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The holiday season is understandably a stressful time for retailers, but ultimately it can also be the most rewarding. You have 11 holiday shopping days that require careful marketing strategy planning. Under these circumstances, it is understandable that some of you may unwillingly drop the ball when it comes to the state of your inventory.

However, it should always be one of your priorities. Research from the IHL group shows that the worldwide retail economy is worth a staggering $14.5 trillion. However, this figure could actually be substantially larger. Poor inventory management is one of the issues that stand in its way. The same report mentions that companies worldwide lose $634 billion a year from items that aren’t in stock and $472 billion from overstocking items. Combined, this leaves us with an astonishing figure of $1.1 trillion. Lost due to inventory management issues. Now that's a pie that you might want to have a piece of. 

We're all familiar with the online cab service - Uber. Even if you live in a country that doesn't yet have it, as a business owner, you must have heard about its success and some of the turmoils that it constantly has to go through in order to stay operational. 

One thing is certain - it is a successful business because it applies some of the best practices and most importantly, it offers a convenient alternative to the traditional cab services. Your eCommerce business can utilize the same principles in order to gain a competitive edge and boost your sales. Let's take a closer look at some of these to find out how exactly your online store can excel in its niche. 

If you're a small business owner, running your online store by yourself or with little outside help, then this article is for you. It's especially difficult when every little change on your website requires help: freelance this, freelance that. And it's even more true when it comes to the holiday season - you've got tons of updating promotions, rotating banners and new visuals practically every 2 weeks.

It's pretty hard to keep up. But there are useful tools, which can really help you save time and effort. Create beautiful images, banners and blog post visuals without any design skills.

Inventory management and shipping are probably one of the most important aspects of running a successful online store. If you're a re-seller, there's no direct way of affecting the quality of the products that you sell. Among some of the things that you can affect are convenient, timely and diverse delivery options. While you can always switch suppliers, if the products are not on par, with your quality standards - fulfillment is something that has to be organized, monitored and upgraded on your side. Lack of proper practices in this domain will cost you sales. 

This is where our latest partner can really help you out. Check out - BarcodeShipping by YBM-Deutschland, a great shipping and order management software product, which can make your life a lot easier. 

Diversifying your sources of traffic is a great way of increasing sales and conversions. Shopping engines are a great way of doing just that. That's where our latest member of the partner program comes in. Meet RetailTower - a great service, which can help you optimize your Magento store for comparison shopping engines.

Its integration with the most popular comparison shopping engines ensures that your products will be seen by the biggest number of people. Not to mention the other great features that RetailTower offers. 

We're very proud to announce that we've added another great hosting provider to the list of MageCloud's options. Please welcome - DigitalOcean, one of the leaders in cloud hosting, optimized for developers. But it doesn't mean that business owners can't utilize their amazing infrastructure. 

This option should work for both, store owners and developers, running their Magento instances at MageCloud.net. DigitalOcean has all of the technology and services, needed to run a stable and fast cloud server. 

As a continuation of our partner streak, we're introducing our latest partner - ExtensionHut. They are a professional and reliable extensions provider with expertise and experience in Magento development and management. Their dedicated and highly skilled team of certified Magento developers can help you boost your business growth and performance of your Magento store. ExtensionHut has all of the necessary skills and tools at their disposal to do that.

This October has been a really fruitful month for us, in terms of partnerships. We're very happy to see new companies join our Partners program, because we know that this makes the pool of great services that we offer even better and more versatile.

Meet Zestard Technologies - our latest partner and a very professional and experienced Magento design and development company. They are your best solution for complex and long-term Magento projects, which you don't have the time, the staff or the skills to deal with.

We're happy to announce yet another great partnership for MageCloud. We're honored to welcome SalesIds.com in our partnership program and are hoping for a fruitful cooperation with them. SalesIds is a Swiss company, which specializes in creating Magento extensions of the highest quality. Their products are designed and optimized to help you easily boost your online business. Here's how.

We want to offer more great hosting options for our users, which will give the desired flexibility to their online businesses. It's all about the product and its robustness. It takes us time to add new hosting providers to our pool, but you have to understand that it's a complex technical solution that needs a lot of work and proper testing to be usable.

We're proud to present our latest addition to the selection of available cloud services within MageCloud - Rackspace, one of the leaders in cloud hosting solutions. Its Managed Cloud solution offers you great customer support and unprecedented technical reliability.