I had a great conversation with a new Ecommerce customer, Ann Marie, yesterday. She was jazzed about launching into our new website project. And the first thing Ann Marie did was go out and buy a little notebook. Smart move!

Whether you opt for the virtual/electronic notebook or the good old-fashioned spiral bound, you need to put some organizational tools in place before you plunge into the Ecommerce world.

To put it a little more sternly, unless you can keep a handle on your various accounts, web presences, administrative pages, and key business relationships, you will be sunk.

Ecommerce has evolved over the past decade. Success doesn’t hinge on just having a simple website. You need to also do some or all of these tasks: incorporate a merchant account, interface with shipping vendors, be on top of your domain registration, possibly manage social media accounts, and keep up with PCI security scanning.

A first step is to keep a list of all the mission critical accounts, usernames, and access urls that make up your Ecommerce business. You will also need to devise a system for tracking your passwords without actually writing down the complete passwords in a non-secure location.

I don’t mean to over-state the importance of good record-keeping, but we have seen too many horror stories of site owners who can’t get on top of the basics of managing their business.

The classic example is when site owners set up a new email address and neglect to change their original email address associated with their domain registration. The next steps in this saga: they don’t get their domain renewal notification, their site is off-line, and then they end up going through some heartache to get the situation resolved.

Get your Ecommerce house in order. You will be glad you did.

Google has a new competitor. Search engine Cuil, pronounced “cool” (the word ‘cuil’ is a Gaelic word meaning knowledge), officially launched today. And while Google can definitely use some competition, I don’t expect Cuil (www.cuil.com) to revolutionize the search experience.

One thing it has going for it is that Cuil was started by former Googlers, who presumably learned a thing or two while with the search behemoth. But it has some immediate differences. For one thing, Cuil can’t use PageRank to organize the results, as Google obviously has that technology squarely in their clutches and they’re not letting go. So Cuil has to look for different criteria with which to assess the relevance of a page. Cuil actually looks at the content of a page, and ignores the popularity measures that Google considers most relevant, such as link analysis.

First, Cuil finds pages with the keywords you searched for, then analyzes that page’s further content and “its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.” The results are returned not in a list but in a 2- or 3- column format, which is visually a more interesting way to view.

Another nice thing is that Cuil’s home page is black, with no ads or other distracting clutter, and there are no sponsored results at this time, so the user experience is bound to be a little cleaner.

Cuil also offers suggestions for refining results. Cuil claims to have a searchable database that’s 3 times the size of Google’s, but really that doesn’t matter much. The size of the index isn’t the most important thing to a user; if the engine doesn’t return the results the user is expecting, they just won’t use it again, and it won’t matter how many pages Cuil has to pull from.

Another thing that makes Cuil a little bit cooler than other search engines is that they promise not to collect or save user data, so your search history is always private, unlike the big Google.

Still, there’s something missing. I searched for “blackberry,” thinking that would be a good search term to test because of the different meanings of the word. All of the results were about the hand-held device, but to the right of the page was an “explore by category” button with the option “Hybrid rubus,” in case you were wanting info about the fruit. Under that category was three options: boysenberry, loganberry, and olallieberry, all of which are varieties of blackberries. However, clicking on those subcategories revealed that Cuil didn’t have any information about them. Cuil suggested that I entered a typo, that my search term was rare, or that I had entered too many search terms. If Cuil is going to come anywhere near to being the Google-killer they claim to be, they’re going to have to beef up their relevancy algorithm, and quick.

People often ask why they should invest in a hosted web application. Paying a monthly fee for someone else’s software doesn’t sound like a very good deal at first. I recently joined MightyMerchant’s team, and I can tell you from personal experience, hosted web solutions are a very good deal! I wasted thousands of dollars and hours trying to get an expensive desktop application to do the job I wanted before finally giving up. A little research led me to web-hosted applications, and I quickly realized the benefits of having a professional team of programmers and developers at my disposal. Web-hosted solutions absolutely make the most sense for business owners who want a profitable web presence.

There are a few people who seem to have an innate knowledge of the mechanics behind those glossy webpages we love to surf. They don’t mind spending the extraordinary amount of time and effort it takes to get professional results. Those are the people who’ll tell you you’re better off buying the software. Without their training and experience, you’re treating your business like a DIY project. I’m going to give you the same advice you’ve heard from friends the world over. “Save yourself the headache and hire a professional!” Personally, I’d rather enter a few dozen lines of copy, download an image or two, and go to lunch. I’m happy to let the professionals do the work for me. At the end of the day, I’ll total the sales and smile. Teh nice.

I shared my experience comparing hosted web solutions and desktop applications in detail on the MightyMerchant website.

Paige Pryor joined MightyMerchant in June as the new Account and Project Manager and self-appointed Environmental Coordinator. Her background and experience in marketing, sales, and database administration led her to web-hosted solutions as a convenient and cost-efficient method of relaying products and services to customers.

Let’s take a look at what RSS is, and the ways it can be used to spread your content and bring visitors to your site. First of all, just what is RSS?

RSS defined

Well, not to make the topic more complicated than it needs to be . . . but there is a little debate over just what RSS stands for. Initially, when it was first introduced in 1999, it stood for ‘Rich Site Summary.’ Now there are a few different ‘flavors’ or versions of RSS, and one stands for ‘RDF Site Summary.’ It is widely accepted that RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and that name pretty well explains what RSS does. RSS is a format using ‘feeds’ to easily share (’syndicate’) content that is frequently updated, such as blogs, news sites, or other media such as podcasts. RSS automatically checks websites for new content, and provides them to the user in the form of excerpts or the full text. This makes it easy for users of RSS to monitor their favorite sites which update often without having to manually check for new content.

Examples of RSS feeds

RSS feeds are so common, there’s a good chance you already use them but just aren’t aware of it. If you have created a personalized home page on Google or Yahoo and automatically receive news, weather reports, or stock quotes, you are receiving those in RSS format.

If you use the Firefox browser, you may have created a Live Bookmark to follow a Craigslist category (hello, free stuff!) or a blog. In that case, the bookmark will update with a number in parentheses to let you there is a new post. This automatic notification is also an RSS feed.

RSS feeds can be set up on a website to pull information from other sites to the first site automatically. Check out MightyMerchant’s Squidoo lens as an example. I have a module set up that automatically displays the title and a short excerpt from the three most recent MightyMerchant eCommerce Blog posts . . . which leads me into a great way to use RSS on your own site.

Uses of RSS

John Jantsch at the Duct Tape Marketing blog wrote about a method of automatically adding content through bookmarking. His video explains it well, but in essence you surf the web finding content that you want to add to your site–something in the news, or mentions of a certain topic, business info, whatever. Tag it using del.icio.us, create a feed, and then take that feed to FeedBurner to publish the content to your site. This pretty simple technique allows you to repurpose info from other sites onto your own site with just a little effort.

The potential for other uses is only limited by your imagination. Anything that can be published in headline or title format is a prime candidate for an RSS feed. Depending on the type of site you have, you could create and publish feeds for any number of things, such as a feed of job openings, new real estate listings, or new forum discussion threads. Calendar events can be published as RSS feeds, as can new listings on eBay or other auction sites. You can even create feeds of photographs, from Flickr or your own site. Think of anything that can be broken down into individual items and you’ve got the raw material for a feed.

Creating feeds

Most blogging platforms like TypePad, WordPress or Blogger automatically generate feeds. This makes it super easy for blog readers to subscribe to feeds of their favorite blog posts, like this one, using the ’subscribe in a reader’ feature that is in our right sidebar (more about this coming up). Knowing how to code in XML makes it pretty easy . . . you just define whatever you want to publish as a list of items, give them a title and description and a link, and you’re halfway there. If coding like this makes your head spin, MightyMerchant can create feeds of your website content for you with a little bit of set up. And of course there are inexpensive tools such as Feed For All or JitBit which allow you to enter your item information and they create the feeds for you. When you have created a feed, you’re ready to publish it.

FeedBurner is the feed publication leader. All you have to do is sign up for FeedBurner account, enter in your site information, and your feed is ready to be distributed. FeedBurner allows for email subscribing to your feeds, automatically notifies directories and aggregators (feed readers) when you publish new content, allows for tagging, and ensures that your feed is readable in any reader no matter what format (remember the ‘flavors’ I mentioned?) it was created in, to help your feed reach a maximum audience. FeedBurner also offers stats that lets you track the number of subscribers to your feed, clicks from your feed, and republications of your feed.

Feed readers

There are many feed reading applications and online services. Popular applications include NewsGator, FeedDemon, and the Firefox Live Bookmarks service I mentioned earlier. Online options include PageFlakes, Netvibes, Bloglines, My Yahoo, or my personal favorite, Google Reader. All of the feeds I subscribe to are compiled where I can easily manage my subscriptions and read them all in one place anytime I want. Thanks to a free utility called Google Gears, I can even read my feeds when I’m offline.

Subscribing to a feed

A great thing about subscribing to information via readers is that when you want to unsubscribe, you just trash the subscription! When you’re ready to break up with the feed, no hearts get broken because you don’t have to provide your email address in the first place. That also means that no one else can sell, rent or otherwise hustle your contact information.

As you’re browsing the ‘net, look for the icons that indicate feeds are present. You may see the standard orange RSS icon on the site or in the browser bar where the site’s address is displayed:

Subscribe in a reader

Or you may see ‘chicklets’ like those below indicating that you can subscribe using your feed reader of choice. Clicking on any of the buttons will take you to the appropriate subscription page for that service.

Chances are you’ve checked out your competition’s websites a time or two. It’s a good idea to do this every now and then. After all, if you don’t occasionally “fraternize with the enemy,” how will you know when they start plotting against you? Perhaps you want to know how often a competitor rotates their featured products, or you would like to know when they post a new article, link or other resource. But . . . it’s time-consuming to manually visit each website you want to keep tabs on, and haven’t you already got enough to do?

Enter website monitoring software. ChangeDetection.com monitors changes in text to a webpage, and it’s totally free. All you have to do is enter in the URL and your email, and ChangeDetection takes over, checking the requested webpage about once a day. This service does not monitor text from external files or text retrieved by JavaScript. It’s not always easy to tell when a webpage has changed, but this service notices any change to any text, which could include changing the date or ads being displayed on the page. ChangeDetection does not monitor changes to images or to the HTML code of a webpage, but guess what? SourceForge.com does.

Another option is WebSite-Watcher, which allows you to check an unlimited number of web sites for changes. This service lets you filter such things as banner ads, so you won’t receive notification every time they run a new ad, unless you want to. WebSite-Watcher saves the last two versions of websites to your harddisk and highlights all changes to the text, to make them easy to spot. You guessed it, this increased functionality comes with a price tag, but it’s pretty reasonable. If, after the free trial, you are hooked, it’s $29.95 to download.

Your competitors have nothing on you now!

This is embarrassing to admit, but before I found Co.mments.com, I would either bookmark the websites of conversation threads I wanted to follow or copy the URL into a word document. I would then revisit these conversations every couple of days to see if anyone had responded to my comments or posted new, interesting comments.

This was bulky and time consuming. Luckily, for any web activity you can imagine, someone has come up with a better way to do it! When signing up for a new Co.mments.com account, you are asked to drag the Co.mments bookmarklet into your Firefox toolbar. From that point on, whenever you are on a forum, blog post, or other site where a discussion is taking place, bookmark it using your Co.mments bookmarklet, and the conversation is tracked for you. You don’t have to make a comment to use Co.mment.com, it works just the same whether you are actively commenting or just want to read what other people are saying.

You can receive updates in your feed reader or by email whenever new comments are added to the conversations you are tracking. Your conversations are tracked on one page, and it’s easy to remove conversations when you no longer wish to track them.

Co.mments.com launched sometime in early 2006, so it did take me a while to discover this service, but I’m sure glad I did. It’s simple and unobtrusive, and if the service is down you lose only the ability to track comments, unlike its competitor CoComments which also loses the ability to place comments.

Try it out and let me know what you think.

Tags: comments, tracking

Ages ago, I ordered something from a catalog, knowing that I would regret it. I paid $11.95 to ship a $4.95 item and said to myself, ‘Just this once, and I’ll never order from them again.’ After that, the catalog onslaught began. Now I receive a catalog from this company about every two weeks.

When the catalogs first began arriving I recycled them, as if a mere peek at the shiny, plastic junk inside would instantly lead to madness. Eventually though, that mountain of mail did exactly what they hoped it would, and I started looking at them again. I found other irresistible reasons to pay exorbitant shipping costs. Every time I opened up my mailbox and found that catalog, I knew I needed to call them and cancel it. I wanted them to know enough was enough, that I wasn’t gonna take it anymore and to save a tree and stop already. But I never called them, and now I don’t have to! Catalog Choice will take care of that for me.

Launched today, Catalog Choice allows you to set up an account with your email address, enter in your primary mailing address, find the catalogs you receive and decline them. They will contact the senders and, poof! No more unsolicited catalogs in your mailbox. You can decline all of your unwanted catalogs at once, and let them do the dirty work of talking to the distributors. Save time, save trees, and prevent junk mail all at once.

Think you know all about Dodgeball? Hint: it’s not a game you played in school. Most likely you’ve heard of Del.icio.us and Digg. You probably know that these social sites are for bookmarking and sharing interesting website content. But there’s been an explosion of social sites that offer just about any service you can imagine, from video and photo sharing to file sharing for office workers. (See the May 2007 SiteBeat for more information about marketing your website through Del.icio.us and Digg.)

Talkr could be a real timesaver. This free service lets you turn any blog entry into a podcast that you can listen to instead of read. Maybe you follow a trade blog or you’ve found a blog about cooking or entertainment that you like to keep up with. Subscribe to it in Talkr and it automatically reads the text to you while you cook dinner at home. The reader sounds surprisingly natural, and didn’t stumble over any pronunciations when I tried it out.

Check out this list of 1000 top “Web 2.0” sites. Don’t let the large number of sites intimidate you out of taking a look–the sites are organized by categories, like audio, blogging, bookmarking and calendar sharing, so you can jump right to the type of service you would like to explore.

While there are many sites designed to help the professional, there are just as many sites for use in your personal life, such as Pooln, for scheduling car pooling.

Check it out. You just might find a resource to help you connect with your customers . . . or your family . . . in a whole new way.