As many of you may be aware, this month we are celebrating our fifth year in business so throughout April we are running a huge promotion right across the board for all hosting plans, dedicated servers, domain names and eCommerce licenses.

The promotion is very simple, enter the coupon code APRILIPOD when making your purchase and your order will be discounted by a massive 20%!

You will also be entered into a prize draw to win an 8GB iPod Touch…

So if you were considering purchasing an Open Mind Commerce license, now would be the perfect time to save some money!

The offer is open to new users and existing clients of Open Mind, it’s our way of saying thank you for the last five years and here’s looking forward to the future!

Just a quick reminder that we will be holding a free Q&A webcast session today at Midday.

The session will allow you to ask any eCommerce related questions about trading online and will be completely free of charge!

There I no registration required and you can join the webcast here:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/open-mind-tv

Please do come along at Midday to what we hope will be the first of many webcast sessions!

KashFlow, the online accounting package, today has announced that use of their API is now free of charge instead of an annual fee of £99 + vat!

KashFlow integrates seamlessly into Open Mind Commerce meaning  that new customers, orders and payments are automatically inserted into your KashFlow application.  This saves a tremendous amount of time and improves accuracy by not having to double enter orders.

In addition we are still offering a discounted rate on new signups to the KashFlow system.  Just look here at the savings you could make!

Annual Subscription
Normal price: £149.00 per year
Our Price: £129.00 per year

Monthly Subscription
Normal price: £13.99 per month
Our Price: £11.99 per month

As you can see there has never been a better time to integrate our eCommerce software with KashFlow!  Start saving time and money today….

As a direct result of feedback from our customers, we are very pleased to announce the immediate launch of our monthly eCommerce software license!

This license will allow you to run up to three stores dependent on your chosen plan from just £35.00 per month. The monthly charge includes a full eCommerce license, hosting and continuous support and upgrades whilst you continue to pay the monthly charge.

Note however that you do not own the license, you are leasing it from us. Saying that though it is a great alternative for those that may not want to pay for a full license just yet and you can always upgrade your license at any time.

For more information, just visit our hosting site and sign up!

We are very pleased to announce the immediate release of v1.2.0 of the Open Mind Commerce system!

We were going to label this release as 1.1.2 but with so many major improvements packed into it we decided it was worthy of a major upgrade release.  So what’s new?

Full CMS Integration
Our eCommerce software now has a full CMS facility built into the system.  For the uninitiated, this means you can now create unlimited extra pages and structure the content through specific categories to provide so much search engine fodder they will probably explode!

Seriously however, providing high quality content laden with keywords is an ideal way to improve your rankings and now our eCommerce software supports this important functionality right out of the box.

Huge Improvements to Department Listings
Let’s say you have a department with just one product in it and another with thirty.  Wouldn’t it be useful to be able to change the display of each of these departments to suit?

Well now you can!  You can set each department to have their own look and specifically control the appearance of the products and how much detail is displayed straight from the admin area saving you time and improving your customers experience.

I’ve got a question!
Shoppers love to give feedback so what better way to allow them to do this than right from the product page itself?  You can now not only accept product reviews and ratings but also engage customers in Q & A sessions and even choose to display this information to shoppers!

Coupled with extra fields for product detail, shoppers will have all the information they need at their fingertips saving them time and increasing conversions.

There are a host of other tweaks and improvements included within this release and license holders can now download the upgrade from their account area.

If you are still deciding whether to purchase our eCommerce software or not, then now would be the time whilst we are still offering a years free hosting and a one year SSL certificate with every full license!

Work has already commenced on the next release which once again will be free of charge to all license holders so what are you waiting for?

It would take more than an earthquake to shake this eCommerce Software!

This morning the UK was struck by the largest earthquake to hit the Isles in over 25 years! Thankfully there were few injuries or major damage reported and all our users have said that their stores were completely unaffected!

On a serious note though, our eCommerce software platform is quickly proving to be one of the most robust and sturdy eCommerce software solutions around. Recent additions to our store portfolio such as the new Best Pneumatics store which recently went live have shown that our eCommerce software is capable of handling everything from a couple of products all the way to thousands!  BPS has well over 15,000 products listed in its database!

So if you’re looking for a rock solid eCommerce software solution that would take more than an earthquake to shake it’s foundations then look no further…

Open Mind Commerce’s Ecommerce Software is designed to be as search engine friendly as possible. We have listened to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) specialists about what was required and we have gone to great lengths to ensure that we have acted upon all of their wishes.

Why is Search Engine Optimisation Important to You?

The majority of people shopping online will use a search engine to find the product they want, this means that a well optimised website will ensure that your website is the one they find among the literally billions of other, possibly competing, websites online.

One of the rules of ecommerce businesses is that the more people visiting your site then the more opportunities you have to sell them your product, and our ecommerce software will enable you to get the people visiting your website!

Search Engine Friendly Features

One of our most useful features is the ability to have SEO friendly URLs, e.g. www.openmindcommerce.co.uk/store.cfm?deptid=12 this would be automatically re-written to www.openmindcommerce.co.uk/d12-my-product-department/ This not only helps the search engines find your site when people are searching for your products but it also looks better and helps people remember your website.

Our ecommerce software allows to easily add body text to each page and each individual product allowing you to create good, relevant text that is essential for SEO. The software also allows you to create unique page titles and meta descriptions as well as add all the keywords you require. These are all easily edited and the title tags are automatically generated from the product name in order to save you time.

The system also includes a Dynamic Site Map Generator which automatically generates a fully working site map which not only helps your visitors, but is also extremely good for search engine spiders.

In fact our ecommerce software provides one of the best value for money SEO compatible systems on the market today.