AscenderCart Shopping Cart Software Review

March 8, 2011 0 Comments

Shopping cart software and providers are a dime-a-dozen these days. Merchants have a lot to choose from when it comes to features, price, hosted vs. licensed, security, SEO, and many others. Each shopping cart software company do not make it easy to choose because they all have a good feature list that can match a majority of retailers. I have been researching and testing shopping carts for about 5 years and today I am going to go over the features of the AscenderCart SEO Shopping Cart.

AscenderCart is a hosted shopping cart that allows merchants to build their website within the software. As a hosted solution, AscenderCart provides all the necessary options that are required to run a successful online business. They have an extensive list of shopping cart features that are included with each of their pricing levels. Each level has the basics of a good shopping cart such as multiple payment options, SEO options, SSL security, order management, customer management, product management, administration, and much more. Their cart design is based of off simple templates that allow retailers to design their site around the core cart components in order to make a fluid design and integration. You have control over your template design and can control the look and feel of your whole site within the shopping cart software. AscenderCart makes it easier for anyone with or without design skill to setup a functioning ecommerce site.

AscenderCart provides three pricing tiers that provide the ability to list up to 50,000 skus, unlimited bandwidth, up to 5GB storage, unlimited email addresses, and as low as 1% transaction fee. Though the AscenderCart is a hosted solution, each merchant must still have access to a merchant account. There are many great options for merchant accounts, but AscenderCart has the ability of providing you with discounted merchant accounts from many providers. If you already have a merchant account, then you should be set, but if you need one, contact AscenderCart first to see how much you could save.

When a retailer chooses to use AscenderCart, each client gets a free seo training manual to optimize your ecommerce site. The training manual is a comprehensive 27-page manual that gets directly to the point about SEO optimization for ecommerce. SEO is a key technique that will enable any sized retailer to make the most out of their website and achieve sales goals that they have never imagined. With the quality SEO features packed in AscenderCArt, it is a must have shopping cart. While best suited for small to medium sized businesses, they do offer a corporate edition that are specially developed for companies and websites with revenue of $250,000 per year online.

If you are in the market for a quality, easy to use shopping cart, then look into AscenderCart. I have demoed the software and it can handle the ins and outs of most retailers websites. If you like the ability to edit the main functions of a shopping cart, then you might not want to look into hosted platforms. Stick to licensed software as they tend to give much more flexibility when dealing with source code. The downside is that you are responsible for security, payment, integration, updates, and much more with licensed shopping carts. Startup retailers should really test the waters with hosted solutions and AscenderCart can provide you with what you need to succeed!

Nuus.com Review – In Need of Interesting Articles

January 26, 2010 0 Comments

I got word of Nuus.com from fellow blogger John Chow yesterday, so I decided to check it out. The site itself looks to be using the wordpress platform, much like every other blog out there. They do have a very simple design with easy colors and text. There are some parts that do not look complete like the contact us page. Some parts are in english and others are not. They will probably need to work on it. They do allow people with content to submit it to them as news. Their submission process is very simple and easy to use. You can put your link in the submission form to get credit for your article.

I submitted a story to them and received an email from them pretty quickly to tell me that they are accepting news from pretty much anyone but it can only be in the following categories: Fun Stuff, Glamour & Gossip, and Tech Stuff. Unfortunately the article that I submitted was neither of those, but they found on my blog that they liked to they took that one. While they do not tell you when you are submitting, you do get $1 to your paypal account when they accept your article. I received it about 3 hours after they accepted my article. The article that they accepted ended up on the first page, but we did not receive but a few clicks from it.

All in all, I think they are being a little ambitious trying to pay everyone for news articles, so I am not sure how long it will last. It seems that they are just taking content that is already on the web and putting it on their site, so they are pretty much a content aggregator, just masked as as news site. Not sure how popular this will be, but if you are looking to make some money for your content, then try and submit articles to Nuus.com and see if they accept it. Just remember that it needs to be related to the three categories that they have listed on their site and hopefully you can submit something interesting. Nuus looks to be in need of interesting articles!

Review: MagicJack Phone Service

November 28, 2009 1 Comment

If you have been looking for a new service for your landline phone, then have you looked into MagicJack? We have tested this piece of software and below is our review of the service.

The magic jack is a usb device that plugs into your computer and uses the internet connection attached to your computer. You then plug in your telephone cable into the magicjack piece and you are on your way. Here are a few things that you get from MagicJack, free local and long distance, free phone number, free call waiting, free voicemail, and free caller id. These are the same features that you usually get from other phone companies and VOIP phone companies.

When we tested the service, we did not have a problem with voice quality or any sound issues. We will say that if you do not have a good internet connection, then you could have a problem with quality. You cannot use this with a dial-up connection or a connection that is very low quality. The best is to have high speed internet from your local ISP, like 7-10mb per second. This should be good enough for the service to work great. Your voicemails are stored on servers that magicjack own, so you might have to worry about security on their part and hopefully they back-up their servers so you don’ t lose your voicemails. If you do a lot of downloading or uploading via your computer, then you might experience some issues with sound quality. We did experience some quality issues when we were streaming videos via our internet connection and talking with someone. This was just a test that we conducted.

While we didn’t have any issues with the service and everything worked great for us, please bear in mind that there can be many things that might affect your service with them. If you have a slow computer or one that has viruses, then this service will be compromised. We have heard some people have problems with uninstalling the magicjack software, but we didn’t have any of those issues. If your internet goes down, which can happen often depending on your ISP, then your magicjack service will not work and you will not be able to make any calls or receive them. These are things that you have to think about before you purchase magicjack.

All in all, we think magicjack is a good service and a nice alternative to other phone services like Vonage or traditional services like AT&T. Please make sure you computer can handle magicjack and your internet service will be able to run smoothly. You can get a free trial via magicjack.com or you can pick up the service a retailers like walmart and best buy.

UPDATE: Here is Another Good Review of MagicJack

iMark Interactive