While there have been many successful ventures of online store that sell products purely via their web sites, many businesses are also beginning to setup online stores to compliment their brick and mortar business. Setup an online store and sell online has the following advantages:-

• The online store will serve as your showroom that opens 24 hours a day.
  Even if the visitors to your site do not buy online, it serve well as an
  online catalogue for them to browse.
• If your site enjoy good position and ranking in popular search engines,
  your sites will surely receive tons of quality hits that can be converted to
  sales if the products that you are selling are attractive and competitive.
• You will be able to sell products online even when you are sleeping.
• The online store has indefinite shelf space and you will be able to sell
  as many products as you wish.
• The online store is convenience to shopper. They can shop online 24 hours
  a day with having to spend time traveling out of  their home.
• The shopper will also be able to browse  and compare prices more
  easily.

One of the E-Commerce Software that I find it easy and useful to build online store is ShopSite that allow you to build an online store and full function shopping cart system. It adopt a very simple concept of your building pages and it is easy to learn and it go through some simple steps that are described below:-

• Upload your product images to ShopSite. Your images can be of any filename
  and you will be able to assign a name that is easy to remember to every
  image that you upload. For example, your image file name may be 13925.jpg
  and once uploaded, you can assign a friendly name such as "cameramodelxyz"
  to it. In that way, you will have no problem tracing the images that you
  have uploaded. For easy management, you can also upload those images in
  separate folders.
   
• Once images has been uploaded., the next step is to add your products to
  ShopSite. For each and every products that you have added, you will be able
  to specify the image to use for each of them. ShopSite Pro 8.2 onwards will
  help you to create thumbnail automatically. For each and every
  products,  there is checkbox allow you to select whether you wish to
  have a more information page that will show larger images and more details.
   
• One products has been added, you can then commence to add your product
  pages. When adding a page, you will be able to select the products that you
  want to appear on that pages. You will also be able to specify the
  navigational links to appear on the same page and add the necessary contents
  as well. The addition of links will allow you to link all those product
  pages together so that shopper will be able to browse easily.
   
• Once product pages has been added, you can then proceed to add content
  pages such as FAQ, Terms and Conditions, Contact Information,….., all
  following the simple step of Adding Pages. In that process, you will be able
  to add contents as well as links that you want to appear on those pages.
   
• The final thing to do is to activate your payment gateway setting.
  ShopSite support WorldPay , PayPal and many other methods. Just key in the
  account information and enable the payment system that you wish to use
  accordingly.
   
• ShopSite support all type of curreny and in the event that the currency
  that you wish to use is not in the list, just upload a txt file on currency
  on ShopSite folder on your server and add that currency in the file
  accordingly.
   
• For the look and feel of the site, you will be able to select from a wide
  selection of theme to use. There is also a place where you can customize the
  header and footer of the site.
   
• Once the above are all done, just click the Publish Button to have Shopsite build all your pages in HTML
   
• That is about all and you can start selling online 🙂

One of the plus points of ShopSite is all the site pages will be built as HTML pages which is search engine friendly. In addition, for each and every pages that you add to ShopSite, you can specify the Page Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords. Put in some effort to optimize your site for search engine by choosing the right keywords will surely serve to improve your site ranking among major search engines.

To use ShopSite either purchase the full license from ShopSite Main Site or purchase a Server Hosting Plan with ShopSite pre-installed for you.

Yes it is important to renew your domain name even if you do not intend to continue to host your web and email any longer. Web site that has gone live for years likely to be spidered by search engines and may enjoy some listing on major search engines. More often than not, expired domain will be picked up and have it pointed to pages with ADs or others.

A friend of mine has registered a .com domain and host his web site for many years before deciding to stop hosting his site two years ago, not sure for what reason and did not renew his domain. Over those years, he has distributed a great number of business cards to his bussiness friends and asoociates bearing his company’s web address. On one fine day, one of his business associates called and asked him a question that really shocked him : “When did you change your company business from being a renovation specialist to a company offering XXX services ?”. Yes, someone has picked up his domain and have it pointed to a XXX site.

It is pretty cheap to maintain a domain name these days and so do remember to renew your domains :-).

Glad to know that Yahoo is going to offer unlimited storage for its email services. With Yahoo the first to take this giant step, I do hope that Google will counter with the same offer. The 2.8GB space offer by Gmail these days is no longer sufficient. Having said that, the Gmail interface is still by far the best interface that is quick to load and fast when it come to message search.

Yahoo will begin offering unlimited storage for its free Web-based e-mail in May, the company announced late Tuesday. The move makes Yahoo the first of the major free e-mail providers to offer unlimited storage, but it likely will not be the last.

Yahoo currently offers 1 gigabyte for its free mail service and 2GB for its premium fee-based service. Google’s free Gmail service offers more than 2.5GB of storage, and Windows Live Hotmail offers 2GB for free.

“We are watching the trend lines of how people are using e-mail…and they are sending more photos and videos and rich media,” said John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail.

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Signed up at the Auction ADs recently after receiving an invitation and have since planted the code in two of my sites and have registered more than 10 thousand impressions and more than one hundred clicks but still with zero revenue.

Most Auction ADs are linked to item listed in Ebay main site ebay.com and since bulk of my site visitors are from Malaysia and with only 25% currently from USA, I think Auction ADs is not likely to generate much revenue for my sites and other local sites. Nevertheless, I will continue to run those ADs and see how Auction ADs will perform in the next several weeks. The result will help me to decide whether to implement Auction ADs

Do post and share your views on Auction ADs here.