travelocity.

1. Conversion rates: There are multiple ways to calculate conversion rates, but the two most common are the ratio of visitors to orders and the ratio of people who start checkout to orders. Advertising and marketing campaigns are used to send visitors to a website and it’s these campaigns that will help you track and measure conversion rate data.
2. Average order value: This is the ratio of revenue to order and can depend on not only the products, but also the merchandizing, making it important to showcase more expensive products and encourage visitors to purchase them.
3. Customer loyalty: The ratio of new customers to old customers, where you want to increase both.
4. Visit value: This calculates the ratio of visits to revenue and is an indicator of the quality of traffic you receive.
5. Search engine referrals: If using paid search terms, then you want to add this to the mix. It’s the ratio of referrals from search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing to the industry average.
6. Category Performance: How much is sold in each category? This is the ratio of products sold within a category to products sold across categories. Through it, you can calculate the total number of products sold and the average order quantity for each product.
7. Time to purchase value: How long does it take for a visitor to make a purchase? This the ratio of the time the visitor spends on each page to the time he makes a purchase on the page.

Tools to Define and Track Your KPIs

The major benefit of tracking your KPI’s is that it allows everyone in the organization to work toward common goals and eliminates tasks that are not generating results. A store is more likely to increase its conversion rates if its core objectives are clearly defined, which is what KPIs can do for you.

Web analytics can be a scary concept for most marketing managers, let alone ecommerce store owners who’ve donned the marketing mantle. Yet without a good web analytical tool, it can be hard to track and measure your key performing indicators. Google analytics for example, can help you measure how well your website in doing in terms of achieving its objectives; what changes are needed; and if those changes are having the desired effect.

Twas the week before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring…except dad hiding in the bathroom on his iphone frantically ordering a last minute gift for his wife.

The holiday season has arrived and although according to Google’s 2011 Holiday Consumer Intentions Report 43% of holiday shoppers planned to do most of their shopping by CyberMonday, that still leaves 67% playing catch up for Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanza. Here are 5 ways to capture their business.

1. Coupons are king: The economy might be improving, but shoppers are still hungry for discounts. According to Google’s report, 55% of shoppers said they planned to use more coupons this year and 50% planned to spend more time shopping around for gifts. Offer targeted ads for last minute holiday shoppers and don’t forget to address shipping dates. Make sure shoppers know their gifts will arrive on time.
2. Make it Easy for Men: It may be a stereotype, but studies have shown that more last minute shoppers are men. According to a 2009 study by the University of Michigan, women see shopping as recreation, whereas any woman who’s been shopping with her boyfriend or husband knows that he wants to get in and out as soon as possible. So, lose the “gatherer” mentality and think “hunter” on your web store.  MerchantTribe includes the ability to add Top 10 lists. Use it! Also, highlight reviews and suggestions to capture last minute male shoppers. http://www-personal.umich.edu/%7Ekruger/Kruger_Evolution_and_Shopping.pdf
3. Get Mobile: We all know that mobile commerce is growing by leaps and bounds, but last minute shoppers especially are browsing at work or on the go. According to Google, 54% of shoppers will use Smartphones to aid them this holiday season and 77% will use tablets. If you haven’t made sure that your web site looks and works great on smart phones and tablets, you could be losing out on sales.
4. Make It Meta: Don’t forget to change your page titles and meta descriptions to reach last minute shoppers. Use targeted seasonal phrases. Make notes about which products you change, so you can change them back after the holiday season is over. You can use Google Insights to view the most searched for terms during a period of time and write your descriptions accordingly. A search for last year’s most popular holiday shopping terms revealed terms like “shoes, coupons and boots” as well as popular brand names. http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=0-18&geo=US&date=11%2F2010%202m&cmpt=q
5. Use Smart Search Engine Marketing: Writing great copy for Google Adwords and other SEM avenues is always important, but for last minute holiday sales remember to be extremely direct. Last minute shoppers may be overwhelmed with options and short on time. The more targeted your ad, the more your store stands out. Use specifics details and suggest gift recipients for added sales.

Use these 5 tips and you’ll be seeing last minute sales in no time!

• Submit your site to the search engines - Yes, some people forgot this step! Unless the search engines know about your site, there is no SEO. If you have a new site (or an old one) make sure that you are listed in all major search engines. Next look for speciality search engines to might fit your market. Then do a search for your own domain name in each search site and make sure you show up. The top 3 search engines right now are Google.com, Yahoo.com and Bing.com (Microsoft's search engine).
• Think Marathon, Not Sprint - SEO is a process. It isn't a set-it-and-forget-it Ron Popeil machine. Your competitors aren't standing still and you shouldn't be either. If you optimize your web site and manage to get on the first page for a specific keyword today, there is no guarantee you'll be there tomorrow. In fact, fresh content is one of the ways search engines determine relevance. Understand that you need to keep tweaking your site and adding content to stay at the top. Don't worry if you're not seeing dramatic results on day one just keep at it and build a great content library over time.

• Boosting traffic might not mean more sales - It sound crazy but more traffic doesn't always mean more sales. What you need is targeted traffic. If you sell women's bathing suits and you get 100% more visitors who are all men, you probably won't see an increase in sales. Make sure that you are targeting keywords which will bring qualified leads to your site. Make sure that you have a good understanding of who your customers are. There may be one than one segment and you may need to create separate SEO landing pages and campaigns to target the different groups. If you can put yourself in the mind of your customers you'll see opportunities for keywords, articles and advertising that will bring in more sales!

I was looking back over my blog history and noticed that three years ago I predicted that all new laptops would be touchscreen in 5 years. At the time my logic was that once you used a touch interface you missed it when it didn't exist. I'm actually a little surprised that Apple hasn't introduced a touchscreen laptop yet but the larger trackpads with multi-touch gestures are getting close.

I've got another 2 years until my prediction is either upheld or fails. I think my original thinking holds true including my opinion that even with touch screen, mouse and keyboard would remain the primary interface for most desktop machines. 

I'll make a new prediction that 5 years from today all laptops will be shipped with wireless chips allowing them to get broadband internet access anywhere you can get a cell phone signal. I'll have to check back in 2013 to see if my touch screen prediction was accurate and how the wireless internet prediction is holding up.

If you weren't aware of it already, Google recently made a major update to their algorithm called the "Panda" update. It has nothing to do with those lovable black and white bears, it was named after a Google engineer who helped make machine learning faster. Machine learning is where a computer is told things like "This is the letter 'a'" and "This is not the letter 'a'" several times. The computer is then shown lots and lots of pictures of letters and will "learn" whether it is an 'a' or not. Google is now using machine learning to help rank web sites according to user satisfaction. 

What does User Satisfaction Mean to Google?

Google used a sample group and asked them to look at a whole bunch of web sites and then answer questions like: Does this web site answer your question? Would you trust this medical advice for your child? Do you think the site is well designed? etc. This created the seed values for machine learning. On the surface the questions are interesting but what it means is that the web site was evaluated as a whole, not a specific part.

How do I change my Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for the Panda update?

So how should you optimize search engine changes? In the past it was fairly easy to pick a strategy. If Google increased the important of social media then you would spend more time on FaceBook and Twitter promoting your site. Because the Panda update evaluates your site as a whole your SEO changes need to shift from specific tactics to overall user happiness.

Give me some practical advice that I can use today!

Here are a few ideas you can use today to improve your search engine rankings with the Google Panda changes:

• Make your pages load faster. Nobody likes to wait. Optimize images, remove external javascript libraries and trackers you don't need and trim page size if possible.
• Rewrite your copy for humans instead of computers. It is important to keep your text keyword rich but narrative text than engages users while still using keywords will rank higher now.
• Remove poorly performing pages from your site. If you have older content that isn't the best experience for users it will slightly impact your overall rankings now. Consider removing it or updating it.
• Don't try and trick users with optimized landing pages. Google knows when a user lands on your page and quickly backs up to another site. If you don't have beneficial content, product or services for the keywords you're using, don't build that landing page. Make each page on your site awesome and good things will come.
• Differentiate to delight. If everyone talks about athletic shoes in terms of "toughness" or "fit" trying writing about how many marathons you've run in the same pair of shoes. Get customers to send in photos of their well worn Nike's and build a community to demonstrate the shoes are tough and fit well. Users will spend more time on your site and reward the extra effort with extra sales

BV Commerce 6 Theme Kit Download
BV Commerce 6 Theme Kit Source Code

This theme kit will help you create custom themes for your store. It includes standard HTML versions of the common store pages which you can use to preview your CSS and images using any standard web design tool like Dreamweaver, Expression Web or Text Mate.

Getting Started

Download the theme kit to your computer where you will be doing design work. Unzip all of the files. You will see “PhotoShopFiles” and “www” folders. The “PhotoShopFiles” folder contains PSD files which you can use to create new buttons and graphics from the existing templates. This will save you time if you use PhotoShop. Many other design/paint programs can also read PSD formatted files. The “www” folder contains a mock-up of a store using a common theme. There are several sub folder that you should become familiar with to create a custom theme.

1. “assets” – This folder contains any custom images referenced by your design. When your CSS file uses the {{assets}} prefix on any URL the theme kit will look in this folder for the image.
2. “buttons” – This folder contains any custom button images for your theme. You should create custom buttons to replace every standard one.
3. “css” – This folder contains the Theme.css file which is the main place you’ll be working to create a custom theme. Other .css files in this folder are standard to the software and are for reference only. Do not edit them as any changes you make will NOT be included in custom themes you upload to the store. Instead, override their CSS settings if you need to in Theme.css

The other folders and files are simple there to create a local copy of your store for design testing. There is no need to edit any of them.

How to work with the Theme Kit

Standard practice would be to double click on the Home.html file which will open in your web browser. You can click through most of the links in the theme kit to move between sample pages.

You should then open your design tool and load up the entire “www” folder as a web site. This will let you easily view all of the files and change the Theme.css to create a new design.

Preview your changes in your web browser locally as needed.

Special CSS Tricks for Theme Kit

The theme kit duplicates some special CSS tricks of your store. The {{assets}} tag should be used as the first part of any URL in your style sheet. For example, if you include a custom image called “HomeAd2.png” in your design you should reference it in the style sheet as:

url(‘{{assets}}HomeAd2.png’);

And you should then place it in the /www/assets folder of your theme kit locally to see the results. The ThemeHelper.js file automatically replaces {{assets}} with the correct link and this will let you upload your CSS file to the live store without any changes.

Uploading to a Store When You’re Done

When you’re ready to upload to your store go to the admin side and click on the “Options->Themes” menu item. Hover your mouse over any installed theme and select “Duplicate Theme” which will create a new copy of that theme. Click the “Edit” button on your “Copy of xxxx” theme where “xxxx” is the name of the theme you duplicated.

Next, change the name, description and other basic theme information for your new design and save.

Then, click on “Style Sheet (CSS)” and copy and paste your entire local Theme.css file into the text box and save.

Third, under Images: Buttons upload all of the files in your local /www/buttons folder to the store.

Fourth, under Images: Assets upload all of the files in your local /www/assets folder to the store.

Lastly, choose “Back to Themes” and then click on “Select This Theme” when you’re ready to activate it on your live store.

Are you using customer testimonials on your store? If not, you should be. They are a powerful tool that lets shoppers know you have other satisfied customers. When new shoppers know that other people are happy with your store they gain a sense of trust and that leads to higher conversion rates and sales.

Most stores (myself included) ask for testimonials and put up the ones that are most flattering. It's pretty easy to get some nice "sound bytes" for your homepage. But, just grabbing to best sounding testimonials may not be the best tactic.

Ramit Sethi from IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com is an expert in human behavior. I had the pleasure of talking with him this week at MicroConf 2011 and he pointed out that testiminials are a great opportunity to build more than trust. They can be used to address specific concerns your customers may have.

He suggested that everyone should be tactical in deciding which testimonials to post. If your shoppers are concerned that the quality of your products may not be great because of your low prices, seek out testimonials that address that concern. Find a testimonial that says something like "I though the quality would be poor because the prices were so great but instead this thing is built like a truck."

Picking testimonials that address your shopper's fears prior to purchasing is something that you can do today that your competitor's won't be doing. It's a quick easy way to increase sales. Take a look at your catalog of testimonials and see if you can swap them out for smarter ones right now.

In just a few minutes we'll be shipping BV Commerce 6.0.40. This update brings some new features (like order editing) and includes a new REST based API. For those who don't know, REST is a way to let machines communicate to each other using standard HTTP protocols. When you type in a URL into your web browser you are making an HTTP GET request and asking a web server to "get" a web page for you. When you submit a form on a web site you're sending an HTTP POST request and posting some form data to a web server.

REST based APIs are simple by nature. They rely on the convention that each "resource" should have a single URL. For example, /api/v1/rest/products/abc123 would represent product ABC123. If I made an HTTP DELETE request to that address the server would delete that product if I have the correct permissions to do so.

Fortunately, you don't have to learn about HTTP methods and REST conventions to work with the new API in BV Commerce 6. We've created a simple class library that makes your life easier. Here's a quick tutorial:

1) Create a new project in Visual Studio

2) Add a reference to the BVSoftware.CommerceDTO class library

3) Make sure you have an API key created under Options->Api in the Admin side of your store

4) Here's the sample code to create a product:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using BVSoftware.CommerceDTO.v1;
using BVSoftware.CommerceDTO.v1.Client;
using BVSoftware.CommerceDTO.v1.Catalog;
namespace SuperSimpleApiSample
{
  class Program
  {
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
      // Create the proxy to your remote storeApi 
      remoteServer = new Api("http://www.mystore.com", "my api key");
      // Create a local product object
      ProductDTO p = new ProductDTO();
      p.Sku = "ABC123";
      p.ProductName = "My Sample Product";
      p.SitePrice = 19.95m;
      // Call the create function
      // - Note, we're passing null instead of uploading an image for this sample
      ApiResponse response = remoteServer.ProductsCreate(p, null);
      // Output the newly created BVIN value for the product
      Console.WriteLine("The bvin of the created product is " + response.Content.Bvin);
    }
  }
}

I've will be speaking at MicroConf 2011 in Las Vegas June 6 & 7. This is a really cool conference for anyone starting (or running) an internet business without outside funding. You'll get the chance to hear from some great speakers include Andrew Warner of Mixergy.com and Patrick McKenzie of BingoCardCreator.com. Even better than hearing from these guys in the chance to meet them one on one and discuss your internet business. Rob Walling and Mike Taber have put together a really special event. 

I know it's short notice but BV is offering a $100 discount if you use the code "MARCUS" at microconf.com I also have one free ticket to give away to the best tweet about why you would like to attend. Be sure to include the @microconf and @marcusmcconnell tags in your tweet.

If you're running an internet startup or have thought about starting one this conference is a great place to start. Meet me in Vegas. I'm looking forward to meeting as many enterpreneurs as possible.