Abstract: The invention provides an electronic advertising system (200) having an electronic advertising board (210) with a number of advertising slots (230). Each slot (230) can contain an advertisement (225). If all advertising slots (230) are full, one or more of advertising slots (230) can be cleared to accommodate a new advertisement, in accordance with a chosen criterion. The criterion may be selected from a range including date, price, category, products/services, location, or randomly.

Abstract: A method (400) and system (100) are described for providing an online hosted customisable searchable merchant directory over the Internet (101). The system (100) includes an Internet server (102) which provides storefront web page templates (1200). Merchants access the Internet server (102), though merchant computers (105n), to set up one or more storefront web pages associated with a business of each merchant and using said web page templates (1200). The storefront web pages are hosted on the Internet server (102). The system (100) provides the customer a search means (1300) to search for merchants and products within a predefined geographic proximity of the customer.