Sources: http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/          
                e Creamery.com: Ice Cream Made To Order  
                By: Pat Callahan
 
 Summary: 
        eCreamery.com is an online business which sells ice cream. It was originally created by Rod Valeroso in 2004. Before it was not that profitable because it was fewer than 75 annual orders but then they saw a good concept to this site and in early 2007, they purchased the site from Rod and more operations to Omaha ice cream parlor. They made improvements and gave a new brand identity for eCreamery.         According to this article, it’s hard for the eCreamery management to rebrand the site. They first consider the customer satisfaction as a factor for online success. In the expression, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression”, they made a point that the customer would feel welcome and interested visiting their site. Through hard work of getting the website up, they come up to a very unique idea, their site offers their customer to fully customize their order. They made orders from scratch. The customers was the one who picks the ingredients, flavors and you can also name your own made ice cream with this innovation, it resulted to increase in sales. But their weakness was the expensive shipping costs.  

Conclusion: 
        I visited the site and find it interesting to explore. It’s my first time to encounter selling ice cream online. I’m just curious how the ice cream is delivered fresh and frozen and not melted. But the concept of this site is so unique and maybe it’s the reason why it is famous. Technology made our lives easier. Today, you can buy your groceries online; even shop your favorite things in just a click. The site is great because you can choose your own ingredients for your ice cream, with all the mix-in, packaging and even give a name for your customized ice cream. I think several years from now, there are more people will be engaged in online businesses.          

Sources: http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/617/
                Social Site Search               
                By Pat Callahan  

             
Summary
           The Fast Company has already launched their newest product platform for search function. This is called the FAST Recommendation. This is a social site search which will help users to find things which they know and will also offer them with the things which are might be interesting to them. The Vice President of the Product Management of FAST Search and Transfer has said that “What FAST Recommendations leverages are relationships between content. It adds in a strong element of what users are looking at, sort of a social aspect of how are the other users like you and what they are interested in, and can it find other products that may be interesting to you.”
           The main idea is that you can easily look for what you want to find with the use of this platform and with the help of other users who can give their suggestions for you to find things which you are not familiar with. For example, you will buy a teen magazine for your niece as your birthday gift to her. But you have no idea where to find it because you are not interested with magazines. Through this FAST Recommendation you can get recommendation from specific individuals or experts.
           In order to Fast provide recommendation, it will create a consumer profiles or personal profiles for every users. These profiles are made up of data from recent searches, product views, purchases and reviews submitted or read. This software will make an interaction between different users and its content and will end up to recommendations. 

  Conclusion
            This new platform is functional licensed software. Organized and personalized data are offered to the users. I think this software will mark a place in online business because of its features but then there are also users who would think that privacy is an issue since personal profiles are needed to work with this social site.         

Source:  http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/649/                              What Makes A Site Effective?               
               By Mat Greenfield 

Summary:

         Mat’s article is all about giving important points on making a site effective. His assessment is comprised by 2 criteria. First is entitled Graphic Design, its sub-criteria are instant affinity, credibility and focus.  Instant affinity is an important measure because customers or visitors make judgment the time they saw your sites. Quality of the design of the site is what your visitors are looking for. Some of its characteristics are clean, crisp looking sites, appropriate image, and a 7-12 word headline. He suggests shorter pages of your sites so that your visitors will not be required scrolling. Credibility of the product or services is also an important factor. He suggest to have an experienced graphic designer so that the materials should be put in your sites are reliable enough. And also the credibility of your business is connected to the content of your sites. Focus is what your visitors want to be clear. If your sites have so many links, your customers will be confused where to click. It is necessary to make the next clicks obvious or know what your customers are looking for and through that make those links obvious to simplify your navigations. Second criteria is entitled Strategy, its sub-criteria are information on products and services, and offer. There should be a clear flow of information regarding the content of your sites or your products and services. You can achieve it by explaining the context of the product or services – the problems/pain that exits, explaining what results the product or service provides, and explaining how the product/service provides the results. And to attract customers, you have to make offers.         These are just some of the elements that impact site effectiveness, but there are also more important on these depends on your websites.  

Conclusion:

         There are many ways to improve your sites, in Mat’s article are just some of those things which you can acquire information on how to make your sites effective. Just put in mind that before you make an online business, you should consider all factors which will be included in your business, such as design, content, customers, competitors, etc. And most especially you should be knowledgeable enough of what your business is. With that, your business is surely effective.

Source: www.ecommerce-guide.com
              Start 2008 with Five E-Commerce Freebies
              By Vangie Beal 

Summary:

            There are ways to start your business or even continue your business with just a little cost or even for free by knowing many useful e-commerce solutions. You can make your web sites as professional like any other site in web. In her article, five different types of tools that you can use to help organize and promote your online businesses and products are outlined.

 1.    E-Junkie: Free Shopping Cart – This tool can be embedded directly into your web site. It’s a very simple but professional shopping cart. Together with PayPal standard, PayPal Pro, Google checkout and Authorized.Net, you can sell digital downloads and tangible items. Some features mentioned are automated shipping, handling calculations, sales tax calculations, inventory management, product promotion and many more. This tool is for free for non-profit organizations.
2.    Microsoft Office Accounting Express: Free Accounting – This Microsoft tool is for free and fully functional. It will provide you to access most used accounting functions such as invoicing, bill payment, online banking, a general ledger, add-on services for payroll, credit card processing, and eBay. This tool is also connected with Microsoft Word, Excel, and Outlook. You can also send invoices in an e-mail message and include a direct link to PayPal. Your customers can open the message to view the invoice and click the link to make a payment.
3.    Campaigner: Free E-Mail Marketing – It will help you send campaigns to your customers. This can also help you with automate the process of sending professional, permission-based e-mail marketing. It has a step-by-step creation wizard, HTML templates, easy-to-change form fields for personalization, preview and test function used before sending the mailing and a dashboard that you can analyze and track e-mail marketing campaign results.
4.    myImager.com: Free Image Editing – you can freely upload images and edit files with the provided tools of this site. This whole thing is for free but with some restrictions such as image cannot be larger than 500kb, since this site deletes file every day, you should save your work to your own hard drive.
5.    Widgetbox: Free Web Widgets – It is an online Web directory that you can use to search for widgets and can add it to your site. It is easy to use because searching is by category. This Widgetbox can provide you with code that you can paste and can be used to your blog services.

 Conclusions:

           It’s really great to read such articles that can provide us some of the Web tools we can use for our online businesses with not spending too much money. You can already customize your sites by just using some of these free available tools. It’s easy for you to make your sites professional enough that can compete to your other competitors. We should always be resourceful because it can make a way to success. But of course to be knowledgeable enough in the things you are doing also matters.        

Source: www.ecommerce-guide.com
              Yahoo’s Mobile Mandate Includes eBay Widget
              By Kenneth Corbin 

Summary
         Since Google is the top ranked search engine, Yahoo is finding ways to be known again in different category. They aim to be the leader in the mobile sector that will bring best possible Internet experience to millions of people in the world. To make this possible, it will include opening a platform to provide third-party developers with tools to create applications which also includes eBay, MTV, MySpace and Yahoo Mobile Widgets. LG Electronics and Motorola were also partners of Yahoo in this innovation. 

        Users can access this widget with a WAN-enabled handset, meaning users can browse a MySpace profile, check status on eBay, they can also customize their mobile experience by browsing and picking Yahoo’s Widget Gallery. This can be also accessed by using Yahoo Go 3.0, a new version of Yahoo’s Mobile Portal.
        Yahoo hopes to introduce this new mobile experience to 2 merging markets, Latin America and Asia. Recently AT&T was one of the investor for this project. 

Conclusion
         This is a good option for Yahoo to aim to be a leader for mobile sector because they know that they cannot change the fact that Google really the top search engine in the Web. So, Yahoo try another category to at least make in line with Google.

Source: www.ecommerce-guide.com
              Wikia Search Launches as Alternative to Google
              By Kenneth Corbin

Summary

         In Corbin’s article, it was said that Jimmy Wales, a co-founder of Wikipedia is admitting that the internet search is currently broken but they will surely find ways to work things out. After several months, Wikia Search was then brought up to be an alternative solution. It is a product of Wikia, Inc., a for-profit company which is separated from Wikimedia Foundation which is a non-profit organization that was founded 2004 and manage Wikipedia.

          It was also stated that Mr. Wales is saying that this will be their strength. As we all know there are many big companies which is engaged in online business today. Aside from that fact, it was also mention that this Wikia Search is both social network and search engine because users can register, create their profiles and be able to do the typical social network can do which are messaging friends, uploading photos, etc. and also users can search information they want, results are ranked in order of relevance, just like Google and Yahoo.

        What made this Wikia Search are Grub Web Crawler, Apache efforts Lucene and Nutch which is in the back end and responsible for the search and indexing. Java, in front end, is responsible for handling user interactions. In Internet world, we are exposed to many information which are some that we don’t know are not reliable. In Wikia Search, they have a community which is in charge of editorial content and will block those aren’t following the rules of the site.

Conclusion

        Advent of technology is very fast. As people used Internet, they learned a lot of things. Mr. Wales and Co. are just one of those people who uses their knowledge to solve the current problem of this Internet Search and with all the researches , studies and knowledge, they come up with a new Wikia Search that they considered as an alternative to Google or Yahoo. Today, Google ranked first among search engines. It doesn’t mean Wikia Search will not work since it is new to everybody. Actually, it is not in the name of the search engines that count, but it is the information and services they can offer to usesrs are more important.

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!