Les Jones

E-commerce > Doing E-commerce Stuff

Light blogging tonght, because I'm researching e-commerce solutions for my father-in-law. He's asked us to build him a new Web site with some e-commerce capabilities.

The last time I looked at simple, turnkey e-commerce solutions I liked Yahoo! Store, and I like it even better now. The templates and sitebuilding tools are nice, and it's a full-featured solution for a fair price. PC Magazine gave it the nod in a comparative review a year ago, and Yahoo! has added features and lowered the price since then. It's very nearly the Dilbert answer to the question: what do customers want? Answer: a better product for free.

Incidentally, that issue of PC Magazine has an article, Marketing on the Web: True Stories , that has some good advice I mostly agree with. Beware, though, of Web site optimization firms. Most of them are snake oil salesmen and their money back guarantees disappear when they do, which is frequently.

That article mentions ValueWeb's ValueTraffic service for increasing traffic to your Web site. For a $100 setup fee and $100 per month they guarantee either 50,000 impressions or 50 click-throughs. I should hope so. All they have to do to achieve the click-through goal is to buy pay-for-position ads on search engines at $2.00 per click or less and the rest is profit for them. For some terms you can buy clicks on Google Adwords for as little as ten cents each. You can sign up for Google Adwords or Yahoo! Search Marketing and do it yourself for a lot less money.