Web Design and more

Update on Google Checkout Fees

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I saw this when I logged in to my Google Checkout account:

Beginning January 31, 2008, you’ll be charged a low 2% plus $0.20 per transaction. If you use Google AdWords, you can receive free credit card processing for some or all of your Checkout sales - just make sure you link your AdWords account to Checkout.

More info here: https://checkout.google.com/seller/fees.html

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December Newsletter Available Online

The December 2007 Portal Planet Web Design and Hosting newsletter is available online.

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Safe Shopping Online With buySAFE

Everyone is afraid to purchase items online. Is the merchant for real? Will my items arrive? This is especially true when shopping with smaller merchants. buySAFE can really improve your customers confidence level when making a purchase on your site. What buySAFE does is they will “bond” your customers purchase. That means that if the customer does not receive their item they have insurance and can make a claim on that bond that was issued. Below is a screen shot of what your customer will get after purchasing a buySAFE bond from your store.

As you can see the customer receives a confirmation of the items purchased, the total amount covered, and a link to view a PDF of the bond issued. This e-mail was sent by buySAFE.com not by the merchant store. Even better the e-mail includes more information about how the online merchant was evaluated:

The above information is true. This is for a BBQ Steak Brander site that I run. When I signed up with buySAFE their signup process was pretty in-depth they even pulled a mini credit report and some of the questions were who my mortgage is through and the approximate amount of the payment. They really want to verify who they are dealing with!

For osCommerce merchants the setup is pretty quick to integrate the code. BuySAFE has details on all of the file changes and new files needed.

For consumers - look for the buySAFE seal (pictured below) on sites while you are out shopping. It is quick and easy to purchase the bond and make sure your items arrive safely.

For merchants - Contact buySAFE and sign up for their services. It is free to sign up and start raising your customers confidence in your site.

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What is website conversion?

Website conversion is when a sale or pre-defined action is made. Typically e-commerce sites worry more about “conversion rates” because they pay for traffic. Conversion can be many things such as:

• A sale is made
• An account is created
• A contact form is filled out and submitted
• An item is added to a shopping cart
• Live chat is initiated

Many website statistic programs such as google analytics can track conversions whether they are a customer making a sale, a customer adding something to their cart, or a lead from a contact form.

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Outages experienced on Tuesday 11-13-07

Some of you may have noticed your site was down from around 8:00 PM EST until the next morning (for some, many it was up the same night). Well, some yahoo ran into a transformer at the datacenter where Portal Planet’s server is Yeah I know. How can a yahoo running into a transformer do that? Well I will post Rackspace’s official response page so you can see it and also watch the progress of their updates. I did call Rackspace that evening and they did call in all three shifts to man the phones. That was awesome! Not too many companies will call in all 3 shifts like that but they do have fanatical support. I did have a voicemail in my office from my account manager who left a message but I didn’t get it until the next morning after I already called to see what was happening. Bottom line: I’m so sorry for the downtime I really do my best to keep all of my clients sites up and responding. Here is the official response page: Rackspace response.

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Google raises e-mail storage

Check out this post over at the google blog. Google is raising the limit for gmail accounts and is also offering a paid service for those who need even more space!

More gmail storage coming for all.

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Keep track of your feed subscribers

If you run a blog chances are your blog has what is called a “RSS Feed“. By default these feeds are there but there is no way to track the usage of the feed. Enter FeedBurner! With feedburner you can “burn” your feed. Feedburner will create a special URL for your feed so you can track who is using your feed (all anonymous though you can’t see if mom is watching it). For wordpress there is a plugin to use the feedburner feed called the

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Happy birthday google

Yesterday, September 27, 2008 everyones favorite search engine, Google, turned nine. Wow! Hard to believe only nine short years ago google was started and look at it now! The search engine, gmail, calendar, news reader, analytics, adwords, adsense and probably many more I’m not remembering right now. What do you use google the most for? Personally I use gmail, the search engine, and then adwords the most but I use the other services mentioned.

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Nice work-around for google PPC advertisers

Google pay per click (PPC) advertisers often like seeing their ad on google. This is not a good practice though because google will see the ad as being shown but not clicked on, thus assuming it is not as relevant for the search term and will not show that ad as much. There is a nice way to see your ad but not have it count as a valid page view. You simply search for something crazy in google, not related to your term.. Then after you search add “&adtest=on” to the end of the URL in your browser. You will see a new background and a warning at the top letting you know that this is for AdWords advertisers to test their ads. You can then type in your terms into the search box at the top to see where your ads are showing up. Leave me a comment if you like this or use it like I do.

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