BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

Elaborating on the previous post (WordPress or Joomla?), next often asked question that we at Zealus Web Design see is which shopping cart should one use?This one is just one notch easier. First - we already know that customer wants a shopping cart solution. Second - he is aware that whatever choice he makes is going to affect him in the future. Uploading or entering inventory is a time consuming task and not many people have time to experiment with that. But the ultimate question remains the same - what kind of problem the customer has? What is he/she selling and in which quantities?

Speaking from experience, I’ve seen customers who’s only reasonable solution would be an eBay. Some people can use quick shopping cart options, like PayPal’s shopping cart or even CafePress. Some could benefit from ZenCart, osCommerce, VirtuMart or peers. Sometimes company grows out of bunch of Excel spreadsheet and starts using CRM, sales and inventory tracking systems, such as RegKeeper, some flavor of QuickBooks or other platforms.

Using full-blown shopping system if you only need to sell two flavors of your widget is unwise. Using PayPal for web store with thousands of clients may cost you significant percentage of your business. Each tool has its own (limited) scope of use.

Popularity: 16%

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We all got used to some extent to the marketers calling us at our homes, at the most inconvenient times. Now they started attacking our cell phones. Just couple of hours ago got a minute-long automated voice message advertising some sort of carpet cleaning service. A little further drilling shows that I was not alone - here http://800notes.com/Phone.aspx/1-516-962-0225 you can find quite a few annoyed people. Some of them report that “phone number traces back to “Brooks Fiber Communication” farmingdale long island”, however, I am unable to verify this.

In the early days if FIDO network, when “modems ruled the world” some pranksters got back to annoying callers by establishing crash-poll sessions in their dialer software. What such session does is repeatedly call specified number until certain packet of information successfully received. I am pretty sure such activity is illegal (and if it is not - it should be), but as far as I am concerned - some telemarketers should be excluded from the protection of law.

Of course, if anyone would be using the services of such ill-advertised company I’d say it is quite unwise.

Popularity: 20%

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If you ever went to local BestBuy, or even swung by - you already know what Geek Squad is. What you, probably, not realizing is that it’s the simplest form of local outsourcing. Buying a computer? Let the Geek Squad member install it for you. But there are only that many squad members on dorky white-orange-black cars.For years your local computer techs have dominated this scene. It was cheaper to build your PC from parts by you local computer store then to buy one from one of the big-name merchants. With Dell hitting hard on prices local techs are all but extinct. I know because I used to be one of those “can you fix my computer” guys. With less waiting time on the phone with tech support and fast replacement turnaround it is now next to impossible to make any decent income (even supplemental) from those gigs. For small businesses, however, it may just not be the case. Services like GeekSquad or similar are in demand. For an office of a dozen people having their own tech guy is very expensive. However, when you need an upgrade for your network, replacement of some old computers while retaining the data or setting up a backup solution - teams like this are indispensable.

From my perspective - it is a good thing. It keeps jobs in USA.

Popularity: 13%

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