As part of my job teaching E-Commerce at QUT’s Faculty of Information Technology I get to spend time investigating interesting and inspirational (okay, “COOL!”) E-commerce websites. It’s not unusual that, in the course of teaching, my students show me things that I’ve never seen before, too.

The following is a list of ten of the coolest E-Commerce sites that I’ve seen, some have been introduced to me just this year by some of my students. In sharing these with you I imagine that perhaps you will discover something new that is useful to you and/or something that will spark some thinking about what you could do to leverage the Web to streamline your business processes and/or to make more money!

Animoto (animoto.com)

Upload photos, select one of the songs from the library (or upload your own) and hit the button. It will do the rest. Using some clever analysis and randomising algorithms it will create a video clip using your photos and the music selected.

How they make money: You can play with Animoto for free and produce 15 second video clips. To get full-length video clips you have to pay a small annual membership fee. DVD quality costs a little more again. Commercial usage requires purchasing a commercial license.

Basecamp (basecamphq.com)

Basecamp is an online project management and collaboration tool. The company that created it, 37 Signals, has a philosophy of keeping software and interfaces as simple as possible.

How they make money: There is a free 30-day trial that will allow you a taste of the service. After that you can choose from three different monthly plans.

Blurb (blurb.com)

Download Blurb’s book-designing software and you’ll be designing your first photography/keep-sake book in minutes

How they make money: Once you’ve designed your book you can submit it to them, select your book finishing options, and they’ll create and ship the book to you.

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