We get this question quite often from customers who are starting their online business.

"I need to get credit cards, what do I need?"

It can seem confusing, but it is fairly straight forward.

You need two things to process credit cards and three if you want to process credit cards in real-time (ie approve/decline the card after the sale without you doing it by hand).

1) You need a business checking account - just a normal business checking account which you may already have.

2) You need a merchant account - A merchant account allows you to accept Visa, Mastercard, Amex etc... You can get this at your local bank or you can get it at another bank or even with an online service (such as Authorize.net).

If you are selling online or selling in a store you have to have a merchant account if you want to accept credit cards. (Besides paypal, which is a different story and another set of options).

Merchant accounts have their own set of fee's. Usually a per transaction fee and a percentage of the sale, most have a monthly fee as well.

3) If you want to process in real-time, you will need to get a gateway account, this basically sits on top of your merchant account and allows you to process credit cards through your website without you having to actually do the processing. As soon as someone completes the order, the credit card is checked through the gateway and the gateway sends back the approval or decline.

A gateway account has additional fee's. Usually a per transaction fee and a percentage of the sale and could even have a monthly fee.

There are a few companies out there that you may want to look at.

The biggest and most popular is Authorize.Net is the place to go. You can get your merchant and gateway account through them.

Another good one is PayPal's PayFlowPro.

Finally, Your Pay/LinkPoint is another.

You can also accept credit cards through PayPal, but that is for another blog post and explaining their different services.

I hope this helps!

One feature of SiteDirector is Meta Titles, though simple enough, can prove to be very helpful to your webstore.

With SiteDirector, you have the option of using Page Titles and in addition, "Meta Titles".

By default, SiteDirector uses the Page title. But if you supply a Meta Title, the system will utilize that meta title for your page title and search engines gobble up the page titles.

It's a simple concept, but difficult to explain so let me explain the two places a "title" is used.

The first is the page, ie a department page loaded with products. You may have a product like "Green Ipod Nano". This is fine for a "title" It is readable, easy for the customer to view on the page and they know what it is.

The second place for a title is in the actual "Page Title" (the small title found at the top of your browser). This is what is read by the search engines. Well Green Ipod Nano is pretty common so lets give the search engines something better to eat or gobble up.

So instead of the "Green Ipod Nano" Lets give our page the "meta" title of "8GB Apple Ipod Nano XXX123" This meta page is giving more information for the search engines;

1) 8GB: People are searching for specific sizes 2) Apple: Brand/Manufacture 3) Nano: Product Name 4) Sku: Finally the part number that people may search on

Utilize your meta titles to give search engines all the information, titles, keywords and sku numbers. These are things that search engines will be looking for and will index on (one of many), but every little bit helps.

Don't go overboard, use thoughtful, useful "truthful" information.

So to recap : Page Title (Green Ipod Nano) easy for the viewing public Meta Page Title (8GB Apple Ipod Nano XXX123) keywordy, searchable and useful.

Hope this helps, keep working your product pages!

As of right now, AuthorizeNet is down, not processing credit cards for "some" users (not everyone is affected).

Some customers are getting through, while others are not. Support is jammed up and I am assuming that they are rapidly repairing this issue.

We'll post when we hear something of more detail.

This is all we have at this moment.

Google base is a great tool for increasing traffic to your ecommerce site.

What is Google Base? It is a simple product feed that accepts an export of your products to be uploaded into Googles system.

Have you ever been to Google and searched for something and see a little set of 2-3 products listed with their prices? This would be just under the top Google Ads. These are results from various retailers who have uploaded their products to Google Base that match as closely as possible (per Google). They don't always come up, but mostly they do and they make things easier for the shopper looking for specific items.

There is also a Google Base shopping area, that your products can be listed in. This area allows customers to drill down into specific product listings and it is pretty extensive with many different attributes. You will need to read up on the various attributes that you can add to your products that show things like available colors, or sizes or isbn numbers. There are a ton of attributes and the more work you put into Google base when creating your products the more likely potential customers will find you.

Best of all -- IT'S FREE (for now). Google may end up charging for this solution, but as of this writing Google Base product submissions are free.

In my previous post, I mentioned Google Checkout. And Kurt from www.seedandgarden.com commented on why would you add Google Checkout if your customer is leaving your site? I too would question that and honestly, I really wish that Google would have handled this differently, but they don't.

So here is why "I think" utilizing Google Checkout and Google Base together adds a one - two punch. If you have your google base feed uploaded and your site offers Google Checkout, your listings in Google Base will have a Google Checkout button next to your listing, this helps highlight your listing even more than your competitors who DON'T have Google Checkout (your Google Checkout icon, is also shown in the Google Base shopping area, and customers can choose to only see results with Google Checkout, ikes you may miss out if you don't have Google Checkout). It also allows more of your products to show up after someone clicks the link below the 3 results to see more results "from companies who use Google Checkout", note this is not just other results, but ONLY results of people who are using Google Checkout. These are all free additional advertising avenues. The only drawback is that when they start there checkout process they are actually pushed over to Google Checkout instead of your normal SiteDirector checkout.

I guess my thought on it is this, it is pretty inexpensive on a per transaction charge to use Google Checkout, it's just another way to get additional revenue and really, do you care where the money comes from, just as long as money is coming?

All in all it is a pretty sweet solution.

So you might ask, how do I get my products into Google Base. Inside of your SiteDirector console follow these instructions.

• Click on Import / Export
• Click on Google Base Export
• This will generate a simple file that you can download locally
• RIGHT mouse click to save the file locally on your hard drive
• Go to Google Base, select Data Feeds
• Follow the directions from there
• Within 24-48 hours, your products will start showing up

Simple as that. Every bit helps especially when the internet has become a very competitive place to shop.

I hope this helps!

We have created a Google Checkout module that is available from QuillDesign. If you are interested in utilizing Google Checkout on your SiteDirector Shopping Cart site, please contact us at info@quilldesign.com and we will contact you with the specifics.

Note about Google Checkout and how it actually works. It is not like paypal where you can accept paypal directly on your site and through your normal SiteDirector checkout process. Instead utilizing Google Checkout, your customers actually leave your site before they start the checkout process and head over to Google to actually checkout. Our modules will pass the order information back once the order has been completed.

But be aware, the customers do leave your site and it is NOT like another payment method (ie Visa, Master Card, Paypal ect..) it is a complete checkout process at Google.

If you'd like this for your site, contact us and we'll work with you.

There are fee's associated with integrating this into your cart.

Many of you have asked for Quickbooks integration into SiteDirector's shopping cart. This is something we really have wanted to implement, but time and resources have been too low.

Well, we now have a solution for you. Clark Valberg over at Epicenter Consulting has put together a seamless Quickbooks integration module that can get you up and running with Quickbooks and SiteDirector.

Basically they are using Quickbooks "Web connector" to grab all of the order data from SiteDirector (behind the scenes) and sync up the orders and create invoices and statements within Quickbooks. All that you have to do is click the button within Quickbooks and the module with SiteDirector does the rest.

If you are interested in getting this module for your SiteDirector installation, contact Clark @ clark@epicenterconsulting.com. He will discuss your needs and the integration and get you setup to utilize Quickbooks with SiteDirector.

We haven't posted in awhile, there have been so many things going on and not enough time to post about anything that would be helpful. I know I know, if you blog you've got to blog, or don't do it at all. Well we like our blog and we would like to blog more, but with all the various projects going on, blogging is the low man on the totem pole.

Anyway, to our topic. We are working on v5.0 of SiteDirector right now. We are very excited we have some strong things going on and you developers out there will be very excited.

Right now we are in the planning stages and soon to be moving into production. But we are putting our pens and pencils to the paper and making sure we cover all the bases of things we have missed in the past.

Our main goals for v5.0

1) Clean code that is EASY to follow and customize: We want SiteDirector to be very developer friendly. More so than in the past. We will be breaking down the pages even more so it will be easy to add additional fields and additional customizations. This is what will make SiteDirector really appealing to even more developers. We had discussed frameworks, but decided against it, even though we like frameworks ourselves, we have found that many developers find it easier to work with procedural code and it makes for easier changes.

2) Easy Skinning - We are going to make the front end very skinnable and the CSS/XHTML will be much easier to manipulate as well as change out. Just swap out CSS files and the whole site makes it's change.

3) Finally the catalog building. We have ourselves been dealing directly with online stores to find the bumps in the road, the things that slow you down in managing your store. We are designing a much more fluid console area that will speed up management and improve best practices.

Some hints: Ajax, drag and drop, flyout windows, better promotions..... more to come!

We have just released version 4.7 of SiteDirector.

This was a minor release fixing a few bugs and adding just a few new features.

From the CSS/XHTML version of SiteDirector, we added to the Non CSS/XHTML version Previously viewed products.

All you have to do is run the RUNME.CFM script that comes with your patch then add the following code in places you want to display previously viewed products. This would take a developer to do.

Another addition for the NON-CSS version of SiteDirector is additional NOTES fields for the shopping cart. The RUNME.CFM script will add those values to your settings table and allow you to then modify those notes files.

All other fixes are minor.

We are currently working on a second set of templates for the CSS/XHTML version. We will release those available for download as soon as they are completed.