Ecommerce - 1.8 Taxes

Question 1

VAT

Answer 1

• Value Added Tax
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_tax
• Assessed at different times in the production process.
• Sales tax is assessed on the final value of a sale.

Question 2

Digital VAT

Answer 2

• https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/vat-supplyingdigital-services-to-private-consumers/vat-businessessupplying-digital-services-to-private consumers#define-digital
• Tax assessed on software as a service sales.

Question 3

In-state

Answer 3

selling from one state in the US (such as KS) to

someone in the same state.

Question 4

Out-of-state

Answer 4

selling from one state in the US (such as KS) to

someone outside of the state, such as MO.

Question 5

Cross-border

Answer 5

Selling from one country into another.

Question 6

Whats the difference between omnichannel and multichannel retailing ?

Answer 6

• Multichannel means that each channel of interacting with a company is siloed. There is little organization and universal strategy. Seems to be mostly an anti-pattern.
• Omnichannel is where all lines of access to the company are coordinated. Similar teams. The goal is to reduce the friction across the experiences and make it as seamless as possible.

Question 7

How can you set up a product catalog for best search results, taking into account issues of duplicate content, meta content, meta title, keyword search terms in product description, attribute weight, and so on?

Answer 7

• Excellent information about ecommerce SEO:
• https://blog.kissmetrics.com/seo-for-ecommerce-websites/
• http://searchengineland.com/best-practices-in-e-commerceseo-176921
• https://moz.com/blog/category/e-commerce

• Key is to think about what people are looking for and use those words. It is far more involved than this, as talking to customers, research in Google Analytics, and watching results over time will make the difference.

• Duplicate content is bad. Thus, the rel=”canonical” meta tag is very important to tell Google what is the “master” page. Magento by default brings in this issue with products: products are viewable just under the root domain (https://example.com/product-name) and also viewable under each category (https://example.com/
category-name/product-name). Ensuring that the rel=”canonical” is on will make that tag point to the product under the root domain.

• Meta content (meta description?): is a shortened description that is often used by Google under the title of the page (the title tag). This is very important that there aren’t duplicate descriptions as these can be customized to increase a customer’s likelihood of clicking your url.
• Keyword search terms in product description: again, what are people searching for to land on your product? These words need to be included in the product description. Not as a “keyword list” at the end (which Google won’t like), but included in human readable sentences and thoughts that make sense.
• In the baked-in catalog search, the attribute weight determines how likely Magento will return a match from that attribute

Question 8

What is a “canonical link element?”

Answer 8

• https://yoast.com/rel-canonical/
• This link tag tells search engines what is the original page. This is helpful to clean up duplicate content. Each of those duplicates should then point back to one page, and the page authority will be focused on that one spot

Question 9

What “social merchandising” techniques and tools are used in ecommerce?

Answer 9

• Could be a wishlist or sharing buttons.
• This also would include tailoring related products or suggestions to that person.
• Reviews are means of attracting social proof, which is very effective in both generating more content for a website as well as encouraging other customers to purchase.

Question 10

When is SSL required when transacting data online?

Answer 10

• SSL is required for any time credit card information is transferred from a customer’s computer.
• However, browsers are making SSL required. For example, amessage now appears when you log into a website (entering in your password), and you are not on an SSL connection.

Question 11

What is PA-DSS? When should PA-DSS be applied?

Answer 11

• https://securityintelligence.com/difference-pci-dss-pa-dsspayment-application-vendor-thinkappsec/
• It helps achieve PCI-DSS compliance. A good overview for this is the PCI Awareness Training.
• All organizations that handle cardholder data must be PCIDSS compliant.
• PA-DSS is validating compliance of a system or a program. PCIDSS is the validation of an organization (meaning the people, systems and hardware)