Productivity Increase on Ebay with FastFox

These days it's impossible to go anywhere without running into someone who's bought or sold something on Ebay. At any given time there are over 100 million active auction listings and each one of those was added by a seller. That's a lot of hours of work if you have several items you are selling on Ebay. I have been a seller on Ebay, and the biggest annoyance and time waster for me was repeatedly typing similar Ebay listings. Or at least it was until I found FastFox.

FastFox is a text expander for Windows or Mac. A text expander, or textexpander, is a form of shorthand software that allows you to paste a chunk of text by typing in a predefined shortcut term. This is much more valuable than a normal copy and paste feature because it can hold many shortcuts each with it's own text value associated with it. How a typing expander works is you set your shortcut term, then set your expanded text in FastFox, and once you type the shortcut term in any browser or program you have instant text conversion to the expanded text.

Now you must be asking "How can this help me to be faster when listing on Ebay?" Well, if you're like me you've dealt with listing hundreds of similar products at one time. Repeatedly typing similar text into my listing software feels like a waste of time. What I like to do is create FastFox shortcuts for all of my auction elements that are the same or remain very similar, and then make small edits as needed. It has quadrupled my productivity while listing.

My example deals with selling baseball cards. I would list a couple hundred baseball cards on Ebay at one time. All of them were from the same year and all of them were similar quality of cards. An auction title read something like: "1961 Topps - Harmon Killebrew #80 - Excellent Condition." The only things that would change in each new auction was the player's name and the card number. With FastFox I could create a basic shortcut that said: "1961 Topps - # - Excellent Condition" and fill in the other information for each card. As soon as I typed in my shortcut, "TITLE," I had most of it finished.

Where this really picked things up was in the category and description of the auction. All of my auctions were in the same category, so filling that out was as simple as typing one shortcut. It really helped to not have to go through and find the correct category. It also eliminated me putting a few cards in the wrong category. Lastly and most important was the description. No more Description Builder! With FastFox I could create a description one time and simply enter the shortcut and add in the player's name and card number. This new way of listing products really sped up my Ebay auction listing process and ended in higher profits over a shorter timeframe.

Learn more about FastFox typing expander on the NCH Software website.

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The End of Accounting Nightmares

Guest post by John Chellan of ISOBE Soft Pvt. Ltd.

I am a small software business owner with lots of experience in software development, but little real knowledge of accounting. Sure, I have done my taxes online, but had never balanced a balance sheet or did any type of journal entry work. Honestly, I’d rather not think about accounting, and just spend my time being more productive developing software and meeting clients.

But at the end of every month, I knew it was inevitable that all those transactions needed to be somehow entered into Excel and create some kind of crude income statement. That was all I could do, and that is all I knew how to do. In the back of my mind, I realized there is was lot more information in those numbers, and I needed either a professional accountant or software to get to that data. So I called a few accountants. Ouch, they were expensive! Next, I tried the trial versions of the two most popular, very expensive accounting programs and I couldn’t figure out what to do—and trust me I spent days trying to figure out what I was doing. Then I tried some free programs off the internet, and they were just silly with no good reports and user interfaces that looked like they came out of the Stone Age of programming. Almost at the verge of going back to Excel, I ran across Express Accounts.

I was skeptical at first and didn’t expect anything different from what I had seen from the trials of the other software. Well let me tell you, I was pleasantly surprised. First of all, Express Accounts was easy to install and quick, too. The interface was broken down in such a manner that one only needs to understand how the sales and purchase process works, and how to enter in expenses. The interface is quite user friendly and intuitive. The wealth of reports was the big thing that really impressed me about the software. Setting up the electronic invoicing and purchase ordering system was also very easy.

I have been using this software for 6 months now, looking for something to go wrong. The reality is, the more I use it, the more I become accustomed to its wealth of functionality. I really think this is one of the best cost-saving tools for small businesses that can’t afford to put up a professional accounting staff and need to streamline the accounting process and produce business data on the fly. Express Accounts has made the end of the month a stress free time, and now I spend my nights dreaming of growing my business.

John Chellan founded ISOBE in 2009. ISOBE started as a humble English language training center in Tamil Nadu and by 2010 had evolved into an educational consultant for colleges, schools and business. In 2011, ISOBE became ISOBE Soft Pvt. Ltd; and began to develop its own home grown software for small to large businesses.

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New Mac Point of Sale Software

Our business team has been working to bring our popular business software to the Mac in addition to Windows, so that businesses have more quality and economical software solutions available to them. The Mac release of Copper Point of Sale Software is just one more step in that direction, providing an easy streamlined retail checkout software application to make the checkout process quicker and more accurate for both your customers and your records, no matter which platform you prefer.

The Copper POS system works a like a cash register. You enter in the products you carry as well as any coupons or promotions that can easily be selected and applied to a purchase by the cashier at the time of check out. Using Copper will help eliminate errors in product pricing and tax calculation, and will generate customizable receipts for your customers. So if you run a retail store and you are a Mac user (or even a Windows user), you will want to take a look at how Copper Point of Sale Software can help you record your sales transactions.

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Hitting the Software Nail on the Head

How many shirts do you need to try on before you find one you want to buy? How many cars do take for a test drive when shopping for a new car? And how many pieces of software do you download and try before you find one to solve your problem? Results from a study of software vendors show only about 1 sale is made for every hundred trials that are downloaded, which is a remarkably low number when you think how many programs people must end up trying or how often they just give up without finding what they want. In the blog post Why Hammers Sell Better Than Your Software, Bob Walsh concludes that the reason there are so many people walking away is that it is simply too hard to figure out how to use the program and they give up.

His suggestion to software companies is something that NCH has been striving for for years - make users immediately comfortable with your applications. Simplify things: provide quick start guides and tutorials or screenscasts to help get the user get through the first few minutes of uncertainty when they don't know what to do with the software they have just downloaded. We have long focused on the first three minutes of a user's experience when using our software, trying to remove as many road blocks as possible so that you can start using the program immediately. Our range of video tutorials and documentation resources helps those who prefer to see how it all works before they dive in. We are doing our best to make sure that when you download our software you will find that the shoe fits and you don't need to worry about breaking it in.

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Software-Buying Decisions

This article on Organic Search Driving Software-Buying Decisions caught my eye since I have a continuing interest in Software Buying Trends. Some of the key findings from the research done by iPrsopect in their study on the effects of organic search, paid search and online display advertising were:

• 37% increased likelihood of visiting a website
  
• 30% increased likelihood of purchasing a software product
  
• 14% lift in brand recall with exposures to both organic and paid search results
  
• No change was seen in brand favorability based on organic results
  

Familiarity with a brand name has long been looked as important when making purchasing decisions. People tend to select things they are more familiar with, associating familiarity with reliability, so I have to agree that it is interesting that increased exposure didn't seem to have any impact on brand favorability. For a closer look at the research and findings see the full report on iProspect,Real Branding Implications of Digital Media - an SEM, SEO, & Online Display Advertising Study .

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Software On-Demand

I recently finished reading The On-Demand Brand by Rick Mathieson, which takes a look at how our culture has become increasingly demanding, seeking instant gratification. From everything from fast food to television, we are no longer willing to wait for things. While Mathieson points to Burger King and their "have it your way" campaign in 1970's as a starting point for this trend, technology and the internet have only increased our need for having things the way we want them on our own schedule. Mathieson goes on to examine ten rules that marketers should know in this on-demand world, all relating to how companies need to shift their thinking to be in line with the expectations consumers have.

The software industry has seen this shift too. We've talked before about software buying trends and the percentage of people who buy their software in a retail store versus purchasing online. It used to be the only way to get software was to get the box with several floppy drives or CDs inside to install from, and it could be a rather time consuming process. Now, you can download and install software in fraction of the time. You don't really need to make plans in advance about your software needs; if you come across a need you can download a software solution on-demand.

NCH Software has adapted to this on-demand mentality quite well. We spend a lot of time trying to improve the usability of our programs so that a user can have the software up and running in three minutes or less, catering to this high-speed demand. Most of our products are under 1 MB in size, so the download time is negligible. We also have a wide range of products that are easily integrated, making it easier for customers to customize a software solution to meet their needs by picking and choosing only the exact products and features that they are looking for. All so you can "have it your way" with software on-demand.

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Software Buying Trends

Earlier this year, LifeHacker posted a wonderful info graphic depicting data from the US Census Bureau comparing how many sales are being made online versus in retail stores across a number of categories.


I found the results of What People Buy Online vs. in Stores fascinating. I'd love to see something that showed trending over time, so I'll have to keep my eyes open for results in years to come. As the world becomes increasingly more connected online, I imagine these numbers will continue to shift in favor of making purchases online.

I did find the software results a little surprising. There is nearly a 50/50 split between computer hardware and software purchased online and at retail stores. I would have expected a larger percentage of purchases in this category to be made online, similar to what is seen with other electronics.

I imagine consumers perceive software products as more legitimate or reliable when seen inside retail stores because they fear online products come from fly-by-night businesses that will be gone tomorrow, or maybe consumers don’t feel comfortable buying something so intangible. On the other hand, consumers who do buy online recognize the ease and immediacy of being able to download an application and have a solution instantly. For example, the software utilities we provide at NCH Software download and install, in most cases, in under a minute. That means you can install a program like Prism Video Converter to convert a troublesome movie file that won’t play on your computer before you could so much as make it out your driveway to go to the store in search of a solution.

Until late last year, 100% of NCH Software sales were made online. We are still new to the retail market and our retail presence is still actively growing, so I am curious to see where the split will be in our overall software sales once we are more firmly established in retail stores. Shoppers in the U.S. can currently find Golden Records, Express Invoice as well as software suites of our audio, video and burning software utilities in stores, with additional products including dictation/transcription software, Inventoria, WavePad, VideoPad, and FlexiServer also being added to the mix. Will we eventually see half our sales being made through retail stores, or will retail sales settle at a lower percentage as more customers migrate to online purchasing? I guess only time will tell.

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