Webmaster Crap
The Search For A Good Shopping Cart System
I have been spending some time looking into different hosted shopping carts. This is something every internet entrepreneur will need to do eventually.
I wouldn’t say that my evaluations are over, however I will discuss where I am now for the benefit of you guys. Plus, perhaps by writing this post, I’ll have some others with good experience with any of these carts chime in. 
Why Hosted?
Certainly, there are a lot of decent cart solutions out there which I could host locally. In fact, I already own a license to X-Cart.
I’m at a point in my business, however, where I would rather pay somebody to deal with stuff for me than have to worry about it myself. For this reason, hosted solutions work best for me.
Plus, most shopping cart solutions which are self-hosted seem to be your classic catalog-style carts. This isn’t what I need. I tend to sell via sales pages, not catalogs.
Scoping Out Options
There are a lot of different solutions out there. There are equally as many opinions. It makes evaluating all the options pretty frustrating.
All of this is a move away from Clickbank, too. The last 2 products I’ve launched, I ran them through Clickbank. The problem is that Clickbank exerts too much control over me (price caps for one). Plus, they take an average of 8% of every order. I have had a merchant account for years. I use it already for my other website. For my 2010 plans, I need something far more robust than Clickbank – something I have control over.
The features I need most are:
- Ability to integrate with Aweber
- Ability to integrate with the software I wish to use. (Amember, Wishlist Member, etc.)
- Ability to do upsells, downsells, 1-click
- Built in affiliate program
The ones I looked closest at were:
Let me discuss my view on each of these…
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Fighting The Wordpress Dragons
What follows is a quick tale into the technical details of Wordpress that I’d rather not think about, but was forced to…
Over on PCMech, I have been having a cyclical and perplexing issue with server load. The end result was that PCMech disappeared from the Internet for a few minutes at a time, several times per day.
Extremely frustrating to say the least. Especially when you pay your web host about $700 per month to keep these sites online.
A few weeks ago, I started host shopping. I am with Pair Networks now, but I started talking with the guys at Rackspace. Both great companies. Rackspace is certainly more proficient with their marketing, but they also back it up. I’m not even a customer and I can tell that their “fanatical support” is indeed what it says. That said, Pair is no slouch either. Pair is always spot on with their email replies and they get the job done.
At the end of the day, I’ve got a business to run, however. As good as Pair is, if they can’t get it done for me, I switch. The prospect of moving all of my sites to Rackspace wasn’t exactly one I wanted to confront. At the last minute, fortunately Pair came through for me and offered to throw a lot more hardware in my direction. Essentially, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.
As I had left it, Wordpress was still proving to be a beast, but we threw so much hardware at it that it was acceptable. Still, PCMech was slower than other sites.
Fast forward to this morning. PCMech is gone. Buh bye. Wordpress is delivering nothing but blank pages.
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Making Videos: What Happens After Filming?
I did a post about how to maximize your video quality. I also did a video showing the exact equipment I use to make videos. But, what happens after that? What happens once I get the footage over to my computer?
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Maximizing Your Online Video Quality [How To]
I routinely talk about how important doing videos is to your blog’s traffic and making sales. However, a common confusion is exactly how to make the video look as professional as possible.
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Creating a Custom Blog Homepage [Wordpress]
Wordpress is extremely customizable and that’s one of the beauties of it. When you are able to master customizing blog themes for Wordpress, you can turn the platform into almost anything.
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Where Should You Host Your Blog’s Videos?
I have talked many times about how it can be a great idea for you to produce your own videos. It is really easy to do. However, once you have a nice, shiny video, how do you go about actually putting it on your blog?
Let’s look at your options.
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Using Gravatars On Your Blog – Why And How
Blogs are simply awesome for building a community. There is innate two-way communication to you posting something and others offering their two cents by way of comments. That sense of community, though, is enhanced when you can SEE them.
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How To Configure OIO Publisher
I have highly recommended OIO Publisher to my readers in the past. It is a powerful ad management platform for Wordpress. It is so powerful, in fact, that some of my readers have expressed confusion on how to use it. Well, I’m here to help!
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Developing a Blog Backup Strategy – How?
Most bloggers put a lot of time and effort into their blogs. Now, wouldn’t it suck if something happened to it and you couldn’t recover? Oh yes, it would. The answer to this blogger’s doomsday scenario is a solid backup strategy.
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Moving Your Feedburner Feeds to Google
Feedburner was bought by Google some time ago, yet nothing changed. Well, they’re forcing the issue now and they are now officially requiring all Feedburner users to migrate their feeds over to Google. The good thing is that they’ve made the process pretty automatic and painless. The bad thing (and I have yet to see it, but am bracing for it) is that it might make my RSS stats drop off the face of the earth. We shall see. Click Here To Continue Reading »
I am a pro-blogger and Internet entrepreneur who generates six figures online per year. This blog is a plain-English, pull-no-punches tale of my life as an Internet entrepreneur and problogger. 
