Contents

- Survey says! - Let your customers rate your service
- Announcements - Breaking news about Red Carpet Web Promotion
- Search engine navigator - The current picture of search engines
- Feature: Internet Security - Order forms and credit cards in a nutshell
- Stay on top - Links to website promotion and ecommerce articles in other magazines and newsletters

Survey Says!

Have your website rated by your customers.

Visitors feel more comfortable making purchases if they know that past customers were satisfied. Third party rating services are available that allow your customers to rate their experience for future visitors. Companies such as www.webwatchdog.com offer this service for free and ePublicEye has a more inclusive service for $15 per month. Red Carpet Web Promotion uses Web Watchdog and you can see how it works by filling out our customer survey at www.redcarpetweb.com/survey.html.

Announcements

In appreciation of your business, Red Carpet Web Promotion is giving rewards to all of our members upon attaining the 200,000th clickthrough and the 500,000th clickthrough.

The Better Business Bureau has accepted Red Carpet Web Promotion as a member. See details at www.bbb.com. Red Carpet Web Promotion has also applied for the TRUSTe seal, which verifies and enforces acceptable privacy practices. See details at www.truste.com.

Search Engine Navigator

The Search Engine (SE) world is ever changing. The most talked about changes occur behind the scenes, such as SE alliances, and where each SE gets its search results. Since this is the first edition of the Promotion Press, I will try to sum up the way Search Engines display their results, and how the alliances affect this.

First of all, there are two kinds of search engines: True Search Engines, and Directories.

True Search Engines include Altavista, Google, Hotbot, Inktomi and others. These SEs list websites from their databases in the most useful order for searchers. Theoretically, the number one result in a search will be the most relevant website to your search query.

Directories include Yahoo, Looksmart, Open Directory Project, and others. Directories contain a collection of websites that were placed into categories by humans. Relevant sites can be found by following a chain of categories such as:
Science > Biology > Botany > Plant Genetics
The resulting page will list all the websites that relate to plant genetics in the directory.

Where do Search Engines get their results?
In order to explain the alliances between Search Engines, you must first understand where SEs get their results. If you perform a search on AOL, the results will come from the Open Directory Project (ODP). There is also are two tabs that read "Web Sites" and "Web Pages". "Web Sites" is the default (ODP) listings. If you click on Web Pages, you will get listings from Inktomi, a True Search Engine database. This example is turning into the norm for most other SEs. Yahoo's results are from its own directory, with secondary (Web Pages) results from Google. Google, on the other hand, gets its results from its own database, with secondary results from ODP. It all gets rather confusing, so I have set up a chart outlining where SEs get their results (D is for a directory, SE is for a Search Engine).

Shawn Campbell is the co-founder and Chief Search Engine Optimizer at Red Carpet Web Promotion.
Shawn will share search engine news in each issue.

Feature: Internet Security

Setting up an online order form can increase the sales to your site. It is a simple enough CGI script to create the order form, but who is going to provide their credit card number online without the knowledge that security measures are in place?

The first step is to have SSL security to encrypt the information included in the form sent by your customers. This assures that intercepted emails will be undecipherable. To learn more about SSL encryption, go to: developer.netscape.com/docs/manuals/security/sslin/index.htm.

The next step is deciding how to process credit card transactions. Some of the most common options for accepting orders are below; from a do-it yourself option to fully automated services. The ultimate goal is to make it easier and safer for customers to make purchases from your site. An important secondary goal is to lower your cost per order while taking into account your time spent per order.

Option #1: Manual
Secure emails with manual credit card processing
This option is well suited for businesses with fewer than 30 transactions per day. If you already have a credit card terminal it is also a good way to start - until your volume picks up. Details.

Option #2: semi-automated
Accepting and processing transactions electronically to your account.
This option combines the best (and the worst) of both worlds. Your customers' cards will be verified online - which is good, but you will need an internet merchant account - which is different from both a merchant account and MOTO merchant account. Internet merchant accounts can be difficult to obtain. Details.

Option #3: Outsourced
Choose a third party payment processor
Essentially, this option is a way of outsourcing your payment processing rather than handling it yourself. Not a bad idea to avoid the frustration that banks present. Details.

Send email notification
After you process an order, make sure that your customers receive an email notice telling them:
- What name will appear on their credit card statement
- How to contact your customer support
- Add any relevant marketing and promotional information about your products or services

Warning signs of Fraud
Once you are set up, there are still security measures that you should take in order to avoid fraudulent orders. For a list of warning signs, go to store.yahoo.com/warsigoffrau.html. If one order shows many of the suspicious signs of fraud listed at that site, you should investigate the order carefully. As a general rule, you should never ship a valuable order unless it checks out.

Stay on Top

Each month we review articles from the industry magazines and newsletters. The following headlines are the most interesting. Click on the headline to view the article.

Less Burn, More Lift - from "get big fast" to "cash is king" B2C revenues up in February 2001 Make Your Copy Work Harder: Think Like a Stonemason Slow Adoption of New Ad Sizes Boo! And the 100 Other Dumbest Moments in e-Business History Five Challenges of Interactive Marketing

Letters to the Editor

Write your questions and comments for our next issue to news@redcarpetweb.com. Be as specific or general as you want - other subscribers are probably wondering the same things as you are. You should also let us know of any promotions, sales or new products on your website.

Next Issue

- Feature: Affiliate programs - The dos and don'ts from the merchant's point of view
- More on how Search Engines work
- Stay on top: More articles from industry newsletters and magazines
- And more...