Hosted Social Commerce Apps For Facebook

Just as e-commerce has become an established and accepted channel for business and shopping, the next wave of technology washes ashore. This is social commerce, an adjunct to and potentially more popular way to conduct business online. Social commerce is an outgrowth of social media, especially using the two most popular platforms, Facebook and Twitter. If social media is where people want to spend their time online, then social media is where you have to go to find customers.

The big challenge is how to you leverage the power of social media? You can flail around trying different approaches. Perhaps you can build a website, launch an e-mail campaign or write a blog. All of these do-it-yourself approaches are now old school as far as the Web is concerned. You won’t be need to be learning new software on your PC or deploying more of your own servers. What you need to be working with are hosted solutions. Facebook itself is a hosted solution, although it should be considered just the basic platform for your social commerce efforts. To get the social performance you are after, you’ll want to add some advanced apps to your Facebook page.

What sort of apps are we talking about? How about apps that give you the ability to create deal shares, fan offers, fund raising donations, viral messaging, photo showcases, RSS feeds, add Twitter feeds, recruit volunteers and so on. Can you build these apps yourself and have them work flawlessly on your Facebook page? Can you even find these functions here and there around the Web? Even if you could, they’ll never have a consistent look and feel.

What you need is an “app buffet” from North Social. The apps are part of a large collection that you choose from to power your Facebook page. Each app has its own content management system. You set preferences, upload images, links and text. No need to learn or write any code.

What kind of results can you get with the North Social app collection power your Facebook page? Here’s an example to give you an idea what’s possible:



Anxious to give this a try? You should know that every account comes with a 14 day free trial. Accounts range from starter to enterprise level. All of the apps are unlocked and ready to use for every account? What differentiates the account levels? It’s based on the number of fans you have. The starter account has a limit of 1,000 fans. The professional account moves that limit up to 50,000. The Enterprise account has unlimited fans and up to 5 Facebook pages. All other accounts are for a single page only, although you can always sign up for more accounts if you need them.

The future of social commerce is already here. Learn more, watch demo videos on each of the apps, and then pick the account appropriate for the size (and social popularity) of your business and start your 14 day free trial.

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.

US and UK Shopping Cart Software

Do you sell online or want to? If you are selling through an affiliate program, all the back-end processes involved in taking the order and tracking it are provided for you. But if you are selling your own products, say books, crafts or components, you need to have a shopping cart for your customers. Omit this feature and you’ll limit your sales.

What does a shopping cart do for you? It provides a way for online customers to visit your website, pick and choose among all the products you offer, and buy multiple items with one transaction. Without a shopping cart, visitors can only order one product at a time. People have gotten use to the shopping cart meme and expect any ecommerce store to have it available and working the way they see on every other site they shop.

So, where do you get one of these shopping carts? If you are located in the United States or the United Kingdom, you can order complete shopping cart packages from Ecommerce Templates. Here, watch this video explanation and see how it works...



Note that there are custom versions of this shopping cart software available for designers using Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Golive and CSS layouts. You can also chose a generic version to integrate into a site that you already have up and running. Ecommerce Templates works with popular payment providers, including PayPal, Google Checkout, amazon Payments, Authorize.net and numerous others serving the US and the UK.

Which type of hosting are you using? Some shopping cart software packages only work with one type or another. Ecommerce Templates lets you choose between the ASP version for Access / MS SQL databases on Windows servers or PHP for mySQL databases on Linux or Unix servers.

Does this sound like what you’ve been looking for to enable your ecommerce enterprise? There are dozens of features and lots more to see, so visit Ecommerce Templates now and find the shopping cart software package that’s right for you.