From the earliest days of e-commerce, user privacy has been a paramount concern, on both sides of the transaction. Buyers are skittish about sharing their financial and personal data, and sellers are leery of violating regulations that could result in steep fees or even the demise of their business.

In response to the recent Internet privacy breaches at AT&T, Google, Apple Inc., and Facebook, Senator John Kerry is spearheading legislation that will seek to better protect online shoppers’ private information. He hopes to pass some form of an online privacy bill by early next year—which seems like a rather lofty goal.

Whether you’re planning a new website for a start-up business or recreating an existing corporate site, now is the perfect time to take a closer look at your hosting company and determine whether there might be more environmentally friendly options. Green or “carbon-neutral” web hosting is an increasingly popular choice… but what qualifies a hosting company as green, and how can you find one?

As every business owner knows, the best customer is a repeat customer. A customer who visits your site and makes a purchase every week, or even every couple of months, is immeasurably more valuable than a casual, “one-off” customer who places one order and is never heard from again. Even so, many online businesses fail to take advantage of the intrinsic profit potential in repeat customers.

Sustaining Repeat Online Business

It can be difficult for online businesses to build customer loyalty, especially if there are a large number of competing websites peddling the same products and services. Successful eCommerce sites start by focusing on the basic objectives for shopping satisfaction—after all, if your repeat customers share one common trait, it’s approval of your business.

According to BusinessWeek, Microsoft took a total of six months to settle on the name “Bing” for its new “decision” engine (formerly known as “Live Search”). For six weeks, a team of eight brainstormed more than 2000 names. Then lawyers and linguists danced their way through the list and eliminated names that were being used by other companies or that were considered obscene in other languages.

Of course, they missed the acronym that many have bantered about since its launch: BING: But It’s Not Google.

My point in bringing this up? Naming your products or services isn’t easy, which is why I’m sharing my roadmap for developing a product or service name that’ll be a bingo instead of a bust.

At Blue Acorn, we talk with a great deal of online retailers daily.  And most of those conversations revolve around how to improve revenue.  Many people that come to us have hit that “glass ceiling”, or they just aren’t sure what to do next to keep growing those numbers.  Now obviously revenue isn’t the only important thing, running a lean business and creating some backend efficiencies are certainly other ways to help improve the profitability of your business.  And if you increase revenue while subsequently reducing margins, that is something you’d need to look at as well.

But, focusing purely on revenue for a minute, the other day I was meeting with our new eCommerce Consultant to discuss some clients he will be working with as part of our eCommerce management services.  We are tasked with, on a long-term basis, helping them realize gains in online sales.  This is where we leverage our combined expertise,  and apply those practices to their site on a daily basis.  We use a very simple formula to determine what kind of impact we’ll see on revenue based on specific actions.  We use this formula in our monthly reporting to clearly, and easily communicate how revenue can be impacted by focusing on three specific areas.  So we present to you, the eCommerce revenue formula:

Last week while attending the Internet Retailer Conference in Boston, I had the pleasure of meeting a variety of eCommerce vendors in the exhibition hall.  Many of them with innovative (and some not so innovative) software, solutions, or services targeted towards online retailers and solving their needs, pain points, and goals.  In discussions with a few eCommerce software vendors, I noticed a trend that seemed to pique my interest and raise concern.  This is the trend of eCommerce solutions as a service.  Vendors that provide the solution, the hosting, and the services on the platform, all from one place.  At first glance, this seems like a great solution for merchants – get everything you need all in one place, right?

Well, my concern with this practice stems from a few points:

One of the most appealing benefits of selling online is unlimited reach. While a brick-and-mortar running shoe store is likely to draw consumers from a 20- or 30-mile radius, an online seller can gain instant exposure to athletes across the world. Whether your target e-market is two miles down the road or three continents away, anyone with an Internet connection can browse and buy your products.

But before you grab your passport and head into the world of cross-continental selling, take the time to do a little homework. Jumping on the international bandwagon entails more than just adding a currency conversion tool to your site. Below are some tips for enhancing your eCommerce store’s global shopping experience and increasing the chances of converting buyers from around the world.

Here’s an “educational” exercise that I sometimes do: I’ll start to buy a product online, but exit before checkout. In other words, I’ll complete everything on the online order form, right up until I have to enter a credit card, and then I’ll bail, just to see what happens.

Why? Well, you can learn many lessons from this exercise, and I encourage you to do it–for competing products as well as for products that are outside your industry or niche.

I usually choose products that have a heavy online advertising presence or that I’ve seen in infomercials. The reason? Well, these eCommerce sites tend to pour a ton of marketing dollars in 1) keeping people from exiting their site and 2) attempting to woo them back once they’ve left.