Each week we take a look at some of the new online stores that have recently launched on Shopify. It's a great way to get some inspiration for your own ecommerce site. It's also a great place to do some shopping!

Would you like to be included in the next New Store Friday? All you need to do is post a link to your awesome store in the comments of our New Store Fridays post on our Facebook page.

There's a lot of work involved with running a shop. Inventory comes and goes as products come in from suppliers and go out to customers, orders come and go as customers make them and they get fulfilled, and there's also the matter of picking, packing, labelling and shipping.

Bizelo eRetail Centralized Inventory Management (or CIM for short) is an app that helps you get on top of all this work. With it, it's a lot simpler to stay informed about your inventory, know when you're low on stock and what your packing costs are and pack, label and ship orders. It's available in the Shopify App Store right now.

We chatted with the people at Bizelo about their eRetail CIM app and asked them some questions. Read on to find out more about their app, in their own words.

Raising startup capital ain't easy. In fact, many entrepreneurs who decide to fundraise say it's the most intimidating and challenging aspect of starting a business. To help you get started, here are seven quick tips on how to raise startup capital:

Search engine optimization is the science - some say art - of convincing Google to show your web page or online store at the top of its results.  If you can master SEO, your store will get lots of traffic and you’ll be flooded with sales.  Best of all, SEO costs you nothing and is automatically built into Shopify.

Today we’re proud to announce several features that will make it easier to improve the SEO of your shop without modifying your store’s template files. With a few clicks, you can now change page title tags, the homepage’s meta description and your image alt tags.

If you think your products will sell themselves, you're dreaming. In addition to paid search, SEO, and social media, you might want to consider more traditional forms of marketing and PR as well. 

There's a lot of debate whether or not press releases are worthwhile anymore. I've heard good arguments come from both sides, and to be perfectly honest, for most online stores it's hard to say whether the juice will be worth the squeeze. 

Companies like Apple can send a release and 2 seconds after it hits the wire there are headlines in every paper and on every TV station in the world. On the other hand, you can spend $500 and send a press release to +35,000 media outlets and be ignored by every single one of them. 

At any rate, sending a news release does have its undeniable benefits. Even if it doesn't generate any coverage, it will at least pop up in Google Search when someone is looking for more information on your store or product. If you're ready to give it a shot, here's a beginners guide to writing and sending your first press release:

Each week we take a look at some of the new online stores that have recently launched on Shopify. It's a great way to get some inspiration for your own ecommerce site. It's also a great place to do some shopping!

Would you like to be included in the next New Store Friday? All you need to do is post a link to your awesome store in the comments of our New Store Fridays post on our Facebook page.

It was another amazing year for Shopify and our store owners! We've seen a 61% growth in number of active online stores running on our platform, and their sales have more than doubled! We have taken the most interesting ecommerce and company data and put it into an infograph - thanks for a great year everyone, and here's to 2012 being even better!