This week in e-commerce news, buySAFE releases free modules for open source carts, a new market reporting tool debuts from Hitwise, an Internet sales tax bill is introduced in the Senate and analysts predict foreign sales for e-tailers from buyers using Google's new translation tool.
Online vendors using osCommerce and CubeCart can now add buySAFE modules to their sites for free. Approved merchants can display the buySAFE Seal, which means customers' purchases can be fully guaranteed with a bond from buySAFE and its surety partners Liberty Mutual, Travelers, and ACE USA. To download and install the osCommerce and Cube Cart modules, visit the the buySAFE Developers' Network Web site here.
To qualify for buySAFE, online merchants must pass the company's certification process, which ensures that they are financially sound, reliable and committed to delivering on their terms of sale. Sellers that use buySAFE earn additional revenue from any bond guarantees their customers purchase.
In other news for the online transaction firm, buySAFE also recently announced partnerships with CRE Loaded and 3dCart, and shopping cart providers MIVA Small Business Solutions, Zoovy, and Cart32 have also integrated the solution into their products.
Finally, buySAFE and security firm ScanAlert announced plans for a joint-offering. Under the terms of the partnership, all of ScanAlert's customers using its Hacker Safe program can apply for free use of the buySAFE Certified Merchant program directly from their Hacker Safe administrative console, and it will also be offered to new Hacker Safe customers as part of ScanAlert's account activation process. Additionally, Scan Alert's Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) validation services will be offered free, as a bundled feature, to all current and future buySAFE customers.
The Hits Keep Coming In marketing news, Hitwise just released an interactive report called Hitwise Dashboard that lets you review customized data from a single page in the Hitwise interface.
Leveraging Hitwise information that is updated on a daily basis, the new dashboard reporting provides up-to-date snapshots of metrics that marketers deem most important to their online planning and reporting efforts, according to the company. E-tailers can view data including:
the relative market share of their brand within their industry online;
the sources of traffic among competitors' sites;
the percentage of traffic from affiliate partners;
the brands and products that are top-of-mind among consumers; and
demographic data and lifestyle segmentation data.
Hitwise studies the online performance of more than 900,000 Web sites as well as the search and online behavior of more than 10 million U.S. Internet users. Future enhancements to Hitwise Dashboards will enable Hitwise clients to integrate other data sets, such as Web site analytics into the Hitwise interface.
Tax Bill Exempts Small Businesses On the tax front, a bill was recently introduced in Congress seeking to require e-tailers to collect sales taxes for all purchases made online. Currently, state sales taxes are collected by Web shop owners only when they have an actual brick-and-mortar store, warehouse or office in the state where the product is being shipped.
Sen. Michael Enzi (R-Wyo.) ushered in the initiative, called the Sales Tax Fairness and Simplification Act. It does include, however, an exemption for online businesses with annual revenue of less than $5 million.
How You Say, 'More Money?' Meanwhile, Google is again making headlines, this time with the debut of a new feature on Google Translate that converts results into 12 different languages, which could mean more sales for online merchants.
Here's how it works: a searcher can enter a query at translate.google.com in any language, select the language for results and conduct the search. Google then translates the query, performs a search and translates the results.
"Now, you can search for something in your own language (for example, English) and search the Web in another language (for example, French). If you're looking for wine tasting events in Bordeaux while on vacation in France, just type 'wine tasting events in Bordeaux' into the search box on the 'Search results' tab on Google Translate. You'll then get French search results and a (machine) translation of these search results into English," Franz Och, research scientist wrote in a blog post.
The program is still in beta, and Och said the translations aren't perfect, but are good enough to relay the general "gist" of the information. What makes it interesting to Web shop owners is that analysts are citing it as a potential boon for e-commerce, as it could open untapped foreign markets with little effort made by U.S.-based online vendors.
Michelle Megna is managing editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.
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