Ecommerce Gallery Website

In doing research on ecommerce and shopping cart websites, templates and designs, I came across the website ecommercegallery. This website offers a picture gallery of many of the internets best designed ecommerce and shopping cart websites. This site was very helpful to me in helping me decide what design aspects I wanted to incorporate into my sites design and I think it will help many of you as well.

Currently there are 200 different websites displayed with new ones being added regularly, also if you own an ecommerce / shopping cart website you can submit your site for inclusion to their list of featured websites. Many popular niches are represented, so you’ll see a good variety of websites.

Out of all the websites I looked at on ecommerce, here are my favorite ones:

Red is White

http://rediswhite.com/

What I liked: category buttons and tags.

See screen shots below…

Category Buttons

Category Title Tags

Ginger Pup Lane

http://www.gingerpuplane.com

What I liked: front page design.

Candy Direct

http://www.candydirect.com/

What I liked: site design.

Perfume Point

http://www.perfumepoint.co.uk/

What I liked: site design and layout.

Equip Your Trip

http://www.equipyourtrip.com/

What I liked: “Shop for” category.

See screen shot below…

Shop For Category

Beddingtons

http://www.beddingtons.com/

What I liked: Nice featured categories, and featured products section on home page.

Cacties

http://mycacties.com/

What I liked: site design.

Borders

http://www.borders.com/online/store/

What I liked: site design and the Magic Shelf featured books section.








There you have it, my favorites. Do you know any other great ecommerce / shopping cart sites? Leave us a comment using the form below.

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QuickBooks Online has three levels of online accounting choices: Free, Basic, and Plus. Before making your decision to use QuickBooks Online, you have to decide between QuickBooks Online Basic and QuickBooks Online Plus. This article will analyze the differences between the two QuickBooks Online choices. Any small business accounting solution should be chosen to match the type of business you operate. There is also a free version called QuickBooks Online Simple Start, however because of it’s limited capabilities it was not considered for this analysis. Hereafter, QuickBooks Online Basic will be referred to as “BASIC” and QuickBooks Online Plus as “PLUS”. Each significant difference and brief comment regarding the functionality is discussed below.

The following discusses the capabilities that work only with Plus:

Importing – With Plus you can import your QuickBooks Online basic, Simple Start Edition, QuickBooks Pro or Premier Edition file(s). The import does not work with a Mac.

Estimates – Estimates can be created and then seamlessly imported to an invoice for billing. By using estimates understandings can be mitigated.

Online Banking – With online banking, transactions downloaded into QuickBooks directly from your financial institution only in PLUS. You only have to review them instead of entering them from scratch. When you download an electronic statement, QuickBooks compares it to the transactions already in QuickBooks and identifies discrepancies. It helps you manage your cash flow, because you always know which checks have cleared your banking account, you also know how much money you have available.

Exporting – With PLUS you can export transactions and balances to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. This feature is critical for further analysis of your business.In other words, you can derive information otherwise not easily available to you. It’s an important feature, that should not be be overlooked, since it adds greater reporting and after the fact analysis capabilities.

Class tracking – Within Plus classes provide a system for categorizing transactions that goes beyond the normal ways of assigning transactions to expense or income accounts. With classes, you can categorize each detail line on a transaction. This lets you write one check to the office supply store for items bought for two different business units and still track the business unit for those purchases. For example, suppose you have a consulting business and an installation business. Class tracking is ideal for you if it is typical to have purchases and sales that include both types of work. By specifying the appropriate class on each detail line, you can run a Profit & Loss by Class report that will tell you if your consulting business is more or less profitable than the installation business.

Business tracking – With PLUS you can categorize data from different locations, offices, regions, or outlets of your company. You are able to assign each transaction to a business. By assigning a business to each transaction as you enter it, you can later see businesses on reports with great detail and clarity. Assigning businesses also lets you efficiently manage groups of transactions.

Time tracking – This feature is only in PLUS and allows you to enter your time into a timesheet for fee for service business i.e. consultants, freelancers, architects,sole proprietors, etc.

Invoicing – Plus also permits you to customize the invoice.This is another reason to try both to see what works for you.

Reporting and Financial Statements – With BASIC you get 40 standard reports whereas PLUS you get over 65 standard reports. In addition, you also get customization and formatting options. If you want to see a very detailed analysis in a chart format of the reporting differences can be found at Intuits knowledge base for comparison of the QuickBooks Online Products.

Budgeting – You can use the budget feature to estimate income and expenses for future years. PLUS budgets’ use a format very similar to a spreadsheet, with a horizontal row for each of your income and expense accounts, and vertical columns for each month or quarter.This is a very rudimentary but provides a bench mark that every company should use.

1099 Reporting – The regulations of the Internal Revenue Service require that a taxpayer issue a 1099-MISC form to its workers for nonemployee compensation providing the payer is a trade or business and the payments are to a noncorporate entity were $600 or more for services rendered. This feature is only offered in PLUS.

Users-BASIC provides access for one person and your accountant (2 users). However, PLUS provides access for 3 users PLUS your accountant for a total of 4 users. Plus can be expanded to 25 users for an additional cost, which is reasonable.

Support – BASIC includes email support provided by Intuit whereas PLUS includes callback and chat support as well as email support . Obviously, PLUS support is better, but with BASIC you can still get your questions answered.

Price – BASIC costs $9.99 a month as compared to PLUS which according to the Intuit website is $34.95 per month. However, if you purchase PLUS by using a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor you can purchase it for $21, which is net of a discount 40% discount, which is currently in effect at this time. Discounts and prices may change in the future. There are no annual contracts.

Summary – BASIC works satisfactorily for smaller companies, whereas PLUS works well for small to midsized companies. Prior to making your decision, you can test drive the software for 30 days for either or both BASIC and PLUS and, then decide which is the best software platform for your business. They are other disadvantages when considering BASIC and PLUS to a Desktop QuickBooks i.e. Pro, Premier, etc. The most significant disadvantage is that the Online versions do not provide inventory functionality. You may be able to overcome this disadvantage by purchasing an inventory add on. Prior making a decision of software selection its important for you to have a discussion with your CPA or accountant concerning which QuickBooks Online accounting package is best suited for you and your business.

Many changes have occurred in the media business in recent years. It is hard to keep up with them since they are occurring so fast. Though social media marketing is a relatively new concept, the average person can now distribute their material over the internet all over the world almost instantly. Media publishing giants like News Corporation and Liberty Media have controlled distribution of news and information all over the globe for 200 years. They have used large media distribution networks in order to do this and they will continue to grow.

There are blogs on the internet for almost anything that is of interest to you. Through these, you can become part of an online community that shares your interests. Many marketers use social media for advertising with things like banner ads and many other advertising tactics that work well on the internet. Consumers can use blogs to comment on their like or dislike of a product or service.

If your information makes it to the first page on Digg this can easily generate up to 200,000 different visitors to our site daily. Other sites such as Slashdot can have the same effect on driving traffic to your site. Since it is so important that your material receives as much traffic as possible some people have tried to manipulate the amount of positive responses to their site. Of course if you are caught doing this you will be banned from the site.

“Word of mouth” advertising has been around for a long time. We have always shared our opinions about purchases via telephone conversations, face to face conversation and through the written media. Now this news gets around almost at the speed of lightening with all of the blogs that have popped up on the internet and the information gets to many more people than ever before. Dartmouth’s Center for Marketing at the University of Massachusetts has done research claiming that 51% of blog content has become a very real force in the market.

Major newspapers now have blogs of their own. This is bringing more interest in online news sources to the mainstream.

Business competitors are now clever to monitor what their competition is doing by reading their blogs on the internet. We are also changing our habits in regard to photos and their distribution. One no longer has to have a very sophisticated camera when a less expensive model, or even a phone, will produce a very good image on the internet and distribution of the photograph is complete approximately instantly.

It has become so simple to engage with a lot of people through the social media that it has become addictive for many. It can be fun and is a hot topic of conversation among a lot of people. They love to examine every aspect of social media in big feature and love to share their opinions with others. It is easy to become obsessed with this technology and what it has to offer.

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With the simplicity of creating a website, there has been a large increase in the amount of web pages that are being created. Some of these web pages are receiving frequent visits, yet other are not receiving any at all. many aspects can affect the traffic that is drawn to you site. One of the most important things you should do, which will increase website traffic, is to utilize internal links.

Having a good internal link, for you web page, will gain the attention of search engine crawlers, as well has make your site user friendly. It also will allow visitors, of your site, to attain the content they are looking for much more quickly.

The search engine crawlers “creep” around the internet, searching from site to site. When they get to a site they index each page, and try to find out some information about it. The text links you create get the attention of the web crawler, and if properly put together will relay information about your site. Therefore, when you are putting your text links together, you should follow these few simple rules.

1. Make sure that the links you have are relevant to the information or services that your website provides.

2. Link through relevant keywords and not use the infamous CLICK HERE, link that people love to use. This does not serve the same purpose as linking to relevant text.

3. Make sure all your links are working and stay working, and always link to something that is relevant to the keywords and text that you are linking to. A link should provide more information about the same topic to be the most effective.

4. You should utilize as many appropriate links as possible, without taking from the text. To assist with the making your link flow, you should not put links into two consecutive words.

Remember by using these tips you can help the web search crawlers to find and better understand your site while also improving your organic search engine rankings. Using good relevant text links can really help get your site noticed, while making it more informative and helpful to visitors.

The steps for article marketing seem simple enough, you write articles to be submitted to the article directory sites and are able to leave a link to your site in the resource box provided. The purpose of this is to promote your website and to drive traffic to your site. Many website owners are disappointed when they do not see the results they were expecting and will automatically assume the technique does not work. The largest problem is not the article marketing strategy but the ones who are using it do not understand how it works. This is why a large portion of sites do not see the full benefits to article marketing techniques.

There are website owners who write the articles their selves and others who will hire a professional writing service to get the job done. In both instances the article marketing can be a failure if the understanding of how article marketing works is lacking. The production of articles using various keywords is just not enough, so many article marketing strategies fail.

The article being written with various keywords that will be relevant to the site is important, the number of backlinks that are left on high ranking directory sites are important. The article itself is the most important part of the marketing technique and many people overlook this fact. The article has to lead to traffic and if it is dull or of no value to the reader that will never happen. The reader has to be encouraged to click thru to your site after reading the article, they have to want more information or be interested in what you have to say to even consider clicking thru to your site.

The time it takes to produce a quality article is worth the end result. There are several article directory sites who will not even consider accepting a poorly written article. Think of the article as advertising for the business, you would not want a poor quality commercial to be aired on television so why would you post a poorly written article on the internet?

The backlinks left on the directory sites will offer you no value in the search engines if your website does not produce unique traffic. The keywords will also be lost in the promotional value as they too should be able to produce unique traffic targeted to your website. Site owners get lost in the backlinks and the keywords believing these to be the only important part of the marketing techniques. In reality the article is the main component that holds it all together and will determine the success of your website.

Search engines are designed to look at various things and the use of article marketing allow you to cover all the bases if used correctly. If you do not use the article marketing strategy correctly you will be left with the realization that your websites backlinks and the time you spend on keyword monopolization have all been in vain. You cannot accomplish your goals if you do not take each step to article marketing seriously and learn the most effective ways to use it. A little extra effort on your part will result in a lot more rewards for your website.

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We’ve already looked at Search Engine Optimization basics, and referred to On-Page SEO. But what really matters is off-page SEO. Think of it as appointing votes. If another site places a link to your site then that site has given you a vote of confidence. As if they’ve said ‘we think this site is good’.

Two main features make up the link to your website. The full web address of the actual page being pointed to. And secondly the keyword phrase (anchor text) that’s high-lighted on the page to be clicked on. A ‘vote’ is then generated for an individual website page based on that keyword phrase. So, a tick to move the site higher up the listings for that phrase.

It is always so. The keyword phrase and targeted page are completely tied to each other. Or the process can’t happen. The SE’s know what search term to use for that page based on the anchor text. To re-iterate: Your website’s search terms are totally controlled by its anchor texts.

Hence, a link saying “click here for…” isn’t a good idea. In this example, we created a vote for the phrase ‘Click HERE’. Who would choose to search for Click Here? Not a soul!

That’s the reason the anchor text must be right. As the keyword phrases you will be rated for depend on it. And by the way, if you DO Google “Click Here” you will always find the Adobe Reader download site at the top. Did they SEO that term? Definitely not. But so many sites have a ‘Click HERE to download Adobe Reader’ link on them, that they’re number one for that phrase.

In other words, the SE’s use the anchor text phrase to cast a vote for a page. It is the logical thing to do. SE’s try to look for relevancy in the same way a real person would. In several ways it doesn’t matter what your page is about. You’ll rank for the terms in the anchor text phrases that point to you. That is the vote that’s cast.

Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that… Because the SE’s also use the page title and wording of the page being pointed at to correlate the results. Along with a host of other things as well. They’ll look, for example at how appropriate the relevancy is of the websites linking to yours.

The bottom line is – to SEO successfully takes a ton of back-links. Plus the back-links have to have the right anchor text phrases and be from many different and varied sites. The ‘authority’ of a site also plays a major part: A back-link from Microsoft.com or Adobe.com would be worth a lot more than a back-link from a local hardware store!

It takes knowledge and skill to identify the best keyword groupings for your site. (Research your competitors well before you plump for yours.) But this is the crux of the thing… What would a customer of yours type in the search box in order to find your product or service? The answers to this question supply your anchor text and keyword phrases.

Interesting answers often come up when you do your researches and tests. It’s so often the case that the phrase people expect is NOT what produces the most results. We all have different ways of expressing ourselves. Imagine you’re intent on sleeping better. You might think to search for ‘comfortable bed’. Whilst the line GOOD NIGHT’S SLEEP could be used by someone else.

Would you really want to trust your marketing to vague ideas and feelings about what might be typed in? A lot of measuring, testing and research of each term is of vital importance. They are absolutely key to the volume of inquiries and sales you can make via the web. An analogy could be drawn with a listing in the Yellow Pages. As a Dentist, you won’t get much business if you’re listed as a Plumber! It’s just as important to be listed for the right terms online. SEO takes care of all that.

Ebay is a very popular and easy way to buy and sell products. Despite the ease of utilizing the services of Ebay, many people are still intimidated by the concept. Maybe this is because they are intimidated by the internet.

Back in the day, Ebay was a lot more complex. It required you to enter your own html to make the lettering changed or different colors or to set up your page. Much time was spent on getting the html correct, and if you didn’t you had to go back in and do it again until you got it correct. It was a very time consuming process and although Ebay did provide you with many of the html codes that you needed, there were many more that you needed to find if you wanted to keep up with the computer savvy sellers of Ebay.

As Ebay grew so did the complexity of the listing process, as then you needed to figure out the html to link some of your pages to others and how to link your website to Ebay. When all was said and done, you were exhausted, but you had your page exactly the way you wanted it.

Ebay later decided that they wanted to make their site easier, so that even those less knowledgeable of the internet would be able to use it. Although this as made the site very uniformed, and boring to some, it is in fact very simple to use. There are buttons that assist you with changing the fonts and colors, inserting text and much more.

This change is both a positive and a negative thing. It is positive because it allows for amateur users to get involved in the latest buying and selling craze. On the other side of the spectrum, it eliminates the ability for some of the fabulously unique techniques that were used by some of the more experienced users. No matter how you look at it, Ebay has successful achieved their goal of a creating a user friendly process, that allows all levels of internet users to buy and sell on their site.