How to promote a SAAS and increase subscription sales

There are several strategies that you can use to promote a SAAS and increase subscription sales:

1. Identify your target audience: Clearly defining your target audience will help you tailor your marketing efforts to the needs and interests of your potential customers.
2. Use content marketing: Create valuable and informative content that addresses the problems or challenges faced by your target audience. This can include blog posts, ebooks, webinars, and videos.
3. Utilize social media: Use social media platforms to reach and engage with potential customers. This can include creating and sharing content, running paid ads, and interacting with followers.
4. Implement search engine optimization (SEO): Optimize your website and content for relevant keywords to improve your visibility in search engine results pages.
5. Offer free trials or demos: Allowing potential customers to try out your SAAS before committing to a subscription can help increase conversions.
6. Use email marketing: Use email marketing to nurture leads and keep potential customers informed about your SAAS. This can include newsletters, promotional emails, and automated email campaigns.
7. Collaborate with influencers or partners: Partnering with influencers or complementary businesses can help increase exposure for your SAAS.
8. Run paid advertising campaigns: Use paid advertising platforms such as Google AdWords or social media ads to reach targeted audiences.
9. Offer incentives: Consider offering incentives such as discounts or free upgrades to encourage subscriptions.
10. Focus on customer satisfaction: Providing excellent customer service and support can help improve retention and encourage customer referrals.

E-commerce Trends for 2023

It is difficult to predict specific e-commerce trends for 2023 as the industry is constantly evolving and new technologies and trends emerge regularly. However, there are a few trends that are likely to continue to be important in the coming years:

1. Personalisation: Personalised experiences are becoming increasingly important for e-commerce websites. This can include personalised product recommendations, customised email marketing campaigns, and personalised search results.
2. Mobile optimization: With the increasing popularity of mobile devices, it is important for e-commerce websites to be optimized for mobile users. This includes having a mobile-responsive design and fast loading times.
3. Social media integration: Social media platforms are increasingly being used for e-commerce, with many consumers using them to discover and purchase products. Integrating social media into e-commerce websites can help to drive traffic and sales.
4. Artificial intelligence and machine learning: These technologies are being used to improve the customer experience, such as through personalized product recommendations and chatbots for customer support.
5. Voice search optimisation: As the use of voice assistants increases, it is important for e-commerce websites to optimise for voice search to ensure that they are easily discoverable through these devices.
6. Augmented and virtual reality: These technologies are being used to enhance the online shopping experience, such as through virtual try-on features for clothing and accessories.

What is Laravel

Laravel is a free, open-source PHP web application framework designed for web artisans. It is intended to make developing web applications faster and easier by providing a set of tools and resources for building modern, feature-rich websites and applications.

Laravel is built on top of the PHP programming language and provides a number of features and tools that make it easier to build web applications. These features include a routing system, a templating engine, a task scheduler, and a database query builder. Laravel also includes a number of libraries and packages that can be used to extend its core functionality, such as a mail library for sending emails, a cache library for improving application performance, and an authentication library for handling user login and registration.

Laravel is widely used by developers around the world to build a variety of web applications, including e-commerce stores, content management systems, and social networking platforms. It is known for its simplicity and ease of use, making it a popular choice for developers of all skill levels.

Ten ways to improve SEO

1. Use relevant, descriptive titles and meta descriptions for your product pages. These should accurately reflect the content of the page and include relevant keywords.

2. Use unique, high-quality product descriptions that provide valuable information to customers and include relevant keywords.

3. Use descriptive, keyword-rich URLs for your product pages.

4. Use alt text to describe images on your product pages, including relevant keywords.

5. Use header tags (H1, H2, etc.) to structure your content and highlight important information, including relevant keywords.

6. Use internal linking to help search engines discover and understand the content on your website.

7. Optimize your website for mobile devices to ensure that it is easily accessible to users on mobile devices.

8. Use social media to promote your products and website, and to engage with your customers.

9. Use customer reviews and ratings to add credibility and improve the user experience on your website.

10. Use Google Analytics to track your website traffic and identify areas for improvement.

6 Ways to Improve ecommerce site search

Site search is arguably the most important area when it comes to user experience. Buyers don’t have time to hunt for products.

Here are some practical action steps for improving site search on your ecommerce site.

There are three options for buyers to find products on an ecommerce site.

• Keyword search occurs when a buyer uses the search bar to find products. Keywords can be anything, from terms relating to products or categories to specific part numbers — UPC, MPN, EAN, internal, competitive, and industry-specific.
• Category browsing occurs when users select a category and drill down to find the items they are looking for in sub-categories.
• Faceted search is when users refine their search by narrowing the results via filters, such as size, color, length, and brand.

6 Ways to Improve ecommerce site search

Multiple factors impact whether buyers can easily find products via site search. Focus on these six items to make it easier.

• Synonyms and substitute terms. Users will search for the same items in different ways. For example, a pair of gloves could be "construction gloves", "work gloves", or "leather gloves".
• Abbreviations and industry terms. Every industry has its own terminology. We see many searches that contain slang, which can lead to a zero results page.
• Misspellings. Users will misspell words as they search. It's up to merchants to decide how tolerant site search should be with misspellings. "Edit distance" determines how many letters in a word can be replaced by other letters to determine search matches. An edit distance of 2 could show "book" in the results for the search term of "back." That scenario would increase the number of results, and decrease the relevancy.
• Predictive search. This feature will help users save time by suggesting products and categories in real time based on the keywords they are searching for.
• Type-ahead. This will show autocomplete suggestions to keyword phrases being entered into a search box. It reduces the typing required of users and, also, helps them understand what other users are searching for.
• Product taxonomy. This is the system to classify and organise products on an ecommerce site. It becomes more complex as the number of items increases. Browse through a category search or look at breadcrumbs on a product page to see a product taxonomy at work.

Saying Goodbye to SSL

Does your website still use SSL or an early TLS protocol?  Are you an ecommerce or member only site or yet to start the migration away from SSL to a more secure encryption protocol? Read on for key questions and answers that can help with saying goodbye to SSL and TLSv1.1 and reducing the risk of being breached. 

What happens on 30 June 2018?

The 30th June 2018 is the deadline for disabling SSL/early TLS and implementing a more secure encryption protocol – TLS 1.1 or higher (TLS v1.2 is strongly encouraged) in order to meet the PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) for safeguarding payment data.

What is SSL/early TLS?

Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol used to establish a secure communications channel between two systems. It is used to authenticate one or both systems, and protect the confidentiality and integrity of information that passes between systems. It was originally developed as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) by Netscape in the early 1990s. Standardised by the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF), TLS has undergone several revisions to improve security to block known attacks and add support for new cryptographic algorithms, with major revisions to SSL 3.0 in 1996, TLS 1.0 in 1990, TLS 1.1 in 2006, TLS 1.2 in 2008 and in March 2018 TLS 1.3.

What is the risk of using SSL/early TLS?

There are many serious vulnerabilities in SSL and early TLS that left unaddressed put organizations at risk of being breached. The widespread POODLE and BEAST exploits are just a couple examples of how attackers have taken advantage of weaknesses in SSL and early TLS to compromise organizations.

According to NIST, there are no fixes or patches that can adequately repair SSL or early TLS. Therefore, it is critically important that organizations upgrade to a secure alternative as soon as possible, and disable any fallback to both SSL and early TLS.

Who is most susceptible to SSL/early TLS vulnerabilities?

Online and e-commerce environments using SSL and early TLS are most susceptible to the SSL exploits, but the 30 June 2018 PCI DSS migration date applies to all environments - except for payment terminals (POIs) (and the SSL/TLS termination points to which they connect) that can be verified as not being susceptible to any known exploits for SSL and early TLS.

What should you do if your Security Scans flag the presence of SSL and the scan fails?

Between now and 30 June 2018 organizations that have not completed their migration should provide the Approved Scanning Vendor (ASV) with documented confirmation that they have implemented a Risk Mitigation and Migration Plan (see Migrating from SSL/Early TLS for information on this) and are working to complete their migration by the required date. Receipt of this confirmation should be documented by the ASV as an exception under “Exceptions, False Positives, or Compensating Controls” in the ASV Scan Report Executive Summary.

What can and should organizations do now to protect themselves against SSL and early TLS vulnerabilities?

If you have not already considered, it takes time to migrate to more secure protocols and organizations should not delay:

• Migrate to TLS 1.2. While it is possible to implement countermeasures against some attacks on TLS, migrating to a later version of TLS (TLS 1.2 or 1.3 is encouraged) is the only reliable method to protect against the current protocol vulnerabilities.
• Patch TLS software against implementation vulnerabilities. Implementation vulnerabilities, such as Heartbleed in OpenSSL, can pose serious risks. Keep TLS software up-to-date to ensure it is patched against these vulnerabilities, and have countermeasures for other attacks.
• Configure TLS securely. In addition to providing support for later versions of TLS, ensure the TLS implementation is configured securely. Ensure that secure TLS cipher suites and key sizes are supported, and disable support for other cipher suites that are not necessary for interoperability. For example, disable support for weak “Export-Grade” cryptography, which was the source of the recent Logjam vulnerability.

TLS 1.3 vs TLS 1.2

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the group that has been in charge of defining the TLS protocol, which has gone through many various iterations. The previous version of TLS, TLS 1.2, was defined in RFC 5246 and has been in use for the past eight years by the majority of all web browsers. As of March 21st, 2018, TLS 1.3 has now been finalized, after going through 28 drafts.

Speed Benefits of TLS 1.3

TLS and encrypted connections have always added a slight overhead when it comes to web performance. HTTP/2 definitely helped with this problem, but TLS 1.3 helps speed up encrypted connections even more with features such as TLS false start and Zero Round Trip Time (0-RTT).

To put it simply, with TLS 1.2, two round-trips have been needed to complete the TLS handshake. With 1.3, it requires only one round-trip, which in turn cuts the encryption latency in half. This helps those encrypted connections feel just a little bit snappier than before.

Improved Security With TLS 1.3

A big problem with TLS 1.2 is that it’s often not configured properly it leaves websites vulnerable to attacks. TLS 1.3 now removes obsolete and insecure features from TLS 1.2, including the following:

• SHA-1
• RC4
• DES
• 3DES
• AES-CBC
• MD5
• Arbitrary Diffie-Hellman groups — CVE-2016-0701
• EXPORT-strength ciphers – Responsible for FREAK and LogJam

Because the protocol is in a sense more simplified, this make it less likely for administrators and developers to mis-configure the protocol.

TCP Handshake over IPv6

The internet we know today heavily relies on TCP/IP to send our information around the world at lightspeed.  With more devices than ever connected to the internet (insert link to back this up, it sounded cool), using IPv4 we're soon going to run out of addresses.  And in fact if it weren't for technologies such as NAT we'd be in a stickier situation than we already are.   In preperation of running out of IP addresses, IPv6 was mustered up around 1998 by the IETF, a 128-bit addressing convention vs the old IPv4 32-bit addressing.

So that means IPv6 has been around quite a while now.  Almost 20 years, yet still IPv4 is all the rage.  Perhaps us techies have trouble letting go of what we know.  I mean why set up an AAAA record, when you only need to set up an A record right?  Why configure DNS to use  2001:4860:4860:0000:0000:0000:0000:8888 or 2001:4860:4860::8888 when you can just use 8.8.8.8 right?  Well yeah, let's save all that for another article, once I've had a beer.

I got thinking - I wonder if the TCP Handshake has changed though?  You know with all the added improvements IPv6 is meant to bring.  Has the secret handshake been updated too?

Turns out, I didn't have to think to very hard.  TCP and IP are two different protocols, 2 different layers of the OSI model and TCP/IP Model (depending on where you're from).  So in theory we should be able to swap out IPv4 for IPv6 and keeping the same old TCP we're used too.

According to the very trustworthy Wikipedia, the only subtle change when TCP and IPv6 are used together comes in the checksum calculation.

When TCP runs over IPv4, the method used to compute the checksum is defined in RFC 793:

The checksum field is the 16 bit one's complement of the one's complement sum of all 16-bit words in the header and text. If a segment contains an odd number of header and text octets to be checksummed, the last octet is padded on the right with zeros to form a 16-bit word for checksum purposes. The pad is not transmitted as part of the segment. While computing the checksum, the checksum field itself is replaced with zeros.

When TCP runs over IPv6, the method used to compute the checksum is changed, as per RFC 2460:

Any transport or other upper-layer protocol that includes the addresses from the IP header in its checksum computation must be modified for use over IPv6, to include the 128-bit IPv6 addresses instead of 32-bit IPv4 addresses.

So there you have it.
Thanks for reading.