You may have seen recent posts about when refunds are posted to your account, or how to make sure you’re not losing money on international orders. I’ve even written about how to help customers who want to change how often receive a recurring delivery to simplify the process.

As I thought about it, I realized that most of the tips and tricks I’ve come across with 1ShoppingCart with my clients relate to specific problems.

It seems to me that you guys should be asking the questions that you want to see answered here on this blog. I want to help you make your website as profitable as possible, but that only comes with knowing your specific concerns.

So, fire away and let me know what aspects of setting up an account or keeping it running are giving you a headache. Consider me aspirin that comes in several forms:

1. If it’s a quick question, you might see me pop into the comments to address it as soon as I get to reading it. You don’t have to worry about long waits.
2. For more involved processes, you may see the the answer as an upcoming blog post. We’ll be sure to let the asker know and credit them in the post!
3. If you need a full-scale consultation to make sure that your business can go from scratch to fully up-and-running, you want to contact me through this site so I can assess your needs.

Three choices and whichever you choose, you’ll get rapid responses about your 1ShoppingCart needs from a leader in the field.

Let’s get started: What do you want me to write about and answer just for you?

All of you using 1ShoppingCart are in some way involved in a business. Either you’re the business owner, marketing for a business, or running the web side of things.

And many of you are “lucky” enough to be doing all three.

So I’m sure most, if not all, are intimately familiar with the concept of social proof, and how important it is when selling your products.

There are few things more powerful than learning other people, just like yourself, give their testimonial about a particular product or service.

You see this in action everywhere, and every good sales process has many real life testimonials from folks.

So how nice would it be to also have this social proof for your potential clients shown on the checkout page, right before they are making the decision to purchase?

Well, if any of you have tried doing this yourself you know that 1ShoppingCart doesn’t make it easy. In fact it took me a little bit to figure it out myself, and I’ve had programming experience.

So what I’ve done, just for you, is create a product that will walk you through the simplest and easiest way to accomplish having testimonials show up on your 1ShoppingCart Checkout or Cart Content Pages.

I’ve implemented it myself for clients, and I’ll show you exactly what you need to do to to get testimonials to appear on your checkout pages, to really convince those people who haven’t quite made up their minds to purchase your product.

“I was very pleased with the look and feel of my how my 1ShoppingCart testimonials came out on my shopping cart. You took care with every detail and I was able to instal this within 5 minutes, thank you.” Steven R Shaw imgears.com

Not only do I show you, in an easy to understand step by step format, how to add testimonials to the check out and cart content pages, but I also show how you can add different, specific testimonials to each individual product pages!

This means that you can add a testimonial about product X, right on product X’s checkout page! It’s hard to beat that social proof!

And this isn’t limited to just testimonials. I lay out the framework for you, but you can replace these testimonials with whatever you want, for example, your great guarantee on your products.

(You do offer a great guarantee right? )

Imagine, you’re the customer trying to decide whether you really want to purchase this product, and then you glance over and are reminded about the terrific guarantee you offer. It’s a great way to increase conversions.

So what will this ability to increase your conversions cost you? Well it took hours to create, and at $135 per hour it would be perfectly reasonable to charge about $500 for this.

Many of you can justify the cost of this with an increase of just 1 or 2 sales. But I’m not going to charge $500, and in fact, I’m not going to charge even half that amount.

Because I want to help out as many of you 1ShoppingCart users as I can, it’s going to cost you less than a hundred bucks, so even those of you with lower priced products can quickly make up the difference with an extra 2-3 conversions.

For $89.97, I’ll show you exactly how to implement this on your own shopping cart, so you can set it up for as many products as you’d like.

And that’s not all, if you have any trouble whatsoever, just send me a quick email and I’ll be happy to help you out.

So don’t delay, be sure to have the power of social proof working for you in as many places as possible, and pick up your copy of “1ShoppingCart Testimonial Template For Checkout” now.

Click the add to cart button below and I will see you on the next page.

Oh… And on my checkout form above, when you click to invest in the “1ShoppingCart Testimonial Template For Checkout”, you’ll see these testimonials in action.

To your business success,

This client had someone else initially set up their shopping cart, and since the beginning was under the impression that he was charging customers for shipping.

When I asked how much, the client didn’t know, so I set out to find the answer. To my, and my clients, surprise, it turned out he wasn’t charging for shipping at all!

Boy was that a shock!

After correcting that mistake which was letting his hard earn money out the window, we set out to set up his shipping for international orders, which is the purpose of this email.

(First things first, for those of you new to 1ShoppingCart, and who have a physical product you send out that you need to charge shipping for, double check that you are charging for shipping!)

This experience reminded me of a little trick I know, that only about half the users of 1ShoppingCart know.

You can set up defaults in shipping so when the United States is the country selected (default setting) users will only see a set number of shipping choices. These include only options within the United States (Overnight, Priority, Express 2 Day, etc.).

To enable different shipping methods, you have to switch to a different default country, which then shows Express, International Air, Slow Boat To China, etc. as shipping options.

Why is this so important?

Simply put, you could be leaving money on the table. As an example one of our clients who had international customers quickly realized that people will, surprise, surprise, choose the cheaper shipping options inside the shopping cart.

Well they were losing on average $5 per sale on international orders. They had roughly 10 of these orders a day, so that’s $50 a day, or put another way, $18,250 A YEAR!

So how do you get these 1ShoppingCart Shipping Options for your 1ShoppingCart account?

Simple, just follow the steps below:

1. Log in to your 1ShoppingCart account
2. Scroll over ‘Setup’ and click ‘Cart Options’
3. Set the 9th line down, ‘Show International Designation Option on Shipping Table:’ to ‘Yes’
4. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click ‘Save Page’
5. Scroll over ‘Products’ and click ‘Setup Shipping’
6. Click your current shipping option (Weight Based, Quantity Based, Realtime Calculation, etc.)
7. Click ‘Next’ on the next screen.
8. You will see a new checkmark box called ‘International’. For all international shipping options be sure to click this checkmark
9. Be sure to check a ‘default’ international shipping option. So you will have two defaults. One for International shipping and one for U.S. shipping.
10. Click ‘Save’ at the bottom of the page
11. Click ‘Done’ at the bottom of the page

And just like that you are done.

Be sure to go through your checkout process and make sure everything works as expected.

ADDED BONUS:

Everyone always says to me, “Tyler, I don’t know how to setup my shipping. What do you recommend?”

Here’s my response.

Sure you can go with Realtime Shipping. By why? It’s complicated and you can’t add $1 or more for handling.

Also, you want to be sure NOT to give your customers too many options when checking out. So I keep the checkout options to no more than 2 options. (2 options for shipping within the U.S., and 2 options for shipping Internationally)

So what I do is set up the following for all of my clients. (The price may change but the shipping options do not)

I choose Quantity-Based so that way when they order more than one product they will be charged shipping accordingly. And I keep the “Minimum total for Free Shipping” set at the default they provide.

Then I set up the following:

Standard U.S. Delivery (3-5 business days)
Overnight U.S. Delivery (1 business day)
International Delivery (4-10 business days)
Canada Delivery (4-8 business days)

• I put checkmarks in the international section for the bottom two.
• I make Standard U.S. Delivery my default for U.S. deliveries and International Delivery my default for shipping internationally.

Why do I offer Canadians a discount? Because, being based out of the U.S. I know it’s cheaper to ship to them then it is any other country. Plus, I never want to piss off any Canadians eh.

“How many subscribers are reading your newsletter and clicking through?”

(The link in your email should be your ‘call to action’ and it’s only effective if your visitors are clicking on it.)

And you know what the response is nearly every time?

“I don’t know Tyler!”

And that response isn’t good enough… You want to know why?

Sure we can send the emails as a HTML newsletter or broadcasts so we could measure the ‘open’ rate.  But many people want to stick with text emails for S-P-A-M reasons. We all know text emails breeze through S-P-A-M filters.

So let me ask you a question… “How many subscribers are reading your newsletter and clicking on the ‘call to action?’”

We just got done testing one of my clients email marketing campaigns and noticed their click-through rates were a miserable 0.83 Percent. We send an email roughly every other day and these numbers were consistent over a two week period.

To put it more simply… We were sending a broadcast to 12,000 people, and only 100 people actually clicked through to the clients website.

When we saw those numbers we knew we had to jump into action. We tried three different variations of emails we sent out.

Email #1: one link in the email at the bottom driving them to the website

Email #2: one link up top and one at the bottom

Email #3: a short teaser email with a link back to the site

Which one do you think outperformed the rest?

Email #1: A 0.83% click-through rate bringing in little to no sales

Email #2: 2.1% click-through rate

Email #3: 14.3% click-through rate bringing a huge increase in sales!

Now for the good news. Those numbers will only go up from here as we will always be testing EVERY email we send out. Our goal is to get over a 22% click-through.

If you get over a 10% click-through rate then you are doing good and anything over 20% is phenomenal.

And even better news for you… I’ve laid out exactly how we test each email step-by-step below:

1. In 1ShoppingCart set up an ‘AdTracker’. Name it the date – type of email with the number of characters in the email – page we drive them too (Ex. “12-01-09 – Teaser 456 Char. – Blog”)
2. Next we set up a redirect through our website instead of using the AdTracker link so it looks like it’s coming from our website.(If you want to learn how to setup a redirect visit http://www.everythingwebbased.com/affiliateredirect.html. This is for our affiliates but just change Insert-Your-Affiliate-Link-Here with the AdTracker link)
3. Upload the new redirect page to your server
4. Put the link to the new redirect page you just created in the email.

Now you may be asking, why do I want to track this through the shopping cart?

Well the answer’s easy.

In fact, I am going to give you the exact excel spreadsheet we use to track each email.

Click Here to download the excel spreadsheet.

Remember, you should always be working on ways to make your emails campaigns more effective. Keeping track of all my clients email campaigns allows us to immediately see what’s working and improve what’s not, which leads to more money in the pocket.

Leave your comments below
and let me know what you want to learn next.

“Do I set up my email sales campaigns with single or double opt-ins when someone signs up via email?”

I say SINGLE opt-in! WHY? It’s all about the numbers!

1ShoppingCart.com recommends the following:

“Using a double opt-in process for your mailing list is a good way to ensure a clean and trouble-free list.”

But what they don’t understand is that you are LOSING up to 60% of your opt-ins.

I have tested this! We have offered free gifts, free audios, free CDs – if they double opt-in.

But think of this… Who, when they signup for something, is going to leave your site, login to their email, and THEN click a link to get the material?

I know I don’t do that!!!

Statistically, 40 – 50% of the people will click 2 links and double opt-in. 65% if you really perfect and test your offer.

However, if you use the single opt-in option, you receive a 100% opt-in response!

That’s right, EVERYONE will get your free material AND be added to your email distribution list!

Now I know what you’re thinking… when you send all those people an email, they won’t receive it because of spam filters.

You’re right. Not everyone will receive your email.

HOWEVER, I just checked my stats and only 3% of my emails aren’t getting through to my intended recipient.

So what would you rather have?

Up to 60% of your clients who don’t complete your double opt-in and you can NEVER email? Or 3% of your single opt-in list not receive your email because of spam filters?

I think it’s a no brainer.

Here is what you need to do to setup your account with single opt-ins:

1. Login to your 1ShoppingCart account
2. Scroll over Email & Marketing in the main menu and click Opt-In Preferences
3. Change the ‘Require Opt-In Verification for Webform Submissions’ from Yes to No
4. Click Save Changes

Hope this helps and here’s to optimizing your 1ShoppingCart account AND your business!