Archive for September, 2007

Ashop Commerce – Yet a better online shop

Shopping Cart Software? You have tried enough? Well, have a look at this one.

When I look for ecommerce software, I usually look at a few aspects:

  • Ease of installation – is it hard to install? Can someone not computer savvy do this?
  • Ease of customization – Eg. Australia’s GST is 10%, NZ’s GST is 12.5%… Is this easy to change in the calculation?
  • Customer Usability – is it hard to navigate? Is it hard for customers to find what they want?
  • Admin Usability – how hard is it for admin to upload product photos and input product information?
  • Funnel to sales – does it provide a pathway to check out?

Ashop Commerce has certainly complied with all the above! In summary their features include:

  • Easy setup
  • Inventory Control – includes product feeds as well!
  • Customizable layout and design – they now offer free layout design – view their homepage for details
  • A variety of payment options including Google Checkout
  • Customizable shipping and tax
  • Web optimized
  • Sales analysis – integratable with MYOB, Quicken & Quick Books
  • Live online tech support
  • Repeat customer accommodation
  • Affiliate program module available
  • SMS alerts
  • ASP & SQL database
  • US based hosted
  • Full https & SSL support

Watch the demo on Ashop Commerce’s website: http://www.ashopcommerce.com/g/11845/test-drive.html

If you have not decided, why not give this shopping cart a try?

(Sponsored review by Smorty)

Review – Home Improvement

Home improvement – is it easy or hard?

For me, I seldom do it – I just don’t like the feeling of getting dirt all over my clothes and hands. But it is actually quite expensive if you hire a handyman to do everything. However, this is not always true.

If you are in the UK, you may want to visit these guys – Anglian Home Improvement. They provide conservatory products and services in an affordable price. Stylish, luxury… you name it! They have so many styles that would certainly fit your home. Their windows and doors are built exactly to what you require.

Their website has made everything simple – they have even put the fitting process in plain English that you can follow! Their “Bespoke Service” can tailor-make for your budget. Give them a call and they will come to your place, give you a thorough quotation with no obligations.

Home Improvement that you can afford. Now you can have a home that everybody envys.

(Review sponsored by Smorty)

Link Building is Important

Why is link building important?

This is directly related to your pagerank. Google sees each link linking to your website as a vote of favour. If you got more links from other websites, you got more vote and hence your site is more popular.

If a site having high ranking links to your site, Google sees it as more valuable and hence you got higher ranking.

But link building is a long and boring process. That’s why you need some sort of software to assist you.

And this software must not be some sort of autobot that submits your site automatically to 2000 websites. You will be banned if you do this.

I am currently using Directory Submitter. Using this software, you do have the chance to go through the listing before submission. This software would ask you to create a project, which you have the chance to input information about the site you are going to submit eg. URL, Descriptions, Keywords etc. After that, it would lead you through the sites. When you reach the site submission page, the information above would be automatically filled in for you. This saves heaps of time!

The free version of it has 350 free directories built-in for you to test out the service. You can sort the directories by their page rank and hence you can submit to the websites with higher ranking first, and slowly go through the list.

Give it a try today. Download Directory Submitter for free.

Google Adsense

It is quite a usual practice that many website contains advertisement.  The banner ad model is basically gone – people ignore them and simply won’t click on them.

The (not so new) way of advertising on website is Google Adsense.  You can customize the look and feel of the ads to fit into your webpages.

And by putting ads onto your webpages, and when someone clicks on them, you get paid by Google.  The payout is US$100. If your website / blog is popular, it is just not hard to make.

3 more things you can do rather than text ads:

  • Image ads
  • Button asking people to join Adsense – and you get commission
  • Button asking people to download firefox – and you get paid up to US$2 if that person downloads the whole package offered by Google (including Google earth, Adobe reader etc.)

It is very important not to violate Google’s rules – including not to click the ads by yourself and not to tell others to click on the ads.