Ecommercepartners.net

From the PR Canada news wire I learned today about an open source PHP ecommerce shopping cart solution that offers a fully search engine friendly catalog, content management, Google checkout, Paypal, Authorize Net, 2CO and Collect on Delivery compatibility, and even real time shipping rates from the world’s largest delivery companies such as UPS, FedEx and the US Postal Service.

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Julian Gomez knows the cigar business. From selling door-to-door to Miami gas stations to managing premium cigar warehouses, he’s done it all. In 2003, Julian began selling cigars on ebay and instantly recognized the power of the Internet to take his enterprise global.

Julian saved enough money from ebay earnings to buy a simple shopping cart. Selling cigars from his apartment, Julian focused on two fundamental principles:

• Know your customers.
• Know your cigars.

Since then, CigarPlace.biz has grown into a world class online destination for cigar connoisseurs from Wisconson to Tokyo.

In 2007, Julian realized that the future of CigarPlace.biz depended on technology that enabled his business to build relationships with customers. With so many competitors entering the market, price was no longer enough; it was time to step up and lead.

CigarPlace.biz contacted Ecommerce Partners with an idea of making a site that empowered customers to discover new cigars and provided deeper insights into the products. Julian wanted to give the kind of personal service he perfected on the streets of Miami to the online world. His ambitions required a partner who had the patience to understand his vision and the skills to execute.

Over the next six months, Ecommerce Partners worked hand-in-hand with Julian to meld his vision and knowledge with the latest web technologies. ECP provided its core ecommerce 3 engine with extensive modifications to allow easy navigation via precise, industry-specific details. The result is the new CigarPlace.biz, the most comprehensive portal for cigar sales.

Ecommerce Partners is proud to support CigarPlace.biz and Julian as they move this online industry to the next level with ongoing marketing, hosting and development support.

We have a great site, with unique features not seen in this industry and a go-forward plan to keep CigarPlace.biz as the number one location for premium cigars.

We are proud to announce the launch of the new Anthony Logistics online store. Anthony is a leader in the men’s skincare and grooming market. This is another feather in the ECommercePartners cap! Congratulations to the ECP team on another site well done and congratulations to Anthony on your new online store.

We recently upgraded a few sites to the latest version of our ecommerce platform, e-shop v3. In doing so we were able to provide www.mywrestlingroom.com and www.essentialapparel.com with some nice added features and overall, a more effective ecommerce solution. Conversions will be better with the new software, no doubt.

(note* my wrestling room was on eshop v2 and essential apparel was on marketlive)

So, as long as the budget and the business is there to justify a change for the better, shouldn’t it be a no brainer to upgrade? Sort of… One of the costs of switching to v3 was that the URL structure would be different from e-shop v2 and the marketlive engine. For anyone interested in their search engine rankings, that’s not the greatest thing in the world to hear. All a search engine has to define a webpage is its URL. They don’t call it a web address for nothing. And each page in your site has its own address, the URL. A few years ago, this might have actually been reason enough NOT to upgrade. Can you believe that? A reason so powerful that it hampered the growth of your business (losing rankings!!)?

Well, good thing today the situation is not so dire because of the wide-scale acceptance by the search engines, of standard re-directs. By using a permanent 301 re-direct, all of the old URL’s will be forwarded to the new URLs. And not only will they be re-directed, but using the 301 is in essence informing the search engines the page has been permanently moved. And that’s exactly what we did for Wrestling Room and EA.

(Using a 302 re-direct will tell the search engines the page has temporarily moved.)

If you’re interested in learning more about re-directs and how they can help you if your URLs are changing, there are several excellent resources that can be found by running a quick Google search or visiting the below list of URLs directly:

• Mcanerin Networks 301 (IIS) redirect for SEO
  
• Mcanerin Networks 301 (Apache) redirect for SEO
• High Rankings 301 re-direct thread

When it comes to Internet Solutions, Big is No Longer Better

If you are doing business on the Internet you soon learn that the only constant is change. For a long time, companies that were making big investments in their e-commerce infrastructures only felt comfortable dealing with big established companies. They felt that there was too much at stake to take a chance with smaller vendors who offer more customized solutions.

This attitude is now changing. Companies are slowly realizing that a large entrenched provider may not provide the best solutions. Yes, standardized solutions work but because they have been designed to meet the needs of a broad range of companies, without really focusing on the specific needs of any one client.

This is what happened with Essential Apparel (www.essentialapparel.com) a big online provider of women’s and men’s underwear and active wear. They started out using a big enterprise solution called Market Live (www.marketlive.com) but soon discovered that the company which was reluctant to use unified code in their site was not providing them with the bottom line results they needed.

So essential turned to Tribeca (NYC)-based E-commerce Partners, a shop that has earned a reputation as an effective marketing street fighter for its clients. With their eye on the company’s bottom line, E-commerce partners re-designed the Essential Apparel site to make it much more search engine friendly, thereby boosting rankings and significantly increasing traffic to the site. They also added enhanced e-commerce functionalities to the site.

But the key to providing the best solution for Essential Apparel and the reason they dumped Market Live for a small more active provider, is to benefit from the ongoing attention of an experienced, flexible, knowledgeable e-commerce specialist. Search engines change algorithms and companies who want the best ROI on their websites need to work with vendors who are willing to make the extra effort to provide customized, high end solutions.