Vincent's Reviews: September 2018

Thursday 27 September 2018

Our Favorite Zaps: Turn Your Accounting App Into a Personal Assistant

Most business owners don't launch into their vocational pursuits thinking how much fun it will be to balance the books. Nor do they imagine long, grueling hours of data entry that keep the business running. Try not to picture Ebenezer Scrooge hunched over his ledger by candlelight as you calculate and log the commission of each sale made this week. Yet, such are the realities of keeping a business in good standing. There is a way to avoid some of the tedium, however, if you're willing to turn your accounting app into your personal assistant.

The way to do it is to use Zapier in conjunction with any accounting app it supports, such as QuickBooks Online, Xero, Freshbooks, or any other accounting app supported by Zapier. With Zapier, you can create commands so that when one common business action happens, such as "QuickBooks received notification of a payment," it triggers another action automatically, such as "send a thank-you email to the client with the outstanding balance noted." You don't need to know how to write code to do it, either.

"My best aha moment was realizing I could automate transactions between multiple QuickBooks accounts"–Heather Satterley, Satterley Training and Consulting

Seeing as my accounting skills are about as good as a squirrel's ("they fail to recover about 74 percent of the nuts they bury"), I asked QuickBooks expert Heather Satterley of Satterley Training and Consulting if she found any Zaps that were particularly valuable. "My best aha moment (I've had so many) was realizing I could automate transactions between multiple QuickBooks accounts, thus solving the tedious manual task of recording intercompany transactions."

I also asked Esther Friedberg Karp, another QuickBooks expert, not to mention president of EFK CompuBooks Inc., the same question. "If my clients have more than one company with intracompany loans, we could create Zaps to keep their intracompany accounts in sync," she told me by email. She added that when she takes on a new customer and creates a QuickBooks entry for them, she has a Zap that automatically creates a new Dropbox folder where they can upload and download shared files.

Below are a few more examples of automations you can create using Zapier and QuickBooks Online. I stick with QuickBooks as the example to keep this article simple, but again, you can use the accounting app for your choice, so long as it's in Zapier's network of apps.

Beginner: Add New QuickBooks Customers to Toggl as Clients

Freelancers and small businesses who bill clients by the hour often use a time tracking app to keep accurate records of time worked. While some time tracking apps include invoicing and accounting tools at various tiers of service, it's not uncommon for a business to use a time tracking app, such as Toggl, in tandem with a separate accounting service, such as QuickBooks. When you do, you need to log every customer in QuickBooks as a client in Toggl. There's no need to worry about copying over such information every time you work with a new client, as long as you set up this Zap: Everytime I create a new customer in QuickBooks, creating a matching new client in Toggl.

Beginner: Back Up Your Customer Contact Info From QuickBooks to Google Contacts

QuickBooks has some fantastic options for hooking up your email account directly to your QuickBooks account so that you can send messages to customers from inside the app. But what if you need to get in touch with a customer or client quickly and you only have Gmail at hand? Or perhaps you want to backup your entire client list and their contact information to another service. Whatever your reasons, you can create a command so that every time you add a new customer to QuickBooks Online, you duplicate that entry in Google Contacts automatically.

Beginner: Mail a Handwritten Thank You Card for Every Sale Closed

Let's say you run a business that depends on you going the extra mile with your high-value clients. When you close a sale with QuickBooks, you could automatically generate an email to thank them, or you can stand out by sending a handwritten thank you card in the mail, even if you don't have time to pick up greeting cards and stamps. There's an online service called Thankster that can write greeting cards and mail them for you. When you set up this next Zap, your clients automatically receive a personalized card from Thankster every time you mark a sale as closed in QuickBooks.

Intermediate: After a Purchase, Add New Customers to QuickBooks and Create a Receipt

Recently, Zapier profiled a small business called Total CSR that offers training to new customer sales representatives in the insurance industry. New clients typically sign up by purchasing some kind of training package through a WooCommerce sales portal on the company's website. On the back end, Total CSR has to create a customer entry in QuickBooks for the new client, as well as generate a receipt for the purchase.

Rather than do this rote bookkeeping by hand, the company uses a multi-step Zap, which means all the necessary steps that must happen after the new client makes the purchase get done automatically. When WooCommerce sees a new purchase (and you could swap WooCommerce here for Shopify or another supported ecommerce tool), the Zap checks whether the purchasing customer is already logged in QuickBooks. If not, it creates a customer entry. And in either event, it generates a receipt for the purchase. That's the kind of data entry that could take a few minutes each time it occurs. With the Zap in place, you'd never have to do it again. Here's how the automated process looks when broken into two separate pieces, just to make it easier to see:

Intermediate: Copy QuickBooks Invoices to FreshBooks and Alert Your Team

Here's another multi-step Zap, and this one is for teams that use QuickBooks as well as FreshBooks, plus Slack for communication. It starts when someone on your team creates a new invoice in QuickBooks. Automatically, a matching invoice appears in FreshBooks. Finally, Slack notifies the relevant people on your team, with as much detail about the invoice as you'd like to include.

What Makes a Good Real Estate App?

For this roundup, we focused software that would save you time and energy when dealing with repetitive, burdensome processes. The apps listed here are primarily companion tools, meaning they can be used together for ultimate efficiency. But some are direct competitors, like Follow Up Boss, Wise Agent, and LeadSimple (all real estate CRM tools).

Every real estate app included in our list meets the following criteria:

Makes it easy to share relevant information with agents, buyers, or sellers (or all three)
Centralizes information for a specific stage (or stages) of the lifecycle, so you can act and react faster
Empowers you to create and manage new programs and activities, with little ramp-up time or without relying on anyone else

Here is the best software for real estate agents, listed in rough chronological order of the average real estate lifecycle.

The 12 Best Real Estate Apps for Agents

Follow Up Boss (Web, iOS, Android) for centralizing communication
Cloud Attract (Web) for building real estate-specific landing pages
Wise Agent (Web) for real estate marketing automation
LeadSimple (Web) for reporting on real estate leads and sales
LionDesk (Web, iOS, Android) for recording and embedding videos into emails and texts to bring properties to life
Mojo Dialer (Web, iOS, Android) for dialing real estate leads
Showing Suite (Web, iOS, Android) for scheduling home viewings via text messaging
Spacio (Web, iOS, Android) for digitizing open house sign-in forms
magicplan (iOS, Android) for digitally creating floor plans and furnishing rooms
PalmAgent ONE (iOS, Android) for estimating closing costs
Disclosures.io (Web) for organizing and sharing disclosures
DocuSign (Web, iOS, Android) for signing offers and closing documents

Follow Up Boss (Web, iOS, Android)

Best real estate app for centralizing communication

An email sent to a Gmail account (top) also automatically appears in Follow Up Boss (bottom).

You'll try a multitude of ways to communicate with buyers and sellers: emails, phone calls, text messages, and video calls. The good news: You'll get hold of them eventually. The bad news: The entire conversation is broken up into pieces across multiple channels. Follow Up Boss wants to fix that.

The main selling point of Follow Up Boss is its inbox, the place where all your and your agents' emails, texts, and calls (including missed calls and voicemails) to your contacts live.

When signing up, you and your agents have to link your Gmail accounts so the app can automatically sync and log all email communication in one place. That means that when you read, respond, and archive emails, it happens on both sides (Gmail and Follow Up Boss).

The inbox itself is clean and simple and looks like any other email inbox you're used to. It displays all your messages in the left-hand column, and if you click on one, it opens the entire message in the middle of the page. You can reply to or archive emails directly in the Follow Up Boss inbox and filter communication in the inbox by emails, texts, or calls.

Follow Up Boss' inbox also takes organization one step further, only displaying emails and texts with contacts and leads, and excluding marketing email, spam, bills, etc., so you can quickly focus on the people you need to respond to.

Follow Up Boss Price: From $149/month for three users. The calling feature is an additional $79/month per user.

Learn more in our Follow Up Boss overview, and automate your contacts with Zapier's Follow Up Boss integrations.

Cloud Attract (Web)

Best real estate app for building landing pages

Generate leads and create beautiful landing pages with Cloud Attract.

An example of a landing page created from a Cloud Attract template.

Cloud Attract helps you generate leads and create beautiful landing pages in just five steps. First, choose what kind of leads you want to attract: sellers or buyers. Then, select one of 16 professionally designed landing page templates, complete with a high-quality, full-bleed background image.

Then, you indicate what kind of information you want to collect from a list of eight different criteria—anything from name to phone number to when leads are looking to buy (Cloud Attract does require that you collect address and email).

Cloud Attract will auto-generate your desktop and mobile-friendly landing page, allowing you to customize font, copy, and imagery. You can even add your Google Analytics ID or Facebook Pixel ID for advanced tracking, and add a meta title and meta description for SEO. The whole process took us less than five minutes to set up.

All your leads will appear in a designated tab, and you'll receive an email notification when new leads come in. The best part? You can even track partial leads, those potential buyers or sellers who start to fill in some information on your form but then abandon the page.

Cloud Attract Price: $149/month on its own; $125/month when bundled with other Cloud Agent Suite apps.

Automate leads and notifications with Zapier's Cloud Attract integrations.

Wise Agent (Web)

Best real estate app for email automation

Create your own drip campaigns to nurture leads with Wise Agent.

Between listing new properties, scheduling open houses, and closing deals, the last thing you want on your list is remembering to email new leads. Wise Agent offers a simple solution for email automation, so you can set everything up once and then let it run by itself.

Create your own drip campaigns by choosing the number of "events" (emails), and days between those events, or fixed dates on which each email should send.

You can also use one of Wise Agent's 16 pre-made email programs that are customized for buyers or sellers and include campaigns like "10 Day Conversion Plan" and "6 Touch Past Client." If you choose one of the templated programs, you have the chance to change the subject line, message body, image, and branding. You can also customize the cadence and the order of emails in the series. Take advantage of these templates if it's your first time creating nurture campaigns—it's much easier to edit content than draft emails from scratch.

While Wise Agent's interface is a bit clunky and dated, it isn't hard to learn. It breaks up the nurture email workflow into different steps, so you don't feel overwhelmed by all the details. It also has a handy calendar view that you can toggle to, which is helpful for determining when to send emails.

Wise Agent Price: From $29/month (billed annually) for up to five team members.

Automate leads with Zapier's Wise Agent integrations.

LeadSimple (Web)

Best real estate app for reporting on leads and sales

Dig into important metrics with LeadSimple's powerful reporting.

Are you wondering about sales trends, marketing performance, or benchmarks, but don't have the time to wrangle all that data in Excel? LeadSimple helps you drill down to understand what is and isn't working with auto-generated reports.

The lead dashboard puts your most important sales metrics right above your lead list, so you don't have to go digging through reports. It shows you how many leads you've received, the median response time, the median number of touches, what percentage of leads have been contacted, and what percentage of leads have converted. You can filter leads by priority, calls made, stage, source, and five other criteria.

The Agent Performance report lets you see metrics like how fast each agent responds to new leads and how persistent they are in following up. It displays a color-coded line graph that shows the number of leads, prospects, and won and last deals based on assignee. You can also dive into pipeline health, company trends, marketing performance, and closed business reports.

LeadSimple Price: From $65/month for the Get Organized plan, which includes up to two users, one lead type, and two connected inboxes.

Automate contacts, leads, and emails with Zapier's LeadSimple integrations.

LionDesk (Web, iOS, Android)

Best real estate app for recording and embedding videos into emails and texts to bring properties to life

Add videos to your emails and text messages with LionDesk CRM.

Sometimes words can't describe the flow of a hallway, the cozy vibe of a kitchen nook, or how the light fills a room. So when a potential buyer can't visit a house in person, your next best option is to send a video.

LionDesk lets you seamlessly add videos to your emails and text messages, bringing your properties to life. You can upload your own videos or record directly in the web or mobile app.

If you choose to record your own videos, you need to follow three steps. First, select a video type: a two-minute video for email or a 20-second video for texts. Then, you click the microphone icon on the video player to start your computer's camera and microphone, and once you allow LionDesk to use your camera and microphone, simply click the record icon to begin. Once the recording is complete, you can add a title, description, and tags to the video.

Then, if you want to embed that video (or a video you previously uploaded) into an email, click on the Marketing tab and either use one of LionDesk's email templates (there are more than 100 to choose from) or create your own. Once you're in the email editor, click the Video button to select and insert a recording.

You can also send your videos via individual or bulk text messaging, but you first need to purchase a custom phone number ($2/month) and pay for an additional video texting plan (starting at $2/month).

Recording and embedding videos are just two of LionDesk's features. It also offers the standard CRM features, like email automation, task management, power dialing, and contact management (among other things). While all the possible features can be overwhelming, it's well organized and easy to navigate.

LionDesk Price: From $25/month for up to 100 outbound texts, 5,000 outbound emails/month, and 100Mb of document storage. Note that this plan does not include video texting.

Automate leads and contacts with Zapier's LionDesk integrations.

Mojo Dialer (Web, iOS, Android)

Best real estate app for dialing leads

Dial up to 300 calls with Mojo Dialer's three-line dialer.

When you're cold calling and dialing each number by hand, you're bound to make a few mistakes and misdial. Mojo Dialer helps you avoid human error and dial up to 85 calls per hour with a single-line dialer and 300 calls with a three-line dialer.

You can organize all your contacts into calling lists (for new leads who have not been contacted) or groups (for leads who have been contacted before). For example, you could create different calling lists based on lead source or geography. Or, create groups based on lifecycle stage like appointment set, hot lead, inactive lead, or future follow-up.

Once you click on a calling list or group, you'll see a table where all the contacts in that bucket are displayed, along with their address, phone number, number of attempts that have been made, status change date, and listing status. You can also click on any row in the table and move that contact to a different group or list, and assign a manager for that contact.

Then, you can click one of three big, green buttons: Power Dialer, Click to Call, and Marketing. Selecting Power Dialer or Click to Call opens a pop-up window where all the calls will be made, with the options for you to pause, hang up, stop, or redial.

Mojo also helps you get hard-to-find contact information with reverse look-up, just listed and just sold data, and for sale by owner data.

Mojo Dialer Price: From $10/month per user in addition to a single-line dialer for $89 per license.

Automate calling lists with Zapier's Mojo Dialer integrations.

Showing Suite (Web, iOS, Android)

Best real estate app for scheduling home viewings via text messaging

Schedule home viewings via text message with Showing Suite.

We use our smartphones for almost every task, so why not add home viewings to that list? Create a single phone number that buyers can text to schedule home viewings and access property information with Showing Suite.

Once you sign up, you can import your active MLS listings to the platform and then enable Showing Robot on those listings, which allows you to automate the scheduling. You'll search for an available robot phone number by entering your preferred area code and part of the desired phone number. You can customize how you and your seller want to be notified of new showing requests, choosing between text or email, and selecting whether you need to manually confirm the showing.

Then you can set a default response to initial home viewing requests—the automated message that buyers will get when they text to request a viewing. Finally, you can set reminder options for list agents, sellers, renters, property managers, asset managers, or other people, sending reminders at five different intervals before the viewing begins.

While this Showing Robot feature is unique and can automate the back-and-forth scheduling of home viewings, the web app has a rather steep learning curve. It's organized by nine tabs for things like listings, showings, calendar, and follow-up. It's not always clear where to go to complete specific actions, like setting up the Showing Robot feature (which you need to do in Settings). The mobile app is easier to navigate, primarily because it doesn't display so much information on one screen and instead breaks it up into bite-sized chunks.

Showing Suite Price: From $24/month (billed annually). There's also a Pay As You Go plan for $30/listing plus $2.95/month.

Spacio (Web, iOS, Android)

Best real estate app for digitizing open house sign-in forms

Create paperless open house forms with Spacio.

Here's an example of someone's profile in Spacio after they fill out an open house form.

With Spacio, you can create paperless open house forms to accurately collect visitor information and automatically send follow-up emails after the open house ends. That means you don't need to keep track of loose pieces of paper with unreadable handwriting after each open house.

Add your properties to the web app, and automatically launch sign-in forms on your computer, iPhone, or Android phone. You can use the default form, which asks for visitor name, email, address, and phone number; or customize your own fields (up to six questions). You can also enable automated follow-up emails based on how a visitor responds to a question. For example, if you add the question, "Are you working with an agent?" and the visitor responds Yes, a follow-up email will be sent to the registered agent after the viewing.

For each person who fills out your form, Spacio creates a profile with links to each visitor's social media accounts, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Gravatar, Klout, Pinterest, Twitter, and WordPress, to help you gain unique insights.

Spacio Price: From $25/month for individual plans.

magicplan (iOS, Android)

Best real estate app for digitally creating floor plans and furnishing rooms

Quickly create digital floor plans with magicplan.

An example of a furnished floor plan on magicplan.

Forget measuring every corner and drawing detailed layouts: magicplan lets you create floor plans in seconds with a smartphone or tablet.

You capture each room with your device's camera, taking pictures of each corner of the room and walking along walls to measure the length. Once the floor plan is created, you can use your fingertips to change measurements, wall thickness, corners, and more. You can also furnish the floor plans, dragging and dropping more than 1,000 objects including doors, plumbing, appliances, furniture, and even fire and safety icons to show emergency exits and fire evacuation plans. If there's a room that needs more detail, add notes and photos or use dedicated icons like "To Install" or "To Remove" to action items.

You can also connect to a 360-degree camera to take panoramic pictures and create a virtual tour of the space.

magicplan Price: Free to download; from $8.33/month (billed annually) for one user and limited features.

PalmAgent ONE (iOS, Android)

Best real estate app for estimating closing costs

Calculate buyer estimates and seller net sheets with PalmAgent One.

Whether you're working with buyers or sellers, there's one question that everyone wants answered: How will this affect my bank account?

PalmAgent ONE calculates buyer estimates and seller net sheets in seconds based on your state and county. You enter sales price, down payment, interest rate, broker fee, and up to seven other pieces of information (depending on the report) to automatically generate colorful, detailed graphs and tables. For example, you might want to run a Net at Close report for the seller. By entering sales price, broker fee, repairs, property taxes, loan balance, interest rate, and closing date, you'll get a circular graph that shows you the total closing cost and the amount of money the seller will keep. You can even click directly into the graph to adjust the numbers.

You can also go one step further and run calculations like monthly affordability, rent vs. buy, and sell to net, as well as compare multiple offers.

PalmAgent ONE saves you from manual calculations and presents information in easy-to-understand graphs. But you do need to have every bit of information at your disposal in order to run these reports. For example, to run the Net at Close report accurately, you need to know how much each repair will cost—and that information is dependent on third-party contractors providing a quote on time. However, if you're looking for a quick way to give buyers and sellers a rough idea of financials, PalmAgent ONE does the trick.

PalmAgent ONE Price: $0.99/month for iOS; $12.99 for Android.

Disclosures.io (Web)

Best real estate app for organizing and sharing disclosures

Organize and share disclosures with Disclosures.io.

More agents are beginning to share property disclosures upfront, before offers, to make sure deals don't fall through at the very last minute. With Disclosures.io, sharing information, from pre-sale inspections to natural hazards reports, is a cinch. The free tool lets you assemble all disclosures in one online location, share them with interested parties, and track activity.

The simple interface walks you through how to create a package for either the seller or the buyer. Just enter the property address, and from there, you have the option of adding documents, photos, escrow information, and instructions. You can also customize the footer signature block, adding buyer and buyer agent names and dates, and attach DocuSign documents directly to the package.

Then, you can share the package with agents by adding their name and email address and customizing the invitation in the pop-up share screen. You can indicate whether you're sharing the package with a team member, who will be able to view, share, and download it; or with a buyer, who can only view and download it. By upgrading to the Pro plan, you can also see who has requested disclosures and who has actually reviewed them, as well as send messages directly from the package.

Disclosures.io is a simple, no-frills app that makes sharing disclosures easier to track and more professional than an email with attachments. All your packages are displayed on the first screen once you log in, so you can see everything at a glance.

Disclosures.io Price: Free for the Basic plan; $39/month for the Pro plan, which includes priority support, messaging, activity tracking, and the ability to share with sellers.

DocuSign (Web, iOS, Android)

Best real estate app for signing offers and closing documents

Get electronic signatures in seconds with DocuSign.

Real estate deals don't always happen in an office, with pen and paper readily available. With DocuSign, you can go paperless and get electronic signatures on disclosures, forms, and closing paperwork, regardless of where you—and the buyers and sellers—are.

To get started, drag and drop your document or upload a file from Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive. You select whether you're the only person who needs to sign or if you need signatures from other people.

Then, if DocuSign detects form fields in your document, you have the option of assigning those fields to a recipient, making the form data read-only, or deleting the data completely. You can also drag in other fields, like checkboxes or dropdowns, change the formatting, add tooltips, and more. Or create a custom field by adding information like value, font, font color, font size, width, height, and more. When the document is ready, you can customize the subject line and message, and send it directly in DocuSign. Everyone is notified when all signatures are added.

DocuSign wasn't created for real estate agents, but it works as if it were.

DocuSign Price: From $10/month for 1 user.

Learn more in our DocuSign overview.

Finding the Best Real Estate App

No one app will take care of all your real estate needs. But by carefully selecting the software that will get you through the process—marketing, lead gen, client management and communication, showings, open houses, floor plans, disclosures, closing docs, and anything in between—you'll create a better experience for your clients. Plus, you'll carve out more time for you to spend where it matters: closing deals.

Title image by Coffee Bean from Pexels

source https://zapier.com/blog/best-real-estate-software/

Wednesday 26 September 2018

How to Get Any App to Work with Zapier

Tuesday 25 September 2018

7 Tips to Cut Costs for Your eCommerce Store

For consumers and retailers alike, eCommerce used to be the more affordable option compared to brick-and-mortar stores. But between Amazon, competition within eCommerce, and the fight from brick-and-mortar stores—which can match online prices 72 percent of the time—online stores need to find new ways to cut costs to stay afloat.

The first step is picking the right eCommerce platform to run your business efficiently. Once you've done that, it's time to consider alternate ways of trimming down expenses to save money while running your online store.

1. Reduce Product Returns

One of the most fundamental rules of commerce goes like this: Keep products in customers' hands and profits in yours.

When a product is returned, it's not just a cut-and-dry undoing of the sale. More likely, you'll eat the cost of shipping, plus labor for bringing the item back and forth from storage, and the nickels and dimes of packaging. Then there's the cost of checking to see whether the product is damaged and the possibility that you can no longer sell it as "new." All that, and you have one more customer who's not coming back.

Reducing product returns is a surefire way to cut costs, but how do you do it?

Make sure buyers know what they're getting before they buy.

Elaborate on your product page descriptions and add multiple photos from different angles so buyers have a more accurate idea of what they're getting. Product videos are even better: They give shoppers a realistic sense of what the product looks like in action.

For clothing companies, a common reason for returns is garments not fitting well. You can reduce that by providing accurate size charts easily accessible from the product page. It's extra helpful if sizing charts include additional measurements, such as a hip and waist measurement for a shirt in addition to chest and length, to help people understand how it'll fit their body shape. You can also include photos using models of different shapes and sizes, with a footnote that says some details about the model. — Danny, CEO and Founder of LemonStand

Extend the time frame for returns.

Although it may sound counter-intuitive, extending the allowed time frame for returns can also reduce return rates. Economists attribute it to the endowment effect—the longer the customer "owns" the product, the stronger their attachment to it.

Longer return policies also relieve the pressure to return as soon as possible, giving customers more time to change their minds and decide to keep the product.

Avoid high-risk customers.

You might be tempted to have the broadest reach possible for your store, but one of the most effective ways to reduce returns is to isolate the customers that pose the highest risk—and stop marketing to them. With a little extra effort looking through previous sales data, you can identify the customer segments with the most returns.

Maybe you notice that most returns come from Facebook referrals. If that's the case, it might be time to slow down on your Facebook advertising. You can get even more granular than that too. Pay attention to the reasons for returns: If someone returns something because they don't like the style, don't send them promotions for products with that same style—they might be tempted to buy again, only to return it.

As long as you have a more educated approach to who's returning your products and why, you'll be better prepared to avoid problematic situations before they arise.

2. Negotiate with Suppliers

If your store is big enough to sustain high-tier bulk shipments from suppliers, try improving your negotiation skills. A silver tongue is worth its weight in gold.

The two main points of interest for your suppliers are payment times and order sizes. If you can accommodate them more in those areas, they'll be more likely to accommodate you in prices.

Working out an early payment or prepayment discount isn't uncommon with suppliers, especially if you have established a relationship with them. The typical "early bird" discount ranges from around 2-5 percent, but depending on your relationship, you might be able to work out an even better deal.

If your supplier offers fixed price breaks (i.e., preset discounts if your order surpasses a specific amount of money or quantity of products), you could save money just by upping your order amount and buying in bulk. To further cut costs, you could even attempt to negotiate a freight-free deal: Discuss how much you'd have to buy for your supplier to waive the freight fee altogether. That's one less expense you have to pay, as long as you can move the extra merchandise.

Effectively managing your supplier relationships is essential to long-term eCommerce success. Be sure to read terms and contracts thoroughly and ask questions as they arise. You may be able to negotiate free shipping, a discount, or other deals with suppliers by offering to pay upfront or due to a longstanding history with the company. Suppliers want you to be successful because your success contributes to their success. Communicate about your needs and don't be afraid to ask for better terms. — Becky, Managing Editor of eComEngine

One warning: When considering these tactics, be sure to determine if you'll pay too much for storing extra goods. Depending on your warehouse arrangements, storing the number of products necessary for bulk discounts may actually cost more than the discount. Crunch the numbers or reevaluate your storage options to find a way to make it work.

3. Negotiate Lower Credit Card Processing Fees

While you're still pumped up from negotiating with your suppliers, why not give your credit card processor a call, too?

While some fees—like charges handed down from Visa, MasterCard, and the rest—are non-negotiable, fees related to your processor can be bent a little, or even nixed completely. Annual fees, statement (or online reporting) fees, and set-up fees are all determined by the processor, which means they can be negotiated.

Just like with your suppliers, the longer you've been doing business together, the more open-minded they'll be to providing discounts. Just like you, processors want to keep their most loyal customers happy, so don't be afraid to throw around the weight of your contract length.

If your processor is unresponsive, it may be time to switch companies. Do your research to see what fees other companies can offer; even if you don't switch, you can use competitors' fees to leverage better prices with your current processor. Of course, double check for any termination fees on your current contract before making the final call.

Another strategy is simply to minimize the number of credit card sales you make. Enable other payment methods like PayPal, Stripe, ApplePay, or Venmo to circumvent credit card transactions altogether. Again, be sure to do your research beforehand—for example, PayPal's refund policy isn't kind on sellers.

4. Spend Marketing Funds More Effectively

As an eCommerce business, you want to play up one of your natural strengths: the fact that you're online. Funneling your marketing budget into digital methods is clearly the best choice, but you still need to know which avenues will help you most.

People looking at their phones while waiting for the subway

Calculating the return on investment (ROI) for each of your campaigns determines the best ways to spend your money, with no guesswork. Here's the basic formula:

net profit from investment ÷ total investment x 100

From there, compare the ROI percentages and allocate more money to the high performers. Keep in mind some avenues take more time to produce a profit than others, but in general, this is a great method for comparing all your ventures on equal ground.

While you're comparing ROIs of paid campaigns like PPC or social media ads, you can also experiment with less expensive digital marketing tactics already known for their effectiveness:

Social media marketing
Blog posts that target specific SEO keywords
Influencer marketing (by providing them a free sample)
Referral programs

Whichever channels you try, be sure you keep an eye on the ROI to decide if it's worth pursuing again.

5. Cut Inventory Costs with Promotional Campaigns

To paraphrase some classic business advice, "sometimes you have to lose money to make money." Offering sales, coupon codes, seasonal deals, and other such promotional campaigns can do more than drum up business if you're in a rut. When used strategically, they can cut inventory costs.

To make unpopular items more sellable, target them with promotional campaigns like discounts, two-for-ones, or as a free gift with more desirable purchases. If you have some stubborn products that are taking up space in your warehouse, unload them fast—that's a direct way to cut inventory storage costs.

With warehouses implementing stricter storage requirements, online retailers should make inventory management a significant focus to reduce penalties and added costs. Our customers find that bundling slow-moving items with relevant, best-selling products is a great way to reduce stale inventory. Not only is it great for your shoppers' experience, but it helps you cut storage costs and stay in the black. — Nick, CEO of ecomdash

Of course, promotions are also a great way to bring in new customers and remind previous customers that you're still around. Just be sure that you're thoughtful in your promotions:

When you're doing a promotional campaign, it's tempting to throw a really wide net, but I've had more luck going with targeted, niche promotions that are a good match for my audience. Instead of casting a wide net for entrepreneurs, for example, I'll advertise with newsletters that have a large readership among freelancers (and often hone in on specific industries: freelance writers, designers, etc.). Their readership is often smaller, but I've tested it, and I get better results from spending $50-100 to sponsor a few separate newsletters that are more targeted, than spending more money sponsoring one huge newsletter. — Michelle Nickolaisen, owner of The Freelancer Planner

Bottom line: Promotional campaigns let you cut costs and grow your business—it's a win-win situation.

6. Use More Efficient Packaging

In eCommerce, one of the most overlooked costs is delivery packaging.

If your packaging is too big or too heavy, you can immediately cut costs by trimming it down. One size does not fit all for shipping packages: You always want to use the smallest and lightest packaging available that will still protect the goods inside. If you can use a padded envelope, you should use a padded envelope. Here are a few specific tips when it comes to packaging:

Use as little protective cushioning as possible: One layer of bubble wrap is enough for most non-fragile items. Not only will you have to buy less cushioning, but you'll also save on shipping weight and be able to use smaller boxes.
When you can, you should buy shipping materials in bulk from a packaging store like The Packaging Company. Take advantage of price breaks at higher quantities. After all, packaging materials are easy to store, and, unlike products, they don't expire or go out of style. You could use cardboard boxes from 10 years ago and customers wouldn't mind.
Try eco-friendly packaging. Eco-friendly packaging is lighter than most other types of packaging, and so reduces shipping costs, even if it's a bit more expensive to buy. In addition to cutting shipping costs, you can boost sales by identifying yourself as a green brand. Consumers today consider eco-friendliness to be a top priority when deciding where to buy, with a majority of shoppers willing to pay extra for green products and brands. Those numbers increase the younger the shoppers are, so this is a business trend that's going to keep growing with time.

7. Automate Your Business

Time is money, so if you want to cut costs, cut wasted time. By automating tasks, you free up your and your team's time, so you can use it for more profitable items. Zapier can handle the busy work for you, so you have extra time for the work that really matters.

Using Zaps—automated workflows that connect two or more apps—you can automate your most common tasks. Here some common workflows you might want to let a robot handle for you:

Automatically add every new customer's contact info into your email marketing tool.

Automatically log all of your sales into your accounting software.

Automatically track all your sales data into a spreadsheet.

Automatically take action for abandoned cart events.

Automatically post new products to social media platforms.

Automatically create sales receipts.

When you no longer have to worry about the minutiae of running an eCommerce business, you can focus on big-picture strategies.

eCommerce's share of the retail market is growing, slowly but steadily. And with new technology like Augmented Reality favoring eCommerce, its growth is bound to accelerate. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't do what you can to cut costs on the regular. Making a few adjustments now will pay off down the road.

Image of businessperson on phone from energepic.com vie Pexels. Image of people looking at their phones from rawpixel.com via Pexels. Image of woman holding box from bruce mars via Pexels.

source https://zapier.com/blog/ecommerce-cut-costs/

Monday 24 September 2018

How This Realtor Saves Four Hours a Week through Automation

“When I realized I could make everything automatic, I knew I could get my time back and do the activities that matter the most.”Matt Castillo, residential realtor at Keller Williams

Thinking about moving? Matt Castillo. a residential realtor, loves helping people find new places to call “home.” Matt works with Keller Williams Realty, one of the world’s largest real estate brokerages that employs more than 150,000 associates around the world.

“Real estate transactions are one of the biggest financial decisions of your life,” said Matt. “Clients need someone they can trust who’ll work hard for them, and they need someone who can think outside the box.”

Matt’s schedule requires him to be a multitasker who’s constantly on the move, whether he’s walking through homes with potential buyers, creating a marketing plan for sellers who’ve listed their home, or working with other agents on home offers.

Matt's Tools at Keller Williams

Icon:	App:	Used For:
	Facebook Lead Ads	Lead generation
	LionDesk CRM	Customer relationship management (CRM)
	RealScout	Listing alert platform

Instantly Move Facebook Leads to LionDesk

Potential homebuyers (or leads) come to Matt through Facebook Lead Ads, and responding quickly is critical for realtors. “If you can’t make contact within the first five minutes of receiving a lead, then you’re toast,” Matt says.

Matt turned to app automation tool Zapier to funnel his leads to other apps such as LionDesk CRM, a customer relationship management (CRM) system for realtors.

“Before Zapier, I was forced to manually check Facebook Lead Ads multiple times per day to see if any new leads came through,” Matt explains. “Then, I’d type in all the pieces of information on each lead I collected through Facebook into other systems.” Not an ideal use of time for a realtor juggling multiple contacts.

By eliminating this time-intensive process, Matt can now focus on the things that inspired him to become a realtor in the first place: helping his clients.

Automatically Share MLS Listings Through RealScout

To help drive funnel conversion, Matt set up a Zap, or automated process, to instantly share MLS listings from RealScout with leads that come in through Facebook. By simply selecting custom categories such as price range or neighborhood, Matt’s Zap finds and shares relevant MLS listings of future homes with potential buyers.

Once Matt understood the power of automating his workflows and processes, he dramatically reduced the time spent checking leads. Instead, his time goes where it matters most: showing clients their new home.

Want to convert more leads in less time? Give Zapier a try for free.

All images courtesy of Keller Williams.

source https://zapier.com/blog/matt-keller-williams/

The 10 Best Pomodoro Timer Apps to Boost Your Productivity

When working or studying, you can only focus for so long before your mind starts to wander. Taking frequent breaks helps, but if you don't specifically schedule time for them, it's far too easy to sit and work for hours on end. The Pomodoro Technique helps you avoid this issue by breaking your day up into 25-minute focus sessions followed by five-minute breaks.

And while you could use an egg timer or the clock on your phone to schedule your breaks, a Pomodoro app may be a better solution. Pomodoro apps are timers designed specifically for the Pomodoro Technique, making it easy to divide your day up into focus sessions and breaks. Here's a quick dive into the Pomodoro Technique, followed by 10 of the best Pomodoro timer apps to help you get started.

What is the Pomodoro Technique?

In college, final exam season prompts a two-week-long cram session. Everyone has their own tales of studying all night, downing dangerous levels of caffeine, and rubbing their eyes at lecture notes. But after a while, extra studying doesn't really help; you're reading the same material, but your brain is so zapped that you won't retain anything.

That's what Francesco Cirillo discovered during his first year of college. After realizing he was getting distracted and not using his study time efficiently, he grabbed a tomato-shaped kitchen timer, set it for 10 minutes, and tried working solidly for those 10 minutes without doing anything else. And it worked—forcing himself to focus before rewarding himself with a break helped him get more done, even with the break time.

With more testing and tweaking, Cirillo settled on a structured framework for what he called the Pomodoro Technique (named after the Italian word for "tomato," in reference to his original kitchen timer). The final technique is just about as simple as his original idea: you use a timer to break your work into focused time blocks (usually 25 minutes) separated by a short, usually five-minute break. After four consecutive working time blocks, you take a longer break, around 20 or 30 minutes.

Each 25-minute work block is called a "pomodoro." If you feel the urge to do something other than work during a focus period, make a note of it. Over time, you'll train yourself to be more productive during each pomodoro.

The benefits of the Pomodoro Technique come from the frequent breaks, which help your mind stay fresh. The focused time blocks also force you to adhere to fixed limits, so you'll be encouraged to complete a task more quickly, or—in the case of a large task—spread it out over a number of pomodoros.

The length of working and break times can vary depending on what you prefer, but here's the basic process:

Start a 25-minute timer
Work until the timer rings
Take a short, five-minute break
Every four pomodoros (focus periods), take a longer break—usually 20-30 minutes

Because the whole technique centers around timing your focus periods and breaks, it helps to rely on a Pomodoro timer app to keep you on track and focused throughout the day.

What Makes a Great Pomodoro Timer App?

When looking for a Pomodoro app, it's easy to get overwhelmed. There are a lot of options to choose from. To compile this list of Pomodoro timer apps, we narrowed down our recommendations using the following criteria:

Extra features: Simple Pomodoro timers are a dime a dozen, and since all they do is count down the time to your next pomodoro, it's difficult to say what makes one better than another. Instead, we're focused on apps that do more than just count down time—apps that have features beyond just timing your pomodoros.
Professional use: Those extra features offered by our recommended apps are geared toward people looking to use the Pomodoro Technique at work. They let you combine Pomodoro and your to-do list, make it easy to track the time you spend doing pomodoros, help you do pomodoros with your team, or offer some other feature geared toward professional use.
Free or free trial: The best way to find the app that's right for you is to test a few options and find the one you love the most. That's difficult to do if you have to pay for the app outright without getting a chance to test it first. The apps below are all either free, have a free plan, or offer a free trial so you can try the app before you invest in a premium version of it.
Intuitive: You shouldn't need to spend days reading through an instruction manual or online help documentation to use a Pomodoro timer app. The apps we selected are all intuitive and easy to use so you can get up and running with your new tool from day one.

If the Pomodoro Technique sounds like something you'd like to try—or if you're just tired of using a kitchen timer to tackle it—here are 10 of the best Pomodoro timer apps to consider.

The Best Pomodoro Timer Apps

Focus Booster (Web, Windows, macOS, iOS, Android) for freelancers who work with multiple clients
PomoDoneApp (Web, Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android) for using Pomodoro with a third-party task management app
KanbanFlow (Web) for combining Kanban and Pomodoro
Pomotodo (Web, Windows, macOS, Chrome, iOS, Android) for combining GTD and Pomodoro
Marinara Timer (Web) for teams looking to complete pomodoros together
Be Focused (macOS, iOS) for simple task and time management on Apple devices
Tomatoes (Web) for motivating you to complete pomodoros
Engross (Android) for figuring out when you're the most focused
Pomodoro.cc (Web) for people who are new to the Pomodoro Technique
Timerdoro (Web) for people who need multiple timers
Alternatives to Timer Apps

Focus Booster (Web, Windows, macOS, iOS, Android)

Best for freelancers who work with multiple clients

Focus Booster lets you attribute your pomodoros to clients for simplified time-tracking and invoicing.

Focus Booster offers everything you'd expect from a simple Pomodoro timer—and then some:

It lets you adjust the lengths of your focus and break sessions.
The timer switches automatically from focus to break time.
Your data syncs across Focus Booster's web, mobile, and desktop apps.

But what really makes Focus Booster unique are the features in its Professional plan that let you use the tool as both a Pomodoro timer and time-tracking app.

Before starting a focus session, add/select a task and client to attribute the time to. When you finish the session, Focus Booster logs the time, task, and client to your timesheet. Then, your Reports dashboard shows a snapshot of your timesheet and revenue for selected dates. You can even download detailed CSV reports for simpler invoicing.

Another useful feature: pause your timer at any time if you're interrupted and need to quit tracking your time. When you're ready to refocus, restart the timer to log the time from the unfinished session to your timesheet, and start fresh with a new focus session.

Focus Booster Price: Free for the Starter plan, which includes up to 20 pomodoros/month; $2.99/month for the Individual plan, which includes up to 200 pomodoros/month; $4.99/month for the Professional plan, which includes unlimited pomodoros, client tracking, and data export.

PomoDoneApp (Web, Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android)

Best for using the Pomodoro Technique with a third-party task management app

PomoDoneApp integrates with many popular task management tools.

If you already have a specific task management system but want to use Pomodoro to boost your productivity, try PomoDoneApp. PomoDoneApp supports native integrations with popular task management tools: Trello, Wunderlist, Asana, Basecamp, Todoist, and more. It imports existing tasks from any connected apps, and it also lets you transfer tasks created directly in PomoDoneApp back to your task management tool.

If you don't already use a task management tool, add your tasks directly in PomoDoneApp—or use the Pomodoro timer on its own. Its timer has all of the functions you need: session length customization options, automatic switching from focus to break timers, and a minimized version that, if you're using the Mac desktop app, displays the remaining time on your menu bar.

PomoDoneApp also features powerful reporting options that let you filter your data and share your logs with others. And with its Chrome extension, you can blacklist certain websites during your focus period—a great option if you're prone to wandering off to check email, scan social media, or visit news sites while you're supposed to be focusing.

PomoDoneApp Price: Free for the Starter plan, which includes two native integrations and one month of data in reports; from $2.33/month for premium plans, which support more native integrations and longer periods of access to reports.

Automate PomoDoneApp with PomoDoneApp's Zapier integrations.

KanbanFlow (Web)

Best for combining Pomodoro and GTD

KanbanFlow tracks your interruptions, helping you discover the biggest impediments to your productivity.

PomoDoneApp is great if you're already using a Kanban tool like Trello or MeisterTask, but if you're not, it doesn't make sense to manage two separate systems to get the combined Kanban and Pomodoro features. Instead, check out KanbanFlow.

KanbanFlow is a Kanban board with a Pomodoro timer built in. It offers all of the features you'd expect from a Kanban app: work-in-progress limits, swimlanes, shared boards, and reporting options. But what makes KanbanFlow unique is its time-tracking feature that lets you initiate pomodoros directly from tasks on your board.

In addition to taking advantage of the Pomodoro Technique and tracking your time toward tasks, KanbanFlow provides you with statistics on your productivity. When you pause a timer, it asks you what caused the interruption. Use these reports to monitor your own productivity over time, and discover what interruptions are preventing you from staying focused most often.

KanbanFlow Price: Free for the Free plan, which includes unlimited tasks and boards, the Pomodoro timer, and productivity reports; from $5/user/month for the Premium plan, which includes file attachments, priority support, and third-party integrations.

Automate KanbanFlow with KanbanFlow's Zapier integrations.

Pomotodo (Web, Windows, macOS, Chrome, iOS, Android)

Best for combining Pomodoro and GTD

Pomotodo uses a to-do list to help you take advantage of both the Pomodoro and GTD productivity models.

Pomotodo lets you combine two different productivity techniques: Pomodoro and Getting Things Done (GTD). Use it to capture all of your to-dos, prioritize them, and organize them into categories, and then execute on your most important tasks using the Pomodoro Technique.

After you create an account, Pomotodo's tutorial walks you through how to use the system—and why each step is important. Once you finish the tutorial, start adding to-dos to your list. Pin the to-dos you plan on working on that day, add tags to categorize to-dos, and/or drag and drop all tasks into priority order. Once you're finished, click "Start Pomo" to start your first pomodoro.

Attach pomodoros to to-do items to track how much time you're spending on tasks, and check tasks off of your list to mark them as complete. You can also set goals for number of pomodoros to complete per day, week, or month if you're working on improving your productivity.

Pomotodo Price: Free for the basic plan, which includes a to-do list and Pomodoro timer; $3.90/month for the Pro plan, which includes recurring to-dos, goals, and customized timer durations.

Marinara Timer (Web)

Best for teams looking to complete pomodoros together

Marinara Timer lets you coordinate your pomodoros with others via a shared URL.

Looking for a web-based timer with no strings? Marinara Timer doesn't even require a signup. It offers three timer options: Pomodoro, Custom, and Kitchen:

The Pomodoro timer lets you get started right away with the default 25/5-minute timers.
If you want to customize timer lengths, Custom mode lets you tweak things to your liking.
Kitchen mode is your plain ol' one-time timer: Set a time limit and it counts down to zero.

The distinct feature in Marinara is that it gives you a unique URL for each timer, so you can share it with other people. Maybe you're working with a team and want to be sure that everyone's able to take their breaks together. Or maybe you want to hold yourself accountable by sharing your timer with a colleague. With Marinara, you get an administrator link and a viewer link, so you can share the viewer link with other people to view on their own screens. Only the administrator can start or stop the timer, so there's no risk of one person interrupting the timer for everyone else.

Marinara Timer Price: Free

Be Focused (macOS, iOS)

Best for simple task and time management on Apple devices

Be Focused lets you combine a to-do list with the Pomodoro Technique, and it provides reports showing exactly where you spent your focus time each day, week, month, year, and even across all time.

Just open your task list, add things you need to do, and then click the clock next to your highest-priority task to start your Pomodoro timer. When time runs out, the time you spent on that task is logged to your reports, letting you see exactly how much time you spent on each task on your list. You can also download those reports as CSV files for your records or invoicing.

Be Focused is available for both macOS and iOS devices, and if you own the apps for both operating systems, you can sync your data across all of your devices. It also supports other basic, desirable Pomodoro timer features: Adjust your settings to change the default timer lengths, skip breaks when you're idle, and adjust the sounds and volume of notifications.

Be Focused Price: Free on iOS for the Focus Timer app that includes everything except cross-device syncing; $0.99 for the Be Focused Pro iOS app that syncs with the premium macOS app; $2.99 for the Be Focused Pro macOS app that syncs with the premium iOS app (note that there's no free macOS version of Be Focused).

Tomatoes (Web)

Best for motivating you to complete pomodoros

Tomatoes lets you compete with other people who use the tool to earn a top spot on daily, weekly, monthly, and overall leaderboards.

For some people, the Pomodoro Technique is enough to keep them motivated and focused. But if you're struggling to stick with the technique and need some additional motivation, Tomatoes offers a solution: motivation via competition.

Tomatoes' timer is very basic. Just click the "Start" button on its homepage to start a 25-minute timer. That's pretty much the extent of it.

What makes Tomatoes unique, though, is that it tracks the number of pomodoros each of its logged-in users has completed, creating leaderboards for each day, week, and month, and across all time. If you're motivated by competition and bragging rights, Tomatoes could be just what you need to stay focused and complete your pomodoros.

Get your coworkers involved, and compete against each other to see who completes the most uninterrupted pomodoros each day or week. It might even lead to useful data if one person in particular wins frequently. For example, if the ongoing winner is the only person who works from home, it could be used as evidence of why letting people work remotely is good for productivity.

Keep in mind that Tomatoes only supports single sign-on via GitHub and Twitter, so you and your coworkers will need accounts on one of those two sites to appear on the leaderboards.

Tomatoes Price: Free

Engross (Android)

Best for finding out when you're the most focused

Engross is a Pomodoro app for Android devices that helps you figure out what times of the day you're most productive. Like many of the other apps on this list, it lets you create a to-do list so you can combine your task and time management techniques in one app. Then, you can use its Pomodoro timer (with editable timer durations) to time your pomodoros and breaks.

But where Engross really shines is with its distractions-tracking feature. Every time you get distracted while trying to focus during a pomodoro, you tap the screen. Engross tracks how often you click the distraction button, compiling reports showing you what times of the day you're best able to focus—and what times of the day you're most easily distracted.

Once you have that information, you can use it to build your own personal productivity schedule. Schedule the tasks that require the most focus during the hours of the day when you tend to be less distracted, and schedule lower-priority tasks during the hours where you find it harder to focus.

Engross Price: Free with ads; $1.99 for the Pro upgrade (purchased within the free version of the app) that provides an ad-free experience.

Pomodoro.cc (Web)

Best for people who are new to the Pomodoro Technique

If you're new to the Pomodoro Technique and aren't really sure yet if it's going to work for you, use Pomodoro.cc to do a trial run of the technique without creating an account. Pomodoro.cc offers both a timer and to-do list like some of the other apps on this list, but you don't have to create an account to use either feature. This lets you try the technique and see if you like it before upgrading to a more feature-rich tool.

Pomodoro.cc's timer is very basic. Pomodoros are set to 25-, 5-, and 15-minute increments that aren't adjustable. Just click a button to start the timer. Your to-do list is just for your reference over the course of the day—there's no way to track time toward different to-dos. You're basically just creating a list, using the timer, and marking things off your list when they're done.

However, if you find that you really like Pomodoro.cc, you do have the option to create an account and save your to-do list so you don't have to recreate it every day.

Pomodoro.cc Price: Free

Timerdoro (Web)

Best for people who need multiple timers

Sometimes, you need timers for more than just pomodoros. In that case, Timerdoro has a solution. It lets you create as many timers as you want to go off throughout the day.

Maybe you need to vary your pomodoro lengths by task. If so, create one for the different lengths you need. Or maybe you need to remind yourself to do multiple things throughout the workday: drink a glass of water, get some exercise, or reduce eye strain by looking away from your computer. Timerdoro lets you set up all of the reminders you need.

Using Timerdoro doesn't require an account, but if you want to use the same timers every day, you can create one. With an account, your timers get saved so you don't have to set them up over and over again.

Timerdoro Price: Free

Alternatives to Timer Apps

If none of the apps on this list work for you—or if you're looking for something either simpler or more customizable—here are two more options to consider:

Create a customized Pomodoro workflow with Zapier

If you want to really customize your Pomodoro experience, Zapier has two internal tools, Push and Delay, that can be used together to create a simple Pomodoro timer as a Chrome extension. Here's how it works:

Install the Zapier Chrome extension if you aren't already using it. If you've already installed it, skip to step two.
Log in to Zapier, and click the "Make a Zap" button that displays in the header of any page.
For your trigger app, select "Push by Zapier."
Select the radio button for "New Push," and click "Save + Continue."
Next, select "Delay by Zapier" as your action app.
Select the radio button for "Delay for," and click "Save + Continue."
Enter the amount of time for your focus session (typically 25 minutes), and click "Continue."
Finally, select how to want to be notified when your timer expires. Here are some ideas:

Choose the app where you want to receive a notification when your timer expires. For example, if you select Gmail, follow the rest of the steps to tell your Zap to send you an email when time expires.
Finally, give your Zap a name, and turn it on. Then, repeat these steps for your short break and long break timers.
When you're finished, just click the Zapier icon in your Chrome toolbar and select the timer you want to start.

When time runs out, you'll get a notification in the application you selected when creating your Zaps.

Zapier Price: Zapier's Pomodoro timer is a multi-step Zap, so you'll need a premium subscription to use it. Prices for premium plans start at $20/month, billed annually.

Use a physical timer

If you like using physical tools—like pen and paper instead of digital task lists—look into trying an old fashioned egg timer or hourglass. There are even some pretty nice options like Esington timers that are designed for productivity and look way nicer than a ticking tomato.

If you want to get a little more high-tech, check out Saent. Saent is a tangible, minimalist button that you place on your desk. You only need a push or a swipe to send it into action, tracking your time and acting as a "do not disturb" sign when you need to focus.

Automate Your Pomodoro Timer

One of the best ways to boost your productivity and focus is to reduce the number of tasks you have to complete. Zaps—automated workflows powered by Zapier—let you automate your workflows so you spend less time completing simple tasks over and over again and have more time to focus on important work.

For example, if you need to log the time you spend doing pomodoros to a separate time-tracking app, use the following Zaps to log your time automatically:

Or track your time manually using the following Zaps:

Is the Pomodoro Technique for You?

If you're naturally inclined to jump around from task to task, a system like the Pomodoro Technique may provide the structure you need to stay focused and productive.

Still, Pomodoro isn't for everyone. If you try it out and find that it isn't right for you, there are plenty of other task management techniques to consider.

Remember, the best approach to boosting your productivity is to experiment—both with tools and techniques—to find a system that works perfectly for you.

Title photo by lucamascaro via Flickr

source https://zapier.com/blog/best-pomodoro-apps/

Friday 21 September 2018

The 10 Best Free RSS Reader Apps in 2018

When you want to follow specific writers, publications, and channels—to see every piece of content they publish—nothing beats an RSS reader app. RSS apps access web feeds published by websites, letting you aggregate and curate content you care about. Instead of visiting multiple sites, just open your favorite RSS app to see all new content in a central source.

If you're still looking for a replacement for Google Reader or Digg Reader, or you're just ready to start experiencing the web chronologically, check out the following 10 RSS reader apps that keep you up to date—for free.

What Makes a Great RSS Reader App?

For over a decade, Google Reader was the gold standard for RSS apps—at least until July 2013, when Google abruptly stopped supporting the tool. After that, many users turned to Digg Reader, a tool designed as a replacement for Google Reader. But Digg Reader was also discontinued in early 2018.

But it's not all bad news. There are plenty of other polished, high-quality feed reader apps that let you access the content published on your favorite sites exactly how you want to read it.

For this piece, we will focus on the best, free, online RSS services—the best alternatives to Google Reader and Digg Reader—and we narrowed our recommendations using the following criteria:

Free: Each featured app is either completely free, or it offers a free plan that rivals the features of most premium plans on the market.
Web apps: Web RSS apps let you read content online using any device by accessing a URL. This is opposed to native RSS apps that sync feeds directly to your device. The apps featured below are all web apps—though some notable native apps are included in sidebars when relevant.
Traditional: A traditional RSS reader app does two things: displays content in reverse chronological order and lets you curate the content you want to read. We excluded any apps that use an algorithm to determine the order in which posts are displayed (e.g., popular posts displayed first), and we also excluded tools better described as content discovery platforms (e.g., Flipboard).
Full-text: When creating an RSS feed, publishers elect to show either a preview of their content or the entire article, so it’s not always possible for RSS readers to display articles in their entirety. But for sites that have elected to show full-text, RSS readers should display the entire article, unless not having full text is a specific feature that provides value to users (e.g., the app is designed to make it easy to skim lots of headlines). We eliminated any apps that placed access to full-text—when made available by the publisher—behind a premium plan paywall.
Usability: One of the major goals of using an RSS reader app is to simplify the process of seeing content from multiple sites. The apps we chose make it easy to perform basic RSS app functions like following your favorite sites, organizing your feeds into meaningful categories, saving articles, and marking articles as read.

With those criteria in mind, here are our picks for the 10 best RSS reader apps.

The 10 Best RSS Reader Apps

Feedly (Web, iOS, Android) for providing every feature you might ever need
NewsBlur (Web, Self-Hosted Web, iOS, Android) for filtering out content you're less interested in
Inoreader (Web, iOS, Android, Windows Phone) for free searching and saving your content long-term
The Old Reader (Web) for sharing content with friends and getting recommendations
Bloglovin' (Web, iOS, Android) for discovering popular lifestyle content
Netvibes (Web) for marketers who want to monitor their brands and industry
FlowReader (Web) for combining your RSS and social feeds
Feedreader (Web) for no-frills feed reading
Feeder (Web, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Yandex, iOS, Android) for viewing your RSS feeds on any device
Selfoss (Self-Hosted Web, Third-Party iOS and Android) for customizing your RSS reader
How to Build Your Own RSS Reader

Feedly (Web, iOS, Android)

Best for providing every feature you might ever need

Feedly is one of the first RSS reader apps you'll hear mentioned if you ask people how they follow sites today. It's not hard to see why—its clean and simple interface is a great solution for both casual readers who just want to see all of their websites in one place and power users who want to take advantage of every feature RSS apps have to offer.

Feedly's free plan offers most of the features casual readers need. Follow up to 100 sources, sort the sites you follow into topical categories, watch YouTube videos, and read full-text articles (when available) in a distraction-free, minimalist view. Plus, Feedly offers mobile apps for Android and iOS devices, so you can access subscriptions easily both at home and on the go.

But Feedly is also incredibly scalable, giving you the tools you need to do more than just curate and aggregate content. Upgrade to the Pro plan to search your feeds, get Google Keyword Alerts alongside your subscriptions, add notes to content, and highlight important passages. This is great for professionals who want to use their RSS app as a research hub.

And if you want to share your RSS feeds with others, Feedly's Teams plan lets you do just that. Share feeds, boards, notes, and highlights with other members of your team so you can all collaborate to uncover interesting research and share ideas.

Feedly Price: Free for the Basic plan that lets you follow up to 100 sources and use the web, Android, and iOS apps; from $64.92/year for the Pro plan that includes unlimited sources and categories, search, and third-party integrations (including Zapier).

Automate Feedly with Feedly's Zapier integrations.

NewsBlur (Web, Self-Hosted Web, iOS, Android)

Best for for filtering out content you're less interested in

With a free NewsBlur account, you can subscribe to up to 64 different feeds, read full-text content of those sites in its web reader, and save stories to read or access in the future. And you don't even need to click that much while reading in NewsBlur. Just keep scrolling: Articles display one after another for action-free reading.

But NewsBlur's most interesting feature is its sophisticated filtering, which can automatically highlight or hide stories based on certain criteria. If you spend some time training your filters, the system will learn your preferences and try to surface the stories that interest you most. That way, you can subscribe to as many sites as you want—even the ones that publish 100 articles a day—and still only see the content you're interested in.

NewsBlur also lets you share your favorite stories, either on social networks or inside of NewsBlur. Within the app, you can add stories that you read and like to your personal "blurblog," or find people with similar interests and follow their blurblogs as well. Or, you can run NewsBlur on your own server for free.

NewsBlur Price: Free for subscribing to up to 64 sites; $36/year for a Premium account that includes unlimited subscriptions, search functionality, and private sharing; free open-source to run on your own server.

Inoreader (Web, iOS, Android, Windows Phone)

Best for free searching and saving your content long-term

Inoreader is one of the most feature-packed free RSS readers on this list. Without paying a cent, you can follow an unlimited number of feeds, and you can even search within your subscriptions without paying for a premium plan.

And while most RSS apps only cache content for the short-term, Inoreader doesn't have limited time archives. Your content—even the stuff you've already read—is stored permanently. To stay organized, you can group your feeds in folders and use tags to separate out individual articles as you read them.

This makes Inoreader a great tool for power users, but it's very accessible for beginners as well. After signing up, you're guided through a tutorial that shows you how to use the app's major features, making it easy to get up and running even if you have no previous RSS experience.

If you upgrade to one of Inoreader's premium plans, you get even more features. Add feeds for Twitter and Google+ profiles just by typing in the username of the person you want to follow, write advanced rules for sorting your content into folders and tags, and customize your dashboard to see exactly what interests you the most when you log in.

Inoreader Price: Free with ads for unlimited subscriptions and search functionality; from $14.99/year for the Starter plan (login required to view page) for ad-free reading, a customizable dashboard, and custom rules.

The Old Reader (Web)

Best for sharing content with friends and getting recommendations

If you and your friends all enjoy reading the same types of content, The Old Reader makes it easy to share your recommendations with each other. Just connect your Facebook or Google account, follow friends who also have accounts, and The Old Reader will show you content recommended by your friends.

This is a great way to discover new blogs, sites, and channels to follow—as well as share your favorites with your friends. And even if you don't have any friends using The Old Reader to connect with, you can check out the content in its "Trending" tab to see a list of the pieces that have received the most recent likes from other people who use The Old Reader.

Beyond its social aspects, The Old Reader's free plan does everything you need an RSS app to do. View full-text articles when available, read all posts in reverse chronological order, and subscribe to as many as 100 feeds. But if you want full-text search functionality, need to follow more than 100 feeds, or prefer to use the app without ads, you'll need to upgrade to Premium.

The Old Reader Price: Free with ads for up to 100 subscriptions; from $25/year for a Premium Account (login required to view page) that includes up to 500 subscriptions, one year of post storage, and full-text search.

Bloglovin' (Web, iOS, Android)

Best for discovering popular lifestyle content

Bloglovin' is the Pinterest of RSS reader apps. While it lets you follow your favorite blogs and publications like every other app on this list, it's designed much more like a social media site than some of the other featured RSS readers. It has a clean, image-focused design, "love" and comment buttons on every post, and a card layout that makes the app feel very modern.

At the top of your dashboard, you'll find a list of categories for popular lifestyle topics like "Family," "Fashion," and "DIY/Crafts." Click any of the topics, and you'll see popular content on that topic, making it easy to discover new authors and blogs to follow. You can even use Bloglovin' to publish your own blog directly on the platform and share your ideas with others.

Like Pinterest, Bloglovin' also lets you create your own personal collections of content. If you're planning a wedding, redesigning your house, or just looking for new crafting ideas, create a collection in Bloglovin' and add any relevant content you find to that collection. Then, when you need inspiration or are looking for ideas, head to your collections to see all of the content you've saved.

Bloglovin' Price: Free

Netvibes (Web)

Best for marketers who want to monitor their brands and industry

Like all of the other tools on this list, Netvibes is an RSS app that lets you follow your favorite publications and view their posts in reverse chronological order. And while it's great as a traditional RSS reader, where Netvibes really shines is with its Potions.

Potions are custom workflows with triggers and actions. For example, some of the other RSS apps on this list let you see the posts of someone you follow on Twitter in your RSS app. But with a Netvibes Potion, you can get even more granular. For example, create a feed that only shows @mentions of your brand, or get a feed of all posts that use a specific hashtag.

Netvibes supports more than 38 trigger apps currently, including sites like Twitter, Medium, Reddit, and Slack. Just set the trigger to monitor the specific site and action you're interested in, then set your RSS feed as your action. When you're finished, all of the mentions that meet your trigger criteria show up in your feed alongside any publications you're following.

The end result: a really powerful dashboard for marketers who want to monitor their brands and stay on top of industry changes and important content at the same time.

Netvibes Price: Free for the Basic plan that includes up to five Potions; from $24/year (billed monthly) for the VIP plan that includes unlimited Potions.

FlowReader (Web)

Best for combining your RSS and social feeds

If you want an easy way to keep up with all of the publications you follow and the things you're following on Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and Pinterest, FlowReader is the RSS reader for you. Subscribe to as many blogs as you want, and see the headlines of their posts in reverse chronological order. Skim headlines quickly, and open only those that catch your eye.

Then, connect your Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and/or Pinterest accounts to see all of the people, brands, topics, and channels you're following on those sites in separate feeds. This keeps you from having to navigate through multiple sites to stay up to date with all of your interests, but—perhaps most interestingly—it gives you an actual chronological view of posts.

For example, when you log into Twitter, it shows you ranked tweets, followed by "in case you missed it," before showing you posts in reverse chronological order. But if you crave the ability to just see what the people you follow posted in reverse chronological order, use FlowReader's feed to bypass Twitter's recommendations, and read posts in the order they were posted.

FlowReader Price: Free

Feedreader (Web)

Best for no-frills feed reading

If all you really want is a no-frills place to curate and aggregate the content you care about, Feedreader is the tool for you. It's a basic, ad-free, web-based RSS reader that lets you subscribe to feeds, see your content in two views—expanded or collapsed—and star items you're interested in to view them later.

But in addition to its standard features, Feedreader offers a few more options for those craving simplicity in an RSS app: Sort your subscriptions into categories to keep separate interests separate, or use the app's keyboard shortcuts to navigate, expand and collapse articles, refresh the page, and mark items as starred or read.

Feedreader Price: Free

Feeder (Web, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Yandex, iOS, Android)

Best for viewing your RSS feeds on any device

Feeder's web app isn't all that different from any of the other apps on this list. Like all traditional RSS reader apps, it lets you subscribe to sites and view their posts in reverse chronological order. What makes Feeder stand out, though, its its browser and mobile apps that let you access the content in your feed however you want, wherever you are.

Using Feeder's browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Yandex is perhaps the simplest way to read RSS feeds—one that's especially popular with those who want to quickly read the headlines and get on with their day. Just click your RSS icon to see recently published headlines from any page of your browser. Tap an article to read it, or just quickly skim through the latest updates without reading everything.

You can also take your RSS feeds on the go with its mobile apps for iOS and Android, where you'll get both the headlines and a simplified view of the full articles. It's a great way to stay informed of what's going on wherever you happen to be when you're looking to catch up on the news you care about.

Feeder Price: Free with ads for the Feeder Basic plan that includes access to all of Feeder's apps; from $59.88/year (billed monthly) for the ad-free Feeder Pro plan.

Selfoss (Self-Hosted Web, Third-Party iOS and Android)

Best for customizing your RSS reader

Want to host an RSS reader app on your own server? Selfoss is one of the best options for that today (along with the aforementioned NewsBlur). It's an RSS reader that lets you follow sites and your favorite people on Twitter in one app. Like many of the other RSS apps so far, it simplifies the reading experience and has some basic features that help you organize your feeds.

Selfoss is open source, so you can download it for free, dig into its code, and customize things if you'd like. You can add additional data sources, build plugins to add extra features, and download pre-made extras from its community. And with a Fever API bridge, it can sync with apps that were designed to work with the now-unsupported Fever RSS reader. It'll take a bit more work to start using, but it will let you make a feed reader that's tailored perfectly to your needs.

Selfoss Price: Free open-source

Build an RSS Reader in Your Favorite App

It seems like there should be an RSS app for everyone. But if you're struggling to find the perfect tool, the best tool might just be one you're already using.

Zapier's RSS integrations let you save new RSS feed posts to Instapaper, Pocket, Evernote, or other reading apps:

If you just need a notification about new posts, create a Zap that sends you a push notification, email, or Slack message about new articles—or logs them to a Google Sheets spreadsheet:

Or maybe your favorite apps and sites don't include RSS feeds. Zapier can help turn almost any app's notifications into an RSS feed, so you can subscribe to them in one place.

Alternately, use Zapier to make your own filtered, combined RSS feed that will show all of the articles from your favorite sites, with filters to only show the articles you're interested in.

You can even build a custom RSS feed reader inside Google Sheets, using its =importfeed() function. Here's how.

Be sure to experiment—with a few tricks, you can read RSS feeds in any of your favorite apps.

RSS is one of the oldest technologies of the internet; it's kind of like email in that way. But also like email, newer advances in technology haven't reduced its importance. RSS remains one of the best ways to make sure you see everything your favorite sites publish—or ensure you never miss out on an amazing Craigslist deal.

If you're just getting started using RSS, try picking an app that's simple to use. Bookmark its URL, subscribe to favorite sites, and learn its features as your needs grow. Power users should consider which features they need most, then look for an app that matches their needs perfectly.

Originally published in September 2015, this post has been updated by Jessica Greene with each app's current features and pricing. Additionally, we removed apps that have been discontinued—Digg Reader, gReader, and RSSOwl—and shifted our focus to the best free, web-based RSS apps. Because of this new focus, we removed some premium-only and/or native apps that were previously included, including Feedbin, Feed Wrangler, BazQux Reader, Newsbar, and NetNewsWire. Zapier senior writer Matthew Guay also contributed to an earlier update of this article.

source https://zapier.com/blog/best-rss-feed-reader-apps/