Here is a video I found which is worth a watch. It has a tips about ecommerce websites from a selection of experts. It is worth viewing a couple of times just to really take the information in, otherwise you can forget some bits within minutes of hearing them.

This the second article in a series about protecting your website, the first article published was about stopping content stealers who damage your website with duplicate content issues.

Stopping the hackers getting into your website is obviously hugely important. Here are a few methods to protect yourself and keep your website secure.

Passwords
Change them often for the login to your website. Make them strong so use lots of letters, numbers and symbols. It may be a pain but for something so simple and important it must be done.

Index.html In All Folders
For every folder on your server make sure it has a blank index.html, otherwise if a hacker visits the folder directly they will be able to see all other files inside the folder.

Monitor Error Log
Check your stats, or 'Error Log' and keep an eye on it. You may spot hackers trying to find web based programs on your site to later attempt to use them. Alternatively you may also find missing files, images not loading etc which is good to locate to improve your users experience.

Htaccess File
Use the .htaccess file on your hosting.

Stop kiddie hackers with this code:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} libwww [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(.*)=http: [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [F,L]

Stop other people viewing the content of your htaccess file with this code (do the same for any other file just change the name):

<files .htaccess>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>

Block IP addresses with this code:

Order Deny,Allow
Deny from ENTER IP HERE

Robots File
Use your robots.txt file to prevent indexing of important folders and files on your website. Here is the code, change folder names to your own. Learn more about this at robotstxt.org

User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder-name/
Disallow: /folder-name1/
Disallow: /folder-name2/

Chmod Permissions (Unix servers only, not Windows)
Change the permission of your files to 644 when possible. This basically means the owner gets 'read and write access', but all other users only get 'read' access preventing programs from running. Obviously if you have a shopping cart script and other functions it may not be possible to have all files 644. You don't want to leave files unnecessarily vulnerable so have the right chmod in place when possible.

SSL
Try and use SSL on your whole website, not just during payments. You may need to pay extra for this so enquire with your web host provider about whether it is possible and for how much.

Backups
Remember to also do regular back-ups of your website should anything happen to it.

Your PC
Make sure it is free of viruses and well protected. Always update and run anti-virus software as often as possible. If your computer is hacked they could get the details to hack your website as well.

Surfing the web on mobile phones continues to grow in popularity. With the rise of smartphones such as the Apple iPhone, Blackberrys and devices from other brands such as Nokia the ‘mobile web’ seems to have become more and more in use.

Worth Becoming Mobile Friendly?
No doubt this is one market that will continue to grow over the coming years, and potentially rapidly, so ignoring this opportunity would be madness. It improves your reach to potential customers, means you are more accessible and also being involved already means you are ready for the future as mobile web develops even further. It also acts as another promotional method as there are directories specific for phone surfers.

Is Your Site Mobile Friendly?
Most websites aren’t automatically suited for use on phones, the formatting can end up all over the place. Get your website up on your phone (if it is internet enabled, which most new ones are) and take a look. Chances are it is isn’t.

Do Any Companies Yet Have Special Websites For Phones?
Yes. Lots of major companies, and much smaller ones, are now creating specific mobile-optimised websites. Amazon, Travelodge & Swiftcover are just a few of the companies already live – test them our on your phone to see what they look like. Another site is DropshipBog.co.uk, that’s right (see image on right), you can read all our content on your device, check us out on your phone now!

What’s The Difference Between The Sites?
Sites for mobiles have to be much ‘lighter’ so they load a lot quicker – compressed images, stripping out design elements and removing scripts are just a few of the changes. A script on your website means it detects the browser a visit is using and shows them the website as appropriate.

How Can I Make My Website Mobile Friendly?
You can either install a script yourself, search in google for things like ‘mobile friendly’ and there are lots of blog posts and articles with advice. Alternatively you can use a service to create one for you (it is free for basic services or paid for a more premium service). One I have tried out is MoFuse.com which is very easy to do and a quick solution. The benefits of doing it yourself are; you have complete control and your content doesn’t get redirected to another domain (like it does with services like MoFuse). However the services are a quicker and easier.

Conclusion
The web really is going mobile, and it is an area you can attack now before other ecommerce sites get in on the act. Be one step ahead of the game, it should pay off!

This is the first post of a series on protecting your website.

It is all very well building your business up, but if you don’t protect it you could end up losing it all, or taking a hit. At the moment one of the things I am focusing on is protecting my business, I’m happy with what I have and don’t want others taking advantage of it, or trying to hurt me. One problem is people stealing your content, that you own the copyright to, and unfortunately it goes on quite a bit.

Content Stealers
This has been a real problem with this blog. People copy my articles and publish them on their own website as their own work. Google then thinks it is duplicate content and hits the rankings. Other people are also able to profit from my hard work. I created the work so I own it and no one can copy it.

The same goes for an an ecommerce store or any type of website. If you research a product you are selling and create a brilliant point of sale that will draw in visitors from search engines and increase sales, don’t let people copy it, it will harm your business!

How To Try And Protect Yourself From The Start
In the footer of this website I have a notice saying “all content may NOT be used without permission”. Will that deter these sort of people? Probably not, but I recommend you put one in your footer anyway. The notice is there on every single page so if you have to take action against someone you made it clear they can’t copy anything.

Also date your work. EG “This article was published on January 1st 2000 by Mr Biggles on mrbiggles.com”. Or if you don’t want to explicitly put that on a page try and keep some kind of proof when a page was published (server records maybe?). This then proves you were the original creator of the work.

How To Find The Thieves
The simplest way is to use copyscape.com. Put the URL of your page you want to find copies of, and it will draw up results from the web of copies it finds. You can then click on them and at the top of the page it shows you how words are duplicate. There are other tools around, search in google for things like ‘duplicate content checker’ to find ones that suit you.

Then What To Do – First Action
First thing is to contact the offending website. Give them the evidence you have found – your page URL, and where they have copied it on their website. Tell them to remove the content immediately as they have no right to use the content because you own it and it explicitly says on your website content may not be copied. If they don’t remove the material tell the person you will inform their web host their client is acting illegally, and you are going to take legal action against them and submit a DMCA infringement. You could also threaten them with a smear campaign on public forums proving how their company behaves and that they are not to be trusted.

Second Action
From here how you act depends on how the other webmaster responds. They may apologise and remove the content immediately, in which case it’s a result, job done. They may blank you altogether thinking you are not serious. They may not even get your email. In these instances send another email stating you contacted them on ‘X date’ and are following up. You should also ‘request a read receipt’ and make the message ‘high priority’.

In a few cases I have found the offender removes the content, but doesn’t email you back. They obviously know they have done wrong but won’t email you to apologise for being a thief. So check the copied content before emailing for a second time as they may have removed it. If they think you aren’t serious contact the host and tell them what you are doing, who knows they may even suspend the website!

Third Action
If they still don’t respond after the second email, or are not cooperating, then you have to decide what to do. If you don’t believe the offending content is having much of a harmful effect (it may be copied on a crappy website with virtually no rankings or visitors) you are best to forget about it – better of spending your time on other issues that can help your business. But if the content is on a major website, or has been copied a lot then you want to go through the effort of a DMCA infringement request, or/and a public smear campaign. A positive result may really help your website getting better rankings thanks to no duplicate content.

Is This A Real Problem?
This is a genuine problem which you should be aware of, because people are behind a computer screen a lof of them think they can get away with it. One of the main articles on this blog was copied by an Indian freelance writer (about 365 words duplicate) who sold it to someone who then distributed it all over the web on article sites, blogs and other publications. It has completely killed the rankings of my article and I’ve made no money from it. So I’m taking action. Many of my articles have been copied many times, harming my rankings. There are also ’scraper sites’ which automatically scrape the content from your website and publish it on their own. So don’t think this doesn’t go on much as their are a lot of people out there copying content.

How To Manage Your Time
This isn’t something I recommend you go mad over and start spending days hunting down content stealers. But it is worth spending an hour or two at the start of each month to check their are no duplicates of your most important work. If you spent a long time on amazing product descriptions don’t let all your good work be wiped out by some illegal acting rat who thinks he can get away with just copying your content because he is behind a computer screen. And often a simple email can get the offending material removed, and an improvement in your pages ranking, definitely worth the effort!

This post has 2 bits of news for you, nothing major but both opportunities you can take advantage of.

Hostgator 20% Discount
The huge web host provider Hostgator.com currently have a promotional code which you can use on checkout to get 20% off your hosting order. Simply enter AUTUMN and receive the saving. We host 3 different websites with them and have always been very happy with the service.

Ecommerce Directory
A small but important new section has been added to our website. It is a free webmaster dir where you can submit your link, all you have to do is place a reciprocal in return. Hopefully this will make dropshipblog.co.uk stronger and gives you the chance to make your website stronger as well!

I regularly scan various resources for new possible ecommerce and other online businesses to buy, such as Flippa, a selection of webmaster forums, Sitepoint and other classifieds. But one of my least favourite places is eBay.

The reason I don’t like eBay is because of the amount of ridiculous listings. People trying to sell terrible domains, they will register something such as michael-jackson-family-forever.net and then make a listing saying it is incredibly value because of the words contained within it and it could be yours for just £25,000! I don’t even want to begin to describe the sort of people who do this and significantly reduce the quality of the ‘Businesses For Sale’ category on eBay.

But having said that I do scan the site every now and then as it does also have genuine listings, whether they be online or offline (you often see mobile businesses such as vans which sell sandwiches etc). And ironically, the site I like least for finding opportunities, turned up one of the best ones I’ve seen.

It was an ecommerce site selling electrical goods such as wireless speakers and surround sound systems. It is receiving 14,000 unique highly targetted visitors per month thanks to some brilliant rankings in Google for some competitive terms, and has been doing so for 3 years! That is where all the value is as the actual website is not very good and is has traffic from no other sources. The words ‘huge opportunity’ were soon swirling around constantly in my brain as he didn’t want a great deal of money for it. I contacted the seller direct, and by the end of the next day we had done a deal as he wanted a quick sale to invest in another business of his. 2 weeks down the line and I’m incredibly happy with the acquisition, especially as we approach christmas sales time!

There is definitely a lesson here, although the eBay category gets filled with rubbish, there are some gems. So be careful about dismissing certain methods and resources you use for finding new opportunities for your business.

If you are on the lookout for new websites to purchase whether it be ecommerce or another business type, Flippa.com is worth checking out. It was formerly the Sitepoint Marketplace.

A lot of the listings on the site are junk so you will have to sift through the rubbish, but there are enough genuinely profitable websites to make the time worthwhile if you have the cash to invest. Recently there was a listing (has now ended) for an ecommerce store which dropshipped bird products such as bird boxes, baths, tables etc. It had been running for a couple of years and made small but solid profits each month.

Opportunities like this aren’t that easy to come across so Flippa is an ideal place to find them, although be prepared to wait because like I said, many of the listings are junk.

During the month of September LCN.com, the UK web host and domain registrar, are providing a new promotion code each day giving you ways to save lots of money! All offers are valid for 24 hours so you have to be quick, you can check daily the offer on THIS PAGE.

Current Deal
At the time of writing the offer is 99% off 1 years web hosting (1 years hosting for 21p!), but it expires in about 12 hours so by the time you read this I guess there will be another offer on.

What’s The Catch?
At first I wondered “Whats the catch?”, for the offers to be as ridiculous as this. But then realised that they are doing the offers simply to try and get as many new customers as possible, and then hope in a years time you renew your hosting (or domain name, or whatever offers you take advantage of) at the full price. As it happens, there prices are quite reasonable anyway, hosting starts from just £21 per year up to £56 per year, the monthly cost works out decent value for money for UK hosting.

How To Take Advantage Of The Offers
Simply visit this page each day where they provide the promotion codes and copy it. Then you checkout as normal and paste the promotion code during the checkout process and the discount is applied, very simple to do.

Who are LCN?
On their ‘About’ page it says they were established in February 2000 and currently hold 350,000 domain names and host 50,000 websites. So they are an established company. If you want to be sure about their customer service before you take up any of their offers do the usual test of contacting them (via phone or email) and seeing how friendly they are, how quick they respond and quality of response.

These offers are only on during September 2009 so don’t miss out, it is a great chance to save quite a bit of money on your overheads. Visit the LCN homepage now or check the latest offer available now.

Here is a very good video I found on YouTube this morning. It is titled Optimizing Ecommerce Product Images. Although the video features two American marketers, what they talk about isn’t region specific so is good advice if you are in the UK.

Because of how dropshipping works you may be thinking “well I can’t do that because I don’t have the products to take photos of!”. Good product images can really help sell items, so spending money on buying the products yourself direct from a dropshipper to take photos of them is an investment. And once you are done you can then sell them on to recoup your expenditure anyway.

If you sell hundreds of products then it may become a slight issue. So perhaps only do it with your best sellers to begin with. You could clearly see in the video what a difference it makes so don’t underestimate the use of product photography.

Here is a very good document titled User Experience Activities which should help you with various aspects of your own ecommerce website and business as a whole.

The points are only short so you will have to research more into a lot of them. Other points have the ability to just make you realise something (the penny drops) instantly. I especially like the 4th point down under the ‘Analyse’ section which says “If the company sells tangible products, get your hands on them and use them. To think like a customer, you must be a customer.” Short, sharp, and so true.