Well, that was a heck of a break, though I do say so myself! The thing about going full-time in any business, is that you just don't know how it will perform when you're doing it "properly" until you actually go for it, and mine took off so dramatically, that I hadn't time any more to write pearls of wisdom here.

Thankfully, I've started to expand the business now, so there's more than just me burning the midnight oil and working hard to deliver customer's projects and so I'm hoping to find more opportunities to start writing here again.

Of course, these days the dreaded fragile state of the UK economy is grabbing a lot of our attention for one reason or another. In my day-to-day occupation, I get to work with a lot of different kinds of businesses, and overall I would say we've yet to see any real impacts on the sorts of businesses that are selling their products online through osCommerce stores.

There is a real probability that as the probable impacts of rising prices and increasing credit card balances begins to eat into consumers wallets, osCommerce store owners should be ready with an armoury of tools to attempt to limit such effects.

So, here are my top 5 credit crunch tips for keeping the customers at your osCommerce store and spending their money:

1. You've worked hard to get your customer base going, so remind previous customers regularly that they should be spending money with you to get that latest "must have" item. Send out newsletters containing details of special offers and new products regularly. To do this, I'd personally recommend using something like e-campaign and have your developer provide you with an easy way to export newsletter subscriber data from your database - it's a lot simpler and easier to manage than using the built in osCommerce Newsletter facility.

2. Your homepage is prime real-estate. Are you making best use of it to promote your latest offers and hot products? Stand back and take a good look at it, from the perspective of a new customer. This is your main chance to tempt them to buy and first impressions count, so maybe now is the time for a tweak or two to your layout.

3. Get some special offers going and make them obvious to customers. Nothing ties up money, and hence cashflow more than old stock sat on a shelf! Mark down items items falling into this category and customers will more than likely buy other items whilst shopping on your osCommerce site.

4. If you haven't already done so, get your products listed on Google Base. It's free and can help boost you in the search engine rankings. There are some ready-made contributions for osCommerce that make this a simple thing to do.

5. Consider offering incentives for existing customers that refer their friends. Offering a gift voucher for each referral that results in a sale can be a good way of increasing your customer base.

That's all for now - a bit of a departure from previous postings, but no doubt I'll be back onto the tech talk again soon, as I'm such a geek, it's hard to resist!