Welcome to the second issue of the CyberArtisans monthly newsletter!

Our goal is to present information that we hope will be useful to you as a web site owner. This month's topics are e-commerce on the web and making complaining easier for your customers.

e-Commerce on the Web

e-Commerce used to be the exclusive province of techies who sold software to other techies. In the last year or two, however, it has grown up. It is now used by ordinary merchants to sell ordinary products and services to ordinary customers.

If your business could benefit from an additional source of customers, look over our section on e-commerce at http://www.cyberartisans.com/ecommerce. Here are some of the issues covered:

How does e-commerce work?
What happens when someone types in their credit-card number into an order page on the web? Is it different from what happens when you hand your card over at a store?

What will it cost?
It turns out that there are many different ways to set up your site for e-commerce, and the best method depends to a great extent on how much business you expect to do. Even a very small businesses (say a sideline or hobby business) can be set up for e-commerce. In fact, the process is quite easy. The downside is that it costs more per transaction. Fortunately, if the business grows, you can easily upgrade to a more efficient mechanism.

How safe is it?
Safety is an issue for both the customer and the merchant. And as it turns out, the customer has better protection than the merchant.

E-Commerce transactions are part of the class of credit-card transactions known as Card Not Present transactions. This means that your customer gives you (the merchant) the card number and expiration date, but you never actually see the card itself. As a result, you have considerably less protection against credit-card fraud than a retail merchant who swipes the card in a card machine. And THAT means that you (or your web developer) had better be very familiar with the risks inherent in these transactions, and the protections available to minimize those risks.

Inviting Complaints can be Good for Business

The Wall Street Journal of Tuesday, August 27, 2002 has an interesting article on consumer complaints. The Journal notes that several companies are finding that it pays to make it easier for customers to complain via the web or email. They found that:

• Giving an unhappy customer a coupon or a refund can turn her into a happy repeat customer.
• It's often possible to sell a complaining customer up to another product that solves his problem better.
• The ability to complain easily often short-circuits the occasional unhappy customer who is willing to take the time to bad-mouth your company to his entire address list.

And as any good salesperson will tell you, a complaining customer is a golden opportunity. If you can satisfy them, and then provide a little more value to show you want them as a repeat customer, you'll have a loyal customer for life.

It's easy to add a Contact Us page or even a Complaints page to your web site. Keep in mind, however, that if you do so, you must have the resources to answer the complaints that come in – quickly. Otherwise it looks like you're ignoring them, which is worse than not inviting them in the first place.

Reminder about Search Engines

Last month this newsletter had a detailed discussion of search engines and search engine optimization of web sites. Clearly there is a lot of interest in this right now, since we are receiving many inquiries about search engine optimization. If you missed it, go to the search engine section of our web site (http://www.cyberartisans.com/search_engines).

And if you are interested in discussing search engine optimization of your web site, please contact us.

Thanks for joining us this month. Next month we'll look at ways to minimize the cost of building a web site while still getting a great-looking site.

Jonathan Spencer
CyberArtisans Web Developers

http://www.cyberartisans.com/
617-965-4110