You could spend a lot of valuable time searching for the tools you need to support your online business.

Luckily I’ve already done the work for you!

Here are some excellent tools that I use in my day-to-day work and also implement for clients. I have had experience with all of them and I’ve only included systems that I find work well. I’ve tried others too, but have been less impressed. I will be adding more to this list as time goes by and I discover more useful tools to share with you.

If you’d like any of these systems implemented in conjunction with your website, do contact me.

1. Hosted shopping cart.

1Shoppingcart is a shopping cart system that means you don’t need to install any software on your own server. Instead, you set up your product list through your browser, and 1Shoppingcart generates "Add to cart’ links for you. It is particularly good for people who want to sell digital products as the files can be securely hosted and delivered from your 1Shoppingcart account instead of your own server, saving bandwidth if it’s an issue. In addition to some very helpful reporting tools, 1Shoppingcart also includes powerful e-marketing features which you can use on their own or with other systems such as Google Adwords and Aweber. For more information click the image below.

2. Email marketing.

Like 1Shoppingcart, Aweber concentrates on one single area and does it extremely well. This email system allows you to build opt-in forms for your website, set up autoresponders (messages that are triggered automatically when someone signs up) and broadcast messages to one or more of your email subscriber lists, for example a newsletter, or to promote special offers. It’s a scaleable system so you can start your list small and then scale up when you reach more than 10000 subscribers.

Here are some of the latest tips from Aweber:

3. Web conferencing.

Megameeting shows a lot of potential, particularly if for a group of people who are in different locations but need to meet often. It’s ideal for avoiding travel to meetings, especially if all the attendees will be using the system regularly to get used to the setup. Although what you have to do to take part in a conference is not hard, there was a little bit of setting up to do which caused problems with one of the older machines we used – make sure you meet the system requirements.

* MegaMeeting is a browser based system that requires no downloads or complicated installations
* MegaMeeting runs on all operating systems and with all browsers although the recording software they use at the moment will only run on Windows, not Mac. They claim that a Mac version is imminent.
* Video Conferencing with MegaMeeting allows up to 16 simultaneous video windows. This is a video-centric conferencing system. Do bear in mind that you may have local limitations on this depending on your broadband speeds and contention ratios – in other words if you or any other attendees are too far away from the telephone exchange, you may have to resort to audio conferencing.
* MegaMeeting is easy to use and extremely powerful, delivering a service that can be used by thousands of small, medium and large organizations and businesses
* It has low start-up prices allowing even individuals and the smallest organizations to use it
* High-end users can have a "private label" version and offer the service without the MegaMeeting.com logo or identification

Skype

Skype is an excellent tool for small-scale conferencing and is perfect for collaborating in small teams. It works very well one-to-one for video-conferencing and even sharing a desktop so both parties can see the same thing together – perfect for comparing notes on a project for example.