Google may be known for search exposure but there’s much more that Google can help your business with. There’s a huge array of info that can help you gain exposure and just help make your business better.

Gmail

Now you can sign up for a Standard account which allows you to use your domain name as your email address. It comes with Google Tools such as Google Docs, Calendar, Chat, Sites, and much more. Here’s some directions to help you get started

Google Alerts

Want to use keywords to help you keep in touch with your industry or products or even watch your own business and how its trending. Google Alerts have so many great uses and applications, it’s truly endless!

Earlier this year, I highlighted some great way to use Google Alerts: http://www.bluedeerblog.com/2010/01/how-to-use-google-alerts-to-track-your-business/

Google Checkout

A great way to process credit cards and allow customers to make purchases. It’s perfect if you are a small business and aren’t selling a lot of items right away.

Google Products

Once knows as Froogle – Google Products is now under the Google Merchant Center. Google has made shopping results more prominent on its search pages. If you have an online store – you should have a Google Product Feed so your products will show up in Google Products Search. Here’s some directions to help you get started!

Google Analytics/Google Webmaster Tools

An awesome free service that provides valuable stats about how Google views and looks over your website. You can see common keywords Google associates with pages or text linked to your site.

Need more tools, checkout this guide to the Top To Google Services for Ecommerce: http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1696-Ten-Google-Services-to-Help-Your-Ecommerce-Business

Share

Related Posts:

• Google+, is it catering to small businesses and ecommerce?

Paypal held a monopoly, back in the days when eBay was king,   allowing folks to do cash transations online no matter where you lived. People could buy a Mr. T lunch box from someone in Germany and send them a payment from Australia. Both parties had paypal accounts that held their bank and credit card info.

Sometimes that can be a hassle and turn-off customers. Sometimes you want to send invoices to your clients but not deal with a merchant account either. That’s where Google Checkout comes to the rescue, it’s set up to be able to take credit cards, but doesn’t require same set up that Paypal requests. Google Checkout can stand alone as a simple shopping cart or can be integrated into more sophisticated shopping carts like osCommerce. This is a list of all the 3rd party software it supports. To get a better idea of how this works, especially if you have a product bases business, here’s a walk-through.

If you are a service based  business,  you can use Google Checkout to help with invoicing. I find that it makes my customer’s lives easier, I send them an invoice, they get it in their email and with the click of a button, they can pay their invoice.  It’s very simple and straightforward.

How have your experiences with Paypal and/or Google Checkout been? Do you prefer one over the other?

Share

Related Posts:

• Fascinating global trends in mobile and ecommerce