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Over the past decade, mobile phone capability has improved at an incredible rate. We can do things with those little devices in our hands that twenty, ten or even five years ago we would have thought impossible. Yet there is one area of smartphones that hasn’t improved. In fact, if anything, it seems to have got worse over recent years. The general battery life of a smartphone is as short now as it was when mobile phones came with shoulder straps. So what’s the deal? Why does the battery run out so quickly and can you do anything about it?

Beware of free apps

If you’re downloading free apps, especially games, most of the power they use might not have anything to do with the app itself but rather is being used on third party advertising services. As little as 20% of a free app might be used on the actual game, and over 50% used on location-specific advertising. In short, don’t use free apps that come with lots of adverts. They drain your battery for no good reason.

Turn off apps

Just because you are not using an app it doesn’t mean they are not using power. You physically have to turn the app off in order to stop it draining your juice. You can do this with the task manager. Forget, and you’re wasting valuable battery for no reason.

Signal

How strong is the signal in your area because if it’s low, your phone will be using more battery to keep you in touch. The same is true for network speeds in your area. However, the reverse can also be true and if you have a strong signal, your phone works to its full potential and can drain the battery faster.

Turn off GPS

Sure it’s good to know where you are and that others do too, but any app that uses GPS is draining your power. Go into your settings and turn it off and you can keep going for longer.

Think about what it’s doing

Just consider the phone you have in your hand. If you’ve got a top quality smartphone like a Samsung Galaxy S3 on contract, you’re essentially carrying around a small but powerful computer. That’s incredible to think about. It’s no wonder it uses battery. In fact, it is amazing that batteries last as long as they do. So, how about giving your phone a break and remembering to charge it up every day?

An SSL Certificate helps you encrypt data transmitted through the internet. If you own an eCommerce store or any kind of site that requires login information or financial details to be transmitted over an unsecure connection like public access WiFi hotspots, then you need an SSL certificate to protect such important information from being intercepted and hacked.

What SSL Certificates does is to encrypt your data before it’s transmitted over any network, even if such data is intercepted the encryption on it will make it impossible for it to be read. With the number of internet scams growing massively every day, the need for SSL Certificates to validate the credibility of a site is paramount.

If you run a website that requires your customers to enter sensitive data like credit cards or any other important payment details, personal information etc then you requires an SSL certificate to gain such customer’s confidence.

My favorite SSL Certificate providers out there include Comodo, Verisign, GeoTrust and Thawte. But the cost of obtaining an SSL Certificate from such established and well-known SSL certificate providers are normally high. An SSL Certificate could cost as much as $250 or more annually and not many people can afford such.

Though some SSL Certificate reseller companies out there are offering cheap low-price SSL Certificates for a fraction of the typical SSL certificate cost, some as low as $14.99, there is also a downside to such SSL certificates. Some do not have browser recognition and when a customer cannot see the lock sign on the browser during an online transaction his confidence will wither.

How to get free SSL Certificate

The best way to get free SSL Certificate for your website will be to sign up with web hosting companies that offer one for free. Hostgator and Godaddy offer a complimentary certificate with their business or eCommerce hosting packages. Hostgator offers shared SSL Certificates for both Hatchling Plan and Baby Plan for $3.96/mo and $6.36/mo respectively but offers free Private SSL Certificate & IP for its Business Plan for $10.56/mo. GoDaddy only offer free SSL Certificates on its Ultimate hosting plan at the rate of $7.49/month. You can also sign up for GoDaddy’s Standard free SSL Certificates here.

Other webhosting companies out there such as Arvixe also offer free SSL Certificates in its hosting plans. So obtain your free SSL Certificate from any of our recommended web hosting companies and secure your website. A free SSL Certificate provides a number of benefits to online stores such as protection of customer data while making online purchases and server authentication. Win your customers trust with a free SSL Certificate today. A free SSL Certificate will secure your server with full 128/256 bit encryption and are embeddable in all browsers and devices. Free SSL Certificates offers the highest levels of online security for your customers and business.

So I hope you can now easily obtain a free SSL Certificate, if you have any more questions or contributions please use the comment below. Remember to subscribe to my RSS feed.

E-commerce is becoming a big online industry, making many people wanting to start their own online store to sell their goods. Even physical stores are taking it to the Web for brand exposure, extending a digital arm into the world of online commerce. Not a fan of codes? It’s fine because you can fall back on tools like Goodsie, to do all the coding for you to have your very own online store.

Getting Started

Goodsie makes it really easy to start up your online store. All that is needed is a store name, an email, your name and a password. After entering all your details for your store you are presented with a flat UI dashboard to manage your newly created store.

One of the main parts of managing an online store is of course, adding and managing the products you want to sell. Apart from having fields for description, titles and price, Goodsie also has some rare features in their product manager such as SKU, an option used to keep track of all your profit margins, and not to mention the ability to add extras like wrapping, color, etc.

Styling Your Store

Nowadays the style of your store is pretty important. The Goodsie store designer is as simple as can be. You can customize the page layouts, backgrounds, colors, fonts and effect, or add your custom logo for the site. There are also design features for products and details, but with all these ‘customization’, there is a problem.

One of the few, or perhaps its greatest weakness is that Goodsie does not allow those that are able to dig into designing full layouts to even touch the default design. In the long run, Goodsie will lose an overwhelming number of tech-savvy store owners.

The Little Extras

But when it comes to the extras, Goodsie makes up for it, going a bit further than other e-commerce services with awesome and useful extra features.

The extra features of Goodsie starts with its statistic dashboard that gives you all of the information that you need from your store including the amount of visitors, actions from the visitors, average time spent on the store, common actions, searches, links to your store, countries and sources of the traffic.

Last but not least we have two other extra features which is the ability to use coupons for your online store and products being sold and the ability to accept credit cards using Stripe Payments.

Up to 55% of shoppers want multiple payment options and will abandon their cart if the option is not there to pay by the channels they are most comfortable with. Thus having Stripe integrated into your store is a big plus compared to other services

Pricing

Goodsie has two plans, Standard, which is $15/month and Premium which is $40/Month. The premium account can give you a few more features. Let’s take a look at what the premium account can give you:

• Inventory email notifications
• Insightful sales analytics
• Targeted email marketing system
• Multiple user accounts and permissions
• Shipping label solutions by ShipStation

Personally, I believe that the premium account is overpriced.

Should You Try It?

Here’s a summary of the good and the bad of Goodsie.

Advantages

• Simple and easy-to-use dashboard.
• Ability to accept multiple payment options using Stripe.
• Coupon Codes feature.
• The extra details within the product information. (e.g. gift wrapping, colors)

Disadvantages

• The site styles may be a bit too simple for some people.
• The account plans are on the pricier side.
• There is no ‘free’ account type.

Conclusion

Goodsie has some useful and unique features but if you are looking for really awesome design, you may find it lacking in that aspect. I’m hoping that there will be improvements in this area, hoping that Goodsie will eventually allow designers to play and experiment with the design side of things.

For the most part, I recommend Goodsie for storekeepers that are looking for a simple easy to use e-commerce service especially, for those that are just starting out in online business and ecommerce.