ProStores Review

StoreSense was originally created by Kurant in 1998, eBay acquired it in 2005 and relaunched it as ProStores. ProStores offers ecommerce solutions to online retailers, with special discounts to eBay PowerSellers. If you are an eBay Gold PowerSeller or above the deal gets even sweeter.

ProStores an eBay company offers two main shopping cart/ecommerce solutions, the Professional eCommerce plan and the Professional eCommerce Plus plan. The Professional eCommerce plan is designed for small businesses who will be selling no more than 5,000 products and will not need unlimited web space and bandwidth. The Professional eCommerce Plus plan is designed more to meet the needs of a medium size business with no more than 100,000 products.  The Plus package comes with all of the features of the other plan but with more management features, more space, more bandwidth, and more email accounts. Pricing for either plan is fantastic for this ecommerce solution package. The Professional eCommerce is $29.95 a month plus $0.5% transaction fee and the Plus plan is just $59.95 a month(was $249.95) plus $0.5% transaction fee. As mentioned before…if it is for an eBay PowerSeller the prices are much less.

The specific details and list of features is much too long for this review but by CLICKING HERE you will be able to not only view all of the many great products and services offered by ProStores, but they actually have a “quick tour” that highlights the shopping cart features and gives you a feel for what things will look like and how they operate.

ProStores “eCommerce 101″  provides a step-by-step guide to help you setup, promote, and manage your online business. If you do not feel comfortable or confident enough to do this by yourself ProStores can design it and set it up for you, they also have services that will help you with your marketing, or again they can do it for you.

What if you review the features, check out the quick tour, and read the eCommerce 101 and still are not absolutely positive about using ProStores? ProStores is so confident you will like their shopping cart they offer a free trial program.

100Best Announces Web Hosting Awards

Ironic that just after our review of 100best-web-hosting.com they have just announced their 2009 Web Hosting Award Winners. 100Best, Inc., recently reported the following press release:

St. George, UT (PRWEB) July 21, 2009 – 100Best, Inc., a leading resource for information on the web hosting industry, announced today the recipients of its coveted web hosting awards. These awards are given to the best web hosting providers based on a number of factors including price, disk space and monthly bandwidth allotments, plan features, reliability, customer service performance, and the amount of time a web host has been in business.

The top web hosting award winners were identified as HostMonster, IX Web Hosting, and GoDaddy. HostMonster received the award for host of the year, IX Web Hosting received the reader’s choice award, and GoDaddy received the award for being the best domain host. These companies, along with all of the other award winners, can be proud of their accomplishments and for putting in the work necessary to rise to the top of the web hosting industry. For more information on all the hosting award winners, visit 100Best-Web-Hosting.com.

The 100Best-Web-Hosting.com web hosting directory was designed to provide readers with an unbiased independent review of the top web hosts around the world. Additionally, readers can read reviews from actual users to help identify if a particular web host is a good fit for them. The directory is also good for web hosts by helping drive online traffic to their websites and providing them with an opportunity to increase their exposure to a targeted market of consumers searching for information about web hosting and Internet services.

About 100Best, Inc.
100Best, Inc., a company on a mission to help educate individuals and business owners about web hosting and ecommerce, was started by a diverse group of web hosting and financial experts to find a better way of delivering information to consumers. Web hosting is a service not understood by many business owners and individuals alike. And even in the high tech world we now live in, many people still don’t understand web hosting and how it works. Through its web hosting directory 100Best-Web-Hosting.com, 100Best, Inc. is striving to educate consumers about web hosting and ecommerce. This is accomplished through its reviews of web hosting companies as well as a series of tutorials and a glossary that can help consumers learn the essentials of web hosting, email, and domain registration services.

If you missed our last post, we did a review of their new site design, check it out.

All New 100 Best Web Hosting

www.100best-web-hosting.com recently changed their web hosting review website.  We found their new design to be much more user friendly.  The top 20 web hosting companies are easy to find, the reviews are informative, and linking directly to the host for purchase is made simple.

The “Compare Hosts” (located at the top of the page) allow the user to choose any two hosts and see a side by side comparison of features and service, again with links directly to the hosts so the user can get even more specific details directly from the web hosting company.

The “Web Hosting Search” (found about 1/2 way down the homepage) makes it easy for someone who is looking for a specific web hosting category, or type, to see what hosts may offer what they are looking for. For example, if someone is looking to build an online store they need a host that offers eCommerce features, by doing a web hosting search under eCommerce web hostingthey will find several options of web hosting companies that will offer eCommerce features within their web hosting plans.  With 30 categories to choose from you will be able to find a host that offers what you need.

If you are not familiar with the types of web hosting categories you will be able to access informative articles that explain each one just to the left of the page, such as Linux web hosting or VPS web hosting. There are also article on web hosting tutorials, domain registration, email services and tools,  awards, and web hosting comparisons.

Overall, we found this website to be full of very helpful information, detailed web hosting reviews, and user friendly features to help everyone from the novice to the web designer in comparing web hosting companies.

Best Shopping Carts

Best Shopping Carts

 When choosing a shopping cart for your e-commerce needs, there are many different features to look for and things to consider.

Price- One of the first factors is price.  Some web hosting packages come with free shopping cart software programs. But, they can run anywhere from free, on up to hundreds, even thousands of dollars over time.

Items- The basics of a shopping cart program include the number of items that can be sold, the ease at which a catalog can be created, the ability to track sales, the types of payment options it allows for, and whether or not it is marketing friendly.  A good shopping cart program makes it easy to add and delete items from a catalog, customize pages with your own designs and logo, include item descriptions, and place things on sale.  

Payments- Most shopping cart programs provide you with payment options including credit cards, paypal, or electronic check.  They also will track your inventory and show your selling patterns in the form of charts and graphs, so you can follow your progress. 

Marketing- However, the real benefits that come from purchasing a shopping cart program are the sophisticated marketing tools that are predominantly found in the most highly ranked shopping cart programs.  These marketing tools can be the difference between a successful or failed business. 

Email- Some of these marketing tools include emailing auto response systems, ad tracking soft wares, built in affiliate tracking systems, grand opening e-mails, bundle offers, gift certificates, search engine compatibility and more.  An auto response program works by collecting names and email addresses, while offering a special promotion on your website in exchange.  The auto response program can then use that mailing list to periodically send out advertisements and coupons for upcoming sales and events.  As your mailing list grows, so will your business and the auto response program makes it as easy as the click of a button. 

Ad Tracking- Ad Tracking software lets you know how your ad campaigns are working by informing you of what, how, and when you are selling.  You will want to know when an ad is working, and if it isn’t working, you will want to know so you can change it.  It is like having your own marketing consultant built into your shopping cart program. 

Affiliates- Another great feature that you will only find in a select number of shopping cart programs is a built in affiliate tracking system.  Often times it is not what you are selling, but how many people are selling it for you.  Affiliate tracking programs allow you to operate your business efficiently by signing up new sales people, tracking their results, and even calculating their commissions.  This is a highly advanced feature that can be a little expensive, but is great to have if there are multiple people doing your marketing. 

Marketing- Finally, one of the greatest marketing tools is the ability to get found on the web.  Find out if the shopping cart program has directories or search engines that you are automatically entered into.  Some will have credit towards advertising fees and some come with their own programs to teach you how to get in the top hits of search engines, known as SEO, or search engine optimization.  No shopping cart program will be effective unless you can drive traffic to your site. 

It is important to find a shopping cart program that meets your companies individual design and marketing needs.

New Network Solutions July Coupon Code

NEW! For the month of JULY Network Solutions is offering a special discount price on their domain registrations. If you act now when you buy one domain name you will receive another FREE!

Offer	Coupon Code	Start Date	Expiration Date
Buy One Domain Get One Free (1 year term for .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, .name, and .us)	BCXXX03016	7/1/2009	7/31/2009

Network Solutions has extended the following offers through the end of July:

$25 off any $150 purchase	GCXXX02978	7/31/2009
$50 off any $250 purchase	GCXXX02902	7/31/2009
20% off new Web hosting	OFFER02886	7/31/2009
20% off new domains (.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, .name, and .us)	PCXXX02980	7/31/2009

Remember to either keep this window open so you can get the coupon code, or write down any of these great discount coupon codes so at final check-out you will be able to take advantage of these great savings!!!

Reseller Web Hosting

What is reseller web hosting? We’ll explain the ins & outs of reseller web hosting plans in this post. If you’re interested in becoming a reseller – this is a must read.

Reseller web hosting plans are basically web hosting packages that have been designed for people to signup and then have others signup on that same plan. The original owner of the plan can give the sub-user an account within the account. This is a cheap way to get into the web hosting business.

Reseller hosting plans come in two forms typically. First, there is the kind that charges something like $20/month and you’re allowed to signup X number of customers for that $20 and you get a certain amount of space/traffic.  This is the case with HostGator.  The other way is where the web hosting company charges the reseller X amount per customer. This is the case with LunarPages.

There are many advantages to reseller hosting. First is obviously the fact that you can make money for doing very little work except finding the client. Second, you don’t have to have your own hardware to start a web hosting company.

Who would want a reseller hosting plan?

There are many different types of companies that could use a reseller web hosting plan. Maybe you’re a web designer that has setup many websites for clients, but you don’t want to give up the recurring revenue that hosting provides. If you design 50 websites a year and you can keep 50% as hosting clients - then you would have 25 customers+ per year. If you can charge them $20/month each for hosting – that’s $500/month in revenue. That would cost you about $20/month on a reseller hosting plan. Then you snowball that each year and you have a nice side income from your past clients.  You can also do domain name reseller plans on the same concept.

Then there are other intentions to actually start a web hosting company of your own – some of these start on reseller plans. Then you move to a dedicated server of your own and then you move to your own datacenter.

So whether you are just looking for some side money or swinging for the fences trying to build a business out of it – reseller hosting provides a great option to make money.