Thought one - on-line shops

It may be all the rage but is it better to have a great looking web site to sell your goods or just great products?

Just great products - well just products really, after all whats great to me may seem like rubbish to you. I look at loads of web shops and some look spectacular and some look like my 5 year old made them.

The important bit is the things they sell, if customers want what the shop has they will buy! So get out there and open your shop - hey mine is at cata-log.co.uk

What stops people buying on-line? I have found 2 things, currency and security, maybe not in that order.

Currency
Its strange in the Internet world that folks wishing to buy online worry about the currency they pay in, well I think its strange! I sell web site hosting (plug) and am shocked by the number of potential customers who contacting me asking why I set my prices in £ (GBP - pounds stirling). I say Hey I live in the UK and that's what we use here. Well if its not in $, Euros, Yen, I'm not going to buy is the reply. I should learn from the situation and price in Euros and $ too but thats life.

Security
Love it you might trust the Internet you might not, but one things for sure, security of your credit card data is important to you. But how much trust do you have?
Many shops have Realtime Card Processing (like Worldpay) which is nice and safe but many just pass your card data to a Real Person for processing later.

Many of us see that little lock appear in our browser and think 'yes its safe' - but is it? You might be securly sending your credit card to a web server but what happens then? Is it just emailed on to the shop owner as clear text? Is it stored on the server unencrypted? What happens to your card number when the shopkeeper gets it? Just a thought but are your details laying unprotected on someones PC? Not a problem? Have you ever been to a computer fair and bought a second hand PC or Hard Disk? Was is compleatly clean or did you have fun reading the letters someone had sent?