Trying to Decide between POS and RMS

JennaSez,

These are all great questions. I hope I can help clarify some of your issues.

POS does not have Work Order or Quote functionality, but RMS does. It really seems that RMS would be a better fit for your business needs.

The POS 2.0 and Office Accounting 2007 integration shares: Items, Customers, Suppliers, and Tax information, bi-directionally. Any of these entities can be created/modified in either application. Sales transactions and closed Item Receipts move from POS to OA only. This means you will not see sales transactions process through OA in POS.

At this time RMS does not ship with a detailed integration to OA 2007 like POS. Perhaps someone on the newsgroups knows of an integration by a 3rd party? If there isn't one available now, I'm sure there will be soon.

Jeff

Jenna, one thing you may not be considering now but will most likely need in the future is an eCommerce integrated product. Do you plan on going online? RMS has some great solutions and there are a few really good providers out there. So, if you think you want to eventually sell all of your inventory on line and have it accurate and down load your orders to RMS then I'd go with RMS. I'm currently evaluating a few options and here they are:

Kosmos RMS eCommerce with X-Cart: Integrates a Kosmos Web Service that exchanges Data with X-Cart open source shopping cart software and Newest Techs RMS Web Integrator. Fully owned solution and you can host anywhere with the proper server configuration, or host with Kosmos dedicated servers. Kosmos is a professional full service web development, design and hosting company that can take your web presence to the next level. Shops are unique, customization to the design and the source code can be done by any PHP programmer with no restrictions at all. Kosmos supports the web portion including the Web Integrator only. Kosmos' staff are not RMS experts, and you'll have to rely on your RMS reseller for support of your RMS.

research has shown this to be an excellent solution when it's fullyintegrated and support from Kosmos is excellent.Rating: 4.5 stars :) StoreFront Also uses the web integrator from newestech to communicate with their web service has to host with them. Shops are basic and boring; customization is a nightmare and has to be done by Store Front developers. I've heard nightmares of clients waiting over a year for their solution to be completed. don't recommend store front, nothing but bad chatter out there.Rating: 1 star :(

Nitrocell Has their own module and web service integration seems to be easy, but shops are very template based and boring. Nitrocell are not web development experts so their site and eCommerce client sites have no unique feel and since it's their hosted cart code customization is limited. You don't own the solution, but as long as you're hosting with them you have the security of knowing the solution will work since they have it locked down. If you want to leave, you can't take your cart and host else where, and if you've invested a great deal in your solution it's hard to let that investment go. If Nitrocell decides to raise their prices you have to continue paying for it since you don't own your own cart software and can't transfer to another provider.

3.5 stars :| There are other solutions out there, but they are not very well proven and you'd be risking a lot of you went with them.

Thomas.

completed.http://www.storefront.net/solutions/int/shopping_cart_pos.aspx> I don't recommend store front, nothing but bad chatter out there. > Rating: 1 star :( >> Nitrocell

Hi Jenna and Thomas, just a few added insights to the NitroSell product. Thomas is correct about all of the advantages in a hosted solution. Of course there are a lot of other really great features that we bundle on the service side that delivers value to our total solution. The fact that it is hosted also allows us to leverage our incredible Search Engine Optimization as well as online market place integration to Goggle base, MSN and Live, and others. We not only provide you with a fully featured web store that delivers total piece of mind (our sites are never down, or slow...check any site your self...you can see them by clicking the Showcases link at our site

but we also market your business for you so you don't have to. We've heard customers rave that their business increased as much as 300% after implementing our web store. How is this so? We get your products out in the places where consumers are looking...As an example do a Live or Google search for 'win in 92688' and see just how high Amazing Grapes comes up. Alternatively go to any of the sites on our show cases and copy the name of one of their products and paste it into a similar search and see just how high that site comes up in the search results. The bottom line is that our solution, out of the box, brings you business by prominently placing your merchandise and your business in today's yellow pages.

Of course our emphasis has always been on functionality; we extend RMS capabilities...you can see this by looking at one of the tennis racquets at

the racquet specifications: none of those fields can be found in RMS itself however our solution allows you to create custom fields and store whatever information you want for your items...so the 30 character item description in RMS is not a factor for us.

As for design it's true we have historically been very template driven. This approach allowed us to literally take a retailer online in less than an hour, and that included some basic training as well as installation. Recognizing the need for retailer to apply their unique branding to their web store however was the impetus for one our latest developments, NitroScript. This is a proprietary HTML based language that allows a web desgner to totally overhaul the layout of the site itself. With NitroScript you can come up with totally unique designs...You can see this by viewing one our latest sites the Perfume Shoppe:

Really what NitroScript and all of these other great features demonstrates is our company's total focus and commitment to our product and online retailing. We release new features every month that our customer are asking for. The fact that we are subscription based means that our solution must deliver results to our customers; if our retailers aren't successful and happy with us they have other options. In this way we have a vested stake in your online business and this let's you focus on your core strengths without the headaches of managing multiple systems.

If you would like to see a demo or discuss the solution I would be happy to assist.

Todd Jensen

I would like to state that SEO (Search Engine Marketing) is not an easy game to play. SEO has so many facets that have to have constant attention to.

1) How often are the spider algorithms updated and how will this affect my site? 2) What Good SEO practices (white hat techniques) and Bad SEO (black hat techniques) are known today? 3) What is the website hosting environment like? 4) What are the basics of SEO that all website owners should know about?

Kosmos Central's founders worked for a company called Intel where they grasped the concepts of SEO and even after Intel, they continued growing their knowledge base of SEO accepted and non accepted practices.

If you look at our marketing packages we offer professional web marketing services with proven results.

There was a mention by Todd about his sites showing up for their domain names for search engine results. Every site should come up number one for their domain name, all search engine spiders automatically give this as an indexing freebee and if you're not number one for your domain name, then you've probably gotten involved with the wrong SEO Company or accidentally coded your site with black hat techniques and was unaware of it.

Like I stated above, SEO is not an easy task and KosmosCentral has staff devoted entirely to web marketing.

Some basics you should know:

1) Is your site SEO friendly, will search engine spiders be able to crawl your site and index it properly? If not it will need to be optimized, if you don't have full control over your content, text and site files then you can never obtain top placement for key words and phrases in your industry. X-Cart is a full open source shopping cart system and since the client owns their cart and code 100% then they have the full ability to adapt to SEO changes in the industry. Do you have an SEO consultant that will educate you to why your site dropped in rankings from a top ten listing to completely off the charts? Kosmos Central's staff stays on top of webmaster marketing industry changes and adapts when changes have been made by search engine algorithms. 2) What about a site keyword analysis? Are you going for the right phrases and how competitive are they. Do you even have a chance of obtaining top placement? A proper keyword and phrase analysis will show your company what your SEO is focusing on and the customer should also be able to gage results with proper reporting. 3) Now that your site is SEO friendly and optimized for search engine results how do you get your pages ranked higher than your competition? The only way to move up in the ranks is to continue getting referrals to your site with keyword focus. There are 100's of ways to obtain referral links to your site and this is a service offered by KosmosCentral. It takes time and patience to review every quality site and getting referrals from sites related to your sites industry practices isn't an easy task.

There is so much more to absorb and learn, but the top two are above. If you'd like to educate your self more about SEO and Web Marketing please visit Kosmos Central and read up on some of our web marketing articles. I hope this all makes sense, call Kosmos if you have any questions too.

Thank you, Alex

results.http://www.kosmoscentral.com/web-marketing/>

hi all

i have a site

still it is not in listing for "data entry" key word

what i have to do to be have a site on top 10 ranking for "data entry" key word?

i don't have to optimise that site.

pls send me suggesation and help for this site.

thanking you, dataentrymi.

results.http://www.kosmoscentral.com/web-marketing/>

Hi all, respectfully I do not think I mentioned anywhere about searching for a specific domain name...rather I referenced using keyword phrases like "wine in 92688"..of course the domain name search should ender the actual web site!

Alex's points on SEO are all very true indeed. My point was that in addition to observing SEO best practices, facilitate keyword searches / analysis, etc. NitroSell does all of this for/with you. It seemed to me that a subtlety of Alex's other point to the retailer owning the software themselves is that you are on your own in dealing with SEO, and as such this requires having to hire a specialist which is stated in the comment as well. NitroSell delivers all of this for you right out of the box. You have the ability to add your own keywords, mis-spelling, etc. so that people could find you on the various search platforms quite easily right from your own desktop; you don't need to hire anyone. We are also available to assist, but that is a part of our service offering, so it's included.

Regards, Todd

I would like to state also that just adding keywords via the software is only one step. Meta Keywords can be adding using our cart too, but not all search engines accept them anymore and so you have focus on the larger picture. Google doesn't accept Meta Keywords anymore so you have to optimize your content and do you want misspellings on your site? Google wants to index your site based on what your site visitors are seeing visually and not what is hidden in Meta Tags. Meta Tags are old school and should not be a major focus at all, and are only a very small piece of the whole pie. X-cart has many SEO (search engine optimization) features out of the box and we also educate our customers on how to market and use the tools properly too. But the tools are only one step and if you don't take additional steps your site will never achieve the results you're looking for.

Here's what X-Cart already does out of the box and you own the shopping cart software:

Search Engine Friendly Pages can be indexed by all major search engines Define custom META tags for every category Customer referrer info is stored in database Product catalog can be generated as static HTML pages for better SEindexing and ranking Search engine optimization options group For this site: who's asking why he's not coming up forthe keyword 'Data Entry' I would first do a competition analysis andthere are a number of factors to review.

1) The top 10 sites for keyword 'Data Entry' have: a. On average over 5000 back links pointing to them with the keyword 'Data Entry' b. All in Anchor average 5 c. Alexa Rank average 50,000 d. Average age of URL's 9 years. e. Average pages indexed 5,000

2) DataEntryMi.com a. Only has 15 back links- Time to get to work! b. All in anchor Zero c. Alexa Rank 450,000 (very high and the lower the number the better) Yahoo has an Alexa Rank of 1 d. Age of URL - 1 year (this domain hasn't been established) e. Pages indexed 13

This is just a sample of how we educate our clients whom are asking for a site analysis and what REAL expectations they can perceive for top placement. The domain mentioned above will get no where with adding keywords with meta tags, they need to work on building their ranking's based on their competition or find a key phrase that's less competitive.

Alex