I love Fans.  People that love you for what you do.  They are the best marketing tool you have.  Someone that tells all their friends about your products.  It is priceless!

Now you can invite customers, friends, and family members to join your store fan club.  Each fan can easily create a profile, upload a picture, bookmark products, and invite their friends.

We also added a way for you to stay in touch with all your fans via HTML newsletter to announce sales, events, new product additions, or just to say hi.

Why we launched this feature:

A big part of creating a successful online store is keeping old customers.  If you can create a community around your products, get people excited, and generate repeat customers you no longer have to rely on external factors like search engine rankings.  We have a lot more in store regarding the fan club (we have only launched a very basic version today) so stay tuned and PLEASE let us know if you have any ideas on what to add.

HOW TO START?

You can easily turn your Fan Club on or off at the bottom of your store settings page of your headquarters.  Can’t wait to see how people use this!

AddThis.com is a social bookmarking tool that will allow your customers to share your product pages with the world. These directions explain how to sign up for an AddThis.com account and set it up to work with your Flying Cart store.

1. Go to http://addthis.com/account.php
2. Create a free account by entering your email, selecting a username, and choosing a password
   
3. *Important* remember your username
4. Login to your Flying Cart Head Quarters
5. Navigate to Store -> Settings
6. Enter in your AddThis username
   

Social Bookmarking is a quick way to bookmark a page on the web and share it with other internet users.

Flying Cart has created an easy way to add social bookmarks to each product page, here are the instructions.
Here is a pretty good definition of Social Bookmarking according to Wikipedia

“Social bookmarking is a way for Internet users to store, organize, share and search bookmarks of web pages. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, but depending on the service’s features, may be saved privately, shared only with specific people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, via a search engine, or even randomly.”

Need a video?… Here is one that I found explaining one of the most popular Social Bookmarking tools: Delicious.

3 BIG Benefits to using Social Bookmarks:

1. Great for Search Engine Optimization, the more your website is linked the better your keywords will appear in Search Engines

2. Increases interaction with your visitors

3. Will provide referral based visitors (the best kind)

Top 5 Social Bookmarking Sites you should always bookmark yourself on
1. Delicious

2. Digg

3. Google Bookmarks

4. Reddit

5. Yahoo Bookmarks

Just click on this link to Join: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=6390815171

Kristen Nicole, a writer for Popular Tech Blog Mashable wrote a great piece on our new social aspect to Flying Cart.

Social networking is a huge web phenomenon, linking people to other people with similar interests on sites like Facebook and MySpace. My friend Jeremy’s life (an 8th grader) seems to revolve around his Facebook profile. That’s some powerful stuff.

In pondering the ubiquitousness of social networks on actual social real-life social lives, I wondered, can I bring the benefits of social networking to Flying Cart? In the world of online retail, it would not only help store owners meet and talk to each other, but it would also help bring in more customers by linking stores. Stores would no longer be islands, they would be part of a retail network. Voila — store networking was born!

We just launched this new feature on Monday and we are already seeing lots of our stores putting up their public profiles and finding other stores to connect with. It’s an instant hit.