Guardian eCommerce - Key E-Commerce News & Tips

You've taken the time to finally build a website, and now it is online. Months go by. Maybe you get a few visitors now and again. Maybe you land on the search engines. Mostly though, it just sits there. Is the website you paid for pulling its weight? A website is a tool and can be of significant help to your business. It can cut a lot of time you put into giving information to customers. It can answer questions and perform tasks for you. Find out where websites fail to perform and how you can figure out where to make it better.

1. Undefined Website Objectives -- Some sites try to do way too much at once, or worse, they have no definable purpose. Many provide no clear objective. A site can do more than look good and flashy and have your contact information. Websites can be informational, storing content and articles based on a topic. Sites can run eCommerce solutions that help you with your sales process. It can also generate leads, asking customers to fill out forms with their information and interests. It can also be a hybrid site, with mixed purposes, like offering a free ebook or free access to information (informational) in return for contact information (lead generation).

Defining the purpose of your website gives a clear direction to your customers. Where should customers arrive when they find your website? Where do you want them to end up? Using a clear path and clear objectives, you can lead them through your site, your products, and your information, depending on how you need to sell your products. Not all products or services can be sold directly in an eCommerce situation. Maybe you prefer just getting to know your customer a bit more, and being able to forward marketing materials, so a lead generation type of site might be more suitable.

Assign a secondary objective. Maybe after visitors sign up for free access, or an ebook, they are encourage to ask more by contacting your sales reps, or perhaps they can make a direct purchase online. Use a clearly definable call to action. "Email for more information." "Clíck here to sign up." Tell visitors where to go.

2. Unidentified Target Audience -- Demographics have been used in marketing for generations. Marketers use the information because it works. Knowing who your audience is defines the purpose to your website and calls out those who qualify and would be interested in your products. Marketing is the one area where discrimination is actually a good thing! You don't want to waste the marketing dollars that draw people to your site who won't need your products in the first place.

Get to know who your clients are. Are they male or female? How old? Where are they located? What do they do for a living? Habits, income levels, preferences, they can all be discovered with a quick email, phone call or have your current customers take surveys and help you figure out what your clients want.

3. Building for the Wrong Audience -- Your site can have a purpose and a select audience, but if it doesn't appeal to audiences, they tend to go elsewhere. Finding preferences is only the first step. Once you figure out what your demographic is, it is time to find out what appeals to them, and use that to your advantage. It could be something as simple as site colors and images, to where and how they prefer to use navigation systems and the type of content presented.

Maybe you need simple content, easy to read and understand for younger audiences. Perhaps you need something a bit more technical for professionals. You can even see if you need to add features for those who are visually impaired. Paying attention to your demographic and their preferences can mean building your website around their likes and getting more responses.

4. Oblivious to Web Traffic Sources -- A link on a Harry Potter fan club forum to your website can bring in traffic, but does it really bring in the right customers? If you're not directing traffic from sites relevant to yours or where a matching market exists, you might end up with empty hits to your website. It looks pretty on stat pages but it doesn't really do anything.

Refocus your efforts on search engine optimization and focus on keywords that do fit, not just what might be popular. You can plan the sort of traffic you want and focus your outreach efforts on that. Planning your search engine campaigns can make them more effective, bringing the right customers to you. You don't need 1,000 random visitors a day, when 100 qualified visitors will do.

5. Underestimating the Competition -- Who says you can't grab ideas from your competition? Find out what they are lacking and draw customers to your site by adding more features and information. Your target audience is searching the web for your product. Don't let your competition become more appealing.

Understand your competition by observing their sites. Where are your competitors linking? Where aren't they? What designs do they use on their site? Does your target audience like that type of design or do they want something better? Figure out how to improve your site and make it better than your competition.

6. Poor Site Communication and Inconsistency -- If you're building a website, is one page orange and another blue? Does one page have your logo and another doesn't? People love consistency. Does your content and images display the right message? Your website might have pretty pictures of your children, or a fun story about what happened to you last Christmas, but is it really what your customers want to know?

Skip the personal info, unless it's relevant and your audience wants to hear about it. You also need to make sure you present your brand in its best light, and consistently give visitors the same presentation every time and on every page. Let your brand stand out.

7. Outdated and Antiquated Site Features -- Out with the old. Check your site for old content and images and delete them. Remove old links that go nowhere too. Forget pop ups and old methods of keeping visitors around. Content is great, but if it's so old that it's irrelevant, you'll lose respectability and your expert status. Stick to new information. Don't be afraid to get rid of old articles and delete old images. Do an update on your site features, like navigation systems and contact forms.

8. Poor Overall Site Performance -- You've plastered all there is to know about you on a few pages. Is this the right way to do it? Maybe not. Yes, you've given them something to look at, but you have to remember, your time to impress people on the Internet is limited to just a few seconds. Long passages of text, lengthy forms, even poorly constructed or confusing navigation can slow people down, which leads to people leaving.

Making your website flow is all about making your site easy to read, easy to browse and easy to find what you're looking for. Include a search function, highlight popular pages, and make it simple for people to give you their information. Start with short forms, only the essentials, and a few simple questions. You can get more info later.

9. Lack of Commitment -- When was the last time you updated additional information to your website? Remember those "Website Under Construction" images from the early years of the Internet? Over time, people have learned those images are pointless. Your website is ever evolving, ever needing updating. Your website is isn't ever finished.

You must make a commitment to update information and to improve interest in your site from visitors. It could be as simple as updating a blog once or twice a week, or updating about sales and special events. Give visitors something to come back to, and let them turn into regular guests.

10. Not using an Experienced Web Firm -- You do a good job with what you do, and a good business and website owner knows when to call for help. Maybe you're okay with writing content, but you need help with creating navigation and setting up forms. It's okay to ask someone else for help, either with a few pages, or for the entire site design, and leave it to a professional.

It also saves money and time getting someone else to do the complicated things for you. Are you spending weeks on figuring out a web page design set up when it takes a professional a few hours to produce? When you're in business, you consult with professionals who will help you build a better website, develop methods of search engine marketing strategies, and find out how to appeal to your target audience. You save tíme, money, and plenty of headaches.

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The Web consumes content like a teenager at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Lots and lots of content makes you more search engine friendly, helps establish your knowledge and expertise, explains in detail what you offer, and justifies that offer with all the explanations, statistics, and rationale you can muster. The problem is no one reads it.

Well that's not exactly true: some people read every scrap of information on your site; they just happen to be the tire-kickers, the people looking for ways to get stuff they don't have to pay for, or they're competitors looking for ways to copy what you do, or worse find something wrong. This is definitely a dilemma that needs to be addressed.

The Answer Lies In The Questions -- The answer is obviously not to eliminate all the good stuff you've worked so hard to create, or to bury it where no one will ever see it. When it comes to Web-content ask yourself:

1. Is our content meaningful and relevant, or is it just hype and bunkum?

2. Is our content understandable by our audience, or is it so inarticulate that people just give up, even when they are desperate to find out what you have to say?

3. Does our content hold our audience's attention? Does it just explain, or does it engage, excite, and entertain while at the same time persuade on both a rationale and emotional level?

4. Is our content so intimidating and technical that it leads to more confusion and questions than answers?

5. Is our most important content buried in volumes of extraneous information or advertising copy, making it difficult to access and understand?
If any of these questions describe the text-based information on your website, then perhaps you need to find a way to make that important information more useful to your clients, not just search engines spiders.

When it comes to website content there are five things you need to keep in mind in order to make that content meaningful: Relevance, Clarity, Effectiveness, Memorability, and Personality.

Relevance: The Appropriateness of The Material -- The material on your website has to be relevant, it is good for search engine indexing and it is good for establishing your expertise and trustworthiness, a quality that is an absolute necessity in a Web-based business environment, but exactly what constitutes relevant content? In order for content to be relevant it must serve your overall marketing agenda and at the same time it must be useful to your target audience.

If your goal is to generate long-term clients by establishing a relationship with your website visitors then that relationship has to be symbiotic, that is, it must benefit both you and the your prospective clients. There are far too many websites around that are based on the P.T. Barnum principle that everyone is a sucker and can be conned. At the other end of the spectrum there are also way too many sites that are nothing more than catalogs, a kind of, here it is, take it or leave it approach. Then there are the sites that provide pages and pages of specifications and features that confuse more than clarify. And finally there are the websites that are nothing more than business cards or display ads, an approach that says to the visitor that you are too cheap, too lazy, or too unimaginative to bother creating an appropriate marketing website.

The fact that search engines seek out relevant content is merely a positive by-product of good content, it is not the ultimate marketing objective, which should be to open up a communication with your audience and start a productive and profitable relationship.

Clarity: The Ability To Be Understood -- Is there anything more important than being understood? I assume you have a website because you want to promote and expand your business, but if visitors do not understand who you are, what you do, and why they should pay you to provide them with a product or service, then exactly what are you doing? Being understood sounds like a simple thing, but it is not. Ask yourself, to whom am I trying to communicate? Is it a search engine robot or a real person? If your main concern is the ever changing search engine indexing machinery then you risk the danger of not being completely understood by the people who visit your website.

There is a certain comfort in dealing with the illusion of certainty that speaks to the mechanics of search engine optimization: all you have to do is follow the rules and you'll be successful. The problem is the game is fixed and the rules keep changing, and more importantly it's the wrong audience. Any order you ever generated was from a real person and if real people don't understand your marketing message, then all that traffic to your site is wasted.

Effectiveness: The Ability to Serve Your Marketing Objectives -- Being clear and to the point is important but it doesn't necessarily make your site effective. Dragnet's Sergeant Friday may have wanted, 'just the facts, nothing but the facts' but in the real world people need more.

People are busy and they do not want to waste their time on things that have no meaning for them, and that is the key. Things become meaningful when they engage while they enlighten, educate while they entertain, and persuade while they present. People spend hours upon hours on the Web doing things that could be considered a waste of time and non productive, so the idea that people will not invest their time on your website is just plain wrong. If they won't spend the time, then they aren't really interested or your presentation stinks.

What makes the Web such a powerful marketing tool is its multimedia capability, the opportuníty to communicate using text, images, motion graphics, video, and sound (audio) design. And of all these delivery options the two most effective communication techniques are video and sound (audio) design.

Memorability: The Ability To Stick In Your Audience's Minds -- Clarity and effectiveness are vital but if people don't remember who you are, all your hard work will be lost. Maybe you've convinced your audience that your way is the answer, but if they don't remember it was you that told them, then you've wasted the opportuníty.

There are lots of sites around that expect instant response. They present their material and expect you to press a button and give them money. It's not that this can't happen, but it certainly is not what usually happens.

How many times have you wished you could remember that website that had that thing that you didn't need then but you need now? Not every potential customer is ready to buy right away, and if they forget who you are, someone else will benefit from your effort.

Let's put it another way, sales is like sex, while marketing is like a seduction. If you're not prepared to invest in romancing your audience, they'll immediately forget you exist and the sale will go to the business that gets remembered.

In order to create that memory, your website has to be an experience, an experience that resonates and entertains by delivering your marketing message with style and flair, using real human beings, analogy, and the classic story format in a professionally executed performance.

Personality: The Ability To Distinguish You From The Competition -- Every business has a personality, an image, an identity that is the sum total of every experience anyone who has ever had contact with your company has ever had. Success online and offline depends on how well you manage that personality.

Your website is part of your public face and in many cases it is your only public face. Your business is not what you sell and it is not you, it is a separate and distinct entity that needs to be treated like a precocious child in need of care and feeding, and development.

Personality starts with a point-of-view and an attitude strong enough to make an impact. And the more mundane your offering, the more important it is to make a statement. Victoria's Secret has little trouble grabbing people's attention, but if it's sandpaper you sell, you better try harder. We especially see this identity crisis with distributors, whose own personality often gets sublimated to the major brands they carry.

Perhaps you remember the J. Peterman character from the old Seinfeld television show. The character was played by, actor and voice-over specialist, John O'Hurley, who is nothing like the real J. Peterman. But the characterization was so strong, and so memorable, that O'Hurley was able to single-handedly rescue the company from financial trouble.

If you're looking to create a Web-personality as effective as John O'Hurley's J. Peterman, you should consider adding a video or audio host to your Web-presentation, one that engages your audience's attention and captures their collective imagination.

At the end of the day there is one thing about websites that should guide you in your decisions as to what you present and how, and that is simply, websites are for people not search engines. If the people coming to your website don't hear what you have to say, understand what you're offering, and remember who you are, then your website isn't doing what it needs to do for your business.

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In a challenging economy, you must find new ways to make marketing work more effectively, get more out of marketing investments, and measure and account for marketing decisions. In short, you must make changes. Doing the same things in an uncertain economic environment and expecting the same results is, at worst, a definition of marketing insanity. At best, it is a flawed strategy.

How can your company be one of those success stories that market and grow their business during challenging economic times? The following strategies will help you allocate marketing investments to better performing programs that will carry your company through the economic downturn and beyond.


1. Get Targeted -- A fundamental but sometimes overlooked marketing tenet is to "fish where the fish are." In other words, invest in those specific, targeted media where you know your customers and prospects will be exposed to your message. Research shows that virtually all engineering, technical and industrial professionals now use the Internet throughout their work process.

The same holds true in most business-to-business markets. However, the Internet is vast, and the fish you are looking for may be using specific Web sites where the content is directly related to their information needs. Work with your media partners to identify and target those sites.

2. Measure Performance -- While it's always the right time to purge marketing programs that don't perform, it may be time to scale back any marketing plans whose results you can't measure or are unsure about. In other words, reallocate and "right-size" marketing budgets to measurable programs. Online programs -- which are built around delivering visibility, impressions, clicks, leads and customers -- are easy to measure.

3. Think Integration -- Integrated marketing means your marketing strategy takes advantage of multiple media, resources and customer touch points to create a whole that's greater and more effective than the sum of its parts. The more that marketing efforts are integrated and comprehensive, the greater impact you can achieve in gaining visibility in your market, qualified leads and sales.

4. Maintain Frequency and Consistency -- The benefits of regular visibility in the market tend to compound over time as more prospects recognize your company. This improves your opportunity to get on a prospect's short list of potential vendors and also shortens the sales cycle. A consistent online presence where your customers and prospects are looking for information -- including Web sites, directories, search engines and e-newsletters -- will help your company stay visible as well as provide measurable lead generation benefits via online contact.

5. Push and Pull Your Way to Success -- Most marketing can be classified as either push or pull: companies push their message out through tactics such as direct mail, advertisements and e-newsletters; and they also establish a presence in online directories, Web sites and search engines to pull customers in real-time when prospects are searching for information, products and services like those your company offers.

Rather than struggling over whether to allocate resources to push or pull marketing, seek out a media partner that has your target audience captive and can offer both push and pull programs under an integrated program.

6. Focus on Quality Over Quantity -- If marketing efforts focus solely on quantity over quality, fewer leads will convert, more sales resources will be wasted, and sales people will begin to distrust marketing's lead generation programs.
Commit to programs where quality is a key attribute: programs that can deliver interested prospects, provide prospect contact information, and offer reports of program performance .

7. Seek Assistance From Media Partners -- The economy is likely forcing you to make harder and smarter decisions about allocating budgets. While you may be facing challenges, you don't have to face them alone. Ask media partners to demonstrate how their marketing solutions help your company achieve the strategies mentioned above.

Ask them:

-Do they have your target audience's attention?
-Can they keep your company visible to prospects and customers at all times?
-Do they offer a variety of integrated marketing solutions aligned with your goals?
-Can they provide both visibility and lead generation?
-Do they deliver targeted, quality leads with full contact information?
-Do they provide reports you can use to measure the performance of your marketing
and justify your marketing investments?

During challenging times or when thing are going well, industrial marketers need to clarify goals and create a tailored, integrated marketing solution that complements your current media mix and extends your company's ability to compete and win business in the market.

Utilize a wide range of e-media advertising and marketing solutions. Consider keyword ads, e-mail marketing, searchable product catalogs, banner ad networks and industry-leading e-newsletter advertisements. Figure out the right combination, and you will deliver the right message at the right time to the right audience and integrate with your traditional marketing efforts.

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Typically, new technologies tend to promise more than they deliver. That has not been the case with Web services, which are being integrated into just about every new e-commerce application. "Support for Web services has come from application vendors, application development tool suppliers and middleware vendors," said Jason Bloomberg, a managing partner with market research firm ZapThink.

The support has been widespread because Web services enable companies to simplify application design, deliver enhancements more quickly, and reuse software more easily. Those features stem from the design of Web services. In essence, Web services provide businesses with a standard way to communicate. They replace complex, proprietary programming interfaces with Extensible Markup Language (XML) documents and standard application protocols. XML is used to tag data, and SOAP is used to transfer it, WSDL (Web Services Description Language) describes the services needed, and UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration) tells applications what services are available.

Because compliant software works with open protocols, it can be discovered by other programs, and two or more applications can interact with one another and perform tasks, such as exchanging information. With this flexibility, companies can integrate their own applications more tightly within the enterprise. An e-commerce corporation might connect its order entry program with its accounting applications so that changes made in one area automatically update data housed in another department. This step can be taken even if the applications are coded in different programming languages.

In addition, businesses can exchange data with their partners, customers and suppliers more effectively. In a best case scenario, they can view and use partners' information as if it was their own. A Web service could carry out payment validation by taking information from one system -- perhaps a customer name and address -- and initiating a request for other information relevant to the process, such as a credit card account number, expiration date or the card verification number on the back of a credit card.

Taking advantage of such features does not require much of an investment for an e-commerce supplier. "Many of the new applications as well as application development tools arrive with inherent support for Web services," stated Randy Heffner, an analyst with Forrester Research. In some cases, e-commerce companies initiate Web services simply by deploying applications, such as Oracle's E-Business Suite.

In addition, Web services have become a feature that many e-commerce suppliers now offer to their customers. "The Web services suppliers win because other companies use their services, and that helps drive up their visibility and eventually their revenue," ZapThink's Bloomberg explained. The customers are content because they have more sophisticated functions than they could develop by themselves.

Because of the benefits, a number of e-commerce suppliers are moving into this space. "Amazon and Google are a few of the companies that have developed Web services that they let other companies take advantage of," Heffner said. Amazon has been in the Web services business since its launch of Amazon Web Services in 2002. The service provides software developers, Web site owners and merchants with access to back-end features found on Amazon's Web site, such as its payment system. As the services have evolved, the face of the companies using them has changed.

"When we started this business, we imagined that smaller companies, particularly startups, would be the first ones to take advantage of our services, given their low-cost nature and the fact that they get to leverage our massive scaling capabilities with no up-front investment," noted Kay Kinton, an Amazon spokesperson. "Now that our services have become more mature, we are seeing larger companies take advantage as well."

While Web services offer many advantages, they face a few deployment challenges. "Web services technology is readily available and works well. The obstacles stem from management issues," said ZapThink's Bloomberg. Many programmers do not want to fully understand how to build applications that take advantage of Web services features. Inertia is also a problem: Some programmers resist designing applications in a new way. Companies often need to invest in training courses in order to overcome those barriers.

Another challenge is most existing enterprise software infrastructures conform to other architectures, such as client/server, thin client, or mainframe computing. Consequently, it can take companies a substantial amount of time, money and manpower to revamp their systems and realize Web services' potential benefits.

To help address these issues, Web services are being rolled up into a more expansive application development initiative: service-oriented architecture (SOA). The goal with this movement is to design all applications so they operate in a plug-and-play manner. Here, support for Web services would be one of the features bundled in with SOA compliant systems.

Because of its potential, major vendors, such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP have been promoting SOA. "SOA has the potential to help companies streamline the application development process further, but putting the pieces in place to take advantage of it has proven to be a difficult challenge," concluded Bloomberg. This problem is expected to be a short-term issue. As SOA acceptance rises, the Web services footprint will grow even bigger in e-commerce companies.

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The Federal Reserve and other regulators are moving Friday to crack down on "unfair and deceptive" practices in the credit card industry that have added billions in debt to people already struggling to cope with the economic downturn. In the most far-reaching crackdown on the credit industry in decades, the Fed and two government agencies are proposing rules that would stop credit card companies from unfairly raising interest rates and make sure they give people enough time to pay their bills.
The banking industry is expected to fight the new rules.

Travis Plunkett, legislative director for the Consumer Federation of America, said that while he hadn't yet seen the details, the rules "appear to address some of the most significant abuses in the credit card marketplace right now." Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., who has introduced legislation to protect consumers from credit card abuse, said in a statement that she was pleased the Fed had adopted some aspects of her legislation.

However, she also expressed concern that "by the time the Fed gets around to finalizing these credit card reform proposals, they will be watered down and come too little too late for consumers who need relief now."

The Fed has been criticized for moving too slowly to respond to abuses leading to the subprime mortgage crisis. The agencies said the new regulations could be finalized by the end of the year.

Plunkett said his group estimates that credit card debt is now about US$850 billion, with households that don't pay their credit card bills in full every month owing an average $17,000.

The proposed new rules that would prohibit:

Placing unfair time constraints on payments. A payment could not be deemed late unless the borrower is given a reasonable period of time, such as 21 days, to pay;
Unfairly allocating payments among balances with different interest rates;
Unfairly raising annual percentage rates on outstanding balances; Placing too-high fees for exceeding the credit limit solely because of a hold placed on the account;
Unfairly computing balances; Unfairly adding security deposits and fees for issuing credit or making credit available; Making deceptive offers of credit.

In news releases, the agencies said the proposed rules also would require federal credit unions to give consumers a chance to opt out of an overdraft protection program. And they would prohibit those institutions from charging a fee for an overdraft caused by a hold placed on consumer's funds when a person uses a debit card.

The Fed, which is expected to vote Friday afternoon on its approval of the proposed rules, is acting in conjunction with the National Credit Union Administration and the Office of Thrift Supervision. Ken Clayton, senior vice president of card policy for the American Bankers Association, said the industry will fight the new proposals, describing them as "aggressive regulatory intervention in the marketplace that will result in higher prices and less consumer credit."

He said the change "basically says that we can't price for risk" and that if higher risk borrowers don't bear the costs, those costs will be passed along to other consumers.

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The hottest gadgets of today will look old and tired a year from now. Sellers of mobile handsets, smartphones, MP3 players, gaming consoles, camcorders, digital cameras and laptops constantly push the latest and greatest technology, leaving yesterday's choice items in the dust. Then there's the fact that this stuff is pretty easily broken.

How to dispose of broken or outdated electronic devices has become a growing question. A one year-old startup, BuyMyTronics.com, thinks it has an equitable and environmentally friendly solution: It will buy anyone's used, new and broken devices. It will fix what's fixable and sell it at profit. The rest gets recycled.

"Everybody has something they [just don't know what to do with]. It's happened to me before. I broke a digital camera, and when I looked for a place to have it fixed, it was going to be more to fix it than it was to buy a brand new one," said Brett Mosley, president and CEO of BuyMyTronics.com.

Although many people have found themselves in a similar position, holding a worthless device because it is broken or out-of-date, Mosley decided he would do something about it. "I'd always had that idea that it would be cool if you could buy things from people at a reasonable price and then have all of your labor and repairs done in-house. You could sell them. It was always something I had been frustrated with and said, 'someone should do something about this.' The opportunity presented itself and I seized the day," he said.

For what Mosley calls a "reasonable price," BuyMyTronics will purchase certain types of electronics from numerous vendors, including Apple, iPods, Blackberry smartphones and Sony PlayStation gaming consoles, among many more. iPhone bricked? BuyMyTronics wants it. Recently upgraded to an iPod touch and you need to move an older model? The firm will buy that too.

"A pretty popular model [cell phone], the Motorola V3, we pay up to (US)$35 for a used one. For a broken iPhone, we pay up to $200 for one of those. A used BlackBerry Pearl, we pay up to $200. A used iPod video -- not this current generation but the one before it -- we pay up to $160. A used mini iPod, up to $37, and a broken nano is up to $51. We pay up to $292 for a Nintendo Wii," Mosley explained.

The response to the site has been excellent, he said. "We've been up and running for about a year now, and month over month we've been growing at 30 percent," he pointed out. Business has been good enough for Mosley to expand the list of electronics he will purchase to include Apple laptops. PC laptops will be added in the future.
"On laptops, we'll be paying up to $2,000. We'll pay pretty well for broken and used," he said.

Whatever the condition of the device, Mosley said, his company will pay consumers for it. If it's not fixable and resellable, once the device has been stripped of serviceable parts, the remainder -- which often includes components composed of toxic elements -- will be responsibly recycled, not sent to a local landfill.
"I'm paying people to recycle, essentially. I'm actually paying really good money, and the concept sells really well with people," he noted.

The green effect does not stop there. The business is 100 percent wind powered, according to Mosley, and by salvaging reusable parts from old and broken devices, BuyMyTronics reduces the number of new components that will need to be manufactured. Refurbishing salvageable devices and selling them to larger retailers and through an eBay site also achieves this goal.

The tech waste problem is massive, Sarah Westervel, e-Waste project coordinator at the Basel Action Network (BAN), said. "One of the things that's really mind-blowing ... to go into a U.S. recycler's warehouse that maybe is 80,000 to 100,000 square feet and see nothing but electronic waste," she said.

The BAN works for the responsible disposal and recycling of toxic waste, of which electronic devices are a significant and constantly growing percentage. The danger to the environment is that many of these products contain lead, cadmium, chromium and other toxic substances.

"Not only are they carcinogens, but there are tetratogens, which cause problems to fetuses. They can affect the endocrine system, the whole hormone system, and they can affect the reproductive system. Some of the heavy metals are actually elements, and they are immortal. They don't ever disappear. They may change form but they don't go away and they cannot be cleaned up," Westervel explained.

For instance, mercury, when put into an incinerator, is released into the air but falls back to earth to contaminate the soil and water, and that's why some fish now have high levels of mercury. Other chemical compounds are bio-accumulative and build up in the biosphere. They are persistent and do not break down, meaning they accumulate in the food chain.

"These have long been known to be problematic. Others they are starting to show are extremely toxic in even tiny quantities. Toxicologists used to believe that small amounts of some toxins weren't a problem. But, now they are finding that these toxins are even more toxic in tiny, minute amounts than they are at larger amounts. They are taken up by the human organism better in small quantities than large quantities."

While environmental laws in the U.S. may prohibit disposal of these dangerous substances in landfills in the U.S., more and more often the most toxic elements are shipped to developing countries dumped there and left to pollute that environment.
BAN has initiated a certification program for responsible recyclers. BuyMyTronics is currently waiting to receive the organization's e-Steward certification.

"We need to keep this toxic waste stream out of landfills and incinerators and out of the developing countries. It is a really problematic waste stream and is the fastest growing waste stream in this country. We don't have a comprehensive national system and we need to address the whole model of constantly upgrading electronic equipment and just tossing it out," Westervel concluded.

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