Virtual Webmaster

When your e-commerce database was developed, installed, and implemented, the price we quote you included everything from the initial mockup to the final configuration. We also offered 30 days of free support where we provided you with anything you required. This included any programming additions, any labor as far as adding features or making changes that are not available in the administration panel or better handled by our programmers.

Now that those 30 days are over, we will continue to monitor your website to make sure it is running smoothly as per your hosting plan agreement. However, our services, which include customer support, programming support, labor, and troubleshooting will incur our $35/hr rate. If you believe you will require more than 1 working day (7 hours) of labor a month to run your website, it may be beneficial to subscribe to one of our monthly service contracts for web development. This will allow you to have the services of a full time webmaster at the cost of 1 to 4 billable working days a month depending on the plan you choose. Due to the size and complexity we project at least a few days of labor each month will be require to maintain the site effectively, in which case it would be best to subscribe to one of our monthly service plans.

What do these plans consist of and why should I use them?

As we already mentioned, even though your website is already up and running, it will still require servicing above and beyond the basic maintenance included with your hosting plan. You may find that you will want to augment your cart with new features, or rework existing ones. You may want to add new images, text, layout designs, or Flash animation, or change existing work already done on the site. None of this is covered in the original price for the e-commerce solution nor is it covered under your hosting plan. Such work would therefore incur our standard $35/hour rate.

We've found that for businesses that use our services substantially, on the order of more than 1 working day per month (7 hours or more), would benefit from subscribing to a month service plan. We therefore provide our clients with three service plans that offer options to augment their basic web hosting. These plans are the Basic Client Support program, the Virtual Webmaster program, and the Rank Strategy program. These plans range in price from $250 to $1000, which is roughly comparable to between 1 and 4 billable working days.

Basic Client Support (BCS)

Our entry-level plan is the BCS program. It provides the same excellent support you have been accustomed to since we began working on your e-commerce solution. This includes unlimited tech support for your shopping cart, and anything related to your e-commerce solution. If you are having technical issues with your e-commerce site, we will help you resolve them as quickly as possible at no charge. We will also provide you with untethered access to our programmers and graphic designers. If you would like any additions to your website, whether they be changes to the original layout, or additions to the cart itself, we will provide them free of charge. The same goes for any additions to the cart you may want. Whereas normally we should charge at the hourly rate, we will provide any service to your cart above and beyond regular maintenance in the initial BCS program price.

How much? As we mentioned earlier, your business can benefit from an entire month of service for roughly the cost of one billable working day, or $250. For this you get everything mentioned above, full access to our staff for any issues relating to your e-commerce solution, and free service to augment your cart as you see fit. What isn't included however is anything that doesn't involve programming or graphic design. This includes working in the administration panel, and adding, removing, or updating products and categories. It also does not gain you access to any of our predeveloped modules that may increase the functionality and traffic of your site. If you need more hands-on support for your shopping cart, it might be beneficial to go with our Virtual Webmaster program.

Virtual Webmaster (WM)

The Virtual Webmaster program provides all of the benefits of the BCS program with many extras. You get the same excellent service and support available with our BCS program, but you also get many benefits not available with that plan, such as support for database entry, and access to any current and future modules we have available for your shopping cart system. If you have several thousand items in your shopping cart, and need to modify many of them with similar information, or just need to add several new products or categories, it may be beneficial for us to help. Although the admin panel is very capable of handling basic changes or additions to your cart, massive changes might be better served by our staff. We can help you add entire new lines, or modify several product lines with ease, to help you concentrate on what matters most, your customers.

This is the service offered in the VM program. It is like having your own full time webmaster, all at a fraction of the cost. We will supply you with our staff for anything you may need relating to your website. This includes any kind of service from the very small to the major. Anything related to your e-commerce solution, from database administration to graphics for products and categories can be handled by our staff free of charge under the WM system.

Also provided under the WM program are the predeveloped modules we offer our clients that do not come factory installed with their system. There are several extra features we have custom developed for some of our customers that we offer to the rest of our client base, as it may be beneficial to them as well. Usually we charge a premium for these modules, on top of the labor costs in installing said modules. Any of these would be provided free of charge under the Virtual Webmaster program. It literally is like having our staff working for you.

What are some of these modules?

Probably the most popular extra features we add to our client's online stores are modifications to the sites themselves. Often times the software's base installation is not sufficient to suit their needs, and they want to add little touches to the site. Below are some of the modules we have developed to better equip our clients to sell their merchandise on a global scale.

The Affiliate Module

This can be implemented in your new e-commerce solution at your discretion. We have the means of creating an affiliate program that tracks referrals and purchases made on your website, and at your discretion allow maximum payouts per order based on a currency amount or a percentage. The administrator utility has functions to activate affiliates and assign commission levels, and we can even create a system for sub-affiliates that can be signed up by affiliates, with unlimited levels or sub-affiliates allowing for a lower commission structure that could bring more traffic and sales to your website. The system can be implemented to include an affiliate front-end, with functions that include account creation and management, lost password retrieval, linking information and order/sales reports.

Along with the affiliate program you can also create a banner program to advertise your services or that of others. Our system comes with a built-in banner ad rotation program that allows you to ad banners to be rotated randomly on the site. You can choose what banners to display and where on the page they go. Both the front-end and administrator utility have contact modules that allow for e-mail based communication between customers and administrators

Log Reports

We use several different analysis programs to review logs for our clients, one of the most popular is AWStats, which lists referrers, search engines people are coming from, keywords they use, unique visits, pages viewed, hundreds of statistics you can use to concentrate on the sections of your web portal that are the most popular. We should note this is separate from your database reports system, whereas your database reports will deal with your sales, tracking pages, orders, popular items, etc. this log reports generated by the hosting itself will give you the options mentioned earlier such as referrals, who visited your site, where they came from, what they used to search, and hundreds of other options. Both will be available to you regardless which host you choose, but would have more flexibility if you choose to go with us for hosting.

The Froogle Module

Recently, Google launched a new search tool named Froogle. The Froogle search engine is designed to allow users to search the Internet for products and compare prices. Froogle is becoming incredibly popular for its ease of you and ability to coalesce thousands of e-commerce sites under one roof. Think of it as a web portal for the global marketplace. Instead of having to shop around at dozens of sites, you can go to Froogle and find the best deals out of several hundred popular sites.

However, to join Froogle you need to offer your product list on their servers. This can be a daunting task for anyone with more than a few items in their inventory. Those that have several thousand items cannot simply just redo months of work to become compatible with Froogle's database. This is where our module comes in. Froogle allows store owners to submit data feeds to allow the engine to list their items. This module for your e-commerce solution adds a function to the administration panel to allow you to easily export your product data into a Froogle import file. In one simple step, you can join one of the most popular retail web portals online. This module alone is worth the price of the VM program, and is free to you.

The Minicart

We've recently developed a modification to our e-commerce interface that will allow your customers to be more informed while they browse through your shopping cart. We refer to it as the "minicart" because it is a subset of the actual shopping cart subroutine of your website. Just like the full featured cart, it will update itself whenever a customer adds an item to the cart, and provide him or her with the information in the same place on the screen at all times.

This way your customer knows exactly what items they are purchasing without having to click out of your product lines. Let's say they are trying to purchase enough goods to meet a certain volume discount or gain access to free shipping, they can at any time glance at their minicart wherever they may be and know instantly what items they have ready for checkout, how much they cost, and what the total will be. We can customize your minicart to fit your needs, adding and removing any number of attributes until you are satisfied. This cart modification is also bundled free of charge with your VM plan.

How much does it cost?

As we mentioned, the Virtual Webmaster plan is like having a full time staff of programmers and graphic designers working for you. The benefit of this program is you can get this service for a fraction of the cost of hiring your own web development team. For the cost of just roughly two billable working days, or $500/mo, you can have our staff working for you, full time, whenever you need them. You can feel free to contract us at the hourly rate, but we think you will greatly benefit from this plan, as your business is projected to require our services for at least a couple days a month for the foreseeable future. It is in your company's best interest to consider subscribing to a service contract.

We should mention however that neither this nor any of our plans cover the cost of licenses for software we might use in servicing your website. Though the cost is minimal compared to our service plan pricing, software licenses must be purchased by the client, as it will be under their name.

These two plans offer all the service you may need for the website itself, but neither cover the work you may have to perform to actually get traffic to your website. After all, if no one visits your site, then it may be impossible for your business to make a successful business venture off online retail sales. This is why we offer the Rank Strategy plan, which is a combination of all we have mentioned thus far plus a full-fledged search engine optimization program. We've learned throughout the years of working with our clients what works best to get your website ranked highest on all the major search engines, and what ad programs benefit our customers most. We are adamant in our quest to make more business for our clients, because the better they do in the online marketplace, the better we do having referred them.

Rank Strategy (RS)

The Rank Strategy program is a new venture we our spearheading for our clients with search engine optimization needs. We've developed several techniques that we have honed through years of experience in the online marketplace to give our clients the best possible rankings in all the major search engines possible. We have a list of monthly maintenance procedures that we can perform and teach to our clients that will significantly increase traffic to their site, which results in more business. Below is more information about our search engine optimization plan.

Our search engine optimization plan includes several steps to help your business do better on search engine rankings. Our rank strategy is your best approach to higher traffic and more business.

1. 404 and other error message META refresh. We will modify the error messages on your website, so that if someone incorrectly types in a URL on your website or clicks a malformed link, it will simply redirect them to your front page instead of a random error message. This will coax your customers to continue shopping as if nothing that happened, instead of derailing them to some cryptic error message that could potentially have them close out of your site entirely.

2. We work on your search engine rankings with a tool called Search Engine Commando, which works with client supplied key words and phrases actual consumers use to get to your website. We work to make sure that your site is ranked as high as possible on these search terms, and give your website the best possible chance of showing up on the front page of all major search engines when those keywords and phrases are entered by potential customers.

3. We offer reports on several systems daily, weekly, and monthly depending on the reports you need. On top of your e-commerce database reports system, and the log reports you receive through your Virtual Webmaster program, we also provide you with reports on your search engine rankings, and how well your optimizations are helping your site. We provide you with what keywords are you ranking higher or lower in, and how we can help push you higher in those lists.

4. We work with Overture to make sure that you are known on all the major search engines that Overture works with, and that the key words you choose get you as high on the list as possible. We do all the work for you as far as contacting and working with Overture and other providers of search engine ranking systems to get you the highest traffic possible. We also work with WebTrends to modify all of your static pages to list what is popular on your site so that you can better market your products on search engines.

5. We optimize the pages themselves with META tags that include keywords, descriptions, and titles for your static pages. META tags are your number one technique to make sure that search engine spiders can see your site and categorize it accordingly, and need to be programmed on every page consistently and properly to give you the best result.

We also offer a module that alters your e-commerce solution to use search-engine friendly URLs for category and product pages, and automatically optimizes those URLs to contain relevant category and product keywords pulled from your product database. It also automatically sets relevant keyword-optimized titles for each category and product page, rather than using the default site title on every page. As you know, the page URL and the page title are two of the most important elements for good search engine placement.

We also offer many other techniques and solutions to help you rank higher among the major search engines, and provide you with more information than has been covered in the scope of this proposal. Please refer to our Search Engine Optimization proposal for further information on how we can help you get more traffic and business to your website.

How much will it cost?

Included of course with your Rank Strategy plan is everything we would include with the BCS and VM plans, access to our graphic artists and programmers for whatever needs you may have. You can also opt to choose our Rank Strategy plan separately if you feel that you would prefer to have us bill your business hourly for service and maintenance to your website, and monthly for your search engine optimization needs. Separately the Rank Strategy plan will be billed at $500/mo, with the Virtual Webmaster plan it will be $1000/mo.

We believe the latter is your best option, many search engine companies will bill you that much simply to do a combination of the 5 steps we referred to earlier, and will not provide you with nearly as much information on what they are doing to help your ranking, nor will they offer you the virtual webmaster plan with your service. We offer you all of the resources available to us, from our staff to our tools and give you all the information you could ever want or need to make sure your business is being advertised as efficiently as possible on the Internet.

What should I choose?

Ultimately, it is up to you as to what will be your best option. If you believe you will need us for less than one billable working day (7 hours) then it may be beneficial just to use us at the hourly rate. We feel however that with the complexity of your website you should at least consider the Virtual Webmaster program, if not Basic Customer Support. Your choice is of course scalable and not a contract, in that you can scale up or down from month to month whenever you feel you need more or less support from our staff. Also consider our Rank Strategy plan, as it may be beneficial especially to new e-commerce sites such as yours that need to traffic to jump-start their business. Consider however that it may take a minimum of 3 months for your search engine optimizations to take full effect.

We hope you will consider our services to maintain a smooth and professional working relationship with your business and your website, and wish you great success in your new venture. Thank you for reading our proposal and we look forward to hearing from you.