If you’re interested in setting up Zen Cart to sell downloadable products (mp3’s, e-books, etc), I highly recommend taking a look at the Downloadable Products in Zen Cart by Adam at I Make Websites. It is very easy to understand and you should have your downloadable products ready to go very quickly and painlessly.

As always, feel free to contact us regarding our Zen Cart services.

• Small Business Summit 2007
  Tuesday, February 13, 2007
  Crowne Plaza Hotel, New York City
• The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines
• Essential Tools Every Blogger Should Have
  Good suggestions in general, but…
  • Most laptops on the market will do (we personally recommend AMD 64 based machines), just stay away from the “crippled” chips out there (if it is a $500 USD laptop, there’s probably a reason for that)
  • Unless you’re doing a lot of design work (coding, graphics, video, audio, etc), two monitors would be overkill
  • Adobe Photoshop is an excellent product, but if you only need to edit photos, GIMP (open source, GPL) should do fine and there are other free or cheaper options out there
  • Of the WYSIWYG editors, Adobe/Macromedia Dreamweaver is at the head of the class, but give Nvu (open source, MPL) a spin first to see if that meets your needs (and budget)
  • Most digital cameras on the market these days will suffice, but the Canon DSLR’s are quite nice if you have that sort of budget and want to carry around a large camera
• Want People to Read Your Blog? Go With a Full Text Feed
• Zune Goes Discount, Contributes to $289 Million Loss for Microsoft
  Does any Microsoft product these days make an initial profit?
• Web Design Contracts: Why Bother
• 25 Tips To Optimize Your Blog For Readers & Search Engines
• WordPress Plugins: Bible Verse of the Day, Our Todo List & Share This 1.4

The Dilute the Magic Blog has been launched and is going to focus on making sense of e-commerce by offering anecdotes, tips and reviews of the available e-commerce options. The blog will be administered by Watershed Studio and will be accepting submissions and questions from readers. If there’s something that you’re curious about or have a submission, please contact us.

Lately we’ve been getting a little disgusted with eBay’s antics, specifically towards their eBay Stores users.

Here’s their latest bit on nonsense…

…(Core listings — auction-style, auction-style with Buy It Now, and Fixed Price) are the foundation of eBay…they account for about 91% of the gross merchandise value sold on eBay.com

Store Inventory listings now comprise about 83% of active eBay.com listings…(and) current Store Inventory insertion fees don’t cover eBay’s costs for hosting them.

These Store Inventory format insertion fees take effect Aug. 22, 2006:

Starting Price 	   New Insertion Fee 	Current Fee
$0.01 -- 24.99 	   5¢ 	                2¢
$25.00 and higher  10¢ 	                2¢

Some Store Inventory format final value fees also will also increase, effective Aug. 22, 2006:

Selling Price 	   New Final Value Fee 	Current Fee
$0.01 -- 25.00 	       10% 	         8%
$25.01 -- 100.00        7%               5%
$100.01 -- 1,000.00 	5% (no change) 	 5%
$1,000.01 and higher 	3% (no change) 	 3%

…the best way to display Store Inventory listings on the site…is, when a buyer’s search returns 30 or less core listings, we display up to 30 Store Inventory listings.

…starting in about a month, we’ll also include an unlimited number of Store Inventory listings after all matching core listings, when the buyer clicks the Buy It Now listings tab at the top of every search results page. When the buyer hasn’t selected this option, eBay.com will display Store Inventory listings along with core listings as described above.

So, to paraphrase, eBay is saying, “Good riddance eBay store owners. We’ve crunched the numbers and you’re not worth our time and efforts. We hope to gain back the auction listings that we’ve lost over the years.”

One huge thing that we’ve noticed over the years is that many people don’t want to hassle with auctions to possibly save a few dollars. Many people want to find what they’re after, buy it and have it in their possession within a week of purchase. From what eBay has been saying, it would appear that they are oblivious to this fact.

In addition to this major issue, in the past week or so eBay decided to not allow users to use Google’s Checkout as a method of payment in an effort to strong-arm people into using eBay’s comparable (and more expensive) PayPal service (tough they deny that of course).

In the near future we will be closing our eBay store. That may be a few months down the road as we explore our options, but eBay will be getting a whole lot less of our money in the coming months and we will not be suggesting eBay Stores as on option for clients. (We will stick with eBay’s Skype service until they give us a good reason not to.) From what’s out there right now we’re leaning towards a Zen Cart installation even though it’s a little bloated and doesn’t function exactly how we’d like, but it does offer key features that we need, is reliable and is free (plus domain and hosting fees of course).

While there are options out there for e-commerce shopping cart services, most are not very user friendly and/or affordable at an entry level plus we don’t know of any that are very well publicized. If someone came out with an affordable, easy to use and well publicized shopping cart system they’d be setup to make a fortune if they did it right. If someone wants to consider offering VC for such a service, let us know.

For a while now I’ve been trying to figure out why certain pages which link to CSS refuse to load the CSS file in Firefox and Netscape.

After searching Google to no avail, I posted to a forum about the issue and Bob quickly found the root of the problem. My server was treating the mime type as html, not css like it should.

Since the problem wasn’t the link (which is setup as text/css) I had to create an .htaccess file and put the following line of code in:

AddType text/css .css

I uploaded it and that did the trick.