CPC (Cost Per Click) Vs CPA (Cost Per Action)

The e-Commerce industry is evolving through search engines, e-commerce business owners are spending their marketing budget to get traffic by advertising online through Google Adwords, Yahoo Overture or MSN Ad centre by participating in their PPC (Pay Per Click) or CPC (Cost Per Click) campaigns or even by advertising in price engine feeds such as pricegrabber or shopping.com websites.

Now, Microsoft has taken an revolutionary step in marketing & advertising by pushing their CPA Model (Cost Per Action) which is more beneficiary to business owners, since they will be paying only if they get orders/quotes/any action that results in merchant's objectives being met.

Microsoft launched its CPA model today (21st May) by introducing "Live Search Cashback" Program, this program allows e-Commerce websites to advertise with MSN and get listed on their comparison site for products being searched and when shoppers search on search.live.com or search.Msn.com and visit advertisers websites and place order or take appropriate action, shoppers get anywhere from 2% to 20% discount based on merchant offerings and merchant pays Microsoft for per conversion/action.

This is truly going to change the way shoppers are going to search, we could expect more numbers/traffic on Microsoft's search engine platform (Search.live.com) and this is a great initiative to drive quality traffic and sales.

Everest e-commerce customers should be engaging themselves to join this cash back program and get quality traffic and increase their sales.

We offer data feed management to Google, MSN and other price engines to submit your product catalog in real time to be listed on comparison engines.

Visit Everest E-commerce data feed, SEO and customization pages.

A Week in New Orleans - Great food and great seminar

If you hear someone say "New Orleans" you would think about the “jazz festival, great sea food, Mardi gras and Katrina “...

Well this time of the year it was little different there were 2 parallel seminars related to e-Commerce right in the downtown of New Orleans, of course "Everest World" with its new version in .Net venued at Marriott and the "e-Commerce Summit" venued at the Convention center from ECMTA.

We at InfoSourcing made sure to attend the e-Commerce Summit to understand the new trends in the e-world and looked very closely for what it had to offer.

Everest World had good attendance with 100+ customers. As I spoke to few of them, they were happy that the seminar took place after a long gap and were excited to see the new 5.0 version with new features, however they were little disappointed as they didn't see live version and it was all presentation (ppt) files ....

My views of e-Commerce Summit/ECMTA: e-Commerce Summit had pretty good turn out too with major competitors like Google, Yahoo, MSN eBay and other e-Commerce vendors.
I did notice a new trend in field of e-Commerce “drop shipment/shipping” which was the buzz word, even Amazon is a key player, they are allowing business to use their warehouse for drop shipping and charging businesses nominal fee for handling, packaging and shipping ...

e-Commerce merchants do see this very attractive and the need for EDI becomes even more important ...

If you are in New Orleans, don't miss to visit French quarters, make sure to feast on "beignets in Cafe De Monde" (pic on left), I had my share early morning around 1:30 am, seriously it tasted good after couple of drinks in the local bar .....

I went to few local restaurants for some great Gumbo and Jambalaya, walked on the streets of Bourbon, hopped in & out of local bars, and enzoyed the nite life it had to offer ...

Friday morning checked out of the hotel and took the local car train to Garden district and wrapped up my visit to the beautiful (devastated) city of New Orleans - what an experience by itself ....

Not to forget, met some ex-colleagues, resellers, customers with whom we worked and interacted last few years ... Overall a great place to visit and a great reason to visit New Orleans.

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Everest World User Conference and E-Commerce Summit, Where the rubber hits the road .....

Everest World User Conference and ECMTA E-Commerce Summit, 2 good seminars are hitting the road t'row Apr 22nd in New Orleans.

We will be attending ECMTA annual conference in New Orleans scheduled from Apr 22nd to Apr 24th, 2008 and we are proud memeber of ECMTA.

InfoSourcing, is focused on helping small and medium business with eBusiness strategy and making it easier for business owners to sell online and provide valuable services.

By attending such seminars we will be able to carry fwd this knowledge to all our clients and make them successfully, whether they are using Everest E-Commerce or other e-Commerce packages, this seminar surely will add value, however few of my Everest reseller network will be attending the Everest seminar so its a combo deal in New Orleans.

I will be blogging on both seminars so stay tuned to my blog for more reviews and if there is anybody out there who wants to network with me, do email me or visit our website http://www.info-sourcing.com/

I 'm so looking fwd for some shrimp, jambalaya, walk on bourbon street and hang out in french quarters and if time permits play 9 hole with few friends ...

.Net is this the New Technology for E-Commerce Solution?

New Technology = New Thinking

New Technology evolves coz of new thinking and something I came across about new "Everest", Everest Software newest version 5.0 will be unveilied in New Orleans (beta) this April’08.

Having heard about the new .Net Version of e-Commerce definitely excites many of us, maybe because we all are tuned with Microsoft way of thinking & using its products.

Thinking about new technology and new release, one has to weigh-in all the possibilities that could happen if you are planning to switch or upgrade from lower versions.

• You will get new feature sets that will automate your business process
• You will have learning curve to adapt with newer version especially since they are integrated and all-in-one software
• You will have to consider your existing customization (backend application, e-Commerce website and reports or any other customization you might have done), take backup of your database review all your code and keep it ready & handy to re-apply.
• You will have spend few hours/days of working with support team and have them hand hold you guys during migration

With new technology there is always ups and downs, let me explain, .Net is advantageous because the application could be faster since all your code is compiled and tons of features integrated within the product will make business owner succeed online and attract with ever growing world wide audience.

However it could be disadvantageous coz, all your existing website ASP pages are indexed and the new technology uses .aspx pages and this needs to be re-indexed by search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo & others, so that means one has to take care of redirecting (301 redirects) to let engines know there are new pages and to drop the old pages and to redirect all traffic to.aspx pages. – CHANGE #1

All your optimization code and customization done on the ASP pages website now needs to be ported to .Net template, remember .Net is new way of coding it can be coded using multi languages such as VB.Net or C# (C Sharp) so the coding is not the same. – CHANGE #2

Other concern is, in .Net you can really knock down all your intellectual coding into compiled coding which is good if you don’t want others to see your code, but what if you have customized your ASP pages with queries etc, now you want to carry forward those customization to .Net and you might be stranded coz if the e-Commerce vendor doesn’t provide you with all the source code, its quite essential that e-Commerce vendors provide source code (code behind) to write your own custom mods else it’s catch 22 scenario. – CHANGE # 3

So consider this for example: AspDotNet Storefront an e-Commerce vendor and one of the best .Net storefront shopping cart application we have seen, they have different flavors of the same application and each flavors has different features set, however their basic flavor has no code behind, that means you can’t customize that edition, however the higher or advanced versions provide you with the source code (of course it cost $$) to customize and compile your code, which makes it easier for business, who don’t like canned templates. – GOOD BUSINESS SENSE

So always weigh in the Pros and Cons of switching to new technology and new version by identifying what’s good for you, it’s better to understand whether .Net is good for you and also how much customization you can do with the availability of source code versus out of the box feature sets.

Earlier days "Technology" used to evolve once in 5 years however off lately it evolving at rapid pace almost every year, its hard to keep up with technology but business owners need to weigh in cost of switching versus cost of remaining on old technology, but if old technology can help you make same $$$ it’s better stay on it.

More to come about technology and new way of thinking as we hear more from the market.

InfoSourcing Inc., re-launches its brand new Website, focused on customer interface

InfoSourcing Inc., re-launches its brand new Website, focused on customer interface -- April 5th, 2008

Info-Sourcing, the leading solution provider for Everest Software and other ERP vendors, launched a brand new customer-focused, interactive website this month.

The site, http://www.info-sourcing.com/, is designed keeping in mind the simplicity to navigate and rich customer experience in finding the affordable services.
InfoSourcing Chief Executive Harsha Sarjapur says: "At InfoSourcing we have always taken customer care very seriously, talking and listening to our customers and taking their views on board."

InfoSourcing is leading custom solution provider for ERP products like Everest Software, Interprise Suite and others, we provide turnkey solution and services from selling of licenses, development, implementation, customization and support services.

Check out our new website http://www.info-sourcing.com/

Everest World - User Conference

Everest World User Conference - Everest Software is launching its first user conference in New Orleans in Apr, the conference is geared towards Everest customers, developers and system integrators.

It's right time they organized this seminar, since Everest is equipped with SDK and the new version Everest 5.0 being around the corner, it would be good to see if the development team takes over the sessions during the seminar to show us glimpse of the software and its power, something to look fwd in April as it unveils in New Orleans, captial of jazz festival ...

Visit Everest World for more information ...

Everest E-Commerce NEW website CoastCoin.com - Success Story from InfoSourcing Inc.

Coast To Coast Coins Implementation Success Story
Coast to Coast Coins, is one of America's largest and most respected rare coin companies, located in Columbia, Maryland. They specialize in rare coins, foreign coins, collectible coins for collectors and investors across US.

Coast Coins needed trusted solution partner who could change their eBusiness, and considered us for implementing their website http://www.coastcoin.com customization which uses Everest E-Commerce.

InfoSourcing has proven its track record of understanding its customers, their requirements and business model and have launched their eBusiness successfully. The website was launched in Dec' 07 and ever since their web orders have doubled and tripled with over 5000+ web orders in month of Jan and average order amount of $100 and with 50K hits to the website, as gold prices soar the website orders too.
Our customization included following features:
1. Everest E-Commerce template customization
2. E-Commerce functionality
3. Integration of Bullion prices (Gold, Silver, Palladium, Platinum) real time price as market price varies.
4. Guest Login and Checkout for faster checkout process
5. Request Catalog, Top Sellers, Sitemap and numerous other features that integrate with Everest in the back and automates their business process making it much more efficient.
6. Finally our SEO package optimize their website to gain top organic search results.


It's always a pleasure to see our clients do such great business and we believe "when clients succeeded we do succeed too ...."

A new website for numismatic people, get their and start collecting old, rare, new mint coins from Coast To Coast Coins, visit their website http://www.coastcoin.com

Everest now digs into SEO

Just ran into this news article on another website, Everest now is offering SEO? The out of the box product doesn't support SEO and they have introduced this offering as part of their customization.

Everest Software Expands e-Commerce Suite and Delivers Customers More
Services to Drive Online Revenue ... DULLES, Va.--(BUSINESS
WIRE)--December 11, 2007--Everest Software ®, the leading provider of business
operating systems for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), today announced
the availability of Everest ® Search Engine Optimization (SEO). As more
customers turn to Everest Software to manage their total Internet storefront
operations, Everest delivers a SEO service that maps how visitors will search
for you, together with how search engines will find you.

We at InfoSourcing have been doing Search Engine optimization for last 3 years and have driven traffic to several Everest E-Commerce websites and few results worth showcasing here.

1. Keywest Aloe - For Generic keyword "Aloe" with 23 million sites we appear on Page 2 of Google search results http://www.google.com/search?q=aloe&hl=en&start=10&sa=N
2. Keyword "Aloe Sun care" - http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=aloe+sun+care+
3. Keyword: Banana lotion very specific term on Page 1 organic results http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=GGLJ%2CGGLJ%3A2006-35%2CGGLJ%3Aen&q=banana+lotion
4. Keyword: data feed management 11 million sites compete for this keyword and our own site comes up on rank 2 http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=GGLJ%2CGGLJ%3A2006-35%2CGGLJ%3Aen&q=data+feed+management

Our SEO Package consists of valuable web based utilities which help business owners to optimize their website at easy. Keyword selections for Everest categories and items, item aliases. Sitemap generation for Google and Yahoo, Froogle analytics and Google analytics integration and submission to 100+ search engines for detailed comparison click here

We can offer 30 to 40% lesser that what most of the competitors (Everest) offer in the market and we optimize the entire site not just few keywords and we also offer various customization such as new template look and feel, new features, Google checkout and Paypal integration .. Visit our website and take a look at what we do and contact us for a FREE SEO demo today.