The recent passing of Jerry Buss (owner of the LA Lakers) got me to thinking about what it was he did that changed the landscape of the NBA. When Buss bought the Lakers:

• he bought the team for $16 million…it’s now estimated to be worth over $1 billion
• front row seats cost $15 per game…now they start at $2500 and more for playoff games
• Los Angeles was more of an LA Rams town than it was a Lakers town

So, how did he change things. Buss knew that to change things up he needed the game to be more of an entertainment outing than a basketball outing. So, he added music, really loud music to the games, added cheerleaders, got Hollywood stars to come to the games, made the team play more up-tempo. In other words, Buss made the Lakers into an attraction, not just a basketball team. Having and keeping Magic Johnson, Kareem, and Kobe definitely helped, but the whole package has made the Lakers into one of America’s most popular teams in any sport.

So how does this relate to your business? In the software space, we need to build our apps in the same way. They need to have a “wow” factor that goes throughout the app. Not just a fancy UI, or compelling functionality. But, it needs to be an attraction that will increase user adoption as your customers use your app. Examples include:

• Facebook & Twitter – it’s an attraction because that’s where everyone hangs out
• Basecamp – it’s a really simple UI with easy to use functionality
• QuickBooks – it made accounting so easy by taking away all the debits and credits and lets a business focus on invoices and writing checks (i.e. takes the complexity and hides it)

These are just a few examples. The challenge is to find your “wow”. The Lakers are known as “showtime”, which is just what they created. For software companies, or companies of any kind, we need to find our showtime that through and through makes users come back over and over again. As Scott Cook says, we need to “change lives so profoundly people can’t image going back to this old way“.

We’ve been helping people integrate their e-commerce systems with QuickBooks for years. While speaking with many companies, we’re often asked to give more details on the basics of how e-commerce works. What components are required and who are some of the reputable vendors that supply these pieces. Not the technical details on the security required or anything like that, but just the highest level information on how it all works.

So, we’ve created a cheat sheet on e-commerce. Just the basics and the different components required. It’s a one-pager and is definitely not a comprehensive view on the subject. However, if you work in the QuickBooks arena and want a checklist of things required to get a shopping cart off the ground, this should help.

It’s free and can be downloaded here. Feel free to print it and share it with others.

If you sell on eBay and want your transactions to flow directly into QuickBooks, you can now do this with a one-click solution. Autofy now enables all PayPal sales transactions to automatically sync up with QuickBooks.

In QuickBooks, PayPal essentially works like a bank account. Money comes into it when people pay you and expenses go out of it when you pay others. With Autofy for PayPal & eBay, we’ll keep that account up to date with all transactions your sales transactions. This means:

-when someone pays you via PayPal, we’ll add money to the account
-when you pay someone else, we’ll automatically deduct the account (as if you wrote a check to someone)
-any associated PayPal fees will be automatically synchronized to keep the account up to date
-sales receipts are generated for all sales transactions directly into QuickBooks, which means we’ll automatically enter billing and shipping info for new customers
-For eBay sellers, we’ll tell you which auction the receipt is for and provide a link back to the auction directly in the receipt.

We have a free 30 day trial of the application which can be downloaded directly off our web site.

We’re really happy to announce that Autofy for PayPal was named as a finalist for the PayPal X Award in the best EBay integration category. We’ll be at PayPal’s 2010 Innovate developer conference coming up in San Francisco showing off how EBay and PayPal now have a seamless integration to QuickBooks.

Contact us to get try out the integration.

Take a look at our latest version of Autofy which now includes the ability to import PayPal transactions at the click of a button. With it, all money sent to you or that you send to others is tracked and entered into QuickBooks. PayPal integration for QuickBooks is now simpler than ever.

Contact us to get up and running.

Joe Dwyer was recently was in on a podcast about Autofy and how it helps companies automate their data entry and integrate QuickBooks into other applications.

http://www.redmonk.com/cote/2010/09/07/makeall009/