Review: Selling Online (US Edition)

Selling Online: How to Become a Successful E-Commerce Merchant
by Jim Carroll and Rick Broadhead
Dearborn Trade, April 2001
576 pages, paperback
ISBN 0793145171

When Carroll and Broadhead published Selling Online for Canadians in 1999 it was very well done. The revised version, which covers US e-commerce products and services, is the best single e-commerce book for the online merchant available in print. The authors have done a fabulous job including in this volume all of the essentials that an e-merchant needs to know. The US edition has expanded nearly 50% from the Canadian edition, much of it due to the authors' extensive use of screenshots to illustrate various aspects of online merchandising.

Selling Online consists of nine chapters, some short, and others 100 to 150 pages long. The first asks 23 tough questions that e-merchants should answer before setting up an online store. Too many small businesses go online with unrealistic expectations and flimsy business plans. These questions will help prospective e-tailers avoid disaster by grappling ahead of time with the opportunities and obstacles of e-commerce.

The second chapter concentrates on store-building software, explaining the various features to look for and how they typically operate. The authors mention a wide variety of e-commerce solutions; unfortunately they don't provide enough guidance on the actual feature and pricing differences.

Chapter 3, "Tips for Building an Effective Online Store," is the highlight of the book. The authors carefully examine each of the factors that affect sales in an online store, and explain how to get the maximum impact out of each. E-merchants who spend weeks studying this section and applying what they learn to their own site are bound to transform both the look of their site as well as their sales conversion rate.

Chapters 4 and 5 provide a good introduction to merchant accounts, online payment processing, payment gateways, security, and protecting against credit card fraud. Chapter 6 outlines in some detail the various methods of marketing an online store, material covered in many marketing books. Chapter 7, however, isn't found everywhere: "Building Customer Loyalty in Your Online Store." Here the authors explain how to retain and get repeat sales from customers, one often-neglected essential to e-tailing success. Chapter 8 contains a variety of tips from US merchants explaining what they found that worked, and what didn't.

I really like the scope and detail contained in Selling Online. It's the first volume I am recommending to both novice and experienced e-merchants.

You may purchase Selling Online at a discount from Amazon.com through these links:
US: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0793145171/wilsoninternetse
UK: http://amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0793145171/732
DE: http://amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/0793145171/wilsonweb
FR: http://amazon.fr/exec/obidos/ASIN/0793145171/wilsoninternet
JP: http://amazon.co.jp/exec/obidos/ASIN/0793145171/