The Mobile Commerce Plug-in for AspDotNetStorefront allows online store owners to provide a full-featured mobile version of their site without having to create a new, separate site.

Our integrated platform automatically detects when a mobile device is being used and makes it look its very best.

• Full-featured - from Browse to Checkout
• Subscription-based and Affordable - Only $25 per month!
• Works on the most recent versions of ML8, ML, ML64 and Multi-Store

Learn How to Reach New Mobile Shoppers

Special offers make your customers feel valued and keep them coming back. Are you taking advantage of AspDotNetStorefront’s built-in promotional features?

Join Jo Benson as she discusses e-commerce trends on customer-based promotions and explains how to make the most of coupon codes, shipping thresholds, quantity discounts, and more in AspDotNetStorefront.

Thursday Novermber 18, 2010 9am – 10am PDT

Next time you visit a Macy's, notice that it has more than one entrance. Always. Each door consciously leads the shopper to the department where they are most likely to spend money.

We can use this knowledge to shape the landing pages on our online stores. Prepare to be amazed.

Join Jo Benson to discuss the importance of landing pages on Thursday October 28th from 9-10 am PDT.

We're proud to announce the official return of Blogs.AspDotNetStorefront.Com!

Focusing on the community, platform and success of AspDotNetStorefront users, this blog will:

• Be the focal point for product announcements, new features, and company news
• Help users and prospective users get involved with AspDotNetStorefront by spotlighting important forum posts, sharing solutions to common problems, and helping users pass along AspDotNetStorefront tips and tricks

Each week, we'll provide:

• A featured article highlighting how to get the most out of AspDotnetStorefront.  Whether it's inventory management, SEO, or design tips and suggestions.
• Product news highlighting changes and updates the platform, or the product roadmap
• FAQs, quick tips, DevNet partner profiles, and/or common support issues
• E-commerce news from around the Web that's important to AspDotNetStorefront users and other online retailers

If there's something you want to see, have an idea for a regular column, or a tip you want to share, leave a comment and let us know!

It's Sunday morning and I have just a moment's calm to take a look at the blog ...... I'll be honest and say that there is a good chance that we will start afresh this week with a whole new blog. I find some blog postings at this address that I can't stand alongside and I'd love to avoid confusion.

Let me be clear - many of these blog posts were written with the best of intent, and the content was true at the time of writing, but isn't now. See Gretchen's article of 2nd August, for example. She does a fabulous job of supporting a policy that we, the new owners, will not be prolonging. In case you haven't heard it on the street, we have revived support on version 8. We will also help anyone on earlier versions - and we'd love to be getting into debate on why we think it's probably a good idea to come a little closer to the current versions.

While we are still making key decisions about the quality and standing of all the available versions, please know that we are simply here to help. We are incredibly busy, so if you have questions that will wait a week or two, then it would be great for us to sink into the new place a little, but for all of you with burning issues, then we want to do our very best to help, so reach out. 

On Thursday 19th August (noon, Eastern) we will be hosting a webinar to talk about our immediate plans for the product, and about the energy we are bringing to our takeover. Try to listen, but if the timing is bad for you, then we will be recording and posting a copy on both the production site and the forum.

This is all I have time for today, but watch out for news of our blog plans. Once we know that we've been smart enough about a decision, then we'll share the future with you all.

Jo

SEO and the BIG Picture
 Search Engine Marketing, SEO, and Optimization are all terms thrown around in trying to get your site to rank. The nature of getting your site exposed to the right market has evolved away from just keywords. Don’t keep your head in the clouds, a well rounded online marketing plan will include search engine optimization, digital asset optimization, social media optimization, and even micromedia optimization (sometimes referred to as real time SEO). Utilizing these will make it easier for various types of search engines to index, find, and rank your content.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO has a significant impact on how your site is found, indexed, and ranked. SEO is all about refining your website in efforts to improve volume, quality of traffic, and therefore helping improve your results in major search engines. The next three optimization tactics are a great opportunity area that you may be lacking.

Digital Asset Optimization “DAO”
How does DAO differ from SEO? Digital Asset Optimization ensures that search engines pick up all of your content: videos, animation, podcasts, message boards, maps, images, and other non-text based files. Everything from your file names to meta tags are an important part of DAO, Including alternative text for your images, and clear descriptions of video and audio files.

Social Media Optimization “SMO”
What is social media optimization? It is about going outside your site and allowing easily found information to be shared and distributed amongst the community.  It is an advanced form of word of mouth advertising through the use of the web. Examples of using social media are: forums and online communities, blogs, social networks, multimedia sharing, social bookmarking and user ratings, Diggs, and RSS feeds. Choosing the ones that will create the most amount of “buzz” can be difficult. Keep your goal in mind; is it to increase conversions, industry credibility, or brand recognition traffic. Also keep your customers in mind; you don’t want to use a social media form that is not often utilized by your target customers or it will be a wasted effort. When SMO is done correctly it will make your site highly visible, help build your brand, get quicker feedback from your customers and reduce gaps between the business and the customer.

Micromedia Optimization
This is a newer term that has been tossed around as of late, which is a spin-off of social media optimization. This is essentially marketing in real time through the use of Facebook status updates, Tweets, and Linkedin updates. Evangelistic consumers like to group together in order to create new demands and trends.  Micromedia optimization allows you to capitalize on this opportunity area.

As long as there are search engines, there will always be a need for some kind of optimization, and to improve search engine visibility. Companies need to consider all the digital assets they have to work with in order to give both search engines and customers the information they are looking for in the formats they will react to best.
AspDotNetStorefront helps your site’s optimization levels with several tools. Right out of the box AspDotNetStorefront is extremely SEO friendly. URL structures right out of the box are very SEO friendly and easy to read. For example a product link may read as such; Yoursite.com/p-16-6830s-notebook-fu500es.aspx.  Which, broken down means that product number 16 is a notebook (Compaq laptop) model number 6930S-FU500ES. Store administrators can change the URL formats for products, topics, entities, etc with simple changes to the web.config file. You can even change the page’s extension (.html, .aspx, etc) if desired. In addition you can create meta information for each product, category, department, and product and entity images can be given alt text.  Another feature right out of the box is the ability to manage product ratings. Enabling ratings allows customers to leave comments on your products, which can help boost sales.  One more SEO feature is the ability to create and execute feeds to sites such as Googlebase, Amazon, and Shopzilla.com. The last AspDotNetStorefront SEO tool that helps get your site indexed more frequently is the ability to generate an XML file that can be submitted to Google/Yahoo sitemaps.  This will ensure that search engines are aware of all pages on your site. To see more information regarding SEO please refer to our online manual at: http://manual.aspdotnetstorefront.com/p-200-what-is-seo-how-can-we-help.aspx

Which AspDotNetStorefront product is right for me?
E-Commerce can be over whelming to begin with; therefore deciding which product is the right choice may be even more difficult.  Today we are going to go over the some of the big differences that may impact your buying decision when considering an AspDotNetStorefront platform.  Currently AspDotNetStorefront’s software is running on over 11,000 websites and used by some 6,000+ developers.  Additionally our licensing is a onetime purchase and there are no monthly or recurring license fees.  For a full list of our features please visit our product matrix page at: http://www.aspdotnetstorefront.com/t-features.aspx

ML Express
ML/Express is designed for a company that really wants to break into the e-Commerce industry with little startup costs.  This platform is the most cost effective option which really lowers the barrier of entry. If you are a small company with few requirements, ML/Express is a great option.  This is the perfect product if your company wants to upgrade from their archaic expensive hosted online store, or obsolete shopping cart platform. AspDotNetStorefront ML/Express is available starting at $695 and supports an easy upgrade path to the full AspDotNetStorefront ML shopping cart platform, allowing your growing business to effortlessly expand while your online sales soar.  If you are only shipping within the United States, have less than 500 products, and do not require source code for any special customizations then ML/Express is your perfect choice. 

ML
Available at $1295 ML is our flagship product and is the most feature rich shopping cart software available.  As the most popular platform that AspDotNetStorefront sells, ML paves the way for many of our other software offerings. It has the ability to support up to 250,000 products, but has no hard-coded limitations internally on the amount of products you wish to sell.  ML supports worldwide shipping, multiple languages, and multiple currencies allowing you to break into the international marketplace!  When purchasing the ML platform there is an option to purchase full source code available in VB.net and C#, allowing you to customize the software as necessary for your sites success.  If you are interested in integrating 3rd party applications please be sure to take a look at our systems integrations page at: http://www.aspdotnetstorefront.com/t-3rdpartyintegrations.aspx

ML/64
For those of you who are or planning to operate in a 64 bit environment but require the functionality of our ML platform then ML/64 is the one for you!  The advantages of operating within a 64 bit environment allow your site to utilize the full potential of your server’s processing and memory capabilities.  Feature for feature the ML and ML/64 platforms are identical, with minimal exceptions.   

Multi-Store
Using the AspDotNetStorefront Multi-Store product will give your company a huge productivity boost!  For many business reasons, a company may want to open multiple web stores that give the flexibility and power for each store to have its own unique look and feel enabling you to market products to a specific target audience.  Our Multi-Store product will empower site owners to operate multiple AspDotNetStorefront E-commerce stores and manage them by using a single backend admin console.  AspDotNetStorefront makes the administration of sites easier than ever by eliminating the need for additional overhead and costs and by automating accounting, warehousing, inventory control and reporting.  Currently available as a beta release, the Multi-Store product includes a $200.00 discount and one year of FREE continuous updates for each site license (roughly a $600.00 value!).  AspDotNetStorefront’s Multi-Store product line will greatly enhance your brand image that reaches and engages its prospective customers.

Welcome to the AspDotNetStorefront Sales Team Blog! We look forward to bringing you exciting topics each week to enrich your knowledge and assist in your decision-making processes! As our inaugural post, AspDotNetStorefront would like to introduce our sales team members.

Michael Rahel - Technical Sales Engineer

Hello and welcome my fellow readers! My name is Michael Rahel. I’m the Technical Sales Engineer at AspDotNetStorefront. My co-workers said I could go with the title “Senior” Technical Sales Engineer if I’d like (since I’ve worked here the longest) but I don’t really think it fits properly since I’m the youngest member of the sales team!  I’ve been with the company for almost 1 ½ years. Before working here, I was a member of the Best Buy Geek Squad.  I’ve been obsessed with technology ever since I can remember but this job is my first taste of ecommerce and software development—and I must say I love it!

In my spare time, I’m an avid photographer (we’ll say “semi-professional” for the sake of this blog post). I’ve been an active member of Boy Scouts of America since first grade, and I am an Eagle Scout. I love to spend time outdoors – camping, hiking, and fishing are some of my favorite pastimes!

Well, I’ll keep this short; I don’t want to bore you.  I’m sure over time you’ll get to know all about your resident (“Senior”) Technical Sales Engineer at AspDotNetStorefront (me, of course).

Molly Perdion - Sales Engineer

In a few phrases, I am fun loving, family oriented and hard working! For close to 10 years now I have dedicated my professional life to the Technology Services Industry. Some of my past professional experience includes handling everything from cellular telephone sales and management, and project management, as well as sales and training of complex, multi-location network and VOIP installations.   It is easy to have a passion for technology and enjoy the constant transformations is undergoes. I have a thirst for knowledge and technology can definitely quench that thirst! Working with AspDotNetStorefront has added a new level of excitement to my technology repertoire as it adds E-commerce into the mix.  I absolutely love the idea that the internet and E-Commerce allows anyone and everyone to go after their dream of becoming a business owner and truly becoming a success! 

In my free time I enjoy spending time with my family and friends.  In addition, I am also a very active member of the National MS Society and Dress for Success Worldwide.  I do everything that I can to help those organizations achieve their fundraising goals to help and support those who truly depend on them and their services.

Brian Lotrean - Sales Engineer

I am a newbie that became a member of the AspDotNetStorefront’s team in March 2010, and so far it has been GREAT!  I am learning new things on a daily basis, and am having fun with the projects that I have been given.  Molly and I will soon be working on several videos that will cover installation and setup and along with training and functionality.  Prior to working here I was working at Circuit City, doing technology sales.   Ever since the days of dial up internet I have been intrigued by how technology, computers, and the Internet work.  Since then I have reformatted my computer several hundred times.  When I am away you can find me the garage working on my dirt bikes which often times leaves me scratching my head on why there were so many extra parts.  Additionally I am an avid outdoorsman and enjoy fishing, boating, camping, and hiking.  I look forward to working and learning with all of you.  

Our AspDotNetStorefront Sales Team looks forward to providing you with interesting blogs each week for your reading pleasure!

The AspDotNetStorefront Sales Staff