Archive for the ‘Shopping And Product Reviews’ Category

Accessorizing Your Hair Style

December 1st, 2011



Selecting the right hair accessories is not always the easiest thing to do. The accessory may look great on someone else, however, when you get it home and try it out in your hair you may find that it doesn’t fit the shape of your hair or that it doesn’t work with the type of hair that you have. For the best results you should read the product description for each hair accessory that you are interested in to see what hair types it will work best with.

If you are looking for hair accessories that can be used to keep your hair out of your eyes or in a specific position then you may want to consider using barrettes, hair clips or headbands. Al of these hair accessories are typical accessories that can be found in just about any hair aisle at a department store or supermarket. To select the barrette, hair clip or headband that is right for you make sure that you know what type of hair you have. For example if you have very fine hair you will need to use small barrettes and clips with gripping teeth. If you have course or thick hair then you will want to use larger barrettes and hair clips.

Hair jewelry is another great hair accessory that you can use to add style and glamour to your look. These items can be found in boutiques and at some department stores. Hair jewelry can either be stickers that can be placed on your hair for added sparkle, or they can be made from decorated barrettes, hair ties, headbands and hair clips.

No matter what hair accessories that you buy to style your hair with you will also want to use the right hair care products to reduce breakage and damage to your hair. Some of the products that you may want to consider include fortifying shampoos, leave in conditioners and split end tamers. You will also want to look for hair accessories that are designed to minimize hair damage.

AbleCommerce 7 ASP.NET Shopping Cart Review

November 16th, 2011



Feature Set: AbleCommerce comes with all the features you’d expect in a shopping cart – infinite category and product levels, options, kits, specials, quantity discounts, coupons, sortable categories, content/web pages, inventory management, order management, integrated payment gateways, taxes, reports and more. There are also many features not found in most shopping cart packages though. Among them are digital delivery of electronic goods, subscriptions (such as a gift of the month club), international currencies, the most flexible shipping options of any shopping cart software, powerful SEO features (see below), product reviews and recurring billing.

What sets AbleCommerce apart though is the user interface that’s head and shoulders above it’s competitors. Extensive use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) make for a faster, more attractive, easier-to-use interface. That means customers move through your store more quickly and easily, meaning more orders. For example, the One Page Checkout (using AJAX) allows customers to choose shipping and payment options in a single page!

SEO: The developers at AbleCommerce have paid close attention to optimizing the applications friendliness to search engines. Title bars are dynamically generated using category and product names, as are the URLs. Content is well positioned for Google and others to be able to index content. There are also 3rd party tools for managing elements like the title bar and META tags. Users generally report substantial gains in traffic, especially if they are migrating from a shopping cart package more than a few years old.

Customizable: Yes, with a catch. AbleCommerce is unencrypted and can be customized in any way you’d like. However, it uses many technologies such as HTML, JavaScript, SQL, AJAX, CSS, C##, Velocity and more. If you aren’t a veteran developer and you want to modify AbleCommerce layout or functionality, save your sanity and hire an expert. There are good developers like Web 2 Market (http://www.web2market.com/) who can help make AbleCommerce match your business needs..

Security: AbleCommerce 7 is PCI Compliant AND PCI Certified. The July 1, 2010 deadline for merchants to use web storefront applications that are PCI certified makes this an important consideration.

Installation and hosting: AbleCommerce 7 is fairly easy to install. Usually it can be done in under and hour if you’re familiar with web servers. It runs on Windows web servers. Web Server 2008 and SQL Server 2005 (or higher) on a separate server is optimal for performance. With dedicated web and database servers, AbleCommerce can easily scale to 50,000+ unique visitors a day. It can also run in clustered environments for sites with 100,000+ unique visitors a day.

Documentation and Support: The documentation built in is mediocre. However, the support forums (http://forums.ablecommerce.com/) are excellent sources of answers for even the most advanced users. Again, an experienced development and/or hosting partner is a must for success.

Conclusion: If you’re a veteran of web storefronts, you’ll love working with AbleCommerce. It’s rich feature set, customizability, scalability, security, search engine friendliness and price make it hard to beat. Look for experienced development and hosting partners for your greatest success. With the right team, your online web storefront will blow away your competition.

Online Shopping Site Review

November 16th, 2011



I recently had the opportunity to take a look at a new and refreshing take on an established internet business model that promises to help their customers make faster purchase decisions on the latest hot products across the web.

The developers of this consumer product review and comparison site are focussed on the online shopping community. In particular, those who do not have the time to invest in searching for products online, finding the best product to meet their needs, identifying a safe and reputable vendor, not to mention the best price.

There are many of these sites available today and some of them are quite good. Others fall well short of providing useful information more often creating a maze of confusion due to their complexity and high volume of sponsored advertisements.

If you are like me, you prefer to shop with ease and simplicity where you are able to find what you want, when you want it, from a respectable vendor – at the best price available. This new site has a very simple concept. It provides what it calls product review spotlights that are generally limited to three or four items for a given product category. Each of the product comparisons that I looked at consisted of a single page providing links to additional products that may also be of interest to their visitors. What is refreshing about their approach is the simplicity and lightning speed of their site. These guys really seem to know what they’re doing!

In addition to product spotlights, I found comparable products with links to thousands of other items related to the spotlighted products. The site was simple to navigate and was noticeably missing the typical spider web effect often found on similar product review sites. And they do not bombard you with other ads or pop-ups. Simplicity appears to be their theme providing pleasant, fast paced, no-nonsense shopping experience. They even allow you to suggest product comparisons of interest providing a new twist to the personal shopper theme.

The layout of this site is straight forward and the main page states its purpose. Within the side menu bar they present a drop down list of product categories and featured products within each category. What I really liked was the fact that each featured product page has a similar look and feel with full graphics and text to describe the product or service. Anchors at the top of the page keep you grounded as you navigate through the different product listings.

The site states up front that it is focused on consumer trends – basically hot products. So if you’re looking for a vintage items you may want to look elsewhere as this site may not be for you.

From my perspective this site appears to present thousands of products and is currently focussed on information and software products. I did find several consumer electronics and health care products as well. It appears that the site is fairly new and adding products rapidly – all from respected online sellers.

In summary, I really like their approach and believe they will be a contender in the online shopping space.