Michelle Megna

Bruce Fields, president of BF Products, a netting and fencing store, was faced with a dilemma: how to show off his more than 40 categories of products, which are best understood through visuals. The solution, he says, is ActivePoint’s new EasyFlip E-catalog, a Web-based application that’s designed to give customers a tangible experience while shopping […]

Caspio, a company that specializes in on-demand databases, today released a major upgrade of its Bridge Online service, which lets small businesses create customized, searchable databases for their Web sites with no downloads, site configuration or programming. “If you want to publish a product database or membership database, it’s easily done because you just import […]

There’s a new e-commerce player in town worth checking out — Shopster.com. After two years of development, the Calgary, Alberta-based company is open for business, offering Web retailers an easy way to get started by taking care of payments and shipping, and offering an inventory of 700,000 products that you can sell. The hosted solution […]

The year 2006 is turning out to be a very good one for online wine sales. E-commerce software provider Nexternal, which has about 200 winery clients, reports that wine sales totaled more than $12.4 million for the first four months of the year, up from $8.5 million during last year’s first quarter. Connoisseurs are also […]

It’s a belated Father’s day for online small-business merchants with two announcements from paternally named companies — Search Big Daddy and Go Daddy. The former is a new pay-per-click (PPC) search engine that pays you in PPC money as an incentive to use it and the latter is the site-hosting and domain-registry company’s plan to […]

Budget for launching new Web site: $1, 500. Being your own boss: priceless. That’s how Jeff Radecki, 21, a college student from Penetang, Ont., could sum up his summer, but he doesn’t. He’s more thrilled that he put his passion — environmental conservation — into practice by unveiling Buy Greenergy, an online resource for people […]

Google Checkout is getting rave reviews from e-commerce vendors and industry watchers who advise merchants to get in the express lane and sign up now. There’s nothing more forlorn to the online seller than the thought of orphaned shopping carts, abandoned at the critical point-of-sale, filled with items and left in the ether with no […]

Patty Barnes, owner of Log Cabin Labradoodles in Shirley Mills, Maine, says 98 percent of her sales come from her Web site, so “it must equal the quality of the animals I breed.” With the help of the Web-maintenance service Edit.com, it does. Barnes noted that keeping her site content fresh is important for her […]

About four years ago, Tim Carter had what felt like a nervous breakdown, but it wasn’t because of his personal life. “I snapped. I literally went nuts because I was receiving so much spam — about 100 messages a day,” says Carter, an information resource manager for a small college in the Amherst, New York […]

This year give yourself an early holiday present: take advantage of a federal tax incentive that lets small businesses write off up to $105,000 for new computers and software. The only catch is that to do so, purchases must be made by January. The American Jobs Creation Act, a mammoth tax break package signed into […]

The CEO of a Napa-based wine-club company shows a customer in Southern California a template he can use to create his own grape group. Meanwhile, in Indianapolis, an analyst at a forensic and investigative engineering consulting firm reviews a case with a client in Hawaii that involves measuring building heights and the angle of the […]

For Monsignor John E. Kozar, national director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in the United States, divine intervention came in the form of IBM-based technology that literally converted archaic manual office operations to a modernized, integrated network. The Pontifical Mission Societies in the United States (which has, as they say with a chuckle, the unfortunate […]