Author Archive

Keeping things simple with your website usually mean the best results. I have found that after being in the website design and marketing business for close to 10 years and trying virtually every tactic on the planet. I’m here to tell you nothing beats keeping things simple!

Simplicity can be a very complicated sometimes though, creating a website using friendly complimenting colors and tightening up your content so it’s working to the full potential without information overkill can be tough.

As a rule of thumb avoiding as many things on your website like scrolling text, flash, music, etc is a no-brainer but moving beyond that there can be a fine line to simple and boring or just plain cluttered.

So how do you do this?

First you want to keep your content focused on your target market just don’t overdo it. If it’s not making any sense leave it out!

Second, as I mentioned above, be careful with flash and images, you don’t want to bug your visitors.

The next thing relating to your content, keep it like a nice well kept salad bar, pleasant to the eye, easy to choose from and easy to digest. It needs to be appealing and compelling.

Don’t talk above people, you may be a geek but you don’t have to speak like a geek! Relate to your visitors, don’t belittle them!

Be original, be creative, be yourself! I know this is the internet and it’s easy to pretend to be something you’re not but don’t do it! People appreciate honesty and can relate to you if you shoot straight with them.

The last thing I would say is to make sure your website navigation is like a walk in the park, not a hunt for buried treasure. Make it super easy for your visitors to get where they want to go and they will appreciate it. Nothing is worse than needing a GPS to navigate a website!

Is your website too complicated? We can help you work it out, call us today at 276-791-6488 or use our contact form and we’ll call you!

We are pleased to announce new features coming February the 18th for our shopping cart. Below are a list of those features.

Product Reviews - This powerful new tool allows customers or even potential customers to comment on / and rate your products. Product reviews come in handy when potential customers are browsing your site; it allows them to evaluate the quality and value of products. As an administrator you’ll have the ability to manually moderate, edit, and manage reviews, and even change your rating graphic.

CSS / XHTML Template Design – All customer facing pages in the new version of the application will be CSS / XHTML driven. This is a major leap forward compared to the tabled version of the application. Besides being more search engine friendly, you’ll be able to very easily customize and change the look and feel of your site quickly. This will give us and our third party developers the ability to rapidly create custom design templates.

Drag and Drop Design Tools – With the new template designs comes our new Drag and Drop design tools. Once in “Design Mode” you’ll be able to change the placement of anything on the front end of your cart by dragging it to the desired location. Additionally you will be able to edit any HTML or CSS code directly from the front end of the site. This is all done using a brand new graphical user interface that we have created.

Template Upload Feature – Soon we’ll be introducing all kinds of new template designs for you to download from the Pinnacle Cart site. And the great news is adding them to your cart is a breeze, you can simply select the template you want from the administrative area of the application and it download it into the cart. You can also switch between templates with a click of a button.

Product Level Promo Codes – Not only can you create promo codes at the global level, but now you can designate which products the promo codes are valid for.

Doba Implementation - Doba provides a place where suppliers can list their product inventory, and you sell these items directly from your site. With over 1.2 million products at your fingertips, you’ll be able to vastly improve the inventory in your cart without the headache of managing inventory and the whole process is complexly automated. These different suppliers will drop ship products right to your customers, so you never have to handle or ship products.

Drop Shipping Feature – The new version will allow you to assign warehouses or drop ship locations to individual products. Therefore allows different rates to be charged by product depending on shipping location.

Improved SEO Tools – We’ve improved our flat URL generation feature to give you more control over the URL’s created by Pinnacle Cart. Want to create a unique URL for a specific product, no problem. These improvements can really assist you with your Search Engine Optimization Efforts.

Image Tags – Another great SEO tool, image tags help search engines better understand what your images are showing customers.

Improvements to One-Page Checkout – We’ve improved our one-page checkout process to make sure you’re customers can check out easier than ever.

Closed Store Feature – Allows you to temporally shut down your store from the administrative area.

MoneyBookers Payment Gateway – Pinnacle Cart is now integrated with the MoneyBookers payment gateway.

Amazon Simple Pay – We’ve added Amazon Simple Pay to our list of supported payment gateways.

Get the jump on your competition and reserve your place in our design queue now!

A lot of people want to put all their eggs in one basket and it’s easy to fall into the rut of selling online in just one place but be careful that you don’t go this direction.

eBay is a great place to start selling and get your feet wet so to speak if you’re a new seller. The reason eBay is such a good place to start is the fact that more than likely if you have a good product you already have customers waiting on you. We have seen many times after setting up a new eBay store for a client that they will start making sales within a few days.

eBay is also a great place to test your products if you are unsure if they will sell and what your profit margin will be.

When you first set up your eBay store you want to go ahead and register a domain name and point it to your store so you can get some age on your domain name. Once you have established your eBay business and things are rolling along at a good pace it’s time to start thinking of expanding and having your own eCommerce website. If you’ve hired someone like us to create a custom eBay store for you them more than likely your logo and part of your design can be carried over to your eBay store.

You take the domain name you have pointing to your eBay store and use it for your website, this will capture any traffic from people that are used to typing in your dot com to go to your eBay store. At this point you want to start looking at eBay as a marketing tool more than a selling tool. Some people will also use eBay as a wholesale outlet to clear out merchandise as well as a marketing tool.

I know I’ve said it many times but only having an eBay store puts you in business with eBay, they are your partner plus you have all those fees. When you have your own eCommerce website you own your customer database, you don’t have the listing and final value fees and you are building an asset that you can sell later on.

I have clients that have created websites just for the sole purpose of selling them a couple of years later and they have pulled five figures from the website when they sold it.

As I said earlier in this article, don’t put all your eggs in one basket, if you currently have an eBay store you should really consider having a website, if you are new to selling online start with this plan in mind.

Contact us now, mention this article and save $50!

Is your eBay store in a black hole?

I’ll keep this short and sweet, sometimes being in this business I forget to get back to the basic things.

If you are selling on eBay using an eBay store and you are using the standard eBay templates they give you then you are wasting your time and money. Yes, I just went there.

You may be asking why so much fuss over this, I’m going to explain why and make it as simple as possible. There are thousands of eBay stores on eBay, most of them look the same and most of them are not running at the full potential that they could be because they have no “eye appeal”, there is nothing to set them apart and they are forgettable.

If you had sales people that you had out going toe to toe with new customers would you want to dress them in rags and have them look like they just fell down 3 flights of stairs or would you want them dressed nice, hair nice, teeth sparkling and breath all minty fresh? I know, stupid question but if you are only using what eBay is giving you then you have a sales person in rags.

When you customize your eBay store and really dress it up then you are sending the message to your customers that you care about your business but more importantly you care about them! You will build confidence with your customers and you will create a lasting impression on them that will result in sales and referrals.

The custom design of an eBay store is only part of the plan, you also have to have the proper text and custom pages so your eBay store will not only show up better in eBay searches but in search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Once you have these things in place provided you have a good product (When I say good product, I’m not talking about $.99 CDs or something like that) you want to start thinking about setting up your stand alone eCommerce website, this will allow you to turn your eBay store into a marketing tool.

I’ll break down more of these things soon but for now I wanted to stay with some basic things. Where does your eBay store stand today?

Contact us now, mention this article and get a 30 minute consultation FREE!

I’ve started reading a new book not long ago but before I go on let me just say I am not a huge reader, I tend to scan for some reason and I have the attention span of a gnat.

This new book is something I can’t put down and it’s already changed my thinking about business and given me new insight on a lot of things. A friend and business associate told me about this book called “The 4-Hour Work Week” and suggested that I read it, my first thought was I would have something else sitting on the shelf collecting dust but I went ahead and purchased it, actually I bought a copy for my iPhone and the hard back.

I usually don’t endorse products like this or give reviews but with this fantastic book I just can’t help it because I know that whoever reads it will find the same golden information I have.

To sum the book up Tim explains how to take control of your time, how to work less hours and be more productive. He also explains how to enjoy your time now instead of waiting for the pipe dream of retirement.

Take my advice and get this book, read it, study it. I promise you won’t be sorry!

I’ve included the link below so you can get the book on Amazon, the book comes in several formats.

The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich