Personal Finance and Investing

If you’re planning to sell goods or services online, you’ll need an ecommerce website. As this will be your shopfront, your showroom, your salesman and your cashier, you’ll appreciate how important it is. Essentially, the success of you ecommerce website depends on getting three factors right – design, usability and search engine optimization.

First, let’s look at design. Design is important as it influences the impression your visitor gets of you and your business. Your website should be attractive and solidly professional. This assures the first time visitor that you are the right company to do business with. In addition, your website should reflect your brand and mission statement.

Next there’s the matter of usability. This determines how easily your visitor can navigate your site. The first thing you have to consider is the mechanics of your business model. You have to decide what you want your visitor to do and then give him clear means to do it.

One factor that promotes clear navigation is making sure all links are well labelled. For example, ‘Click here for more details on our refrigerators’ is much more useful that just ‘click here’ or ‘more information’. And your visitor should always know his location and how to return to your home page. Remember if your visitor gets lost on your website, he’ll just click away, probably never to return.

The next factor in usability is the mechanics of your ecommerce model. If you’re selling online, you’ll need a payment processor and an online shopping cart. Here you have a host of commercial offerings to choose from. Or you can go for the open source shopping cart system, Zen Cart, a favourite of developers and shoppers alike.

Ultimately, your beautiful and usable site will do you no good unless you get visitors. For this, you have to get search engine optimization right. Your site needs to be optimized so that when searchers enter relevant queries in the search engines, your website appears high in the results. For this you need relevant text optimised for the keywords that searchers use. Achieving this requires expert keyword research and specialized writing skills. Your text must be not only readable and informative, but also indexed by the search engines for the right words and phrases.

When looking for a firm to handle your ecommerce needs, choose one which can handle the whole project. Otherwise, there’ll surely be coordination problems. So look for one firm that has both the artistic skill to design engaging and user-friendly website as well as the technical skills to handle the SEO requirements that will get you listed high in the search engines.

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Whether you are applying directly to your lender or claiming eligibility under HAMP, the practical decisions are all to be made by the lender. You do whatever you can to set out your side of the proposed bargain with a clear set of accounts showing money in and money out. The need is to demonstrate a guaranteed slice of your monthly income that can be devoted to paying a reduced instalment. So list everything you are obliged to pay to keep body and soul together, from food to utilities to transport to health insurance, and so on.

Without the modification, this is going to be negative, i.e. on paper, you are spending more than you earn. The “trick” is to show enough to cover a modified instalment, perhaps with a tiny slice of money left over for the inevitable emergencies. If the modified instalment you prove can be paid is enough to keep the lender less unhappy, the modification will be agreed on a trial basis. But if the minimum instalment the lender requires will leave you in negative territory, your offer to modify will be rejected. Why reject a good faith offer? Because people who have to juggle monthly payments to fit into the available money almost always default again. Your income must cover all outgoings.

If the modification is agreed in principle, it moves on to a formal trial basis. In theory, this is a three-month trial, but the reality is that the lenders usually drag their feet and are very slow to convert the trial into a permanent modification. This ought not to affect you. After all, you are paying the agreed amount. But there is a problem. Until the modification is made permanent, the lender will report you to the credit rating agencies as still delinquent. This is grossly unfair.

You are paying what is agreed. But, as the law stands, the unpaid balance each month will be reported as late. Thus, the longer the trial period is allowed to drift the worse your credit score will become. This requires action. You should contact the three major agencies, Experian, Equifax and TransUnion, and ask that details of the trial be added to your credit file. That way, even though your score will continue to decline, all other lenders will be able to see what is going on.

So what is happening during the trial other than you proving your ability to pay the reduced instalments on time? The answer is slightly disheartening. It is always in the lender’s interest to collect as much money from you as possible on your mortgage. But, while you stay in default, the lender is entitled to foreclose at any time. If the lender judges it will make more money by foreclosing rather than accepting the reduced payments over the rest of the term, it will always foreclose.

It is simply collecting as much cash from you as possible before triggering your eviction. No-one said the home loan industry had to work fairly, and it does not. The only time the lender will accept a permanent modification is when the accounts clearly show more profit in keeping the mortgage alive. While the housing market remains depressed, the odds are in your favor. But if resale prices start to rise, the odds will swing against you.

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