Hey Shel, Hello Marcia If at all possible within your budgets please simplify the carts, certainly unify them. Customers expectations are much higher than in the past. Shel, as a fan of yours you know I would navigate to extremes to get to your products. Marcia, I haven't yet had the pleasure of meeting you. But while the solopreneur business model may attract shoppers more dedicated to purchase your products than say a product shopper at TigerDirect, why frustrate them? If one is public ally upset, more than likely 7-9 others ones are too-but silently. There are 7 reasons that explain the majority of reasons customer's abandon carts. Difficulty in use and checkout is number 6, accounting for 15% of abandoned carts. (Not wanting to pay shipping is #1. The other five will cost a cup of coffee.) A common mistake by online merchants that leads to frustrated customers and poor shopping experiences is that the carts are hard to use. They are not easy to navigate, to edit, or to query for more information. Not only is this frustrating, but it interferes with the flow of moving the customer through checkout. But there are ways you can avoid these problems and make the shopping cart a customer's friend, not a distracting enemy. We've developed an e-commerce solution and shopping cart that has incorporated years of online best practices that we can customize appropriately depending on the particular business model. These practices have proven to decrease abandonment rates and actually increase average sales for smaller professional service companies as well as some of our larger national accounts. I'd e happy to discuss some of the strategy offline. Dan Green www.hampdencounty.truepresence.com 498 South Gulf Road Belchertown, MA 01007 (413) 253-3400 -----Original Message----- From: hidden-discuss-bounces at lists.hidden-tech.net [mailto:hidden-discuss-bounces at lists.hidden-tech.net] On Behalf Of Marcia Yudkin Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2006 10:23 AM To: Hidden-discuss at lists.hidden-tech.net; shel at frugalfun.com Subject: Re: [Hidden-tech] Referral Commissions... ** Be a Good Dobee and help the group, you must be counted to post . ** Fill out the survey/skills inventory in the member's area. > > Affiliate sales are a pretty small part of my business, but what I do > is I have three different rates: I pay 50 percent on e-books, 25 > percent on printed books and speeches, and 10 percent on client work. > The way I work this is with two different shopping carts, one to > calculate the 25% sales and one to track the 50%. The client > referrals are easy to track manually, as there's not a big stream of > them. > -- Shel, Do your site visitors get irritated with the two separate shopping carts? I also have separate shopping carts for tangible items and for downloadable products, and occasionally I get an exasperated email from someone who tried and failed to place one order for the two kinds of stuff. Because of this, I'm on the verge of creating one new shopping cart for everything. So I'll be interested in your experience on this! Thanks, Marcia Yudkin, Goshen Are you ready to create income while you sleep? If so, learn more about the upcoming "Launch Your Information Empire" program: http://www.yudkin.com/informationempire.htm _______________________________________________ Hidden-discuss mailing list - home page: http://www.hidden-tech.net Hidden-discuss at lists.hidden-tech.net You are receiving this because you are on the Hidden-Tech Discussion list. If you would like to change your list preferences, Go to the Members page on the Hidden Tech Web site. http://www.hidden-tech.net/members