First system I tried was Hootsuite (http://www.hootsuite.com) – nice looking presentation, social statistics, inexpensive – good deal? Kind of. My main goal is to automate my blog posts so I post once and that articles posted to Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin without me doing anything. I set this up and Hootsuite – took some time because they overdid  with user interface and my browser was going crazy on almost every click and there are way too many buttons. and after 24 hours – nothing got posted anywhere. Bummer.
After digging in their forums, I found many people having the same problem and somebody suggested dlvr.it (www.dlvr.it) for the same service – posting rss feed of your blog to social networks. And we have a winner – was very easy to setup, no browser crashes, lots of advanced features to customize your posts but will work fine by default, you can even set your own domain or subdomain as link shortener (instead of bit.ly) and still get the stats – sweet. works great, easy to setup.

 dlvr.it – highly recommended to automate your blog posts to social networks.

Some ideas to use this service for your e-commerce store – setup RSS feeds with your newest or featured products and post to your social accounts for your followers to see as soon as products are released. Magento has RSS extension and for X-cart xcartmods.co.uk offers an add-on which will help. Fully automated!
Better yet, setup wordpress blog and post weekly new products review there and use www.dlvr.it to distribute it to your networks. Will worth the time invested.

As usual, we are here for you in case you need help with setting this up.

Best regards,

Anton Pachkine
FinestShops E-Commerce Management
Hosting | Customizations | Design | Marketing
www.finestshops.com | 1(800)675-0162

P.S. Do not forget to follow me on Twitter and let’s connect on LinkedIn.

Beginning at 12:00 AM (Midnight) CST (6:00 AM UTC) on Jan 25, 2012 data center will be performing an emergency maintenance on a failing switch that is in front of some of our VPS Servers. This maintenance is on the Service Net Switch for the cabinet, so it will only effect traffic to the of the server. We have scheduled an hour for the maintenance, however we expect to not need the full hour window.
This maintenance will affect only a few virtual private servers and will not last more than 30 min.
We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.
If you have any questions about this maintenance, please contact your Account Manager or Support team. We hope you understand that such maintenances are necessary to benefit you and your customers.

Article source: https://www.mystorehelp.com/index.php?/News/NewsItem/View/112

U.S. online holiday spending is holding strong, with e-commerce sales reaching $25 billion, up 15 percent from a year ago! Though people are spending more money offline, sales at bricks-and-mortar retailers are not growing nearly as quickly.

Don’t keep us a secret! Tell about us to anyone you know who’s thinking about making “the switch” or about setting up a new Internet store!

Your FinestShops Team

Article source: https://www.mystorehelp.com/index.php?/News/NewsItem/View/110

We’d like to take a moment and express our gratitude and thank you for being a loyal client. All of us at Finestshops are honoured to work with you and we wish you and your families the happy and safe Thanksgiving!

Your FinestShops team.

Article source: https://www.mystorehelp.com/index.php?/News/NewsItem/View/109

Our office will be closed on Monday October 10, 2011 for the Thanksgiving holiday. We will still have technicians on-duty and will be monitoring your servers 24/7

If you have any urgent issues, please submit an “Emergency” priority ticket at https://www.mystorehelp.com and technical support will be paged right away.

Happy Thanksgiving to our Canadian clients!

Your FinestShops Team

Article source: https://www.mystorehelp.com/index.php?/News/NewsItem/View/108

1) BCS Engineering are offering it as a custom add-on (last time I checked, it did not look too professional):
http://www.bcsengineering.com/store/mobile-mod-for-x-cart.html

2) X-Cart iPhone and Android Optimized Theme from mercuryminds
http://www.mercuryminds.com/product/x-cart-iphone-and-android-optimized-theme.html
This one looks good but we did not use it for anybody yet.

3) mobi-cart.com (http://www.mobi-cart.com) was working on X-cart integration but I did not see a complete add-on/package yet.

1) Blocked fraud origin countries in .htaccess

See this article for more details: http://www.finestshops.com/easy-way-to-block-a-country-if-you-are-getting-fraud-orders.html

2) Blocked proxy servers in .htaccess

# block proxy servers from site access
# http://perishablepress.com/press/2008/04/20/how-to-block-proxy-servers-via-htaccess/

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP:VIA}                 !^$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP:FORWARDED}           !^$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP:USERAGENT_VIA}       !^$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP:X_FORWARDED_FOR}     !^$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP:PROXY_CONNECTION}    !^$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP:XPROXY_CONNECTION}   !^$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP:HTTP_PC_REMOTE_ADDR} !^$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP:HTTP_CLIENT_IP}      !^$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ – [F]

if you need more details about that, see the original article at http://perishablepress.com/press/2008/04/20/how-to-block-proxy-servers-via-htaccess/

Another proxy blocking code you can try is in this article: http://perishablepress.com/press/2007/10/15/ultimate-htaccess-blacklist-2-compressed-version/

And more aggressive settings in Anti-fraud module helped to prevent a few frauds which still passed the above blocks.

go to http://www.countryipblocks.net

1) in “select format” choose: “.htaccess deny”
2) select countries you want to block holding CTRL and left clicking to select
3) click “Choose countries”

See screen shot: http://screencast.com/t/g4KjNsmR5

Copy all the code in the result and add it at the end of your .htaccess file or email to support@finestshops.com for the installation:

See screen shot: http://screencast.com/t/OPrk0wkvUmu

We are experiencing a network connection problem affecting several VPS servers. Engineers are working on that problem.

Thank you for your patience,

Your FINESTSHOPS Team

Article source: https://www.mystorehelp.com/index.php?/News/NewsItem/View/107