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There are lots of shopping cart software providers out in the market (agora shopping cart, 3d shopping cart, to name a few). But whether you’re utilizing a cheap shopping cart solution or one that costs a bomb (or an even better alternative: you’re using InstanteStore), a first-time online merchant might get lost in all the ecommerce jargon strewn across cyberspace.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a way of getting quality traffic to a site without any financial outlay. This natural or organic method involves tweaking the site’s content, coding and HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) to raise its relevance to particular keywords and make it easier for search engines to index and thus boosting the site’s visibility on a search engine’s result’s page (SERP).

SEM

Search Engine Marketing or SEM is a way of promoting a site via the use of paid placements or paid inclusion. This form of internet marketing can raise your visibility in SERP’s much faster then SEO alone, but at a cost of course.

Hard Goods And Soft Goods

An online store may sell a variety of goods that are generally divided into 2 categories - hard goods and soft goods. Hard goods are tangible items like footwear and MP3 players. Soft goods are products that exist electronically like MP3’s, software and ebooks - items that can be downloaded.

Internet Merchant Account

An internet merchant account assists the receiving of online payments, usually by credit card. If you have trouble having an internet merchant account, you can consider the services of a merchant broker. A merchant broker would then charge a setup fee and develop the software and hardware necessary either by lease or sale, as required.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate has nothing to do with religion. As an alternative it relates to the percentage of visitors to an online store who are converted into buyers. Conversions do not happen easily and depend on a few factors to help convert a visitor to buy from a particular store. The clever use of images, content and call to action phrases all play a part in this process of conversion.

So before you sign up for a feature-rich yet cheap shopping cart solution like InstanteStore, remember that you brush up on your ecommerce jargon.