Don’t need a full blown ERP or business accounting system. Do you like Free? We can help.

I don’t have too many bones to pick with Quicken or MS Money other than they lock you into their proprietary framework and nickel and dime you to death for extras. This is the first in a series on free hosted and open source alternatives. Do they work just like their commercial rivals. No. Will they get the job done for most of us. Yes. And, you’ll never pay a dime for the software unless you decide to make a donation - something we recommend you do if you like the product.

Buddi

From the Buddi Website

Buddi is a personal finance and budgeting program, aimed at those who have little or no financial background. In making this software, I have attempted to make things as simple as possible, while still retaining enough functions to satisfy most home users.

Buddi is released as Open Source Software. You can download it for free, with no disabled features and no time limit.

Buddi will run on almost any computer which has a Java virtual machine installed. This can include Windows, Macintosh OS X, Linux, and many other operating systems.

Buddi is a mature and stable stand alone package that is very easy to use, and has more than enough features to effectively manage the household trust.I find the learning curve to use much faster than MS Money or Quicken. Buddi supports plug ins, and being a popular package in the open source community there are a number available and more being written every day.

Mint

From Mint’s home page

Eliminate the need to manage multiple Web sites to get a comprehensive view of your personal finances. Mint.com connects securely with more than 5,000 US financial institutions. By adding your bank, credit card and investment accounts to Mint.com, you get a complete perspective of your finances in one, easy to use location. Planning your personal budget just got a lot easier.

Separating your work expenses from your personal spending or joint accounts from individual accounts is also simple. Simply hide the accounts that you wish to exclude from your financial picture.

If you’re think about Quicken online. Why not try Mint. It’s a free hosted package that is tightly integrated with online banking. and other financial institutions. Mint is monetized by ads and services - kind of like Google. In my trials, I actually found more nags and nickel and dime goodies on Quicken online than i found on Mint. The interface is simple and intuitive.

Most of us in small business don’t spend a lot of time planning to be a dominant force in world markets. We’re usually too busy trying to keep the customers we have while trying to get a few more of them every day. One of the deeply rooted problems in Ebay’s culture is that they do not regard persons and businesses who sell there as customers, but it goes deeper than that. Om Malik of GigaOm, an analyst who follows internet ventures summarizes it very concisely:

eBay and its management needs to take a cold hard look at why the sellers took such an extreme step (as to strike). In my opinion it is a corporate low-point for any company when your customers decide to strike and boycott you?

Lesson to take away: When you ignore your customers, and try to dictate how they will do business with you, you will end your company. Ebay survives today only because they are the dominant force in person to person selling or a near monopoly in online auctions. Soon, when their dominance has ended, and the company may die quick death if they don’t change. If you want to stay in business, do not follow Ebay’s example

While shopping online is at an all times high, security of personal information still tops consumer concerns. The online retail industry as a whole has been working to educate consumers that credit card information is still typically safer that giving your card to a clerk in a store, but the concerns persist.

A new study from the Pew Internet Project casts light on the love-hate relationship many Americans have with e-commerce.

In response to the survey, 78 percent of U.S. Internet users said that online shopping is convenient, and 68 percent said it saves time. Yet, 75 percent said they don’t like giving out personal information like a credit card number over the Internet. More on Personal information security concern is still a big issue for online shoppers, and what you can do to build confidence.

Ebay sellers have often made threats , and even organized a few boycotts, but failed to muster enough support to make much of an impression in the past. The uproar over fee, policy and site changes have crated a tidal wave of discontent this time around. Here’s a slide show that highlights many of the sellers grievences.

Houston mom, Lori Pope had a epiphany born of frustration from how quickly her children tire of new toys. What if she could return toys for new ones every month and pay a small fee? No one one else was doing this!

If you can rent movies, video games and even handbags online, she thought, why not toys?

That’s the idea behind Baby Plays, a Web-based company Pope launched in October that allows parents to receive four or six toys in the mail every month, assembled and ready for playtime.

Call it Netflix for the toddler set.

Baby Plays subscribers visit the company’s Web site to browse among nearly 200 toys for newborns through preschoolers. Customers build a wish list of toys they’d like to rent, and Pope’s staff ships them to their door. (from Yahoo)

We’re all exposed to great ideas just by finding new and better ways to solve the problems of daily life. By doing buisness online with the world as your market, even solutions to obscure problems can have a huge market.

There have never been more buyers in the web, and and an ever increasing number of sellers competing for their business. The trend for both is going to continue.

“Today’s consumers have become increasingly savvy in their approach to online shopping, discovering new sources of product, pricing and information, said LinkShare CEO Steve Denton in a statement. LinkShare, which operates an e-commerce marketing network, commissioned the research.

“Marketers must respond to this new world by deepening their customer engagements, broadening their online marketing portfolio and creating a richer shopping experience,” Denton said. (from internet news)

If you’re looking to grow, or just hoping to keep your market share, it’s never been a better time to diversify. If you sell on ebay, start selling on Amazon. If you sell on your own online storefront, time to try ebay. Differentiate yourself, and most of all your products, and beat the competition with better service.

It appears that Pennsylvania is making good on threats to punish Ebay sellers who have not obtained an auctioneers license. Before other states follow suit, they should consider that by not doing so, they will be welcoming business (and tax revenues) that the others are chasing away.

A few years back we wrote about states that were passing inexplicable laws requiring anyone selling goods on eBay for others to get an auctioneer’s license, something that can be quite costly and sometimes requires a long-term apprenticeship. It appears just such a law is being used in Pennsylvania to go after a very successful eBay seller (via the Agitator). The story in that case is even more ridiculous, since the woman in question only began selling goods on eBay in order to be able to stay at home with her young daughter who was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Even though the woman stopped (and got a job outside the home) as soon as the state notified her that she was illegally selling goods, the state is still moving forward prosecuting her. (from Techdirt)

As predicted changes have come on the heels of the announced departure of Ebay CEO Meg Whitman and President Bill Cobb. Fees will be reduced for listings and final value commissions will be increased. In theory this will reduce the risk of listing goods on the declining marketplace. The most universally hated fee, that for a gallery image has been eliminated, which will actually improve buyer experience since many sellers had stopped using the feature. Power sellers with high feedback ratings will also receive volume discounts.

It’s also abundantly clear that Ebay’s new team is just as out to lunch as the old team when it comes to understanding their real customer, the seller. The seller is the one who pays the bills., yet management sees the buyer as the customer. If you want better sellers who treat buyers better, you need to lead by example, and the example set by Ebay is world class awful. Sellers with other options sell less if anything at all on Ebay these days largely because of high cost, an incredibly cumbersome business model, and and poor to non existent customer service.

More on Ebay makes sweeping changes, not all good for sellers.

It’s something most of us have always instinctively known, but now there is proof. To work efficiently you really need to focus on one task at a time. A new study proves that attempting to multitask makes most of us more error prone, and less and less productive, while making us less healthy.

from Atlantic Monthly: its overall goal, getting more done in less time, turns out to be chimerical. In reality, multitasking slows our thinking. It forces us to chop competing tasks into pieces, set them in different piles, then hunt for the pile we’re interested in, pick up its pieces, review the rules for putting the pieces back together, and then attempt to do so, often quite awkwardly. (Fact, and one more reason the bubble will pop: A brain attempting to perform two tasks simultaneously will, because of all the back-and-forth stress, exhibit a substantial lag in information processing.)

More on We always knew it, but now it’s confirmed: mulitasking does not work

Can you effectively compete with larger, funded competitors or even a mass marketer like Wal Mart? You bet you can! You have to set yourself apart and be unique. If you are selling products, it’s amazing how the big guys will have every big ticket, low markup item offered to the public at nearly wholesale. It’s completely futile to try to compete with them on these goods alone, and why bother? The place where nearly all drop the ball is with the accessories or parts and support services. Find yourself a place in this niche and may end up losing all interest in trying to compete on the big ticket goods. Remember, if you are selling online, your reach is to the world. Even a tiny niche locally can be very big in the global market. A local niche that compliments a mass merchant you locate near to can be just as powerful. You can also accomplish this online through the use of key words and search terms.

Here another way of looking at it from online marketing guru, Seth Godin:

Mass phenomena are tricky things. It’s true, the typical American reads exactly one book a year. How are you going to predict which of the 75,000 books published are going to be that book? You can’t.

Many bloggers seem to be on a perpetual hunt for the front page of Digg. Sure, it brings you hordes of eyeballs, but then they turn around and leave. What’s the point of that, really?

I think that are plenty of tips you can follow to optimize your offering for this fickle mass group. But it’s still a crap shoot. Doesn’t it make more sense to incrementally earn the attention of a smaller, less glitzy but far more valuable group of people who actually engage with you? And the best part is, your odds of success are a lot better.

Sure, Seth’s addressing Bloggers looking for traffic, but the rules and the game are essentially the same.