E-Commerce in a Box

Volusion.com

I have lead quite a few clients to this site whose services focus on providing their customers with a quick start e-commerce site. Upon signing up, you receive instant access to their site control panel where you can upload and import images in to their web templates along with entering inventory information for the products you wish to sell. No web design experience required - no programming skills needed.

It is also nice to have a solution that can integrate directly in to Quickbooks. I have clients that use Volusion.com web services so transparently that they have zero inventory on hand. The simply provide a means for clients to purchase material and they have everything drop shipped from the vendors.

Charges for these services are modest and fixed. Predictable operating costs are always nice and easy to compare in a budget.

For those looking to become and online merchant, Volusion.com is where it's at.

The Power of Ping.fm and Friendfeed

For those of you who try to maintain an online presence for business or personal reasons, it can be a pain to keep those sites up to date. Many of them rely on the user (you) to keep it up to date with thoughts and status updates. The problem is between the hundreds of different options that are offered for social networking, keeping them all up to date can be a time consuming problem.

I have found both ping.fm and friendfeed.com to be very convenient ways of linking your social networking sites together for status updates, blogs, mini-blogs and even photos. You essentially update one site and it will broadcast the update across multiple social networking mediums.

Friendfeed, now acquired by facebook (here) and ping.fm both link together as well and work on pretty much any social networking site or chat client that there is to download.