This is a slide deck I put together to speak to a group of college ecommerce students. Please share.

1. Kirkwood eCommerce Class 03.22.2011

2. WhatiseCommerce? Selling online Maximizing profits Minimizingcosts Customer Service SEO/SEM.

3. Things to consider… What products am I selling? Who are the buyers of my product? What platform should I use? Where should I host the site? How will people buy the product? What payment gateway should I use? How am I going to ship my products? How can I leverage SEO/SEM? How will I handle customer service?.

4. Products Whatproductsam I selling? Are thereanyspecialconsiderations, whatmakesmyproduct unique? How manyproductswill the site have? How often do the products change? How manypictureswill I need to display? How muchdoes the averageproductcast?.

5. Customer Whois the primarycustomer? How do theygetthisproductnow? Whatmakesthemwantourproduct? Whatis the average $$ spent by a customer over the life cycle of the relationship?.

6. Platform Whatlanguages do I know? How muchis in the budget? Whatkind of support do I need? Is the customerinvolved in the update? (I hopeso…).

7. Hosting How important isuptime? How long can I afford to be ‘down’? Is there a budget?.

8. Shopping Cart Poor man’s shopping cart. PayPal WordPress WP e-Commerce (http://www.instinct.co.nz/e-commerce/) QuickShop(http://www.zackdesign.biz/wp-plugins/34) eShop(http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/eshop/) WordPress Shopping Cart(http://tribulant.com/plugins/view/10/wordpress-shopping-cart-plugin) Shopify(http://www.shopify.com).

9. Payment Gateway PayPal.

10. Shipping Shipping istricky, becareful Bump up shipping charges Declare a clearcut-off timeShipanythingthatisordered by 3pm Be careful.

11. SEO/SEM Assumingproperproductselection and customer service – the most important concept in eCommerce Learn as much about SEO/SEM as youcan LearnwhatcanonicalURL’s are.

12. SEO/SEM Resources Danny Sullivan (http://twitter.com/dannysullivan) SearchEngine Land (http://searchengineland.com/) Matt Cutts(http://twitter.com/mattcutts) Matt’s SEO Blog (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/googleseo/) SEO 101 (http://www2.webmasterradio.fm/seo-101/) Joost de Valk(http://yoast.com).

13. Customer Service The customerholds the keys Make sure the customerishappy Call the customerafter the sale to askquestions Askwhytheyboughtwhattheybought? Whydidtheychooseyou’re store? Weretheylooking for somethingyoudidn’toffer? User testing.

14. Other questions: 10 things that make e-commerce work Product Customer Service SEO/SEM Social Media Price Simplicity Hard work Testing Feedback Find your passion What is the best way to set up pages that will be accessible correctly in the majority of browsers? If adjustments are needed, do you do that in the CSS or in the HTML of the actual page?.

15. Other questions: How to use tools to make shopping carts more e-commerce friendly? Best use (most cost effective use) of shopping cart for a small (very small) business? Do you only use Pay Pal for transactions? Tips for the developers in class on what to do and what not to do? What make people want to purchase products and vise versa - what factors, styles, positioning, etc throw people off and disrupt the flow of purchase. How to make a online ___________ business the most successful? What do you think we should expect out in the work field?.

16. Questions/About Me: Tom Altmantom@tomaltman.com319-430-0407Blog: http://tomaltman.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/tomaltman