The A List
I’ve been reviewing products for over 15 years for PC Pro and for my own purposes. On this menu you’ll find links to my absolute favourite software and services along with an explanation of why I like them and who I think they’re suitable for.
I use every single one of the products on this A List, many of them day to day and many of them critical to the success of my businesses. In the interests of complete transparency, I do earn a small commission on some of these products and services if you use the links in this category but it’s important to point out that I used the products first and only then became an affiliate. The income is very small and is used to keep this site going – it doesn’t cost you a penny extra to use these links (often the reverse) so please do sign up via the links on this site if you decide to trial any
Having set up and run a number of online shops over the years, I’ve used several packages. I started with ShopFactory but that’s desktop based (you upload your store) so when we came to launch MakingYourOwnCandles, we wanted an online service. We chose EKMPowershop simply because we were testing to see if the business had potential in the period before Xmas. The good news was that yes, it had immense potential (we shut again after 5 weeks because we couldn’t cope with any more orders!), the bad news was that EKMPowershop was an utter dog.
In my view, it’s impossible to get a good looking site using EKMPowershop without paying them extra to design it for you. When we used it (late 2009) it still featured table-based layouts, betraying the dated nature of the underlying technology. And the management interface was rubbish.
When we decided to formally launch the business in January 2010 we were, therefore, looking for something new. After much research, I signed up for a free trial of BigCommerce and was immediately blown away by how easy it was to use and how quickly I was able to create our inventory. Crucially, the customer experience is in a different league – it feels much more like Amazon than the amateurish shop we had before. This resulted in good sales from the off and we haven’t looked back.
BigCommerce features integration with most payment providers and even integrates with Royal Mail to give live postage cost calculation. It integrates with Mailchimp so you can add customers to your mailing list. It has excellent order management facilities, built-in product reviews, discount codes and product variations. In short, it has everything we’ve ever needed to sell our expanding range of products.
Perhaps most importantly, BigCommerce is being actively developed: it’s even better now than it was when we first created our store and the developers are pretty responsive. In fact, it’s so good that our partner company FixedPriceWebsite is now an authorised reseller for BigCommerce, offering a shop design and setup service.
Use Facebook to Comment on this Post
I’ve used a number of email marking services over the years – most notably GetResponse.com and AWeber but MailChimp is my favourite.
Just as every business needs a decent website, every business should have an list of people happy to receive their emails. How you go about generating this list is a wider topic but MailChimp is by far the easiest to use in my experience. If you’re on my mailing list, you’ll be experiencing MailChimp first hand. You might have noticed how tightly it’s integrated into my website but, for me, its key advantage is the speed with which I can set up new email campaigns, autoresponders (emails sent in a set sequence) and lists.
Mailchimp has a sophisticated dashboard, and nicely designed too
MailChimp operates in very strict adherence to SPAM regulations which means that your messages are all the more likely to get delivered. This also encourages you to prune your list on a regular basis to remove old or poorly responding subscribers.
They have a very generous free plan which allows you to store 2,000 email address and send 12,000 emails per month – plenty to allow you to get used to the system and make sure it’s right for you. Across my accounts I have well over 4,000 active subscribers and gaining and managing has been (almost) a joy with MailChimp. In fact, the only major criticism I have of them is that it’s impossible to move an email address from one list to another (for example from “prospects” to “customers”) although they do encourage segmenting within a list so it’s not a major problem.
Use Facebook to Comment on this Post
