An online shopping cart is the foundation of any e-commerce website, providing a safe and easy way for customers to purchase products and for merchants to receive orders for multiple products from their websites. But advanced SEO shopping carts can offer much more than that. An SEO shopping cart has the ability to help websites increase organic sales while providing the merchant with a long list of priceless benefits and features. Here is a look at the benefits of a must have shopping cart solution developed by Ascender Cart.

Search engine optimization: Your shopping cart should be search engine optimized to improve your search engine rankings. Ascender Cart offers premium SEO shopping cart features including custom keyword rich URLs, image ALT attributes, page titles, anchor text, header H1 tags, Meta keywords and Meta descriptions. Additional SEO features include 301 redirections and breadcrumbs. Ascender Cart also provides a FREE SEO training manual, making it easy for merchants to learn and understand basic SEO techniques and practices.

Marketing tools: Drive your brand’s message with the help of the right shopping cart software. Ascender Cart’s SEO shopping cart offers marketing tools and features to help generate traffic to your site and build brand value. Features include the ability to customize discount coupons, share products on social media sites, recommend products and feature product reviews. Customers can also add to the cart without leaving the product page.

Premium security: Advanced shopping cart software should offer secure transactions, so that your customers can feel safe and confident when ordering from your website. Ascender Cart is PCI certified and offers premium hosting, integrated IP blocking security and much more.

If you have decided to become a retailer in the online world, there is no doubt that one has to open an e-store for a start. Since some of them might require a decent upfront investment, beginners might not necessarily be pleased with the way things turn out, so it is always advisable that one tries out a free e-store first before investing any money.

And if you have any doubts, here are some benefits that might help you to make that choice sooner rather later:

Benefit #1: First and foremost, the only expenditure when using a free e-store is that of your time, so it is always a good idea to get started this way.

Benefit #2: There won’t be any need for a developer as templates and freebies offered by the free e-store will avoid these costs as well.

Benefit #3: There will be no need to upgrade your website or even buy a hosting package in availing of e-stores.

Benefit #4: A community of e-tailers will be there to support you if you need any help.

Benefit #5: Depending on which sites you wish to use for this, one will get help indexing the products or services over the search engine for greater availability.

And while one might not be able to avail of the several options that are open to most e-tailers these days (with their own full-fledged e-store that is paid for), the truth is that in keeping your investment low, your chances of success can be that much greater.

LA Times just published a story on how some California visual effects companies are shutting down, due to cheaper labor offshore and tax credits in other states, which results in production companies sending their work to other states.

By taking advantage of tax credits in Vancouver, Canada, and London — where visual effects work for “Iron Man 2″ and “Inception” was done — or employing low-cost labor in China, Singapore and India, filmmakers are able to shave tens of millions of dollars off a movie’s production budget.

“We would bid stuff at break-even and they would say, ‘We can do the work for 20% to 40% less going offshore to Canada, U.K. or Australia,’ ” Says one production company representative in California.

A Los Angeles based visual effects artist I know, emailed me this:  “This is sad but it is the reality for Los Angeles based VFX companies .  Rates have dropped, and now there are 100′s of new matte painters and concept artists, young and hungry looking to do work in features for anything to get the foot in the door.  On top of it I was working at places last year where Compositor also matte paint smaller sometimes bigger shots and all the composting related things combined with that, meaning less work for the matte painters that only focus on matte painting with no other additional current industry tools .  US is outsourcing since they can not make the same profits anymore, pay freelancers/contractors on time, and have no cash flow .   When I worked as an Art Director and got more involved in meetings, realized that they were times were Film Studios wouldn’t pay the FX Vendors up to three months, and even in some meetings they asked for free concept work . . .FREE .  These are film studios,  so no wonder the work is going somewhere else cheaper now. They were enough signs and the most and unfortunate thing is that rates have gone lower.  We all have to adjust.  I have had to travel to other states for work. Regardless it is very sad, and unfortunate .

Not only is the work being outsourced to other countries and foreign talent, but our Supervisors are begin hired to go and train them and work with them making sure all works fine as it does and did for years back home ,  so with that happening, it will only get worst .  The only thing that will change it is our government offering tax breaks like other countries do within the state for California for Film related companies and vendors to help keep the work at home.”