Easy Way to Build an Online Store

You’ve got products or services you know will delight your customers. In fact, you’ve been selling locally for awhile now and are convinced you could sell like crazy online, too. Now, if only there was a way to get up and running on the Internet with an eCommerce site that looks good and works perfectly.

What’s holding you back? Is it the fact that you have no design experience and fear that anything you create will look amateurish and might not even function correctly. That’s going to ruin your reputation and send customers away for good. Getting shopping cart code up and running? Ha! That’s got disaster written all over it.

What you need is more of a turn-key solution with proven code and the flexibility to easily customize it to reflect your brand. Well, now there is just such a solution and you can even try it for free before you make any commitments.

It all starts with a library of professionally designed templates. No cheesy graphics or “I just got started with HTML” look. If you have a template you would like to use, you do have the option of doing that too. I’m guessing that you are just getting started in eCommerce and would be best off choosing from one of the pre-build templates that look like you are reputable and serious about selling online.

Let’s say you are selling your own creative T-shirts. You know that offering just one size or color limits sales. With this eCommerce solution, you can give your shoppers a choice by offering various sizes, colors, men’s or women’s fit, and even up-sells like custom slogans. Shoppers get to see what the finished product will look like and cost before they place their order.

How about other products like artwork, jewelry, stuffed animals, photography, specialized electronics, cell phone covers or unique tools? You can showcase your products with multiple images and views, including a magnifying glass so that potential buyers can get a close up view.

By the way, this solution also works for services like lawn service and gardening, ebooks or other digital goods, and subscriptions. If you’ve got it to sell, you can get it online quickly and easily.

You also know that many customers are now shopping from their tablets and smartphones instead of traditional desktop computers. No problem. You can have a mobile-ready version of your store up and running in minutes. It’s just an extension of the standard eCommerce tools. You can also get instant order alerts from your store while you are on the go. The mobile notifier for iPhone gives you instant notification when orders are placed.

This particular solution goes far beyond simple shopping cart software and a standard website. You also get business tools to let you easily manage orders, so you can track status updates from receipt of payment all the way to order shipment. Customers can even register for an account and look up their own orders.

There’s a lot more to this, too. You can capitalize on social media by offering unique promotions on blogs, Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest. Create your own affiliate program to expand your reach. Use autoresponders for targeted email campaigns to your best prospects. Offer discount coupons or free shipping. Whatever it takes to bring in those sales.

Are you ready to find out if this simple but sophisticated eCommerce solution will work for you? There’s no risk involved. Simply sign up for a 30 day free trial and see for yourself . If you like the way it looks and works, you can then decide to keep going with a monthly or yearly subscription. No contracts and no long term commitments. Plenty of experts available to help you along the way, although you may not even need them.

Stress Testing For Your Website

You’ve built your website and bought hosting. Now you’ve launched a massive marketing campaign designed to recover all that time and expense through online sales. Everything is going smoothly until, horror of horror, the entire ecommerce enterprise comes crashing down. Worse, yet, it was during huge surge of visitor activity. What rotten luck.

Luck? I don’t think so. You could have known this was going to happen. How? By stress testing your website in advance of the traffic onslaught. Many companies don’t and find the weak spots in their infrastructure the hard way. The most unfortunate get brought down during the holiday rush and don’t recover in time to take advantage of the bubble in shopper traffic.

Don’t let this happen to you. Know where you stand before you find out the hard way. Load testing will tell you in short order how much capacity you really have so you can be sure to handle the traffic that will come your way or beef up the system while you have time.

BrowserMob load testing has the resources to give your web properties a run for their money, so that they can really run for the money when the opportunity permits. This is a cloud based service that make serious load testing affordable for companies large and small. In fact, the best deal of all is a free trial offer. Give BrowserMob a chance to stress test your site and see how it stands up.

The BrowserMob cloud generates massive amounts of simulated traffic using virtual users, real browser users or a combination of both. The traffic comes from a large pool of IP addresses to simulate actual visitors coming in from various parts of the country or around the world.

Not quite sure how to perform this type of testing? No problem. BrowserMob has a world class support staff to provide you with expert testing advice. Some of the features you’ll be interested in are real browsers to mimic the actual user experience, True AJAX support, flash video streaming and a maximum concurrent browser pool of up to 5,000 browsers. The maximum data throughput is over 6,000 Mbps. That’s the type of traffic that could cost or make you a fortune depending on whether your site can support it.

Can load testing tell you things about your website that you’ll be really glad to know? There’s one way to find out. Take a free cloud-based load test and see how it works. Then upgrade as needed to get the basic and premium testing you need to ensure the performance of your web properties.

Try Cloud Website Load Testing Free

You’ve built your online presence. The question is whether you’ve built a house of straw, a house of sticks or the proverbial brick house. All websites look great when the server is just stilling there idling. The real test is when the visitors come in droves. Can your site handle the traffic? There’s only one way to know. You need to do load testing.

There are different ways to do load testing. BrowserMob offers some significant advantages for business users who take their online presence seriously. It’s reasonably priced, considering the value of lost business when your site crumbles under the load. That’s business you’ll never get back. Frustrated users are gone for good. This is especially important with the holiday season looming. Your worst e-commerce nightmare could be a ton of traffic, each user with credit card in hand, and nothing but a stalled out storefront or hideous 404 page staring them in the face.

How do you make sure your website is up to the task? Give it a serious test before the real onslaught arrives. BrowserMob gives you a choice of real browser users, virtual users or a combination of both. They use real browsers to create an experience that more accurately mimics the real user experience. Massive amounts of simulated traffic is generated by a cloud computing resource utilizing a huge pool of IP addresses.

Why not blast your site with up to 5,000 concurrent browsers? Simulate as many as 500,000 sessions with a maximum capacity of 6,0000 Mbps. Make sure you are doing it right with expert testing advice from the BrowserMob load testing and website monitoring experts.

What’s the best way to get started? Why, with a load test of course. If you like what you see, you can then move on to choose a service plan appropriate to the size of your operation.

Please note: The free website load test from Browser Mob is no longer available. Sorry.

Managed Hosting Service

If you run a website or an ecommerce business of any type, you are already familiar with web hosting. But did you know that there are many flavors of web hosting available? Have you heard of managed hosting serves? If not, you may be missing out on more reliable hosting solutions at costs lower than you may experience by trying to do everything yourself.

At the beginning of the commercial Internet, many businesses got their start online by acquiring server software and dedicating one computer to be the Web host. Today, most SOHO and small businesses have abandoned trying to do everything themselves and purchase their hosting service for just a few dollars a month. What they’re actually buying is something called “shared hosting” or “virtual hosting.” They are one of many businesses websites running on the same physical server. At relatively low traffic and business levels, you don’t need all the performance a modern server can provide and you don’t want to spend that much money.

Things change when you are supporting a larger organization or have a popular e-commerce site with thousands or tens of thousands of visitors browsing your pages, making demands on the databases, and placing orders with expectations of snappy response times. The need for the lowest cost hosting service becomes less important when the lost revenue from a day’s or even an hour’s downtime can exceed the monthly hosting fees. You can no longer afford to be at the mercy of someone else on the same server hogging resources or somehow crashing the system and taking your site down as well as their own.

At this point, you are ready for dedicated web hosting. That means that an entire server is allocated to your exclusive use. The question is whether to buy this service or buy the equipment and support the servers in-house. Companies with substantial IT staffs may have the talent and want the level of control that comes with having everything under one roof. Some may find that renting physical space in a colocation center gives them access to lower cost bandwidth and saves considerable cost on things like backup power and physical security. It’s still your equipment and you are responsible for it. It’s just not installed at your premises.

Managed hosting servers are provided by a colocation center and managed by center personnel as well. They buy the server hardware, provide all software updates for the device, ensure the physical security of their premises, have multiple levels of power backup so that power outages won’t even be seen by the equipment, provide fire suppression in the event something goes horribly wrong in those server racks, provide redundant bandwidth connections so that individual line failures won’t make your site invisible on the Internet, and monitor server operation 24/7/365.

One well known and respected provider of managed hosting services is The Planet. They specialize in mission-critical enterprise-class hosting solutions that range from a single physical server to complex infrastructures that can support the largest operations. These are customized to your needs and come with a Service Level Agreement that includes 100% power and network availability, 1 hour hardware replacement and 15 minute critical live-person response time. Their Northstar managed hosting also includes managed backup and data protection, security and patch management, database management and optimization and regular business and capacity planning.

Have your server-based operations become essential to the operation of your business? Do you struggle with having the right level of resources available at the right time? Would you be seriously jeopardized by a server outage? If so, you may be able to benefit from managed hosting from The Planet or other high quality hosting service. Get prices and availability on managed hosting services now.

FastE and GigE WAN Connections

The need for business bandwidth is growing, but corporate budgets are not. So, does that mean that businesses will be stifled for throughput and perhaps lose customers to slow performing ecommerce websites?

No. There’s a telecom bandwidth solution available that can give you the extra network performance you need to keep up with productivity and customer satisfaction demands. That solution is Ethernet.

Standard Ethernet connections at 10 Mbps are readily available over both copper and fiber optic cable. But higher speeds are also available. These are Fast Ethernet or FastE at 100 Mbps and Gigabit Ethernet or GigE at 1000 Mbps. You’ll notice that these line speeds exactly match the common LAN speeds of 10/100/1000 Mbps. Yes, you can get WAN connections to match your LAN speed so that your network performance is consistent regardless of whether packets are traveling in-house or across the country.

In rare cases, it may be possible to provision FastE service over bonded copper pair. But that only works if you happen to be very close to the carrier POP or Point of Presence. The usual way that FastE and GigE service are brought into the building is by fiber cable. If you already have a fiber connection, you may find that you’ll save considerable cost by switching your WAN service over to Ethernet.

If your building isn’t yet “lit” for fiber, it may still be possible to have fiber brought in at little or no construction cost. It all depends on the bandwidth demand. For instance, if you happen to be in a large office building with many business offices that could benefit from higher bandwidth options than the T1 lines that they typically have now, a carrier might be interested in lighting that building to get the ongoing bandwidth business. The same is true of industrial parks where modern manufacturing and warehousing businesses need high speed connectivity. Don’t automatically write off high bandwidth services just because you don’t have them now. Telecom carriers have gotten very competitive and may well want to enable you to get their higher performance services.

What can Ethernet connections do better than conventional telecom services? First, there is improved network performance because the protocol is Ethernet from end to end. There’s no need to convert between Ethernet and other protocols and suffer the inefficiencies that come from that process. The interface is trivially easy. It’s the same RJ-45 connector that you use for all your network connections now. You can get Ethernet for point to point connections or multi-point to multi-point to connection your far flung business sites. Dedicated Internet is also available.

By far, the most popular reason to switch to Carrier Ethernet services is the cost savings. You may find that you’ll spend half the cost or less per Mbps when you switch over to Ethernet. Sound interesting? Explore the FastE and GigE WAN connection options available for your location.

My Store is Solid, Solid Like a Cactus

You want to port your retail business to the Web or start an online business selling products you know will fly off the shelves. So, what do you do? Rent office space and start interviewing programmers? Take the cheap-charley approach and build your own site using bargain software you found at the office supply store? Naw. What you want is a Yahoo! Store from Solid Cactus.

Solid what? Solid Cactus. That enigmatic name happens to be one of the top 500 fastest growing private companies according to Inc. 500 Magazine. Like Google, they happen to have their own restaurant to serve their 150 employees. It's Saguaro's Cafe. You might get the impression that Solid Cactus is a great business in Arizona. But it's actually been awarded the title of "One of the Best Places to Work in Pennsylvania." Pennsylvania? Go figure.

What Solid Cactus does is build Yahoo! Stores for their clients. They've designed lots of them. More than 3,500 Web sites built to date. Sure, you can go off and build your own store. But why take the hard road when you can get a professional result quickly with help from Solid Cactus.

A Yahoo! Store is an ecommerce platform offered by the same company that is a main player in the field of Internet search. What you get with a Yahoo! Store is a online storefront that can handle anything from a few to a few thousand different products. You get a shopping cart, tax and shipping calculator, gift wrapping options, and the ability to accept payment from credit and debit cards or PayPal. You'll be able to print invoices and shipping labels and use major carriers like UPS, FedEx, and USPS to get the goods to your customers.

Yahoo! Stores are built upon a platform called RTML or Real Time Markup Language. It was designed by Viaweb and later sold to Yahoo! as a means to create Web pages too complex for standard HTML programming. You can learn RTML to customize or modify your store pages, or you can let a developer such as Solid Cactus handle that for you.

Solid Cactus has taken the basic store templates that Yahoo! offers and added additional features. Some of the features you can get are multiple photos of your products on a page, reviews written by your customers, send-page-to-a-friend, display the money saved when buying from your store versus retail, randomly displayed best sellers, mailing list sign-up, randomly displayed testimonials, and LivePerson's live chat and contact center.

There are other enhancements designed to improve search engine optimization so you can be easily found on the Internet. Online marketing as well as website development is a key expertise of Solid Cactus. In fact, the owners of the company got started with their first Internet based store in 1994. That was long before the popular retailers you find online today were doing anything on the Internet.

1&1 makes 1.99

If I were to say to you "1&1 makes 1.99", would you respond:

(A) Well, I see at least one child was left behind.

(B) Dude, change the battery in your calculator already.

(C) You thought you were soooo smart buying that old slide rule at a garage sale.

(D) That's the best deal I've heard in ages. Sign me up NOW.

Time's up! If you answered (D), you recognize the greatest bargain in hosting that's come around in ages. Let's analyze the formula and see why.

First of all, 1&1 isn't a math problem this time. It's the name of perhaps the most innovative Web hosting service going. Headquartered in Montabaur, Germany, 1&1 is a subsidiary of United Internet and now the world's largest Web hosting company. Their new U.S. data center in Lenexa, KS has 5 server rooms in 55,000 square feet with 20 Gbps of connectivity.

So, what's so innovative about a big honkin' Web hosting company? That's where the 1.99 comes in. It's actually $1.99, the price you'll pay per month for entry level hosting service on 1&1 for the first 3 months. Then it's just $3.99 a month.

Oh, but that's got to be some cheap-charley product that's about as useful as the "personal" Web space they give you with a DSL or Cable broadband service, right? Au Contraire, mon ami (French for wrong-o, pal). This is the starter package in the realm of professional hosting services. Look at all you get for your measly starting $1.99:

1. You get a domain with your account and they pay for it. Not some cheesy ISP related domain, either. This is a real professional grade domain name the you pick with the TLD of .com, .net, .org, .info or .biz. As long as you keep your account active, 1&1 pays for the domain registration and renewal. That could be worth $8 to $20 a year all by itself, depending on where you buy your domain names now.

2. To host your domain, you get 10 GB of storage and a monthly transfer allotment of 300 GB. Once you've exceeded these limits, you've got a major online business going and should be embarrassed that you're only being charged $3.99 a month. Upgrade to the 1&1 Business account if you need more space or bandwidth. If not, avoid further embarrassment by telling business associates that you're actually paying $99 a month and that it's a steal at that price.

3. To communicate with customers and others, you get 600 e-mail accounts with 2 GB of mailbox space. IMAP and POP clients are supported. Plus you get Webmail access and spam filtering. You'll come to worship that hosted Symantec spam filtering when you've got 600 e-mail accounts active.

4. Big business ambitions but no site building skills? No problem. With your account you get the 1&1 WebsiteBuilder. This easy to use tool lets you build a professional looking Website in minutes. You also get an online photo gallery and a blog to round out your Web package.

Oh, wait, did I say something wrong? I see. It's just that you've been paying over thirty bucks a month for a very similar service to get your business online. That's happened to a lot of people who haven't heard of 1&1. But now that you know better, how about switching to the 1&1 Beginner or Business accounts that have special introductory pricing right now? This deal may not last much longer, so time is of the essence.

I should mention that there are actually four featured hosting packages from Beginner to Developer and that you have your choice of Linux or Microsoft hosting. There are also e-commerce and business solution features as extras, and you can even upgrade to dedicated servers when you need the horsepower. The special offers require a 12 month commitment, but you do get a 90 day satisfaction guarantee and free 24/7 support by phone and e-mail. Well, don't just sit there watching me carry on. Visit 1&1 Internet Inc. now and get all the details for yourself.

Tired of Flaky Internet Connections?

It's hard to do business when your tools are intermittent and unreliable. You'd expect that advancements in technology would really improve things, but often the opposite is true. The more sophisticated and interconnected processes become, the flakier they seem to get. A simple cash box transaction turns into an e-commerce disaster. Why can't things just work right all the time?

All the time might be a bit much to ask. Anything technical is going to hiccup occasionally. But most of the time, the vast majority of the time, your business systems should run like clockwork. If they don't, you need to find the weak link in the chain. For many small businesses it comes down to a flaky Internet connection.

When the Internet was a novelty, it was pretty much a world of students, researchers, entrepreneurs and the generally curious. Now it's a utility. Nearly every business demands an Internet connection or an equivalent way to transfer electronic data. The Internet tends to be the network of choice because it is universally available and connects to practically everyone, everywhere. But the Internet is the flakiest, most insecure, unreliable, congested public resource there is. Isn't it? It doesn't have to be.

A lot of what makes the Internet feel like such a flaky medium is what's called the "last mile" connection. That Internet jack on the wall never goes directly to the backbone of the Internet. Not unless you're a major ISP or Internet Service Provider. A Tier 1 ISP is part of the inner workings of the Internet and peers with all other T1 networks. Other ISPs buy their access from these networks and, eventually, one of them sells service to you via a last mile connection. The high speed fiber optic core of the Internet is blazing fast and highly reliable. What you get may be something quite different.

It generally comes down to cost and availability. In major metropolitan networks, you may have a dozen or more ISPs vying for your business. Out in the boonies, you have fewer choices. There is also a huge difference in price vs performance among various connections. The lowest priced service is generally DSL or Cable Modem. These are shared access "information services" rather than dedicated telecommunications services. What's the difference besides price?

An information service isn't regulated the way a telecommunication service is. It is offered on an "as available" basis with no guarantee as to availability or time to repair when failure occurs. Even when the connection is working, bandwidth can vary all over the place. That's because the service is oversubscribed to keep the cost down. Just like getting bumped when the airlines sell more seats than they have on a plane, your connection can slow to a crawl because the ISP sold more connections than they have the bandwidth to support. They assume that only some of the subscribers are online at any time. When too many show up at once, they have to share what is available.

What's better? Dedicated Internet service improves your experience dramatically. If you order T1 dedicated Internet access, what you get is 1.5 Mbps of bandwidth for both upload and download. It's consistently available at all times. On rare occasions when line breaks or equipment failure take down the circuit, these telecom services get fast attention and are usually restored in a few hours or less. The dedicated designation means that you don't share the available bandwidth. It's there for your use whenever you need it.

Other dedicated connections include bonded T1 lines for faster access in increments of 1.5 Mbps. That's 3, 4.5 ,6, 7.5, and 9 Mbps typically. Ethernet services start at 10 Mbps and go up to 100 Mbps and, in some areas, 1000 Mbps. Ethernet is available in metro areas. T1 service is available just about anywhere.

If you are being driven crazy by flaky Internet service, you'll breathe a lot easier and your business operations will perform better by moving up to dedicated Internet access. The price differential is probably less than you think. Find out now by checking prices and availability for dedicated Internet access at your business location.