With tax season looming large, you may have been thinking about taxes and how having an ecommerce business will affect your status as a taxpayer. Will you have to pay because you're a business owner? Always seek the advice of a qualified accountant to be sure you have the most up-to-date information, but here are some tips on tax write offs that you may not be aware even exist.

Mileage you know about, but are you doing it? You might think you don't need to keep track of your mileage because you make short trips around town to the supplier, the bank, and other necessary trips. Along with mileage, deduct any traveling you do that could be construed as for your business. Those miles add up and at the end of the year, it is a real eye-opener to see how much you can actually write off.

Unpaid invoices are another write-off. If you attempted to collect the money from someone you provided goods or services to and they won't pay you, you can deduct it from your taxes as a loss. You don't have to take the deduction the year it occurred so if you have a number of bad debts around, go ahead and deduct them this year. Be sure to have full documentation of the debt and your attempts to collect.

Your shipping and postage expenses are another often overlooked deduction. When you add up at the end of the year how much you actually spent on shipping your product, you will gladly take that deduction!

Make sure you're getting the proper deductions for your business! Talk to a qualified accountant or visit the IRS website at http://www.irs.gov.

When someone is looking for a product or service, chances are they will look at Google before they even think to crack open the Yellow Pages. In order for your ecommerce store to be found by potential customers, you must be listed in the various search engines and directories.

Search engines send out text indexing robots called "spiders" and those spiders have the job of crawling the web. When a spider arrives at your website it will read and index every piece of prose on your website. Now you know why web content is so important even over fantastic graphics and the best flash animations. The spiders don't bother with those. They want text to index.

Make sure that your site has a good amount of writing on your index page that tells what you sell and your products. If you have a latest news page, put a blurb on your index page. Spiders will read and index all that text on those pages. The way it comes together is the more you write about your products on your pages, the more relevance the search engine spiders give those pages. When someone goes to Google and looks up a search word that relates to your site, the more you have talked about your product or service, the more likely that person is to receive your website in their return search results.

Do not just repeat the same words over and over on your webpage. That will have the effect of getting your website blacklisted by the search engines.

Now that you know the basics, update your website and get yourself found by your potential customers!

No matter how great your website looks, it doesn't matter if you have the best flash animations and the coolest shopping cart program around, the key to business success is referrals and repeat customers.

Customers will use your product or service generally until you give them a reason not to. If your service becomes bad or someone representing your company via email or on the phone is curt or short with a customer, you will lose their business. Furthermore, statistics indicate that if a consumer had a negative experience with a company, they will tell five people about the experience that will in turn tell one person each. That is the kind of viral marketing you do not need for business.

Your customers are your lifelines for your business; make sure anyone representing your company treats your customers exactly as important as they are. If you are relying on simply the quality of your product to make your business a success, you need to step back and think again.

People and their attitudes when dealing with your customers are a huge part of your business success. Make sure that your company is a service driven company. When a customer has a problem, take a minute to see things from their point of view.

Establishing and maintaining a good relationship with all your customers is a great way to maintain a loyal consumer base. Additionally, add incentives for referrals from customers such as discounts or even free items.

Advertising your website online can be very profitable if done correctly. There are a number of good venues to get your website and products seen by the right group of consumers you're trying to reach.

First of all decide the type of advertising you are going to do. Banner advertisements work well when you work through a banner exchange program.

Text based advertisements, if written well, can be as powerful as the fanciest flash animations. If you don't feel you can convey your site's message within a few words, best to hire the job out. Google, Yahoo and other search engines and directories offer text based advertising for your website that you can set up yourself. Another way to get your website message out is through a corporate blog. These are indexed by search engines and the sheer numbers of people that will find your site based on a corporate blog is astonishing.

Pay-per-click is another form of advertising that is good to use. You only pay when someone clicks and follows your advertisement back to your website. The incentive for someone to display your advertisements on their site is any sales from potential customers pay the merchant that displayed your ad a small commission. Depending on the amount of face time you bought for your advertisement, it will appear on a regular basis and more so the higher number of impressions that your purchased.

To make your online advertising pay off, do a little homework. Choose the venues where your advertisements will be appearing very carefully. If you sell funeral plots, don't advertise on a website that has mainly traffic from college kids. If you sell products geared towards men, choose those venues. The more you target your consumer base - the more products you will sell.