A great way to earn extra cash from your Shopcreator website is to become a member of Amazon's affiliate program. Amazon has over 900,000 affiliate members that add amazon products to their own website. Every time someone buys a product from Amazon they earn up to 10% commision which is automatically paid to their bank account.

The way we have seen this used is by retailers selling one type of product adding Amazon's affiliate widgets to their website to add other linked product types. For instance Little Films (a site that sells baby videography services) has added a widget selling other popular baby products.

There are a range of widgets that can be easily set up and imbedded in your Shopcreator site by simply copying and pasting the widget text provided into any information page via the admin system.

You can find out more about Amazon Associates here.

On Wednesday June 11th between 07.00AM and 08.00AM BST PayPal will be making system improvements and as a result the site will be temporarily unavailable.

Here's what to expect during the service interruption:

• If you attempt to access the PayPal Web site (https://www.paypal.co.uk ) during the maintenance window you will receive the following message:

"The PayPal website is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance meaning that some features are currently unavailable. Site maintenance began at 07.00AM BST and is expected to last for an hour. Normal functionality will resume once the maintenance has been completed."

• This interruption in service will not impact the eBay Web site or active listings. However, PayPal payments will be unavailable during this time

• You will be unable to log into the PayPal system to check your PayPal account status or to verify payments

• Since we will also be upgrading our internal tools during this time, PayPal agents will be unable to access your account information during the maintenance window

• You will be unable to send or receive funds via PayPal payment buttons on merchant sites or directly via the PayPal site

• After the maintenance is complete, buyers and sellers will be able to interact with PayPal as they normally would

• More information can be found from the PayPal Announcement Board at http://announcements.paypal.com/gb/

An academic study from parity and Bournemouth University shows that by not using Web 2.0 you can seriously damage your businesses health

While the public seems to "get" Web 2.0 business seems to be lagging far behind. In a recent research study "Web 2.0 - More than Social Networking" , conducted by business services company Parity and Bournemouth University that looked at current levels of web 2.0 adoption and understanding among UK businesses. The survey found almost half (47.1 percent) of UK senior managers do not understand the business benefits associated with embracing web 2.0 technologies, while almost a third (32.4 percent) of IT managers lack an understanding of the capabilities of web 2.0.

The results of the survey reveal endemic misunderstanding and misperception amongst both senior managers and IT personnel that has deterred investment. Indeed, only one third of businesses have made any investment in Web 2.0 and the majority of these have done so to attain tangible benefits from enhanced content management rather than embrace the benefits of collaborative working that Web 2.0 can deliver.

As a result, for the first time, the use of professional technology at home is far outstripping that in the office. Given the much lamented information overload being experienced in offices across the UK, it is time for the IT industry to ask why so few organisations understand the role Web 2.0 and collaboration can play in transforming working practices.

One of the major fears of Web 2.0 is that it will lose you control of your IT and your business, but as the Parity study points out unless industry wakes up to Web 2.0 it will remain a consumer-only tool "at a significant cost to business" can you afford to absorb that cost?

This post came from Marcus Austin at Internet Retailing for more great articles visit them here

Being an Efficient Online Retailer

Over the past few days I have rapidly summarized the first two major areas retailers need to focus on to drive success online. The final area I'm going to cover is driving up margins from the products sold through a website. To do this a retailer will need to make sure that they have great control over the costs of sourcing and delivering goods and indeed the pricing of products on the web.

The level of sophistication ranges widely between retailers from the smallest to the largest. However, tools are available that allow any retailer to maximize their profit by managing their costs. Here are some important points to focus on:

Before you start selling online it is always good to produce a business plan and financial forecasts.Running a store online can be a simple way of getting into running your own business. Like all businesses costs need to be managed. With retailing, however, the costs involved in your business can be quite dynamic. Working out the cost to source, store, market and fulfill goods is key. It is also important to make sure that the margin you receive on each sale covers the costs to keep the lights on.

Our Transact stores are very diverse in the products they sell. The team at Shopcreator take great pleasure in seeing a number of retailers branching out into developing some really well defined propositions tailored to niche audiences. It is one of the key benefits of Transact pricing model that any customer can enter the market at no risk.

Of course these days a really unique store idea will generate good traffic from search engines. This is because a store selling t-shirts will be competing against many others whereas one selling historical memorabilia, books and...well...oddities will have very few competitors.

This is the case with My Little Bit of History which is amongst other things selling a signed copy of Terry Waites autobiography, a 95 million year old dinosaur tooth (no really) and a copy of Bono's Signature.

Here's what they say about themselves:

My Little Bit Of History is where you can see and buy a little bit of history of your very own. Through a wide range of sources we hunt down those things that aren't always much money but are always interesting to us. It amazes me what really interesting things can still be found, some of which I find incredible when I think of the history of them, or who they have been signed by or just simply what they are. This seems all the more significant somehow in todays modern disposable world. Please have a browse through and hopefully you too will be intrigued by some of the items we have got. We are a great place to maybe start a collection and most of our things make the most fantastic presents that are most certainly different and a "little bit of history"

You can see the My Little Bit of History store here.

29 April – From Get Elastic

The use of colour in delivering additional traffic might seam like an odd principle but Linda Bustos has been examining ways of using multiple colour options to boost search engine ratings and site traffic. Read more here.

24th April – Grokdotcom

One of the common reasons people abandon a purchase in the checkout is "sticker shock". If you tease customers with low prices and then hit them with high tax and delivery rates they are likely to abandon right at the final hurdle. Read more in Robert Gorell's post here.

2nd May – Practical Ecommerce

Many of our customers use Google Analytics to better understand the traffic that there site gets. Michael Stebbins has written a nice quick post on getting more out of your keywords using these tools. Read more here.

22nd April – Sitebrand

If you watched The Apprentice this week our friend Kevin Shaw might have convinced you that not being green is like the American government refusing to sign the Kyoto Agreement. With this in mind we thought we might link to Carolyn Gardner's great post on Green Shipping Options. Read more here.

29th April – Jack Loechner

Want to know what narks your customers? Well in summary: finding out products are out of stock after you have tried to buy them, payment failures, rubbish return policies and shipping information and lack of purchase confirmations. Get more detail here.