Its always difficult to useful and aggregate customer feedback on products and services. Yes, we do get our share of feedback from customers, some more vocal than others. But translating it into actionable and viable ideas are mostly a trial and error method. Recently we have added an idea lab, where we add a laundry list of things in our to-do list and let customers vote for it.  The iScripts Idea Lab ( we copied the concept from Google shamelessly). Goal is to keep it as an informal venue to get ideas to fuel our future growth. So lets know what you want us to work on. We have limited resources, like everybody else. so we want to spend it in areas that can have maximum impact to our customers profitability. So lets know what you want to see from iScripts , let it be a new applications, new features to existing ones or other services. Speak your mind. and be heard.

By the way, thanks to the folks at user voice who created this app, its awesome.

Aji Abraham

We created iscripts multicart almost 18 months back after 6 months in development. Initially the idea started out as a website for handcraft products. There are a lot of people who makes these cute little things with clay, clothes  and anything you can imagine. Most of them do this as a hobby or side business.  They are good in crafts.  Well… most are.  They never strike me as good marketing folks. So the idea of them managing their own ecommerce store selling these crafts did not make much sense. As a one man/woman show they can either spend time on creating new  beautiful crafts items or doing web marketing. It is a crime to ask them to do the marketing by themselves. if they hire they need fork over most of the money from the sales to the so called experts (including us) for any meaningful results.  It did not make much sense. So we thought wouldn’t it be wonderful if we create a co-op web store for handicrafters? All they need to do is list the products and ship out to the buyers. We would in turn take care of the marketing, technical aspects, payment processing, tech support for the handcrafters. in turn we would charge them a small fee based on the cost. as its a narrow vertical, we can market things well.

After talking to bunch of handcrafters in the summer fairs we created harcraftweb.com. Initially it was working out very well. but it turned out, we are very good in creating web software. Not very good promoting a website. It meant going to all those craft fairs and selling this idea to hard crafters. then visiting bunch of forums and magazines for crafters and advertising. It sounded too much work, in an area where we have not much interest or experience. So the site kind of slowed down.

then we got a call from somebody looking for a multivendor site for baseball cards. He asked if we willing to sell the software and customize it for his site. sure, why not? We did it and their business was doing pretty good.  Then we realized this is a good software for small industry niches, where it does not make sense for individual players to create their own stores. So this offers entrepreneurs an opportunity for creating a one stop shop for that niche. The niche could be handcrafts or baseball cards.  Finally we decided to make the software more customizable and make it an official iScripts product. so we created iScripts Multicart as a multi-vendor shopping cart.

I looked around and did not see many products competing with it directly. So I was happy we came up with something very unique and new.  Explaining this to customers who calls to find out exactly what this software can do for them. Most of them had some business model in mind and wanted to find out if this can meet their need off the shelf or can we customize to make it to meet their model. I used to explain it as a multi vendor system with a single store front. Then folks where confused about who handles fulfilment , who takes care of payment etc..  So to make things clearer we used to explain it as a virtual mall software. So as a mall, you would have a number of vendors selling their own things. But it would be under the umbrella of single entity(mall).  Most of the potential customers called during the time was looking for a business model where individual shops need to manage their payment processing as well as fulfilment. So I was looking for better ways to explain what exactly iScripts multicart do?

Last week when I was explaining the software to a potential customer for this script, she asked  if it works like the new Amazon.com. Well it is.. It was an interesting realization that Jeff Bezos settled on the same  business model for Amazon, as we did for handcrafters.  The only business model which made any money for amazon after all these years. If you notice lately(2006-07) amazon is not just selling products under their brand. They push cistomers to other vendors, even competitors, who does the fulfilment.  Only difference is amazon used their super weight brand to attract customers and then push to other vendors for almost everything under the sun. In teh case of handcrafters, we were focusing on a very small niche.

Aaahh hard drive backup. It is up there with flossing, balancing your checkbook. You know you should. But you don’t. There are number of excuses. And one day it happens. It always happens when it’s most inappropriate. You stare at the computer for some time at the blue screen. Try rebooting it. Twice. Now you start panicking. Then you are into denial. No, this cannot happen to me.. You kick yourself and the reality slowly sink in.. your hard drive is fried. AND YOU DON’T HAVE A BACKUP

What is the probability a hard drive will fail? It is one hundred percent. All hard drives will fail. No matter how important data you have on it. Only question is it fails on you. But you know that already. Don’t you?

If its so damn important to back up why people don’t do it? I will agree it is really difficult. Everyday or every week to remember doing the backup. And wait doing nothing your computer is actually backing up. We all have lives. Who has time to do it?

Well its changed. Now spend 5 minutes to set up automated backup with Backup2Net, you don’t have to remember it ever again. This new automated powerful software will keep doing it for you. How do you want to set up the backup? You can backup your hard drive to the same drive, another drive, a network drive or an online server. The security of the backup is in the order of same drive, another drive, a network drive or an online server. Which method you want to do depends what if you loose the data? What’s it worth to you?

Backing up on the same drive has some protection. If you delete something by accident you will have a backup to go back. If you only one drive on your computer that’s one way. But if your hard drive fried you loose your data and backup. But its better than nothing.

You can download the software from Backup2net.com and set up to do a backup every day, every night, once in two days, once a week, month whatever.

If you have only one drive, Go buy one. Hard drives are pretty cheap nowadays. So if you have 2 drives use one as the primary drive and other one as the secondary drive. Download backUP2Net from HERE and select the folders you want to back up. Then select the backup drive as the destination. Select a when you want to do the backup automatically. It would be fine if you select to do the backup every day say 2 am. If you are a night owl lets make it say 5 am. Point select is a time when you are not using the computer.

Backing up to another drive offers more protection than backing up to same drove. If one drive is hosed you have the other one to protect your data. Still there are some situations when you can loose both drives. If operating decides, its time, you are in trouble. So you need to protect some of your valuable data in another location. Information that must want to retain. Things like financial info, home works, creative works, emails etc..

For that added security you need an online backup solution. Surprise… surprise.. Backup2Net can help out here too. If you don’t have much of the junk you can select the free backup plan, which gives you 100MB server space. You can sign up for the free plan HERE. If you need more space you can select from different plans and choose enough space.

In the same Backup2Net client you can set up online backup also. If the previous example you set up daily backup at 2 am to the backup drive. Now lets set up an online backup. Select a new backup job in the software. Select the folders you must protect as the source. For the destination select online backup. Now select to do the backup say every Wednesday at 3am or 4 am .

That’s it you are all set. The automated software will take backup of your precious data every day to the secondary drive and every week to online server. If something backup happens you can restore selected files with a click of a button. Happy backing Up!

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