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Usability Report Card: Acihoist.com
Alan Gonzalez at ACI Hoist & Crane, Inc. recently inherited the responsibilities for the company's website, Acihoist.com, and its ecommerce push. He is in the early stages of improving the site's...
Tech Support July 2007: Accessibility
I keep hearing about accessibility. What is it and why is it important?
Accessibility, in the context of a website, is the measure of how easily people with disabilities can perceive, navigate,...
SMBs Should Consider Surveys
The online store that makes me feel awesome even after my product(s) have been delivered will get my business next time around. Their URL will be committed to memory, and I’ll visit the site often...
SellPoint Offers “Active” Product Tours
Ecommerce businesses want to move more merchandise. A service called SellPoint can help with this, by creating, hosting and syndicating customizable product tours. These tours integrate detailed,...
Learning Bookkeeping Basics
Poor financial management is one key contributor to why more than 50 percent of small businesses fail in the first five years of existence, according to the Small Business Administration.
Because...
Interview: UPS V.P. On Shipping Technology
When Jordan Colletta talks about the way we used to ship and track and deliver goods before it became a way of life for thousands of e-entrepreneurs, he knows what he's talking about.
For three...
Lowering Shopping Cart Abandonment
As an ecommerce owner, you always want to make the checkout process as quick and smooth as possible for your own ecommerce customers. Here’s a quick checklist of simple website changes that could...
The Law Of PPC Advertising
Many of the legal issues existing today have little, or no, clear legal authority to guide us. This is because many of the abuses are:
• Not discovered.
• When they are discovered by the...
Boosting Your Programming Skills
If you're tired of calling your web design firm every time you want to make a minor tweak to your site, there are online courses you can take to boost your knowledge in HTML, JavaScript, cascading...
Video Tutorial: Rounded Corners with CSS
Rounded corners present a unique challenge to website designers, particularly when using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to create layouts that are search engine friendly and scalable. In an attempt to...
Six Surefire Ways To Boost Sales
I would venture to say that not a single website in the world has reached its peak of effectiveness or earnings potential. No matter the circumstances, every site can "better its best." If a "magic"...
Google AdWords: It Just Keeps Getting Better
Over the past few months, Google has announced a number of new features in the AdWords interface. Some are relatively minor and simply affect the interface; some offer new functionality and a lot of...
Quick Query: Alternative Payment Option eBillme
Marwan Forzley is president and CEO of online payment alternative eBillme (Modasolutions.com), formerly known as SECURE-eBill.
How does a consumer use eBillme?
Forzley: When you are at the...
Click Fraud Not Top PPC Concern
Click fraud has been a popular topic of discussion for a number of years, and it doesn’t appear the issue will fade away anytime soon. The industry is full of various numbers thrown around putting...
Protect Data From Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Attacks
Security is always going to be a concern for both developers and ecommerce business owners alike, since providing a secure environment for making transactions is not only a matter of gaining customer...
Video Tutorial: CSS Design, Part Two
In the conclusion of our two-part video tutorial on CSS layout and design, we will take the layout we created in the beginning of this tutorial and begin to apply graphics and other visual stylings...
Merchants Should Be Preparing For The Holidays Now
Just as most consumers begin to enjoy summer, it's time for savvy merchants to put the finishing touches on holiday sales plans. While it is difficult to estimate the volume of "gifting" purchases...
eBay Isn't The Only Auction Site
In the time zone-crossing, closing-bid-countdown world of online auctions, everyone knows the place to turn a quick buck — or at least where to get started: eBay. Yet in a transformation that...
Video Tutorial: CSS Design, Part One
Designing search engine friendly websites can be intimidating, particularly for designers who are just learning how to use CSS formatting. One of the most intimidating aspects to learning CSS design...
SEO: Metrics That Matter
Out with the old, in with the new. In terms of SEO, what’s falling by the wayside?
Obsessively watching indexation numbers and rankings on “trophy” keywords (like the one you know the CEO...
Product Spotlight: Mercado 4, Surveys, And More
One Stop Site for Wholesale Products
WorldwideBrands’ new OneSource is an online database of thousands of wholesalers representing millions of wholesale products. Users can search by product...
“Mobiwebolized” Search Marketing
If you're one of the big guys at the top of the search engine organic results, your business is probably doing pretty well. For the rest of us, there’s an “early bird” special. It’s called...
SEO Report Card: Change Home Page Links
This month's selectee, Millcraftfurniture.com, is an outdoor furniture manufacturer operating a small (less than 100 pages) MIVA Merchant-powered ecommerce site. Its rankings are in the doldrums. The...
Click Fraud: What To Do When You’ve Been Cheated
So you think you’re a victim of click fraud, and the question is now what? Well, it’s time to play “cyber detective” and get refunds from pay-per-click (PPC) engines for the wasted dollars....
Product Spotlight: eBay Items, Mouse & Tablet, And More
Blog Your eBay Items
Have you ever found something on eBay that you really wanted to let your friends know about? Or is your business selling items on eBay and you want to cross-promote those items...
Web Conversion Strategy: When Design Dominates
A local business magazine had written an article reviewing the website designs of various local companies. As you may imagine, I read with dismay as the three-page article focused solely on graphic...
Bloglist: Ecommerce Potpourri
In Bloglist, we ask ecommerce professionals to identify their favorite blogs. For this installment, we've asked Thomas Holmes with logic+intuition.
Name: Thomas Holmes
Founder, logic+intuition...
Is Your Website Ready For The Holiday Shopping Season?
Anyone’s who has talked with me for any given amount of time will tell you I’m adamant about testing sites for security and navigation. Summer is the perfect time to plot out upcoming holiday...
Critique Part Five: Customer Experience & Usability
The Problem: A blob of home-page text greets the consumer.
The Fix: The home page could be improved by relocating its long introduction to either the bottom of the page or, preferably, to the...
Critique Part Four: Site Search
The Problem: The results aren't always relevant.
The Fix: A search for "snowboard" returns wax as the top result — but no snowboard until the fourth page of results, even though the site has an...
Critique Part Three: Search Engine Optimization
The Problem: Long, complex URLs create search engine indexing issues.
The Fix: Rewrite the URLs to eliminate "stop characters" from the URLs. You might wonder, "why bother?" when the dynamic pages...
Critique Part Two: Pay-Per-Click Advertising
The Problem: A quick glance at Daddies Board Shop's Google account indicates in-depth keyword research was not performed.
The Fix: It appears that the company chose keywords based on insider...
Critique Part One: General Internet Presence
The Problem: Daddiesboardshop.com isn't taking advantage of branding opportunities on video and social networking sites.
The Fix: Aside from the videos I found on YouTube and Google Video (which...
Daddiesboardshop.com Wins Site Review
Melanie Loveland and her son Dan built a business together around a mutual passion — snowboarding. What started as a small, brick-and-mortar store in Portland, Ore., has evolved into a full-fledged...
If Your “Baby Is Ugly,” Fix It
You know those little spur-of-the-moment, do-it-on-a dare things that occasionally bring about permanent change?
Something like that happened to Shirley Tan. There she was in her third year at...
Improve Email Marketing With Co-registration
Email marketing can be a powerful means to boost your company's revenues. However, before you can enjoy the many benefits of email marketing, it's necessary to build a solid email list. One way to do...
Online Payment Alternative: Bill Me Later
Vince Talbert is the vice president of marketing for I4 Commerce (pronounced "eye four commerce"), a company offering the online payment alternative Bill Me Later at I4commerce.com.
What does Bill...
'Exclusive Offers' Help Retain Customers
Minding the Store is a classic book written by one of the all-time great merchants, Stanley Marcus of Neiman-Marcus fame. Its lessons were extensive, but taking care of the customer and delivering a...
Comparison Sites Can Help Boost Sales
Shopping comparison sites enable merchants to market to the masses, but stepping into a competitive environment like BizRate, PriceGrabber or Shopping.com can seem pretty daunting to the owner of a...
How To Create 'Buzz,' Boost Traffic At Your Site
Over the last year or so, "social media" has quickly become the next "big" thing online. A plethora of social communities with names like Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, Wikipedia and YouTube have...
The Entrepreneur, The Optimist
Patrick Coughlin is experiencing firsthand the same challenges many online entrepreneurs face: It's hard to build a successful online business.
Coughlin has owned a successful brick-and-mortar...
Ebiz Start-up: Selling Online Is Hard Work
Seven months into the operation of his new ecommerce store, Pat Coughlin's goal of reaching $1 million in sales is nowhere in sight — but that hasn't curbed his enthusiasm for the online...
Aligning Keywords And Landing Pages
As a child you probably played "connect the dots," drawing a line from number to number to create a picture that answered a riddle. Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing presents a similar "connect the dots"...
SEO Report Card: Error Pages Create Big Issues
Modernmini sells modern-style babies' and children's furniture, toys, bedding and more. Its site is powered by the Zoovy platform. Founder Pazit Kagel, a designer and mother of three, requested a...
Show-Me-The-Money Conversion Ratios
When I begin an ecommerce optimization engagement, there are four key ratios that I immediately look for. And as strange as it might sound, the site's overall conversion ratio is not one of them —...
Toolking.com: From eBay To A $31M Empire
If you order pliers from Toolking.com, you really can't just order pliers. You need to know what kind. Do you want locking pliers? Needle nose pliers? Tongue-and-groove pliers, slip-joint pliers,...
Tools To Boost Conversion
Most ebusiness owners can find ways to increase traffic to their site, but turning a visitor into a buyer remains an ongoing challenge.
To get a visitor at your site to do what you want him/her to...
Earn Affiliate Commissions
Say you run a smaller ecommerce operation that sells specialized running shoes, but nothing else. Your customers might request running apparel, but you don't carry running apparel, and you don't want...
SEO: Link Baiting Tips To 'Juice' Your Site
Link bait, simply put, is content that is so funny, so interesting, so useful, or otherwise remarkable that it becomes irresistible to bloggers and website owners, who set up links from their pages...
Video Tutorial: Choosing the Right Image Format
Choosing the right image format for publishing images on the web can be tricky. After all, you don't want to spend hours and hours cleaning up a product image and making it look irresistable to your...
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