FEATURE ARTICLE

Driving Conversion - Is Your Store Running on All Cylinders?

Part 2

MonsterCommerce Achieves Visa CISP Compliance
In an effort to improve its daily operations as a whole, and to meet and exceed industry standards for security and compliance, MonsterCommerce was granted compliant status as part of Visa USA's Cardholder Information Security Program (CISP).
Read more

MonsterCommerce CEO Stephanie Leffler Named as Finalist in Stevie Awards For Women Entrepreneurs
Our own Stephanie Leffler was voted a finalist for Best Young Entrepreneur at the 2005 Stevie Awards. The Stevies, produced by the creators of the prestigious American Business Awards, were hailed as “the business world's own Oscars” by the New York Post.
Read the press release

Getting Ready to Go Live?
Launching your online store is an exciting time, as you get to see all of your investment and effort start to really pay off. You've undoubtedly spent countless hours revising and reviewing your site, but occasionally, minor details can be overlooked. Details that can cause your customers to have problems shopping on your site. To ensure that your site is running effectively we're offering a new Site Review service. With this service we review your navigation, images, checkout process and essential site settings - to ensure your site is running successfully, right from the start. Click Here for more information

New Year's Resolution: Get More Traffic to Your Site!
It's a new year, the perfect time to set up your site for success throughout 2006. Top rankings in Google, MSN, AOL and Yahoo! Can take months to achieve, so now is the time to have your site professionally optimized by MonsterCommerce's team of SEO specialists. Enjoy 10% off when you purchase a search engine optimization package in the month of January. Call 1-877-663-5169
or Click Here to sign up

New Link Popularity Building Service Helps with SEO
We are pleased to announce the launch of a new service that will help your website with its search engine rankings. Our link building service provides you with reciprocal and one-way relevant links from other sites in your industry, causing the search engines to crawl your site more frequently and helping your site with rankings for keyword phrases. Link building, when done by our team of professional link developers, will show the search engines that your site is naturally developing "backlinks" at a steady, natural growth rate from a variety of relevant sites and directories. We will develop and manage your link campaign every month so you're not spending your valuable time monitoring and looking for links. Take advantage of this new service today! Call 1-877-663-5169 for Click Here for more information.

Congratulations to December's MonsterSellers
The MonsterSeller Award medal is given to those merchants who sell a specified number of products, within a month, through their MonsterMarketplace store listing. Their listing is marked with a Platinum, Gold or Silver medallion, which helps enhance credibility. Click here to view the MonsterSellers for December.

MonsterMarketplace merchant spotlight
Congratulations to Paul Zimmerman for the success of his site, AshdownRoses.com, which was featured as the Merchant Spotlight for the month of January.
Read more about his achievements.

Take Five

Each month, we ask a different MonsterCommerce merchant the same five questions regarding his or her online business and its success.

This month's featured merchant is BubbleSupply

MonsterCommerce Merchant
since: June, 2005

Owners: Christian and Julie Rano

Best-Selling Product:
Eco-Lite Bubble Mailers (14 sizes to choose from)

1. What is your favorite feature about your site right now?
   Without a doubt…the side cart. Although we are new to MonsterCommerce, we are not new to ecommerce. We used many different shopping cart solutions for our old company, and it seemed as if we received 20+ emails per day asking “What is the shipping charge for “abc” to zip code “xxxxx?” The side cart makes it easy for our customers to calculate shipping and checkout, which allows us to maintain a small staff.
   
   
2. What was one major obstacle to your store's success, and how did you overcome it?
   Our one major obstacle was, and still is, exposure. We are less than one year old, and are still working on cost effective marketing. To achieve this, we use Google and Yahoo PPC advertising - as we are working to increase our organic search results. To help bolster our organic results, we had our site SEO optimized by the MonsterWebPromotion team. We are confident that over time we will achieve our goal of high ranking organic results, which will allow us to weed off of “PPC only” adverting…thus lowering our advertising costs.
   
   
3. To what do you attribute most of your site's success?
   Our pricing is extremely aggressive and we are fully committed to providing exceptional customer service. Secondly; with the help of MonsterWebDesign, we have tried to make our site simple and fun to use as compared with typical shipping supply stores.
   
   
4. What is the best or most rewarding experience you've had so far selling online?
   Despite being open for less than a year, we are already seeing a growing number of repeat and referral business. In the end, this validates the fact that we are exceeding our customers' expectations by following through with our core principal of “Delivering high quality shipping and packing supplies, at exceptional prices with unbeatable customer service.”
   
   
5. What web sites or online tools or resources would you not be able to live without?
   MonsterCommerce, Order Manager from Stone Edge Technologies, Google Adwords, and eBay.
   

Industry News

• Online Holiday Shopping Tops 30 Billion
  The 2005 holiday shopping season, or "ShopFest" - as we're calling it - was a massive success, reports eMarketer. According to the "Holiday eSpending Report" issued by Nielsen/NetRatings, Goldman Sachs and Harris Interactive, consumers gorged themselves on the online buffet, spending $30.1 billion from October 29 to December 23 - a 30% increase over 2004.
  
• Plenty of E-tailers Still Behind in Card Data Security
  More than six months after the June 1, 2005 compliance deadline set by Visa, a large number of merchants still have not complied with the data protection rules of MasterCard International, Visa U.S.A., American Express Co. and other major card brands.
  
• Focus on Quality Helps Zappos.com Increase
  Holiday Sales 67%
  Zappos' focus on "improving the customer experience," over new or improved marketing efforts helped the company increase December, 2005 sales 67% over December,
  2004 figures.
  
• Online Customer Satisfaction Down During Holidays
  Even though revenues were up, customer satisfaction went the other direction at many top retail websites during the
  2005 holiday shopping period. Proof positive that quality counts, and when you do things right, there's room for competition with the big boys.