Thursday, November 26th, 2009
Google algorithm changes are a big deal for all of us in the industry. They key is to be aware of all that is happening and be ready to anticipate, test and react. One of the keys to obtaining swift rankings is to ensure that your pages load quickly.
Site speed is always an issue. If your page is not loading quickly enough then it can create problems for your site. You can check your site speed using this page speed tool. Use it by downloading the page speed add-on. Page speed is part of the best practices of web design.
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Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
Once upon a time, PayPal disputes amounted to less than 1% of all transactions. It wasn’t really necessary or desirable to have a procedure to handle your side of the dispute.
In fact, in our business, we used to simply refund them and inform them that they weren’t welcome to make any purchases in the future.
The economic downturn and other factors have sent PayPal disputes through the roof for many businesses though. Our own current rate is over 6%. We have customer who is experiencing a 26% PayPal dispute rate and/or chargeback rate.
This all started in October of 2008 right when the stock market crashed. It was simultaneous with a large change in the Glyphius database and a huge blip of absolutely no sales in the businesses of several of our customers for a solid two weeks in October. We also experienced reduced sales during that time.
Perhaps you experienced the same thing. Perhaps you needed to put into place a program to start disputing the PayPal disputes and chargebacks for no other reason than to protect your PayPal account from being shut down.
It’s actually a very simple procedure in the end. PayPal makes it very easy for vendors who meet just a few criteria to win every single PayPal dispute.
First, let’s break down disputes into the two categories that PayPal uses:
1) Significantly not as described.
2) Not received.
Your customer (or thief in this case since they really aren’t customers… they are trying to rip you off) has to choose one of those two reasons.
The first reason is the easiest to dispute and win. You simply enter the UPS tracking number of the item being disputed and click the “escalate to a claim” button.
The dispute will be automatically judged in your favor and closed immediately.
The reason is that PayPal does not put itself in the position of deciding if an item is described properly in your sales letter. They really can’t do that. That’s up to enforcement from the F.T.C. and/or civil remedies in courts.
Of course, you must follow the law and describe your products accurately in the sales letters.
And also, of course, there is no reason to feel guilty about winning the dispute. You describe your items accurately so the “customer” (ie: thief) has just filed a fraudulent claim with PayPal trying to steal from you and get your PayPal account shut down. Winning a dispute with a thief is a good thing, not something to feel guilty about.
The other reason is “not received.” The action to take is identical. You simply enter the UPS tracking information and escalate the claim. This one won’t be closed immediately. It will take some time for PayPal to look at your tracking information and make sure the item has been delivered. However, once PayPal looks at your claim, it will always be found in your favor.
Once again, the “customer” (ie: thief) has placed a fraudulent claim pretending that they have not received the item you shipped. PayPal trusts UPS because UPS simply doesn’t lie about delivery. In fact, they get a signature if your product is over $100 and you buy the insurance.
That brings us to the details of how to use this extremely simple procedure to win every single PayPal dispute with less than one minute of work. Here are the steps:
1) Ship something with every order. If you are offering a service, still ship a CD or something with a copy of the results of your service.
2) Always use UPS. USPS has tracking, but some percentage of the time they simply say they lost the tracking information. Use UPS and you’ll always get a delivery confirmation that PayPal loves.
3) Always buy insurance if your item costs more than $100. This gets you the signature confirmation that PayPal likes to see if your customer paid more than $100.
4) Always require shipping information when setting up your PayPal buttons so that you have the address to ship to.
5) Instantly refund any order that doesn’t have a confirmed address or uses a P.O. Box. These are extremely likely to result in a dispute by a con-man after they receive the item. You won’t be able to win these disputes because PayPal only offers seller protection for shipments to confirmed addresses. You can’t send via UPS to a P.O. Box. It is best to simply refund them and not ship to these con-artists at all.
That’s it. Enjoy winning 100% of the disputes. Also be sure to tell every con-man that disputes a transaction with you that they are not welcome to do business with you in the future.
Some percentage of them will go out on the forums and complain about your policy. That will warn off other con-artists which is a very good thing.
The author is the creator of TestiVar, the world’s most effective multivariate testing solution. MuVar completely automates the task of optimizing your sales letters for more sales. Check it out here:
http://www.TestiVar.com
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Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
Android announce preview of SDK 1.5. The new o/s contains a bunch of enhancements – see http://developer.android.com/sdk/preview/features.html
I love the Android phone but have two issues:
- Doesn’t sync to Exchange without 3rd party software
- Battery doesn’t last
Otherwise it’s pretty brilliant.
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Thursday, January 22nd, 2009
It’s a very common problem that ![]()
tags have a title attribute set. This is against the W3C standard and so should be avoided – use the alt tag instead.
SiteCara.com has had the site audit functionality changed to include checks for this issue on all pages checked. If you want a swift rank or ranking at all you must comply with all standards
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Friday, September 26th, 2008
Weird issue on my sites recently. I have one VPS account with Plesk and the ports all get locked in a ‘CLOSE_WAIT’ state. Using ‘netstat -p” shows its usually httpd locking them up. Restarting VPS will get the ports unlocked but in investigation I found restarting Apache from the Unix command line does the trick to.
Anyone have any experience with this type of issue and how to fix it?
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Wednesday, September 10th, 2008
Put in a whole bunch of PPC (pills porn casino) links and we only noticed because the site wasn’t ranking when it should have, and by looking at the source code. The sire is pure HTML, no applications installed. How the heck they got in I don’t know, all I can assume is they got into the box through someone else’s site and added these links. Now I have to spend time cleaning it all up. Were do I send the bill for the cleanup?
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Wednesday, September 10th, 2008
The speed your site responds to queries is used as part of the overall ranking algorithm – sites that don’t respond at all are likely to get dropped from search engine indexes. Therefore turning on any performance enhancements you can is a must if you want to maintain rankings.
To that end I’ve been working on performance on our sites. My previous post was about turning on PHP errors and correcting them. One page on an internal site went from taking a few minutes to render to under 20 seconds all because I had $$var instead of $var in one line in a loop. (For those not in the know about PHP, $$var causes $var’s value to be referenced, so if $var = ‘test’ then $$var is treated as $test).
So next up is MySQL performance. If you have a database driven site using MySQL (most Unix blogs are like this) then you’re almost sure to gain performance improvements from turning on MySQL cache. By following the recommendations at http://www.databasejournal.com/features/mysql/article.php/3110171 you will give a performance boost for your site. How much depends on what your site does. On a blog the performance improvement will be minor but over thousands of visitors it will add up to less disk activity overall. If you have a large database driven site doing number crunching (we have one of these) it can make a huge difference to response times.
I don’t know how this works on a shared host as all our hosts are either dedicated or VPS (virtual private servers). You may want to send the URL to your host to see if they will implement the necessary changes.
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Wednesday, August 27th, 2008
We are now back up after being down for nearly a week. The problem was the site had lost its main hard drive. We had a second hard drive and there were backups in place on the second hard drive but the host did not know about them or couldn’t restore them as they should have. They moved us to a new machine and gave us root access, we restored the hosted sites from backups and didn’t lose much of anything.
A friend lost a hard drive on his web site, had no backups and lost a number of sites that were generating good income. Now he’s in litigation with his host over it. Much cheaper to pay the $10 per month your host charges for backups, or if you have a stable site download the files and the database to your local hard drive.
Remember – always have backups and check they work.
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Thursday, August 21st, 2008
This applies to you if you use Google Analytics, or any other third part javascript and your site stops responding whenever the third party site goes down.
One of the main ways this affects users is the page does not display in their browser, and in the lower left of the browser window they see ‘Transfering data from pagead2.googlesyndication.com’
The problem is caused by the script tag being in the <head> section of your site. If you move it to just before the </body> the browser will render your entire page before waiting for the third party site to respond. This will also improve the overall responsiveness of your site.
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