Don't Get Ripped Off On The Internet--Five Tips For Newbies

Written by Joanne Fritz


If you are new to doing business onrepparttar Internet,repparttar 108997 experience can be overwhelming. Cyberspace seems like a big, disorganized bazaar with hundreds of vendors shouting at you to buy their products. Except that these vendors use sales letters that could persuade anyone to do anything! It is more than easy to end up with products you can't use and don't really want. To make it all more manageable I have developed some criteria to use when evaluating products. The following five tips have helped me save money and avoid getting stuck with products that I don't really need or that are too advanced for my level of expertise.

1. Before buying any product, make sure there is a good guarantee. Look for assurance that you can returnrepparttar 108998 product and get your money back, no questions asked. Allrepparttar 108999 best products do have such guarantees. Stick with those sellers. Also, check to see if there is an affiliate program for that product. If you really likerepparttar 109000 product, you will be able to promote it to others and earn a commission.

2. There are many services that require payment on a monthly basis such as private websites, web hosting, and list managers. Think aboutrepparttar 109001 annual cost as well asrepparttar 109002 monthly. That will help bring some objectivity torepparttar 109003 decision to purchase that service. Twenty dollars a month may not seem like a lot, until you realize that you'll lay out $240 forrepparttar 109004 year. If you do purchase a monthly service, make sure there is an easy way to stop your subscription any time you find that you are not using it, or your financial situation has changed, or you found a better deal. You should be able to cancel right fromrepparttar 109005 service's home page or member site.

Providing Excellent Customer Support on a Small Budget

Written by Bill Platt


An integral part of any successful e-commerce website is an effective customer support solution. Your online business must be able to quickly respond to inquiries from potential clients and from existing clients, and then be able to address those inquiries accurately and efficiently.

There is no other area of an e-commerce website that is as important as customer service and support. If your online business fails to address this one issue, your business is nearly doomed to failure.

Small business owners usually rely on a simple email address or a contact form on their website to direct inquiries. The reasons for this choice are obvious.

Most small businesses are one person operations. There is seldom any need to provide anything more elaborate provided there is only one person handling all communications.

Inrepparttar event thatrepparttar 108996 site is being managed by only one person, it is recommended that you provide your customers a simple contact form attached to a simple contact script which can be found for free in numerous places online. A good starting point is:

http://cgi.resourceindex.com/Programs_and_Scripts/Perl/

This isrepparttar 108997 recommended method because spammers ruthlessly use email harvesting software to gather email addresses from websites for their spam games. If your real contact email address is hidden inside of a CGI script, thenrepparttar 108998 spam harvesters cannot find your address, thus protecting your email address from large amounts of spam email.

Anyone who is operating a website for profit and has no intention of ever expanding his/her business beyond current levels should not worry too much about expanding beyond a simple CGI contact script to run their customer service and support.

However, if you find yourself growing torepparttar 108999 point of needing something better, then please keep reading.

Small business people often find themselves inrepparttar 109000 mode of needing to add extra support staff, but still being small enough to not be able to yet afford a customized support software solution.

Software driven help desks can be an expensive proposition. WonderDesk is a decent application to serve this market, but starting at $499 and going up to $8499, it can be a really expensive solution.

http://www.wonderdesk.com

Facing costs like this, many small businesses choose to try bringing on extra staff and trying to manage incoming messages through various POP email accounts.

While this method remainsrepparttar 109001 cheapest solution, it is not alwaysrepparttar 109002 most efficient. Think about this.

If you have email going to Bob and to Steve --- in a theoretical scenario --- and you have Bob handling sales and Steve handling support, all would seem well.

But what if Bob finds himself extremely ill and unable to work? What then? Now you are stuck withrepparttar 109003 very real possibility of sales inquiries not being handled until Bob can return to work. Sorepparttar 109004 way to handle this becomes making sure that everyone has access torepparttar 109005 accounts that handle sales inquiries and support inquiries. So, you make arrangements for both Bob and Steve to be able to getrepparttar 109006 email fromrepparttar 109007 POP accounts.

Of course, this introduces a whole brand new problem. Now, both Bob and Steve are getting email from both accounts. But now, if Bob answers an email, Steve really has no way of knowing that Bob has already answeredrepparttar 109008 email. If both Bob and Steve answerrepparttar 109009 inquiry, then your company now looks as if it consists of a couple of bumbling idiots. That is definitely notrepparttar 109010 image you want to portray of your company. Additionally, you don't want Bob and Steve answering inquiries that have already been answered because it is a waste of human resources.

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