Shopping Carts Australia

The section of a website page that is visible without the user having to scroll. It is the part they see first when they arrive on that page.

Also known as the Acquiring Bank. This is the bank where you have a merchant account set up. This is the bank where you will receive all your credit card transactions when they are processed through yourpayment gateway provider.

A programme whereby businesses provide banners on their websites, and when customers click through the banners and make a purchase the business who displayed the banner earns a commission.

Stands for "Asynchronous JavaScript And XML". It is a web-based technology to improve Content Management based web-applications by using JavaScript to change pages without reloading them. It is not currently used by ozCart.

Alt tags are a piece of HTML code that are optionally attached to images in your website. The tags contain a short text description of what the image is about. Search engines usually index alt tags when they encounter an image in a webpage.

These tags are useful as an accessibility option to your website for browsers that cannot display images, but also for search engine optimisation, by improving search engine indexing of web pages in your site.

The words that you click on in a link. So for example, if you had a link that read Ecommerce, the word 'Ecommerce' would be your anchor text. Anchor text is important in sites that link to you. You can usuallly improve your search engine rankings by encouraging sites that link to you to use an anchor text phrase that matches what your target customers search for.

Stands for Active Server Pages. It is a proprietary Microsoft script programming language used to build web-pages on Microsoft servers.

Software that sits on a webserver that is used to automatically answer email enquiries. For example, a business could send automatic emails to let customers know their sales or support enquiry has been received and will be processed by a person later.

B2B stands for "Business to Business". It refers to transactions between two businesses.

Stands for Business-to-Consumer. Refers to when businesses sell to consumers.

The backend of your shopping cart website is the administration area where you can view your orders, edit your products, set your payment options and more. In an information website, it is the section where you add your content and manage any users.

A link to your website or a page on your site from another website.

The amount of monthly data that can be transferred to or from your site in a given month through your customers browsing, uploading and editing of your products, making sales etc. On Osc Works'Platinum plan for example, you get an allowance of 20GB of data transfers every month. This is sufficient for even extremely large online stores. Bandwidth is also known as Traffic.

Banners are small, graphical and sometimes interactive advertisements placed inside websites to promote a service or special feature. When the customer clicks on the banner they are taken to alanding page where more information about the promotion or feature is displayed. For many companies, the landing page is just the home page of the customers site, but research has shown that creating a special landing page for special promotions creates more continuity for customers and increasesconversion rates for amarketing campaign.

These are graphical advertisements that are placed in a website for customers to click on - usually to get more information about a special promotion.

BitMaP format (BMP) is an uncompressed image file format, where each dot in the file represents one pixel on the screen.

'Black Hat'Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) methods of optimising your website to improve its placing in the search engine rankings are heavily frowned upon, and heavily penalised by search engines when they are detected.

These methods include any trick used to try and trick the search engines into ranking a site higher than it should naturally be placed. For example, by creating a separate page that the search engines see and people don't that is packed with search keywords and no real content.

Legitimate 'White Hat' methods of improving search engine rankings include writing meaningful and useful content and link building from relevant, authority websites.

When a website is banned from search engines - usually because it has been using unethical tactics for trying to improve their search engine rankings.

Blog is an abbreviation of web log. Blogs are websites or parts of websites that provide reverse chronological entries from their author. Their normal uses are for commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. Businesses are increasingly using blogs for search-engine-optimisation.

bps stands for bits per second. It is a measure of bitrate - the speed of data transfer across a network like the Internet.

There are 8 bits per character transmitted so to work out how many characters per second are transmitted, divide the bps rate by 8.

In computer terms, broadband refers to high-speed Internet. Broadband internet connections allow the user to display websites containing high-resolution videos and graphics.

A company or organisation who providesdigital certificates to verify the identity of a store or website owner. Commonly used to issueSSL Certificates to verify an online store's identity and encrypt credit card details as they are transferred across the Internet.

Examples include: GeoTrust, Comodo, Thawte and Verisign. The SSL Certificates provided in Osc Works stores use the RapidSSL Certificate Authority.

These are transactions billed back to your merchant account - to reverse an online transaction. For example, if you give a refund on a transaction or something has been bought with a stolen credit card.

IP addresses are like telephone numbers for web browsers - they tell the web browswer where to go to find your website. The format of an IP address is four blocks of numbers of 0-255 e.g. 74.54.75.210. The third portion of this address is called the Class C block.

Search engines like Google sometimes look at the Class C values of an IP address in order to determine if a site comes from the same server. Sites on the same server do not always have as much "voting power" when they link to eachother. Google often gives preference in voting power of a link to sites that it assesses to come from different businesses.

Occurs in Pay-per-click advertising where someone or an automated script clicks on sponsored links with the intention of costing the advertiser money and not to buy or review the product. Click fraud is increasingly being made illegal in an attempt to prevent people from maliciously clicking on competitor's online advertisements.

Stands for Content Management System - Software that is added to your website to make it easy for you to manage your own website's content in a similar way to how you use a word processor. Pages can be created and edited and then published to the live site when completed - without you needing to know any HTML, have graphic design skills or be a computer expert.

CYMK is an accurate way of representing colour for print format. It works on the basis that inks in the colours Cyan, Magento, Yellow and Black overlap they create a broad spectrum of colours.

In printing presses, rollers of each of these four colours are pressed on top of eachother one after the other at different intensities. These make up the colour document that you eventually see.

The four colours Cyan, Magento, Yellow and Black are also called the 'Process Colours' in printing-jargon.

The conversion rate refers to the number of people who actually buy something from to the number of people who visit your site or click through to your site from a banner advertisement.

In Pay Per Click Advertising, the Cost Per Click is the amount you will actually pay when a customer clicks on your online advertisement. In CPC systems like Google Adwords and Yahoo, you bid your maximum CPC on a keyword and when a customer clicks on your ad, you are charged up to that amount per click - depending on what your competitors are bidding at that time.

The Click-Through-Rate is usually expressed as a percentage. It is the number of clicks on abanner advertisement compared to the number of times the ad was displayed (impressions).

An electronic file that sits on your website to confirm that you have verified your identity. Digital certificates are needed for businesses usingSSL encryption on their website. The digital certificate confirms the identity of the organisation who operate the server.

Domain Name System - the online phone book used by web browsers to look up domain names (www.oscworks.com.au) and converting them into IP addresses (e.g. 75.54.75.213) that computers can use to find the website and display the page.

A name that identifies computers and websites on the Internet or appears after an email address e.g. oscworks.com.au, sales@test.com.

DPI is a measure of print quality. The higher the number of dots printed per every inch of paper, the better the quality of the printing.

This is the dispatch of a product directly from the manufacturer's place to the customer's after an order. It is popular with people who run a home business as there is no stock handling involved, but can cause issues if the goods are being imported from a long way overseas as postage costs may not be economical for small numbers of stock. Dropshipping can also cause problems if there are product returns so it is important to have a very clear returns policy and process in place if you plan to use drop shipping for your business.

URL stands for Universal Resource Locator - it is what you see in the address bar of your browswer when you visit any webpage.

In websites, pages can either be fixed and predefined in advance, or be dynamic and are built by the server every time a visitor goes to your page. A dynamic URL is in the form of:

http://www.mysite.com.au/forum/thread.php?id=167&sort=2

The advantage of dynamic pages are that they can adjust by customer and are easy to update, because a change can be made in the administration section of your site and automatically reflected in all your pages. For all but the smallest and simplest of sites, dynamic pages are usually superior.

The drawback of dynamic pages is that the URLs that are generated when they are created are hard to read and difficult to remember. Not good for your marketing strategy. Search engines also have trouble indexing them and sometimes do not index them at all.

Fortunately, there are add-ons available to force sites with dynamic URLs to appear to visitors and search engines as if they had non-dynamic or fixed URLs. For ozCart, we offer such a package in ourMarketing Add-ons section.

The buying and selling through electronic means usually through the Internet. Ecommerce websites allow customers to browse through hundreds or even thousands of products, add them to a shopping cart, pay for them through an online checkout and in many cases have payments processed in real time, in most cases through using credit cards.

A form of direct marketing using email instead of physical post. Email marketing campaigns involve collecting gaining permission to use a customer's email address to contact them with promotional information, and then developing relevant and useful newsletters or promotional emails to encourage them to purchase.

(Another way to write the word e-commerce.)

Ecommerce is the buying and selling through electronic means usually through the Internet. Ecommerce websites allow customers to browse through hundreds or even thousands of products, add them to a shopping cart, pay for them through an online checkout and in many cases have payments processed in real time, in most cases through using credit cards.

A document or list of questions and answers about a company, product or service. FAQs are usually published on a business website and used to provide support or for additional information to encourage people to purchase.

For example:

Osc Works Shopping Cart Software FAQ
Web Hosting FAQ

A firewall is a piece of software that sits on a server or a personal computer to help protect it against hackers and other intruders.

Like a literal wall of fire around a building would do, a firewall creates a buffer zone between the outside world and the server or computer being protected. It inspects everything passing in and out of the computer network and uses rules to identify suspicious behaviour - blocking anything it is not too sure about.

The behaviour of some firewalls is so strict that even legitimate information can be blocked, and in this case certain rules have to be set up to allow that information through.

An animation standard that allows small graphical animations, sound and music to be included in web pages. In some sites this is used to create an added effect to a simple site. In other sites, the entire site is a Flash animation. Flash content cannot be indexed by search engines and it is not displayed by all web browsers, so it should be used very sparingly in anecommerce website.

A forum is like a big message board. Registered users log in and post messages for others to read. Also called Bulletin Boards, Electronic Message Boards and Discussion Groups.

File Transfer Protocol - A method of transferring files over the Internet. In ecommerce, FTP is typically used for uploading product images to a website.

A Gigabyte is a unit of measure for computer disk space or website traffic.

• 1 byte = 1 character e.g. a letter of the alphabet or number
• 1024 bytes = 1 kilobyte (KB)
• 1024 kilobytes = 1 megabyte (MB)
• 1024 megabytes = 1 gigabyte (GB) (approximately 1 billion bytes)

1 Gigabyte of data is approximately equivalent to two CD ROMs worth of images. Approximately 4 Gigabytes is equivalent to the capacity of a DVD full of photos.

This is the file format of an image i.e. the way a picture is saved on your web server or computer.

The GIF format compresses the image so it takes up less space, but it only allows for 256 colours. The format is best suited for images that contain lettering, icons and images with a small number of colours. For photographs or images with a high number of colours, the JPG format is better.

A major search engine on the Internet.

Whenever the web server displays a page to the visitor the page and all its elements must be retrieved. The retrieval of every one of these items is counted and is called a 'hit'.

Hits are an indication of how much traffic you are getting to your site, but only tell you the number of times an object has been viewed. They do not tell you the number of visitors to your site.

A website setup where your website provider such as Osc Works takes care of all the server management of your site, leaving you to take care of your business - adding products, adding content, editing prices and processing orders.

Due to the complexity of shopping cart software behind the scenes, today more people than ever are selecting providers who offer shopping carts with managed hosting.

All Osc Works Shopping Cart Software uses a managed hosting setup.

Hyper Text Markup Language - a way of saving content including instructions on how it should be displayed. HTML is written as labels (called tags) surrounded by angle brackets.

Inonline advertising, the number of impressions is the number of times abanner advertisement was displayed for a specific time frame.

The process of promoting a website or using the Internet to promote any goods and services. The tools of an Internet marketer include banner advertising,Google Adwords,search engine optimisation (also called SEO - for example link exchange and link building),affiliate marketing, and email marketing. Internet Marketing is also known as Online Marketing.

Internet Protocol Address - every computer and website on the Internet has a number (like a telephone number) that is used to identify it and communicate with other computers. The IP number is written as four numbers separated by dots - for example: 74.54.75.213. Because IP addresses can be hard for people to remember, friendly names were created called domain names (e.g. oscworks.com.au).

Pronounced "J-Peg", this is a file format used for storing images in a compressed way. It stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group, who are the industry group who invented the format.

The JPG format works best with photographic images but is less effective for pictures that contain letters, icons or shapes. For those types of images the PNG or GIF formats are usually better.

Kbps stands for kilobits per second. It is a measure of bitrate - the speed of data transfer across a network like the Internet.

Significant words, topics or phrases that visitors use in searching for information on the Internet are known as keywords. The keywords in a website are the words that best describe the content of your site. If you can match the content of your site to the key words that people search for in search engines, then that will help you improve traffic to your site.

A key promotional tool in Internet Marketing is to choose keywords that are heavily searched and write your content to reflect those words where possible. This is part of the art ofSearch Engine Optimisation

A Kilobyte measures computer disk capacity or website traffic. It is roughly equivalent to 1000 letters in a document including spaces.

• 1 byte = 1 character e.g. a letter of the alphabet or number
• 1024 bytes = 1 kilobyte (KB)
• 1024 kilobytes = 1 megabyte (MB)
• 1024 megabytes = 1 gigabyte (GB) (approximately 1 billion bytes)

When a customer clicks through on a banner advertisement, the page that customers go to when they click is called the landing page. It can be a specialised page for the particular promotion or just a regular page on your website.

Linux is an operating system, based on Unix.

Live Chat allows your site's visitors the chance to talk to an actual person online - to type in questions about your products or services and receive answers. Some businesses even use it to provide support.

Customers of Osc Works ecommerce websites can purchase alive help add-on for their own site and offer this to their own customers.

If you focus on the content of your website and your website provider takes care of all the server maintenance and hosting configuration (e.g. emails, spam blocking, security, performance tuning), then you have a managed hosting arrangement. Osc WorksWeb Design andEcommerce packages use managed hosting on high-performance servers that are maintained and monitored 24x7x365.

A specific marketing promotion. For example, a 20% sale for a month is an example of a marketing campaign. This campaign might be supported by different forms ofinternet marketing activity, or even 'offline' marketing like TV, Press, Radio, and Direct Mail.

Mbps stands for bits per second. It is a measure of bitrate - the speed of data transfer across a network like the Internet.

A Megabyte is computer disk capacity or website traffic measure.

• 1 byte = 1 character e.g. a letter of the alphabet or number
• 1024 bytes = 1 kilobyte (KB)
• 1024 kilobytes = 1 megabyte (MB)
• 1024 megabytes = 1 gigabyte (GB) (approximately 1 billion bytes)

As a size guide, a CD-ROM holds 650MB-700MB of images or music.

An account with a financial provider such as a bank that allows businesses to accept credit cards and debit cards. Once a business has a merchant account they can set up their ecommerce site to process credit card orders directly by using a payment gateway such as DPS (Payment Express), Eway, DirectOne or Paystation.

Information that sits behind-the-scenes in a webpage that search engines use to better understand the purpose of a page. This helps them index it. Correctly defining meta tags can help with customers searching your site using your 'search' button (if you have one) as well as customers searching on external search engines for information about your site.

OzCart online shops automatically define meta tags for a page and site, but you can customise these yourself if you wish from the administration section of your website.

An open-source database system used in many websites, e-commerce shopping cart software, content management systems and web applications. ozCart software uses a secure mySQL database to hold information about the configuration of your shop.

URL stands for Universal Resource Locator. It is the address that you see in your browser whenever you visit a web page. A non-dynamic URL is an easy to remember URL that is also easy for the search engines to index.

For example, instead of
http://www.mysite.co.nz/thread.php?id=11010817&sort=9

You could have:
http://www.mysite.co.nz/jan08/all-about-trees-topic-17

Many shopping cart software packages generate dynamic URLs out of their box. With ozCart you can purchase a marketing add-on forsearch-engine-friendly URLs to help your store be better indexed and the content more memorable.

The process of building quality links to increase a site's perceived importance by search engines, and hence their search engine ranking on key words.

The process of writing content and making other changes to a web page in order to help it rank as highly as possible on search engines.

Search engines like Google take into account the number of quality links to a site as well as the relevance of a page to a search term when determining what to display back to someone who searches for a term. On-page optimisation (also called On-site optimisation) is a way to increase the relevance of a page to your targeted keywords.

Talk to Osc Works about oursearch engine marketing assistance.

A powerful ecommerceshopping cart software system provided by Osc Works and customised for the specific business needs of Australians and New Zealanders. ozCart websites include hosting and are affordable, easy to use, and come with considerable administrative support. Customers are not restricted in the number of products provided, or the pages they can add - unlike many other e-commerce systems.

Google defines PageRank as a measure of an individual webpage's relative importance to other pages on the Internet.

Google uses links from pages as votes for the importance of that page. Votes alone are not enough though: Google looks at the importance of the pages that link to your page as well as the volume of votes.

PageRank figures are displayed as a figure from 0-10, with each PageRank score a factor of ten greater in significance than the number below it. This means it is relatively easy to move from PageRank 1-2, but significantly more difficult to move from PageRank 4-5.

A common form of paying for advertising where the business only pays for the number of clicks they get on an online advertisement. Google and Yahoo's ad-word programmes are examples of Pay-per-click advertising.

The electronic equivalent of an Eftpos terminal and is an electronic means of facilitating the processing of tranactions on the Internet. Major payment gateway providers in Australia and New Zealand process transactions in real time, and include Eway, DPS, DirectOne and Paystation. Manual payment gateways like e-path also exist to present a gateway checkout process for customers but with offline verification and processing of credit cards

For more information see:Our Guide to Payment Gateways

An alternative topayment gateways, a payment service like Paypal, Paymate or Paymex takes the user to a different website to process their credit card transaction and then returns you to the site you were on once the payment is made.

A computer screen or TV is made up of hundreds of tiny dots of colour of different brightnesses. Each one of these is made up of a combination of the colours red, green and blue (RGB) and is called a pixel.

POP3 is a format for receiving email. Because of the way it works, it is popular for users with dial-up connections and has become the most common email receipt format available on the Internet today.

The keyword or phrase entered into a search engine by a potential customer before they visit a site.

The process of trading links between sites is called Reciprocal linking. A reciprocal link is when you have a link to someone else on your site and they have a link to you on theirs.

The referrer to any given web page is the previous web page that the visitor clicked to your page from. So if you were on the Ecommerce page of a site and clicked to the Home page. The Ecommerce page would be the referrer.

When entering a hyperlink url into your HTML editor (e.g. Frontpage, Microsoft Expression Web, Dreamweaver), you can choose between absolute and relative paths.

Here is an easy way to remember the difference. If you were asking how to write down the address of the house next door. If your house was number 23 Start Street, you might write down the address of the house next door 'as the white house to the left of here'. This would be the relative address - it tells you how to get to that house from where you are now. The absolute address on the other hand would be the full address of the place next door - something like: 211 Start Street, Sampletown, Sample State, 9000, Australia.

A format for representing colour - usually for screen presentations. RGB format came about because the colours on the colour spectrum can be broadly divided into the reds, greens and blues (see below)

By mixing combinations of red, green and blue, computer screens can reproduce other colours.

An abbreviation for "Run of Site". Refers to online advertising that appears on general pages of a website - usually in rotation with other ads.

Some online shopping cart software, such asozCart produces search-engine-friendly content to drive thousands of additional visitors to a site. This is made possible through having unlimited pages, indexable home pages and other content pages (e.g. shipping), and an add-on you can buy for search-engine friendly (non-dynamic) URLs.

Search Engine Optimisation - the process of building traffic and presence in search engines. SEO involves a programme of activity, including optimising the content of pages for maximum relevancy on search engine keywords, and building links. Osc Works has a number of SEO packages for customers to consider.

Stands for "Search Engine Results Pages". When you enter a query into a search engine like Google and get a result, the collection of pages returned to you to review are the SERPs. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a process used by many websites to try and get as high as possible in the SERPs for their target search engine and target queries.

Internet-based software that turns a website into an online shop. For example,ozCart shopping cart software allows a website's customers to view products, add them to their online shopping cart, review what they selected and purchase the goods through a secure payment system.

Many ecommerce packages use sideboxes - the content elements that appear in the left and right hand columns of your shopping cart website.

SMTP is a common format for sending emails across the Internet, and is used by most web hosting providers in Australia and New Zealand.

The sending process uses the email address, account name, a password, name of the mail server and a 'port number' to do its job. A port number is like an outward postbox or courier bag for your web server that is dedicated to picking up email from your domain name.

To prevent automated robots trying to take control of your server and spamming, Osc Works changes the default port number so you have to consciously set this up when you configure your email. We show you how.

Spam is the abuse of electronic systems by the sending of repeated, mass unsolicited bulk emails. Most spam comes in the form of email.

Sponsored links are the text links in pay-per-click advertising.

The sponsored link advertisements are displayed on web pages based on the content of that page (typically search results in search engines like Google, Yahoo or Microsoft). When people click on those links and go to the advertiser's site, the pay-per-click advertising system charges the advertiser based on the advertiser's bid.

Secure Socket Layer - a technology used to encode secure ecommerce transactions and are popular for highly secure ecommerce stores. Customers can purchase an SSL certificate to be installed on their web site server. The certificate authenticates the owner of the website and encrypts communications as you go through checkout. SSL is highly recommended for customers accepting credit cards using a payment gateway/merchant account. At Osc Works, this functionality is offered free for the first 12 months on the Platinum Package and as an additional paid service on the other packages.
The major types of SSL certification authorities include Comodo, Verisign, RapidSSL, GeoTrust and Thawte. Most SSL certificates purchased from Osc Works are certified from RapidSSL.

A measure of the number of different web browsers that came to your site. This is a very good indicator of the total number of people that came to your site during a given time frame because each web browswer is only counted once. It's not 100% accurate, but it is a much more accurate measure than the number ofhits.

Stands for Universal Resource Locator. The address that you see in the address bar when you visit a webpage. For example, http://www.oscworks.com.au/glossary/URL.html

The URL is the language that Web Browsers speak in order to find pages on your website.

How prominent your website is to search engines. Do you have a top high or ten ranking on your key search terms? If so you would have high visibility to search engines. This may increase the frequency that search engines visit your site.

Web 2.0 is a collection of technologies that make Internet websites more interactive and encourages customers to produce content and make comments. They also help web software behave more like desktop software. For example:

• Ajax is a technology that reduces the communications delay while web-based applications send data to and from the server. It opens up opportunities for web-based applications to behave more like desktop software. An example of an Ajax application is Google Maps.
• Wikipedia is a website that allows anyone to contribute content.
• Social bookmarking sites like Digg and Del.ic.ious allow people to vote for content on the Internet that is interesting and appealing.

The software loaded on to your computer that is used to display web pages. For example, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer are all browsers.

The company providing the disk space and monthly traffic allowance for your website. Osc Works is the web host for customers on our ozCart, CMS Web Design and Web Hosting packages.

The amount of disk capacity you are allowed by your website provider. The greater the capacity, the more photos, videos, images, and products you can list on your site.

'White Hat' methods of optimising your website to improve its placing in the search engine rankings include building links from reputable sources and developing meaningful, useful content that other sites wish to link to. White hat are the legitimate methods that do not attempt to trick search engines into higher rankings. Sites that use 'Black Hat' methods to attempt to fool search engines are heavily penalised by those search engines when they are detected.

An international database of domain name owners. An Internet utility by the same name can be used to look up the owner of a domain name and their contact details. To prevent spam, most Whois database enquiries are limited to 20 searches per day, per IP address.

A major search engine on the Internet.