Ecommerce Jargon For First-time Online Web Store Owners
October 26th, 2009 charlestangThere are lots of shopping cart software providers out in the market (agora shopping cart, 3d shopping cart, to name a few). But whether you’re using a cheap shopping cart solution or one that costs a bomb (or an even better alternative: you’re using InstanteStore), a newbie online merchant might get lost in all the ecommerce jargon strewn across cyberspace.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a way of driving quality traffic to a site without any financial outlay. This natural or organic method involves tweaking the site’s content, coding and HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) to increase its relevance to exact keywords and make it easier for search engines to index and subsequently increasing the site’s visibility on a search engine’s result’s page (SERP).
SEM
Search Engine Marketing or SEM is a way of advertising a site through the use of paid placements or paid inclusion. This form of internet marketing can improve your visibility in SERP’s much faster then SEO alone, but at a cost of course.
Hard Goods And Soft Goods
An online store may sell several goods that are actually divided into 2 categories - hard goods and soft goods. Hard goods are tangible items like watches and MP3 players. Soft goods are products that exist electronically like MP3’s, software and ebooks - items that can be downloaded.
Internet Merchant Account
An internet merchant account assists the receiving of online payments, generally by credit card. If you have complications obtaining an internet merchant account, you can consider the services of a merchant broker. A merchant broker would then charge a setup fee and supply the software and hardware necessary either by lease or sale, as required.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate has nothing to do with religion. As an alternative it refers to the percentage of visitors to an online store who are converted into buyers. Conversions do not happen easily and depend on a few factors to help convince a visitor to buy from a particular store. The clever use of images, content and call to action phrases all play a part in this process of conversion.
So before you sign up for a feature-rich yet cheap shopping cart solution like InstanteStore, ensure you brush up on your ecommerce jargon.
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