We know of a few people that have done this Vinnie.

It certainly looks better when a site has 500+ likes than some of the sites we have just launched that have less than 10 likes. It's not just about people buying from a site with more likes, it's about people wanting to join your community. Why would the average person want to join a community with another 8 people? They probably won't see any benefit in that.

I tried out a '5 custom articles for $5' type thing just because I was a little bored one afternoon and wanted to see if they would actually deliver. To my surprise, they delivered the articles within a few hours and they were all unique (I checked copyscape). The articles were written in a strange manner, when loaded into a word doc every 5th or so word was underlined so that it appeared like it was incorrect spelling. A little dodgy.

I wouldn't actually use this service for anything useful. Key rule for anything on the net: if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

Work on building meaningful relationships and that way you'll get FB likes in a natural way. And you'll be able to engage your fans and get some benefit out of the relationship, not just 1000 meaningless likes.

Text links pass far more link juice than image links.

Having said that, remember you want a 'natural' linking profile - so don't be afraid to add a few image links here and there (just make the majority of them text based).

I'd second Vahe's response re Magento.

Also I have used Volusion - it's not too bad if you know what you are doing. I'd prefer Magento though.

Depends what sort of tasks. We've employed people from elance for basic semi-spammy basic link building techniques as well as some mid-level site analysis type requests and had mixed results. The key (of course) is their feedback. Stay with the major players and you can't go too far wrong.

I work for a company that closely mirrors the dropdowns employed by a very large ecommerce site - http://www.surlatable.com/.

Upon analysis of this URL, there are well over 100 links on that page because of the way their dropdowns are designed (over 400 in fact). However, upon close analysis, only 52 of these internal links are followed, and 370 internal links are not followed.

Based on this, I would recommend if you have well in excess of 150 or so links, use nofollow for those less important sub categories like this site has. (I'll have to change the structure of our site now...)