I have been using the Google Email App for a while now and I’m very impressed. In my experience most small business owners use either a free web email like Hotmail or Yahoo or they use the email that comes with their hosting. The problem with web mail solutions like Hotmail is that it looks unprofessional having your email @hotmail.com (although some allow you to use your domain if you pay) and many are limited in the ways you can access your email (some don’t allow IMAP for example). Using the email provided by your hosting company is not great either. Usually their web access applications are sub par, their spam filtering is lacking, and most people switch hosting companies all the time. This means you have to always have a local copy of all your emails at all time.

Here is where the Google Email App comes in. With Google Apps you can change the MX records on your hosting account to redirect all email traffic to Google. What this does is provide a 3rd party who will handle your email no matter what hosting company you use. Another great feature is the Google web mail interface. In my opinion their web mail interface is one of the best in the business! They also allow IMAP access to your account. By using IMAP you can sync all your computers and mobile devices including all folders! Another great thing about having IMAP access is that if you wish to switch from Google to another email provider the new provider can easily pull all your email data using IMAP.

I recently had an issue arise when a client wanted to switch from Yahoo Small Business Email (which is a paid service) to another service. Yahoo does not allow IMAP access so moving to a new service would mean either losing all his emails or downloading them to his local computer. Even downloading them to his computer would be a massive undertaking because without IMAP access none of the folders he has created on Yahoo would be transferred. Ultimately he decided it wasn’t worth the effort and chose to stay with Yahoo. This situation can be avoided by choosing an email provider that allow IMAP access.

Google Email App also allows you to create multiple accounts for yourself or employees all on your domain with their own unique login. However the best part of the Google Email app is the price… FREE! Google also offers a paid version with a few features more suited to larger companies.

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Alright so it’s been slow going on the site. We are still both working full time so we don’t have a whole lot of time to dedicate to Performance Tread right now, but we are chugging along.

I have Magento setup on our new host and we are starting to add products. We are starting with the performance tires first since that’s really our initial target audience. It’s a slow process though we have to enter one by one for each model and each SIZE! It’s going to take forever. I have also been looking to see if we could get a csv file or something from the manufacturers with all the tire data so we don’t have to copy paste specs from their site one by one. Not much luck it’s like pulling teeth. We managed to get access to some good quality images for Goodyear and Michelin but no data. We have to figure something out for that or we will never finish adding these products.

I have also started looking into how we can do a by vehicle search since a lot of people have no idea what size tires they need or where to find their tire size. There is a company that sells the data of tire size for all makes and models or cars but it’s a bit pricey like $2k/year. Then I have to integrate it somehow into Magento. I think we will pass for now. I’m hoping our target customers are a bit more savvy about tire size than the average joe. Will just have a search by size for right now.

Still working on that deal I mentioned last time, hopefully I will have more to say on that soon. Also looking to partner up with a local rim manufacturer who is producing some very nice, very high quality rims. We keep debating if we want to carry a lot of items or just focus on the best stuff. We have the racing experience to know what works best and what doesn’t so why bother with the lower end stuff… not sure which way to go.

Last but not least I have started looking into shipping costs… I don’t like what I see. We setup a basic account with UPS and I compared some of the rates I got from other sites to what UPS was giving me for the same shipment. It was around double… ouch! Can’t be charging more than everyone else for shipping. I think it goes back to volume. So many little things we didn’t even think would be an obstacle keep popping up kind of demotivating. Anyways will be speaking to UPS rep soon to see what we can do.

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We have a name! Performance Tread Inc domains are purchased, corporation is set. Very excited we finally have a name for the business. Took us a while to come up with a name and even longer to come up with a name that had an available domain! There really arent many good domains left. I think we picked a good name though. Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Ok so my partner is working on a deal I’m very excited about! I don’t want to revel what it is yet because I’m afraid we will jinx it, but it will give us some credibility right out the door and could help us sell a few tires locally. Getting some sales under our belt will help a lot.

Now that we have accounts with distributors I’ve been doing some price checking and the margins on some of these tires are HORRIBLE! We would lose money trying to compete with some of the sites out there. That’s why this upcoming deal is so important. Could increase our sales volume so we can start negotiating better rates. If we can’t improve our rates we wont be able to compete, this concerns me.

On the technical side I’ve pretty much decided to go with Magento. I love it! Does most of what we need out of the box and there is a HUGE number of third party plugins that can do everything else. It is incredibly robust. Integrates with UPS, Paypal, Authorize.net and a lot of other right out of the box. It is not as fast of some of the others and seems to use a different MySQL database so some hosts don’t support it, but I have found some hosts that specialize in Magento.

I have also been playing with customizing it on the test server… it’s pretty confusing. Right now all I’ve been able to do is replace the existing images it comes with by just overwriting them with my own. Have to read up some more on how it’s all set up.

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