"Lack of trust" is the most frequently cited reason that online customers don’t buy. Shoppers want input and advice. And they want to know they’re dealing with a reputable company.

Chat live in realtime with customers visiting your website. Online chat has been around for awhile and there are many flavors of tools available on the market but if you’re looking for a low cost, meaning free, solution for your growing business, then Boldchat is a great solution to test out the waters.

There are 3 editions of Boldchat: the Basic free edition, the Pro edition and the eCRM edition. Each version builds on the previous one with additional features and cool tools. The eCRM edition incorporates a very extensive ticketing support system as well so you can organize all of your support & help requests in one place, whether they are inbound chats via Boldchat or emails to your support address.

• Reduce shopping cart abandonment
• Increase customer confidence
• Initiate chats with visitors
• Improve Your Support
• Better leverage staff
• Be available for instant answers
• Send prepared answers

Check out Boldchat - Free Live Chat for Your Web Site

Tags: boldchat, online+chat, customer+service, support

Here is a good reference article on starting your own successful e-business. The article is a primer on Search Engine Marketing, affiliate marketing, selling on eBay, customer service, finances, online taxes and other subjects for managing your business.

Read the full article on Everything you need to know to start your own successful e-business.

EBay offers a new storefront option, in addition to it’s existing eBay Stores subscription, that essentially gives businesses a complete turnkey solution that is integrated with the eBay marketplace. eBay ProStores enables small and medium sized businesses to sell products and services online through a fully customized Web store. Prostores has made creating a Web store easy to use, with built-in, step-by-step wizards that help them design the look of their store, upload products, and set up shipping and sales tax information. Although the eBay ProStores includes its own hosting and would be separate then any of the services we offer here at Pezland.net, we still think it is a viable option to consider when starting your online business or as a way to supplement an existing website presense. With ProStores you can still use your own custom domain name and just have it point to your eBay ProStore.

They offer a full suite of functionality:

• Domain registration and hosting
• Shopping cart
• Secure, SSL-encrypted credit card processing
• Integration with eBay and PayPal
• Marketing and Merchandising Tools
• Product catalog

I would say the biggest benefit to using a service such as eBay ProStores is that your ProStore is integrated into the full eBay site so when visitors search for products, your store is included in those search results. You instantly get to leverage the added visibility of being part of the HUGE eBay marketplace. This integration would launch your business into the search engines.

To learn more about eBay ProStores and get a 1 month free trial, visit the ProStores website.

Mobile professionals on the fly - Google announced today that they have acquired Writely.com, a web based word processing service. It’s essentially like Word only instead of composing your document on your local computer, you do it through a web browser and the document is stored remotely at the host. This allows you to compose, edit and retrieve the document anywhere you have web access as well as share the document and collaborate on it with other people. It’s pretty cool and definitely a great idea for people who exchange information online a lot. I can see it being helpful if you travel a lot and need access to important documents or proposals or maybe even used as a place to store your resume so it can be printed on the fly at any location.

Check out the beta version at www.writely.com.

For business (and life in general) being personal counts. These days in a world of massive companies like Microsoft who struggle to stay trendy, there’s lessons to be learned on being big… but staying small. Seth Godin has written a post in his blog about how “small is the new big”. It makes sense.

Enron (big) got audited by Andersen (big) and failed (big.) The World Trade Center was a target. TV advertising is collapsing so fast you can hear it. American Airlines (big) is getting creamed by Jet Blue (think small). BoingBoing (four people) has a readership growing a hundred times faster than the New Yorker (hundreds of people).

Big computers are silly. They use lots of power and are not nearly as efficient as properly networked Dell boxes (at least that’s the way it works at Yahoo and Google). Big boom boxes are replaced by tiny ipod shuffles. (Yeah, I know big-screen tvs are the big thing. Can’t be right all the time).

I’m writing this on a laptop at a skateboard park… that added wifi for parents. Because they wanted to. It took them a few minutes and $50. No big meetings, corporate policies or feasibility studies. They just did it.

Read the full post at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/06/small_is_the_ne.html

Technorati Tags: seth+godin, business, marketing

Books by Seth Godin:
 Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable
 All Marketers Are Liars : The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World
 Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers