E-Commerce Resources

OSI Rockstars:  By far this is the one membership website that every e-commerce business owner should belong to. It is run by Janelle Elms who is THE national expert on e-commerce business. She is a best-selling author and former instructor for eBay University.

On the OSI Rockstars website, there are over 600 hours of education available to the members in addition to a very active and vibrant forum where the members help and encourage each other.

Cathi Aiello is one of the "Stage Managers" behind the scenes at OSI Rockstars and keeps on top of the Accounting and Taxes forum. She also periodically conducts webinars along with Janelle on the subject of accounting for e-commerce businesses.

Click the banner below to come join us and Choose Success!

QuickBooks Software:  The best software for most e-commerce businesses is QuickBooks. It is very affordable and offers a lot of user-friendly features.

Although it is easy to use once you have learned how, we do not recommend you try to learn it on your own. The majority of the books and tutorials available for QuickBooks are geared towards small business in general and do not take into account the unique issues that e-commerce businesses have.

We specialize in this area and have helped hundreds of eBay and e-commerce merchants get set up on QuickBooks and learn the basics of using it for their business.

For eBay and e-commerce businesses, we recommend the QuickBooks PRO program. Simple Start is not powerful enough and Premier is overkill.

Once you have purchased your software, the next step is to purchase one of our Complete Setup Packages to get your QB file set up for you and spend some time with us to learn how to use it including how to import your sales into QB from PayPal.

Inventory Spreadsheet:  Our basic spreadsheet for tracking inventory that we developed for our clients is available for free download HERE.

Receipt Scanner:  You know all those little pieces of paper you accumulate throughout the year... those receipts? The majority of them today are printed on thermal paper. That's the slick, sort of shiny paper that is just like the first fax paper back when we used thermal paper in fax machines.

Do you remember what happened to those thermal faxes over time? The ink on them evaporated over time. Back in the days of thermal faxing, it was common practice to run all important faxes through a copy machine to create a better permanent record.

The same is true for those thermal receipts. You can pack them neatly away in a box, spend hours filing them into their appropriate folders, tape them to paper and organize them neatly into a binder, but still in 2-3 years most of them will be completely blank. Blank pieces of paper are not going to help you in an audit.

Those receipts need to be copied or scanned. And if you scan them, be sure to use one of the scanners that are approved by the IRS (not all of them are).

The scanner that we recommend is NeatReceipts

PayPal Import:  The IIF file that can be downloaded from PayPal and imported into QB can save you tons of time on the bookkeeping for your e-commerce business. We always recommend using it over the EAA (eBay Accounting Assistant) product from eBay as the PayPal IIF file always works and the EAA can be very buggy with little to no support offered.

BUT....

There is another tool you can use as step between the PayPal IIF file and the QB file that will bring your PayPal data into QB cleaner and more completely than if you just used the import file straight from PayPal. That product is SimplePort and we highly recommend it.

It does come with a monthly (or annual at a discount) subscription price but for many of our clients, the time saved far outweighs the money spent. You need to have both it and your QB file set up correctly, though and we can help you with that during a consulting session or even better, with one of our complete setup packages.

Website Building:  If you're in business, you need a website.  XSitePro is seriously the easiest program I've ever used.  You do NOT need to know website programming or html to build a great site.  In fact this site is built with XSitePro.

Get it. You won't regret it!