By Karon Thackston © 2009, All Rights Reserved

A recent article found in Internet Retailer revealed that 85% of consumers plan to shop online this holiday season.  Sixty-nine percent plan to make holiday purchases online.  The survey goes on to say that 57% of shoppers are planning to use the Internet to “compare different retailers to find the best price.”

This comes as no surprise during a time of economic upheaval.  But is your ecommerce site ready to convert these shoppers?  What if you offer the same price as many other retailers?  Or even a higher price?  Are dollar signs the only card consumers are willing to play this holiday season?  No.

During an economic challenge, the focus isn’t necessarily just on price alone.  What shoppers want is value.  Sure, it’s an old-school term, but it still holds just as true today as it did in the ‘70s and even the ‘30s.

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I don’t mean to get carried away with the title of this post, but since reading John Maxwell’s book, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, I’m convinced that one of the key success factors to being a successful business owner is becoming a better leader.

Here’s the good news – becoming a better leader is a learned behavior, just like most other skills we learn.

So, what exactly is this thing we call leadership? What does it look like?

According to John Maxwell “leadership is influence – nothing more, nothing less”. Leadership may come in all shapes and sizes, but it only comes from influence and that can’t be mandated by a title, position or knowledge. It must be earned. The only thing a title can buy is a little time – either to increase your level of influence with others or to undermine it.

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Sell Downloads Guide

Sell Downloads Guide is a complete course, designed especially for beginners who are interested in selling digital downloads and setting up their own online business from scratch. From product creation to product security, web designing to uploading, creating a “Buy Now” button to delivering the product, writing an ebook to marketing, this course covers everything you need to finally start selling digital downloads online. There is no such thing as ‘get rich in one night’ and, thus, this course teaches real and practical techniques you must have in your possession to succeed as an internet business owner.

Click here to visit SellDownloadsGuide.com

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2Checkout’s development staff has been dilligently working to create a back office application programming interface (API). This API will help vendors automate both the account and order management process through either their own custom development or through third party software that supports the API.

When used in conjunction with our Instant Notification System and CGI purchase parameters, the API will enable the creation of sophisticated and powerful order management systems.

We are currently conducting a private beta for the first 10 API calls. If you are a 2Checkout vendor or a software developer who would like to participate in this beta program, please send an email to techsupport@2co.com that includes the following information:

• Your Name
• Your 2CO Supplier ID Number(s)
• Your Preferred Email Address

If you are a third party software developer, we would like to know the name, and anything else you would like to tell us about, of the product you develop.

After confirming the submitted account information, we will begin contacting those selected to participate, in the coming weeks.

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KnowledgeBase Manager Pro

KnowledgeBase Manager Pro is web based knowledge base software. It is commonly used as internal knowledge base for sharing of articles, white papers, and guidelines, as knowledge base for customer self-support, as FAQ software or documentation software for sharing user manuals, troubleshooting information and user guides. It’s never been so easy to share information between staff, partners, and customers. Advanced permissions system enables everyone to contribute to the knowledgebase and at the same time helps to keep information well-organized and consistent.

KnowledgeBase Manager Pro includes lots of must-have features: LDAP (SSO with Active Directory Integration), powerful search, searchable attachments, publication to several sites at once, unlimited entries and categories, active response system, WYSIWYG HTML editor, related articles, multiple users, groups and permissions, custom styles, comments, reports, statistics, RSS syndication, email subscriptions, Dashboard for everyday tasks, article version history, backup and undelete functions, SEO tools, Google Gears support and much more other useful features!

Knowledge base software is available as installation package for your website or hosting and also as service hosted on your servers.

Click here to visit Web-Site-Scripts.com

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