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There are lots of shopping cart software providers out there (agora shopping cart, 3d shopping cart, to name a few). But whether you’re engaging a cheap shopping cart solution or one that costs a bomb (or greater alternative: you’re engaging InstanteStore), a new 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 certain 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 quite a number of goods that are actually divided into 2 categories - hard goods and soft goods. Hard goods are tangible items like Cds 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 facilitates the receiving of online payments, normally by credit card. If you have problems getting an internet merchant account, you can consider the services of a merchant broker. A merchant broker would then charge a setup fee and generate the software and hardware necessary either by lease or sale, as required.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate has nothing to do with religion. But rather it relates to the percentage of visitors to an online store who are converted into buyers. Conversions do not happen automatically and depend on a few factors to help capture a visitor to buy from a specific 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.