The E-sign Act and UETA, Two Laws that Enabled E-Commerce

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Two laws were passed with the intention of making electronic signatures valid as a regular means of validation. These two laws are the ESIGN Act and the UETA, both of which made a lot of positive changes possible for e-commerce. Both laws have expanded the functions of electronic signatures, ushering in many new ways for companies to do business in the modern world. E-commerce is now alive and well, thanks to the passing of both laws which particularly support new business practices geared towards online business operations. Both the UETA and the E-sign Act are there to support and protect electronic signatures and the documents they are in, and have provided many benefits for e-businesses in the process.

The E-sign Act is officially known as the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act, and is one of the United States laws that facilitate the use of electronic signatures and records for legal electronic contracts and documents both for interstate and international transactions. The E-sign Act makes sure that electronic documents are made legal and scrutinized under similar legal effects as regular paper documents. Nowadays, electronic records and signatures are considered just as valid and effective as regular paper contracts and documents thanks to the E-sign Act. Because of that, these e-documents are also under similar regulations as those imposed on paper documents.

The UETA (Uniform Electronic Transactions Act) is an act that was originally proposed by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws. The NCCUSL has since then influenced the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and 47 local states into absorbing similar regulations within their own laws. The UETAs purpose works hand in hand with the E-sign Act as a means of having a governing law that concerns the retention of paper records and the use of electronic processes to validate e-documents as an alternative.

Prior to the UETA, physical copies and printouts of many documents were required by most states. This presented a problem with regards to storage and production of waste, especially in the case of banks, where every check had to be kept in storage for processing. The UETA made it possible for these companies to use paperless processes instead of handling physical paperwork all the time. Keeping everything in electronic data form not only makes storage a lot easier and less space consuming, but also supports the green movement by eliminating a lot of paper wastes and the need for carbon production via paper production.

The E-sign Act and the UETA have both contributed to the now widespread use of electronic signatures in many industries. Companies have seen the many benefits that these laws offer, and are looking at other ways to maximize the convenience present in using electronic signatures and records. The ease of use has helped many companies in wrapping up even the most complex transactions and business deals within a day. With the ongoing trend of businesses going towards web site-driven operations, these laws have definitely made the future of e-commerce a lot brighter.

Ways that Website Analytics Can Save Your Online Business

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Website analytics is probably the last thing an online business owner wants to worry about. With 15 things to do every day before 10 am and another 50 to do before you can call it a day, sitting down in front of a bunch of web traffic stats seems like a waste of time. While I agree with the sentiment, it’s completely wrong. In fact, website analytics should be the first and last thing you review every day and I’ll give you three reasons why:

1. Web Analytics Help You Detect Fraud and Incompetence

Have you hired an SEO expert? PPC marketer? Social media guru? If you have people on staff or retain contractors to help you with your site, website analytics are your best friend.

Forget about the reports these experts create because all stats and data can be manipulated or ommitted. What you need is raw, reliable data to calculate the ROI of the services you are paying for.

Specifically, programs like Google Analytics can help you quickly isolate specific traffic streams and provide a host of useful data to calculate ROI, including:

Conversion Rate of Specific Traffic Channels
Conversion Rate for Specific Targeted Keywords
Average Time on Site for Specific Traffic Streams
Bounce Rate for Specific Traffic Streams

Of course, the conversion rate data for specific traffic streams (or Internet marketing experts) will help you calculate the ROI. But the average time on site will also help provide a rough gauge of overall traffic strength. If a specific traffic channel can’t keep visitors on site for more than 2 minutes, the traffic is either weak or you have significant issues on your landing pages.

2. Web Analytics Help Assess Site Health

To put that another way, web analytics essentially help show you where you need to invest your money most to boost online profits. Specifically, website traffic analytics will help you assess:

A. Traffic Strength
B. Sales Funnel Effectiveness
C. Shopping Cart Function and Conversion Rate
D. Website Conversion Rate and Rates for Specific Services/Products

For instance, high bounce rates and low average time on site typically indicate weak traffic or exceptionally poor landing pages. You can confirm which by looking at the data for specific traffic streams to see if there are significant variations in performance. If there are, then the issue is likely a weak traffic stream but if all channels are doing poorly, it’s more likely to be landing page.

The point is, the data tell you what’s wrong with your site so you can best channel your investment dollars to the most critical areas.

3. Web Analytics Eliminates Needless Split Testing

In most cases, optimization of landing pages and product descriptions is completed via split testing. That is, decide what sales tool you want to test (like a headline or CTA) and then create a new one to split test against. If your new sales tool performs better, conversions will increase and your hard work rewarded. However, this is rarely how it works.

You see, the thing people always forget about split testing is it’s sheer expense. To statistically verify even a lead gen site with a non-monetized CTA, you need at least 1,000 visitors or more to each version.

So if you think a landing page or product description might have problems with the headline, value proposition, and credibility tools, that’s at least 3 tests you need to run at 2,000 visitors per test. At even $1 a click, you can see how that would get very expensive, very quickly.

And the worst part: You have no idea if the headline, value prop, or credibility tools are even suppressing conversions. You are just split testing one sales tool versus a new one and hoping for the best, seriously.

But with web analytics, you can pinpoint the issues and eliminate the guesswork saving loads in unnecessary testing costs and content creation.

In conclusion, web analytics really are vital to your online success because they provide you with an accurate assessment of site health and your investments in traffic generating services. If you don’t know the true health of your site, then how can you possibly know what it needs to grow and be more profitable?

Benefits of e-Commerce Website Design

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In this era of technological advancement an increasing number of people prefer to do business transactions via internet. More and more businesses hire a company to design and develop e-commerce websites, considered a vital aspect in the process of using the internet to help increase sales of their respective products and services. As a result, e-commerce websites have become indispensable, as most commercial enterprises have their own e-commerce websites through which the organizations interact with their customers in addition to selling their products and services.

It is imperative to take into account certain factors that influence e-commerce website design. Appropriate images and pictures should be utilized in order to make the e-commerce website visually appealing. Making a good impression and grabbing the customers attention depends on the design and layout of the website. It is important to maintain a professional look which is also user friendly and not complex. Including a search engine and advanced filters would ensure that customers will have access to the product easily. Keeping your site uncluttered and navigable is essential in order to enable the visitors to obtain the necessary products and information.

Generally, a customer does not like to spend more than 30 seconds in the process of evaluating a website. Therefore, it is important that the customer gets the information he or she is searching for within that time. As a result it is possible that they would explore the website ultimately making a purchase. An effective e-commerce website therefore, must be able to give a business this advantage over others.

A merchant account that accepts all types of credit cards is essential for the success of an e-commerce website. Install a secure server and a reliable payment getaway to ensure that the customers information is safeguarded and verified at the same time. For this purpose, use companies that offer SSL certificates.

E-commerce websites help create new business opportunities with potential customers, potential business associates and new product manufacturers. Customers who initially did not know you existed will know about you, and other businesses will approach you about partnership opportunities.

Another benefit of an e-commerce site is that it gives you the ability to possess unlimited store hours, providing your customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week access to shop and buy products and services from you. In addition, brand or product awareness will increase as you will be able to reach out to millions of consumers all over the world.

A bitter taste in the mouth

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We’ve had our first ‘negative’ experience since starting www.LensLocker.co.uk. Not one, but two of our orders did not came back! Obviously we have had a few occasions where parcels have turned up late, nonetheless, in such cases a quick call to the customer has confirmed that the lens or camera has been returned and the delay is with the courier.

Not this time around…..despite all of our efforts we have been not able to contact the customer on the phone, email or letter, and we now have recognized that we’re highly unlikely to retrieve our photography gear.

We’ve spent a couple of days feeling hopeful (maybe they will arrive!), frustrated, disappointed, angry and then very angry! I am now feeling resigned that this type of thing happens and hopeful the police, which are now involved, will have the ability to allow us to resolve this case.

As the whole experience leaves very bitter taste the only factor that we’re certain of is the fact that we must learn from this experience. What will we do in order to minimise the danger without deterring customers from using our services? So what can we provide when it comes to delivery and collection which supplies added assurance our equipment is going to be sent back? What further inspections are we able to do ahead of time to flag potential risks? These are things that have now been pushed very rapidly towards the top of my ‘to do’ list!

Despite this slight setback we still love our business and helping our customers. We’re ongoing to further develop the business and we our expanding our selection of equipment and our stock levels. We take great pride within the service we provide and we’re getting receiving great customer feedback. We are starting new and exciting offers, we are keeping our website fresh with new ad banners and pages and we are working with our designers to ensure we are getting the most from our stock and our website.

And also the best little bit of news now….we hit number two for several key phrases around the search engines like Google – pretty good for a company which is not even 6 months old.

Easy Tips for Ecommerce SEO

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Ecommerce websites are light on original, textual content, making it difficult for their webmasters to garner editorial links. And since content and links are so important in SEO, optimizing ecommerce websites may seem like an impossible feat. Fortunately, by following these 8 easy tips, you can get your ecommerce website to rank highly in no time.

1.Include expert product reviews of at least 300 words for each product you sell. Not only do product reviews make your site more linkable and improve the overall user experience, they also allow you to include more unique content, which search engines love.

2.Create unique product descriptions. Rather than utilizing the descriptions provided by a manufacturer or supplier, rewrite product descriptions so they are original and contain target keywords. Otherwise, the descriptions on your site will be duplicates of the descriptions on other peoples sites. The wordier your product descriptions, the better. Rewriting all of the product descriptions will be overwhelming, so start with descriptions of your 10 most important products.

3.Add descriptions to category pages. Category pages are important to ecommerce SEO, and you can make them even more valuable by adding descriptions of at least 100 words. The descriptions must be unique and contain target keywords.

4.Allow users to submit content. User-generated reviews not only enable you to fill your site with unique content, they also vastly improve the usability of your site. People love to read user reviews and contribute their own. Furthermore, user reviews often heavily influence peoples buying decisions.

5.Add a cool widget, tool, or piece of content to your site that attracts links. People will be more likely to link to your site if you provide something that is fun, useful, or valuable. For example, if you sell bandannas, you could provide a free information product that teaches customers 50 ways to tie a bandanna.

6.Add a buyers guide that educates website visitors about the products you sell. Buyers guides should be informative, unique, and keyword-rich. Buyers guides improve the linkability of your website in addition to providing your website visitors with valuable information that helps them make smarter buying decisions.

7.Optimize your websites home page for your most important keywords or for the names of the most profitable products you sell. If you also own a local store, make sure to include local search terms (i.e. toys in Denver) so you can drive local search traffic to your site. Treat your home page like your storefront. Include direct links to the various categories of your site on the home page to make it easier for visitors to find exactly what theyre looking for. When you add text links to your home page, incorporate them into textual content because it looks more attractive than featuring a long list of text links.

8.Add an education and information section to your website to increase linkability. The section could include informative “how to” content and videos. For example, if you sell toys for toddlers, you can create a section that includes articles and videos that teach people activities and games that they can play with their toddlers.