E-commerce websites are the ideal junction of buyers and sellers. Businesses and sellers now don’t need to worry about how to expand their products and services to the maximum audience as websites are accessible beyond boundaries and customers can also buy their choice of products by placing an order from anywhere at any time.The craze of e-commerce websites has led to the rise of a challenging situation among the developers to choose from thousands of e-commerce platforms available in the market. The primary condition of an online store is to develop the proper functionality to make the site user-friendly.Among so many options available in the market, developers are in praise for two most trending platforms Shopify and Magento for developing online retail websites.Let’s focus on some in-depth characteristics of these two platforms that make them unique among others.ShopifyAdvantages:
• Shopify is considered as the most reliable e-commerce website for building an easy to use online retail website.
• Shopify offers easy coding in HTML and CSS.
• Website built on Shopify platform is user-friendly with easy drag and drop interface and many such simple features that offer the user a seamless user experience.
• Shopify powered e-commerce sites offer the customer uncomplicated experience in buying and checking out.
• Shopify takes few minutes to set up a complete e-commerce store.
• The platform is ideal for non-technical people and small businesses as it is a hosted platform one don’t need to update the modules or worrying about the technical complications.
• With the simple interface, Shopify offers the retailers to easily create and manage categories, to add products without causing any major complications.
• For SEO optimization Shopify is the ideal among all other platforms in the market. It offers the SEO professionals to edit ‘title’, ‘tags’, ‘meta description’, ‘pages’ etc.
• Shopify offers 24*7 active customer support. Customers with issues can reach the support team anytime through e-mail, chat, and phones.
• Retailers also get guided by Shopify to keep their website in a good form.Disadvantages:
• Though Shopify offers more than thousand themes and templates but the price range of premium theme is quite high.
• The advanced plan of Shopify though provides the retailers to make promotions and offers, the basic plan does not support discount and sales.MagentoAdvantages:
• Magento is ideal for tech-savvy online retailers for creating unlimited opportunities.
• Magento offers the retailers to manage the servers on their own where they can make changes according to the requirement.
• Magento offers the most cost-effective options in choosing themes and templates which are quite a user- friendly and responsive to any designs.
• The basic version of Magento helps in making better sales by offering cross-selling, up-selling and product comparison features.
• Magento is extremely SEO optimized.
• Magento is ideal for large businesses and requires a one-time investment on server and store development.Disadvantages:
• For non-technical people choosing Magento is a total thumb down as the platform is not that user- friendly.
• Magento is free but one may have to bear extra cost for the plug-ins in addition to paying monthly fees to the hosting provider.
• The major drawbacks of Magento are the lack of active customer support system. One may find it difficult to resolve technical issues or may have to partner with a Magento forum or may have to solve the problem on their own.Developing an attractive and user-friendly e-commerce website will always be the priority for the developers and engineers and choosing the right platform is the ultimate key to whooping success in online retail business.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Base Tendriling Travel Expenses
As business travel expenses nose upward, companies are realizing that better cost-management techniques can make a differenceUS. corporate travel expenses rocketed to more than $143 billion in 1994, according to American Express’ most recent survey on business travel management. Private-sector employers spend an estimated $2,484 per employee on travel and entertainment, a 17 percent increase over the past four years.Corporate T&E costs, now the third-largest controllable expense behind sales and data-processing costs, are under new scrutiny. Corporations are realizing that even a savings of 1 percent or 2 percent can translate into millions of dollars added to their bottom line.Savings of that order are sure to get management’s attention, which is a requirement for this type of project. Involvement begins with understanding and evaluating the components of T&E management in order to control and monitor it more effectively.Hands-on management includes assigning responsibility for travel management, implementing a quality-measurement system for travel services used, and writing and distributing a formal travel policy. Only 64 percent of U.S. corporations have travel policies.Even with senior management’s support, the road to savings is rocky-only one in three companies has successfully instituted an internal program that will help cut travel expenses, and the myriad aspects of travel are so overwhelming, most companies don’t know where to start. “The industry of travel is based on information,” says Steven R. Schoen, founder and CEO of The Global Group Inc. “Until such time as a passenger actually sets foot on the plane, they’ve [only] been purchasing information.”If that’s the case, information technology seems a viable place to hammer out those elusive, but highly sought-after, savings. “Technological innovations in the business travel industry are allowing firms to realize the potential of automation to control and reduce indirect [travel] costs,” says Roger H. Ballou, president of the Travel Services Group USA of American Express. “In addition, many companies are embarking on quality programs that include sophisticated process improvement and reengineering efforts designed to substantially improve T&E management processes and reduce indirect costs.”As companies look to technology to make potential savings a reality, they can get very creative about the methods they employ.The Great LevelerCentralized reservation systems were long the exclusive domain of travel agents and other industry professionals. But all that changed in November 1992 when a Department of Transportation ruling allowed the general public access to systems such as Apollo and SABRE. Travel-management software, such as TripPower and TravelNet, immediately sprang up, providing corporations insight into where their T&E dollars are being spent.The software tracks spending trends by interfacing with the corporation’s database and providing access to centralized reservation systems that provide immediate reservation information to airlines, hotels and car rental agencies. These programs also allow users to generate computerized travel reports on cost savings with details on where discounts were obtained, hotel and car usage and patterns of travel between cities. Actual data gives corporations added leverage when negotiating discounts with travel suppliers.”When you own the information, you don’t have to go back to square one every time you decide to change agencies,” says Mary Savovie Stephens, travel manager for biotech giant Chiron Corp.Sybase Inc., a client/server software leader with an annual T&E budget of more than $15 million, agrees. “Software gives us unprecedented visibility into how employees are spending their travel dollars and better leverage to negotiate with travel service suppliers,” says Robert Lerner, director of credit and corporate travel services for Sybase Inc. “We have better access to data, faster, in a real-time environment, which is expected to bring us big savings in T&E. Now we have control over our travel information and no longer have to depend exclusively on the agencies and airlines.”The cost for this privilege depends on the volume of business. One-time purchases of travel-management software can run from under $100 to more than $125,000. Some software providers will accommodate smaller users by selling software piecemeal for $5 to $12 per booked trip, still a significant savings from the $50 industry norm per transaction.No More TicketsPaperless travel is catching on faster than the paperless office ever did as both service providers and consumers work together to reduce ticket prices for business travelers. Perhaps the most cutting-edge of the advances is “ticketless” travel, which almost all major airlines are testing.In the meantime, travel providers and agencies are experimenting with new technologies to enable travelers to book travel services via the Internet, e-mail and unattended ticketing kiosks. Best Western International, Hyatt Hotels and several other major hotel chains market on the Internet. These services reduce the need for paper and offer better service and such peripheral benefits as increased efficiency, improved tracking of travel expenses and trends, and cost reduction.Dennis Egolf, CFO of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Louisville, Ky., realized that the medical center’s decentralized location, a quarter-mile from the hospital, made efficiency difficult. “We were losing production time and things got lost,” he says. “Every memo had to be hand-carried for approval, and we required seven different copies of each travel order.” As a result, Egolf tried an off-the-shelf, paper-reduction software package designed for the federal government.The software allows the hospital to manage travel on-line, from tracking per-diem allowances and calculating expenses to generating cash advance forms and authorizing reimbursement vouchers. The software also lets the hospital keep a running account of its travel expenses and its remaining travel budget.”Today, for all practical purposes, the system is paperless,” says Egolf. The software has helped the hospital reduce document processing time by 93 percent. “The original goal focused on managing employee travel without paper,” he says. “We have achieved that goal, in part due to the efforts of the staff and in part due to the accuracy of the software.”With only a $6,000 investment, the hospital saved $70 each employee trip and saved almost half of its $200,000 T&E budget through the paper-reduction program.Out ThereConsolidation of corporate travel arrangements by fewer agencies has been a growing trend since 1982. Nearly three out of four companies now make travel plans for their business locations through a single agency as opposed to 51 percent in 1988. Two major benefits of agency consolidation are the facilitation of accounting and T&E budgeting, as well as leverage in negotiating future travel discounts.A major technological advance that allows this consolidation trend to flourish is the introduction of satellite ticket printers (STPs). Using STPs enables a travel agency to consolidate all operations to one home office, and still send all necessary tickets to various locations instantly via various wire services. As the term implies, the machinery prints out airline tickets on-site immediately, eliminating delivery charges.For London Fog, STPs are a blessing. London Fog’s annual T&E budget of more than $15 million is split equally between its two locations in Eldersburg, Md., and New York City. Each location purchases the same number of tickets, so equal access to ticketing from their agency is a must. With an STP in their two locations, the company services both offices with one agency in Baltimore. Each office has access to immediate tickets and still manages to save by not having to pay courier and express mail charges that can range up to $15 for each of the more than 500 tickets each purchases annually.Conde Nast Publications’ annual T&E budget of more than $20 million is allocated among its locations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Detroit. Since 1994, travel arrangements have been handled by a centralized agency, Advanced Travel Management in New York City, by installing an STP in each of these five locations. In addition to increased efficiency due to consolidation, Conde Nast now has the ability to change travel plans at a moment’s notice and have new tickets in hand instantly.The real benefit is that the machines are owned and maintained by the travel agency., so there is no cost to the company. Due to the major expense involved, however, STPs remain an option only for major ticket purchasers. “STPs are a viable option in this process for any location that purchases more than $500,000 per year in tickets,” says Shoen.As airfare averages 43 percent of any company’s T&E expenses, savings obtainable through the various uses of technology have become dramatic. For example, the ability of corporations to collect and analyze their own travel trends has led to the creation of net-fare purchasing-negotiating a price between a corporation and an airline to purchase tickets that does not include the added expenses of commissions, overrides, transaction fees, agency transaction fees and other discounts.Although most major U.S. carriers publicly proclaim that they don’t negotiate corporate discounts below published market fares, the American Express survey on business travel management found that 38 percent of U.S. companies had access to, or already had implemented, negotiated airline discounts. The availability and mechanics of these arrangements vary widely by carrier.What’s the Price?Fred Swaffer, transportation manager for Hewlett-Packard and a strong advocate of the net-pricing system, has pioneered the concept of fee-based pricing with travel-management companies under contract with H-P. He states that H-P, which spends more than $528 million per year on T&E, plans to have all air travel based on net-fare pricing. “At the present time, we have several net fares at various stages of agreement,” he says. “These fares are negotiated with the airlines at the corporate level, then trickle down to each of our seven geographical regions.”Frank Kent, Western regional manager for United Airlines, concurs: “United Airlines participates in corporate volume discounting, such as bulk ticket purchases, but not with net pricing. I have yet to see one net-fare agreement that makes sense to us. We’re not opposed to it, but we just don’t understand it right now.”Kent stresses, “Airlines should approach corporations with long-term strategic relationships rather than just discounts. We would like to see ourselves committed to a corporation rather than just involved.”As business travel expenses nose upward, companies are realizing that better cost-management techniques can make a difference.US. corporate travel expenses rocketed to more than $143 billion in 1994, according to American Express’ most recent survey on business travel management. Private-sector employers spend an estimated $2,484 per employee on travel and entertainment, a 17 percent increase over the past four years.Corporate T&E costs, now the third-largest controllable expense behind sales and data-processing costs, are under new scrutiny. Corporations are realizing that even a savings of 1 percent or 2 percent can translate into millions of dollars added to their bottom line.Savings of that order are sure to get management’s attention, which is a requirement for this type of project. Involvement begins with understanding and evaluating the components of T&E management in order to control and monitor it more effectively.Hands-on management includes assigning responsibility for travel management, implementing a quality-measurement system for travel services used, and writing and distributing a formal travel policy. Only 64 percent of U.S. corporations have travel policies.Even with senior management’s support, the road to savings is rocky-only one in three companies has successfully instituted an internal program that will help cut travel expenses, and the myriad aspects of travel are so overwhelming, most companies don’t know where to start. “The industry of travel is based on information,” says Steven R. Schoen, founder and CEO of The Global Group Inc. “Until such time as a passenger actually sets foot on the plane, they’ve [only] been purchasing information.”If that’s the case, information technology seems a viable place to hammer out those elusive, but highly sought-after, savings. “Technological innovations in the business travel industry are allowing firms to realize the potential of automation to control and reduce indirect [travel] costs,” says Roger H. Ballou, president of the Travel Services Group USA of American Express. “In addition, many companies are embarking on quality programs that include sophisticated process improvement and reengineering efforts designed to substantially improve T&E management processes and reduce indirect costs.”As companies look to technology to make potential savings a reality, they can get very creative about the methods they employ.The Great LevelerCentralized reservation systems were long the exclusive domain of travel agents and other industry professionals. But all that changed in November 1992 when a Department of Transportation ruling allowed the general public access to systems such as Apollo and SABRE. Travel-management software, such as TripPower and TravelNet, immediately sprang up, providing corporations insight into where their T&E dollars are being spent.The software tracks spending trends by interfacing with the corporation’s database and providing access to centralized reservation systems that provide immediate reservation information to airlines, hotels and car rental agencies. These programs also allow users to generate computerized travel reports on cost savings with details on where discounts were obtained, hotel and car usage and patterns of travel between cities. Actual data gives corporations added leverage when negotiating discounts with travel suppliers.”When you own the information, you don’t have to go back to square one every time you decide to change agencies,” says Mary Savovie Stephens, travel manager for biotech giant Chiron Corp.Sybase Inc., a client/server software leader with an annual T&E budget of more than $15 million, agrees. “Software gives us unprecedented visibility into how employees are spending their travel dollars and better leverage to negotiate with travel service suppliers,” says Robert Lerner, director of credit and corporate travel services for Sybase Inc. “We have better access to data, faster, in a real-time environment, which is expected to bring us big savings in T&E. Now we have control over our travel information and no longer have to depend exclusively on the agencies and airlines.”The cost for this privilege depends on the volume of business. One-time purchases of travel-management software can run from under $100 to more than $125,000. Some software providers will accommodate smaller users by selling software piecemeal for $5 to $12 per booked trip, still a significant savings from the $50 industry norm per transaction.No More TicketsPaperless travel is catching on faster than the paperless office ever did as both service providers and consumers work together to reduce ticket prices for business travelers. Perhaps the most cutting-edge of the advances is “ticketless” travel, which almost all major airlines are testing.In the meantime, travel providers and agencies are experimenting with new technologies to enable travelers to book travel services via the Internet, e-mail and unattended ticketing kiosks. Best Western International, Hyatt Hotels and several other major hotel chains market on the Internet. These services reduce the need for paper and offer better service and such peripheral benefits as increased efficiency, improved tracking of travel expenses and trends, and cost reduction.Dennis Egolf, CFO of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Louisville, Ky., realized that the medical center’s decentralized location, a quarter-mile from the hospital, made efficiency difficult. “We were losing production time and things got lost,” he says. “Every memo had to be hand-carried for approval, and we required seven different copies of each travel order.” As a result, Egolf tried an off-the-shelf, paper-reduction software package designed for the federal government.The software allows the hospital to manage travel on-line, from tracking per-diem allowances and calculating expenses to generating cash advance forms and authorizing reimbursement vouchers. The software also lets the hospital keep a running account of its travel expenses and its remaining travel budget.”Today, for all practical purposes, the system is paperless,” says Egolf. The software has helped the hospital reduce document processing time by 93 percent. “The original goal focused on managing employee travel without paper,” he says. “We have achieved that goal, in part due to the efforts of the staff and in part due to the accuracy of the software.”With only a $6,000 investment, the hospital saved $70 each employee trip and saved almost half of its $200,000 T&E budget through the paper-reduction program.Out ThereConsolidation of corporate travel arrangements by fewer agencies has been a growing trend since 1982. Nearly three out of four companies now make travel plans for their business locations through a single agency as opposed to 51 percent in 1988. Two major benefits of agency consolidation are the facilitation of accounting and T&E budgeting, as well as leverage in negotiating future travel discounts.A major technological advance that allows this consolidation trend to flourish is the introduction of satellite ticket printers (STPs). Using STPs enables a travel agency to consolidate all operations to one home office, and still send all necessary tickets to various locations instantly via various wire services. As the term implies, the machinery prints out airline tickets on-site immediately, eliminating delivery charges.For London Fog, STPs are a blessing. London Fog’s annual T&E budget of more than $15 million is split equally between its two locations in Eldersburg, Md., and New York City. Each location purchases the same number of tickets, so equal access to ticketing from their agency is a must. With an STP in their two locations, the company services both offices with one agency in Baltimore. Each office has access to immediate tickets and still manages to save by not having to pay courier and express mail charges that can range up to $15 for each of the more than 500 tickets each purchases annually.Conde Nast Publications’ annual T&E budget of more than $20 million is allocated among its locations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Detroit. Since 1994, travel arrangements have been handled by a centralized agency, Advanced Travel Management in New York City, by installing an STP in each of these five locations. In addition to increased efficiency due to consolidation, Conde Nast now has the ability to change travel plans at a moment’s notice and have new tickets in hand instantly.The real benefit is that the machines are owned and maintained by the travel agency., so there is no cost to the company. Due to the major expense involved, however, STPs remain an option only for major ticket purchasers. “STPs are a viable option in this process for any location that purchases more than $500,000 per year in tickets,” says Shoen.As airfare averages 43 percent of any company’s T&E expenses, savings obtainable through the various uses of technology have become dramatic. For example, the ability of corporations to collect and analyze their own travel trends has led to the creation of net-fare purchasing-negotiating a price between a corporation and an airline to purchase tickets that does not include the added expenses of commissions, overrides, transaction fees, agency transaction fees and other discounts.Although most major U.S. carriers publicly proclaim that they don’t negotiate corporate discounts below published market fares, the American Express survey on business travel management found that 38 percent of U.S. companies had access to, or already had implemented, negotiated airline discounts. The availability and mechanics of these arrangements vary widely by carrier.What’s the Price?Fred Swaffer, transportation manager for Hewlett-Packard and a strong advocate of the net-pricing system, has pioneered the concept of fee-based pricing with travel-management companies under contract with H-P. He states that H-P, which spends more than $528 million per year on T&E, plans to have all air travel based on net-fare pricing. “At the present time, we have several net fares at various stages of agreement,” he says. “These fares are negotiated with the airlines at the corporate level, then trickle down to each of our seven geographical regions.”Frank Kent, Western regional manager for United Airlines, concurs: “United Airlines participates in corporate volume discounting, such as bulk ticket purchases, but not with net pricing. I have yet to see one net-fare agreement that makes sense to us. We’re not opposed to it, but we just don’t understand it right now.”Kent stresses, “Airlines should approach corporations with long-term strategic relationships rather than just discounts. We would like to see ourselves committed to a corporation rather than just involved.”source: http://orlandomap.info/base-tendriling-travel-expenses
Debt Management Companies = Debt Free Customers
Your Debt ProblemsHave you found yourself in debt recently? Are your credit card payments spiralling out of control? Is keeping up with your mortgage demands making it difficult to pay other debts? If so, then there is a good chance that your life, when not at work, is spent dealing with phone calls from your creditors that leave you down, depressed, and hopeless.You are not alone.Debt has been a crippling influence in modern times. An age of unrestricted spending, has led to an age of unrivalled recession. In recent weeks, the problems that many believed had passed have returned with a vengeance. People with debt problems need to know that they are not alone. So many people are dealing with debt today, that those who are not are the minority. You should not be ashamed of your debt. Silence leads to greater problems, and increased debt. Speak to someone about your debt today and start your climb to a debt free life.Debt SolutionsThe main advice that anyone suffering from debt problems should be given is – get help. With the rise in debt problems in recent years, there has been an accompanying rise in debt solution companies wanting to lend a hand. Many offer free advice with no obligation. Do not sit back and let the total of your debt grow to levels above your means. There are now so many options out there to help you, that the first step to being debt free could be just a phone call away. Debt Management Companies offer various solutions, some of which are outlined below:Debt Management PlansA Debt Management Plan – also known as a DMP – is an effective and flexible way of managing your debt. If you are in debt to more than one creditor, many debt management companies will help you consolidate your debts into one affordable monthly payment appropriate to your means.Debt Management Plans can be the perfect solution. DMP companies can make it so that you no longer have to deal with calls from your creditors. Your interest charges can be reduced or even frozen. And you can do all this without having to take out further loans or put your home at risk.As with all debt solutions, however, there are pitfalls to a Debt Management Plan. The payments can be extended over a longer time than expected if you cannot meet your payments, and you will have to continue to pay your mortgage and bills. But, to expect a successful debt solution without negative elements is, unfortunately, unrealistic. Unfortunately, to expect a debt solution with no repercussions is unrealistic A debt management plan may be the best option fro despite the negatives that attend it.Individual Voluntary AgreementAn Individual Voluntary Agreement, also known as an IVA, can free you from debt in as little as five years. The simple way of describing an IVA is as a formal agreement between you and your creditors in which you mutually agree a series of reduced payments towards your total debt.IVAs are an alternative to bankruptcy, and come with much less damaging consequences. As long as you have a regular income and can agree to meet set payment terms over a fixed period, you may be suitable for an IVA. However, IVAs are a more drastic measure than Debt Management Plans and the two should not be confused. A Debt Management Plan may be more suitable to your situation. You should seek advice from a reputable source before committing to anything.An IVA offers some of the same benefits as a Debt Management Plan. Your debts will be consolidated into affordable monthly payments, calls from creditors will cease, and once debts are written off – you can start afresh. Some of the disadvantages are more severe though. You will have to declare all assets and liabilities, and any excessive assets may be ceased as payment towards your debts. You may also lose any windfalls, inheritance, or bonuses that come you way. And, of course, the results of missing payments can be harsh. A failure to comply with the IVA can lead to forced bankruptcy.BankruptcyAnd now, we come to one of the most frightening words in the English language today: bankruptcy. A very serious concern, bankruptcy has wide-reaching consequences that can be deeply damaging for a long time. If you can avoid it, do. Sadly, many people can avoid it no longer. If you are unable to repay the debt in an amount of time deemed reasonable by your creditors, you may be left with very little choice.Bankruptcy is a final option. All other options should be considered first. With bankruptcy you will find that all your assets are under threat, you may lose your house, your car, your business. But, after a year, any debts that remain will be paid off for you. You will be debt free.Bankruptcy is a horrible word, but is also a necessary one. After bankruptcy many things will be different, many things will be worse, but many will also be better.Debt AdviceWithout a doubt, debt advice is your first step on that long and treacherous road to financial freedom. This article has tried to clear up the differences between certain debt solutions, and give advice on the main ways of becoming debt free. But this article does not claim to be enough. There is more to all of these solutions than can be covered here, and the best debt advice is simply to talk to someone; to talk to someone and to remember not to feel ashamed.Debt is easy to get into, hard to get out of. Debt is a crippler, it is a fearsome enemy, and it is a growing epidemic. But there is a way out of debt. Debt management is a growing industry, and although it could not exist without debt, the industry is full of people who want to help end debt for you. Do not suffer in silence. Do not let debt build around you. Get help today.