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| Term |
Plain Meaning |
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Affiliate Program
|
| You can create a program where other web sites can advertise
your web site or products and receive a
commission on sales or a fee per click thru.
The registrant site can view their statistics
and see amounts owed/paid online and you
can track users. A great way to build up
a network of advertising that feeds you
customers. For example, the WeDoHosting.com
affiliate program pays web site owners a
flat fee for a referral. The program is
easy for us to maintain and helps advertise
our products without up front marketing
expense, we only pay when we have a sale!
|
|
| Banner Advertisement
|
A
graphic on a web site that points to another
web site or page that is tracked using
software. The banner often has a fee paid
to the web site owner and is calculated
in cost per thousand banners shown (CPM).
There can also be fees for click thru's
or even commission paid on successful
sale conversions. There is a range of
software for tracking and managing banner
advertisements.
Right
click on the banner to the left (our advertisement)
and notice where the image is coming from?
It's being pulled from another site (this
allows us to track how many times this
newsletter is read for instance: each
time someone looks at it, it calls the
banner one time!).
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|
| Basket |
| When some is on a web site, using a shopping cart,
this describes the "place"
where products are placed until the user heads
to the "Checkout". This is a metaphor more
than an actual thing. The user can add and
remove things at will until they are ready
to pay for their purchases. Most shopping
carts use baskets which each have a unique
id and dissolve on their own if a user doesn't
complete the transaction.
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|
| CC Processing
|
| When your customer makes an online purchase you may have
the ability (depending on your site package)
to take and process credit cards. There are
numerous packages and features to this that
should be investigated. Often you must already
have an online merchant account thru your
own bank (Check with them FIRST!).
With some merchant processors like Pay PalŪ they do all
the work and you only need an account with
them. When you want to download money into
your own bank account, Pay Pal allows wire
transfers and even have a Debit Card!.
|
|
| Charge backs |
| An unpleasant fact of life is that some customers order
and receive their goods then claim they never
authorized the transaction. This can result
in the CC company (Visa etc) reversing the
transaction and charging you a fee for this.
The CC company always assumes the client is
honest in these situations and unless you
can produce a signature, you are out of luck.
So not only will you be out the merchandise,
you can be out the money and an extra fee.
A simple method of preventing fraudulent use is by requiring
all new customers to download, print , sign
and fax you an authorization form that authorizes
you to make this transaction (and can even
authorize repeat transactions until revoked).
The customer, if trying to use a fake credit
card will not take the trouble to fax a sheet
back and if they do, and later it comes to
light that the card used was fake or stolen,
the CC company can see you obtained a signature.
|
|
| Checkout |
When
a shopper is done with their browsing, they
can then provide their shipping and payment
information to you. Some merchant solutions
(shopping carts) have "Up Sell" features
where you can suggest other products or
services the customer can add to their purchase
(socks for the shoes they just bought etc).
|
|
| Click Thru |
When
a person clicks on an advertisement banner
or link, and they go to another site this
is called a click thru. It usually refers
to advertisements where the advertiser pays
for traffic to their site.
|
|
| Cookie
Apache
139.142.244.3.22932995928466683
cookie.tucows.com/
0
3649082624
29797856
1258701216
29430729
* |
|
The
web server can place a cookie on a visitors
computer that indicates when they visited
your site. On subsequent visits this cookie
can be checked and compared to records (last
visited on X date etc). This technology
is misunderstood. It does not spy on a user.
It is just a "tag" that can be called by
the site that issued it. It can also be
used in an affiliate program to tag a customer
who visits but does not buy on that visit.
They may return later and the cookie ensures
your affiliate gets paid for the visitor.
To
the left of this is the contents of a cookie.
It shows the ip of the visitor and who owns
the cookie (tucows.com) and then a date/session
ID.
|
|
| Encryption
Unencrypted
Encrypted
|
| This means that data is scrambled up and rendered unreadable
by anyone without the proper code to read
it. In e-commerce it means that your customers
can send you information like credit cards
with bank level privacy. To the left are two
links to the same web site. The top link is
the unencrypted connection and the bottom
one is protected with a secure certificate
(see below). Click back and forth and notice
that on the secure page you get a little lock
when you are encrypted. This means any information
you would provide will be scrambled and encrypted
as it is sent to us.
|
|
| Hits |
Each
element on a page (graphic, icon or text)
counts as a hit when a user visits your
site. This means that if you have lots and
lots of stuff, your hit count is high. This
doesn't mean you are very popular it just
means you have lots of stuff to download.
This is never as good an indicator of traffic
as "Visitors". The best metric (measure)
is "Unique IP's Visiting" as this is the
unique number of addresses that visited
(each user has an address they came from).
|
|
| Merchant Account |
This
is what you need from your bank to accept
credit cards. Typically you need one per
card accepted (Visa, MC and Amex). Any online
processors take the funds from the customer
and then transfer them to your merchant
accounts. The time it takes to transfer
into your account varies by processor.
|
|
| Price Club |
Would
you like to be able to offer different prices
to some visitors to your store? Price clubs
are a way of offering a different price
structure to different visitors (Wholesale
or "favorite customer" rates). With some
solutions you can designate
some visitors as "price club members" and
when they sign into your web site., the
prices change to reflect the discount you
are offering them.
|
|
| Secure Certificate
|
This
is an electronic document that is loaded
onto a web server that identifies your site
as being you. When a customer enters the
secure part of your site (https://yoursite.com) they will be
able to transmit data (Credit card info
etc) to your site in privacy (encryption).
This protects both the customer and you.
All information gathered from a user should
be done under a secure certificate.
|
|
| Secure Session |
| The
time a user spends under a secure certificate
(see above).
|
|
| Session ID
PEERCENTRAL.com |
An
ID # issued to each visitor to a site that
unique identifies them so that when they
sign in, they can move freely around the
site without constantly having to sign in.
The Session ID may last minutes or days
and is used to keep track of things they
buy or just remember their profile. Visit
the site to the left and look at the address
line in your browser (Where you type in
where you want to go). You will see your
session ID (long string of numbers and letters.
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| Shopping Cart
|
The
Catch-all term for the software that is
catalogue, basket and checkout on a web
site. It can also encompass inventory control,
customer relationship management, affiliate
management and more. We offer several levels
of "Shopping Cart" to meet each need and
circumstance.
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