When most folks imagine Christmas it's hard not to think about the wonderful gifts associated with the holiday. For brick and mortar retail merchants, the thought of Christmas usually brings dollar signs to their eyes. The latest retail industry to profit from Christmas is online merchants who use shopping cart software to advance their online business.  If you’re an offline business owner Christmas is the best time to get started selling online. Unlike many other business’s selling online requires very little start-up and basic marketing to be profitable. I will continue to outline several methods a new business would use to increase sales though out the next few posts.

Reliable eCommerce Hosting – Take a moment and think about the following scenario: You have just spent bunch of money on purchasing a shopping cart solution, you paid developers to customize it, and on top of it all spent a few thousand dollars on a creative eCommerce friendly website design. The site you have poured your heart and soul into is finally live and ready to make you money. One problem, your hosting company is experiencing technical difficulties, and not only are visitors getting error messages, but search engine spiders can run though your site. In a period of twenty four hours you have potentially lost hundreds if not thousands of dollars in business not to mention the damage done with regards to search engine ranking. This is why I strongly recommend researching a potential hosting provider to make sure they committed to a 99.9999% uptime.

In the next eCommerce post I will dive in to some of the great off page marketing techniques I use to promote an online business so please stay tuned.