When you are a small business or just starting out it may not always be practical to spend a lot of money on expensive software. If you are in the market for new software, like a new photo editor or anti-virus software, and you are a little strapped for cash, check out the list below. You are bound to find a software package suitable to your needs for free.
The Best Free Software of 2010 – PCMag.com
Gizmo’s Freeware Editors’ Choice List
The sites below are all free, reliable places to start a web site on. You should remember though, in order to get your own domain name you are probably going to still have to pay. I’ll be updating this post as I find more.
I have finished creating the new The GreenTech Shop database. I created it in MySQL and I used PHPMyAdmin as my front-end. The above screen shot is the table structure on one of my tables. This new database will replace most of my current need for the out-of-the-box Yahoo! Store (or Yahoo! Merchant Solutions if you want to be fancy) database that I use. Using a custom database should improve my site in the following ways:
My next step is to go ahead and redesign my the template that I mentioned above. The orginal plan was to create the database, then create a control panel that would access that data. Now I think it may be better to go ahead with the redesign and I can wait on the custom control panel. For the time being the PHPMyAdmin interface should be an adequate front-end to manage data.
When I first started The GreenTech Shop I wanted to test sell on eBay before building my website. After a couple of months I realized that it would be a good idea to go ahead and keep the eBay storefront. I figured that having a storefront on eBay would be beneficial in that I could use the storefront to drive traffic to thegreentechshop.com, have another source of revenue, and to gauge interest in products that I sell. Plus it just made sense to tap into such a huge customer base, since eBay is one of the largest marketplaces in the world.
Afterwards, I decided to expand my business onto Amazon for the same reasons that I sold products on eBay. So currently, I have three storefronts that I use, eBay Amazon, and thegreentechshop.com.
In the last couple of months I have been slowly concentrating more on my website than outside storefronts. The great part about selling on your own website is that it is so much easier to process orders. You don’t have to comply with any eBay or Amazon methods or protocols. Plus you get to keep a bigger portion of the revenue. The bad part is that you are pretty much on your own in terms of marketing and developing a brand can be a slow process.
In my opinion, the strategy that makes the most sense is to have a mixture of selling on your website and to have storefronts on popular marketplaces. That way you can leverage the power of their established brands to help you build your own brand.
Google applications have helped me become more efficient and productive in both my business and personal life. Below are my 5 favorites:
Google Reader – I use to visit a bunch of sites daily to stay informed or just to be entertained. Now I have those sites send me their updates through my Google Reader. The Reader saves me tons of time surfing and I’m less likely to get distracted and wander off into Cyberspace.
Gmail – I found that I spent too much time checking my different e-mail accounts, such as, Yahoo!, Hotmail, and old Gmail accounts. Now I funnel all my personal e-mail to one Gmail account. I still like to keep my business e-mail separate, but now I have 2 e-mail accounts to check instead of 7 or 8.
Google Docs – Way back when I use to e-mail documents back and forth to myself. With Google Docs I can just store all of my documents online and have them accessible from any where as long as I have an internet connection. Very useful.
Google Analytics – This is the most sophisticated, free traffic tracking sites that I’ve seen. One of the main uses I have for it is to see organic traffic vs paid traffic for The GreenTech Shop. I especially like the Site Overlay feature where you can see where people are clicking on your actual site. The motion graphs that display traffic data instead of the old line graphs are pretty cool too.
Google Calendar – I use this app mainly for all of my appointments, important dates, and birthdays. The features I like are E-mail reminders, the ability to see other people’s calendars, and being able to create different color coded calendars within the same calendar. For example, I could have my business appointments in blue and my personal appointments in red within the same calender.
Those are my Top 5. I’ve just started using Google Wave and Voice and maybe over time they will become one of my favorites. What are your Top 5 Google apps?
In case you haven’t heard yet, you can donate to the Red Cross Haiti Relief effort by texting ‘Haiti’ to 90999. The $10 will be charged to your phone.
I’ve been using Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) for a couple of months (including the busy Christmas season) now and I’ve been pretty impressed with the results. The system is easy to use and is quick to set up. Basically, you create a listing, assign fulfillment to Amazon instead of yourself, create a shipment, and then sent it to Amazon. From then on all you are doing is managing the listing and sending more inventory if needed.
Of course there are fees involved, but it works for me and makes my life a lot easier. You also miss a branding opportunity, because as far as I know you can’t send them your custom boxes or packaging. I’m willing to trade that the branding opportunity for the convenience for the time being though.
If you have an e-commerce company I would definitely suggest taking a look at this service.
Here is a big thank you to Beth Hodgson at Global News who mentioned The GreenTech Shop in a blog post this past week. The blog post The GreenTech Shop was mentioned in is titled “Five great, green online shops to visit on Cyber Monday” and I just happen to agree with her 
The GreenTech Shop got a mention in the Quarterly Newsletter for the Environmental and Energy Study Institute this week. It’s pretty short, but its a start. If your interested in joining the Environmental and Energy Study Institute Newsletter please visit their site at eesi.org and enter your email address in the box toward the upper left hand corner of the page. And if you happen to be interested in joining The GreenTech Shop Newsletter, you can do so at thegreentechshop.com and enter you email address in the box at the lower left hand corner.
I’m in the process of upgrading The GreenTech Shop database. Currently, The GreenTech Shop has been using a Yahoo! E-Commerce back-end (I’m not sure what RDBMS they use), but I just don’t think that its flexible enough for to create a dynamic site that I envision.
For example, I want the radios section page to show all of the radios we have for sale in our database dynamically. So I’m going to have to write a simple query to select all radios where the product category equals radio. Simple enough right? The problem is that you can’t access the Yahoo! E-Commerce back-end using SQL as far as I know. So I’m in the process of creating my own database which I can access using PHP. This will make the website more dynamic and I can start deleting all of those static pages that are pretty tedious to maintain.
I believe that you can do something like this using Yahoo’s templates, but I’m not interested in learning their system. For whatever reason, probably prior experience, I still think that Yahoo’s template will be flexible enough. At this point I rather build my own custom solution.
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