Free and Easy Online PDF Forms, Faxs and Shopping Cart

Fillanypdf.com enables your accounts to complete orders online on interactive pdf forms. You upload your form (up to 5 is free) and they fill them out and digitally sign them.

Interfax.net is cheap outbound fax and efax is free inbound. Combine them for a no-print fax solution.

I ran into a free ecommerce shopping cart (6,000 users as of late July 2010) which is hosted on their servers but integrates seamlessly with your website. They rely on third party payment systems to process credit cards: Google Checkout, Paypal, Authorize.NET, and 2CheckOut.

New This Year - Art Walks in Old Forge and North Creek

New this year! North Creek's Art Walk take place on the third Thursday of the month. The Old Forge one takes place on the first Friday of each month from June - October.

These communities join Saranac Lake, Glens Falls and Saratoga Springs in celebrating the arts on a monthly basis.

Does your community have a monthly art walk?

Free Yourself from Merchant Credit Card Services

Free yourself from merchant credit card services payments, fees and processes

The following tools and others similar are already available to cut down on expenses and save time to both the artisan and the shopowner:

The Future of Money, cash, checks and credit cards - who needs them? The new global currency is flexible, frictionless, and (almost) free by Daniel Roth, Wired, March 2010, p. 7 (excerpts from seven page article)

About 20 percent of all online transactions now take place over so-called alternative payment systems according to consulting firm Javelin Strategy and Research. Hundreds of engineers and entrepreneurs are attacking the payment ecosystem, seeking out ways small and large to tear down the stronghold the banks and credit card companies have built.

Square
Square, a new company founded by Twitter cocreator Jack Dorsey, lets anyone accept physical credit card payments through a smartphone or computer by plugging in a free sugar-cube-sized device - no expensive card reader required.

Twitpay
"What if people could transfer money over Twitter for next to nothing, simply by typing a username and a dollar amount." Using Paypal's X.com platform, Ivey linked users' Twitter accounts to their Paypal accounts, and his new company, Twitpay, took off (summer 2009). It now has 15,000 users.

Obopay
A startup called Obobay, which has received funding from Nokia, allows phones to transfer money to one another with nothing more than a PIN.

Zong
Instead of entering credit card information anew for every online purchase, users fill in their phone number and the charge shows up on their monthly bill.

GetGiving
This mobile app uses PayPal to enable charities to accept small donations without the usual exorbitant credit card transaction fees.

Hub Culture
Travelers can avoid the hassle and fees of swapping dollars for euros by transacting in virtual currency in this international network of workstations.

Paypal
In November 2009, Paypal opened its code. Two months later, 15,000 developers had used it to create new payment services, sending $15 million through the company's pipes. It provides developers the cloud-based processing power and storage space they need to build applications and services.
Two payment service applications developed as a result are adding a "quick pay" button into the program ShopSavvy by software developer Big in Japan and a streamlined payments tool which turned invoicing and time-tracking into an automated process for LiveOps, a call-center outsourcing firm.

Amazon and Google
Amazon.com and Google are both distributing their shopping cart technologies across the Internet, letting even the lowliest etailers process credit cards for less than the old price, cutting out middlemen, and figuring out ways to bundle payments to sidestep the credit card companies' constant nickel-and-diming.
Amazon's Web Services provides developers the cloud-based processing power and storage space they need to build applications and services.

Google
Google created a platform that lets anyone buy or display online advertisements.

Facebook
Facebook is building its own payment system for virtual goods purchased on its social network and on external sites. It allows any developer to write applications for its social network.

Apple
Last March (2009), Apple gave iTunes developers the ability to charge subscription fees through their applications, making iTunes the gateway for an entirely new breed of transaction. It allows any developer to write applications for iTunes.