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Does Your Site Need A Makover From Ecommerce Pros?
Sign up today! Practical eCommerce is assembling a team of ecommerce professionals to review one website's key elements. A group of experts will evaluate one site on design, SEO, merchandising, fraud...
SEO Report Card: Escaping the Google Sandbox
New sites are always at a disadvantage when it comes to ranking well in Google, particularly when the domain name is new, too. This phenomenon, known by some as the "Google Sandbox" and by others as...
Treat Customers as Next-door Neighbors
People often ask me where I learned so much about ecommerce and business in general. I didn't attend business school, nor do my college degrees reflect what I do today. Besides being book smart and...
Google Is Keeping Score Of Your Keywords
It's one of the topics that floats to the top in the search marketing world and generates intense discussion — even though no one knows exactly what it means: "Quality Score." In the usual, Google...
Are 1-800 Numbers And Live Chat Important?
As online shopping matures, merchants must avoid the tendency to be complacent in their merchandising efforts. Here are five ways merchants can truly innovate in the coming year. In the end, there is...
SEO: Can Wikipedia Help Your Business?
In Google, Wikipedia is everywhere. Pretty much anything you type into Google seems to result in a Wikipedia entry being returned as a top-10 result. Wikipedia's status in the search engines as an...
Conversion: Define Your Audience
Regular readers won't be surprised to find that this month's column describes one of the key elements of effective conversion. In fact, this element is so critical, I consider it to be the cement...
Tutorial: Gaining Control of Search Engine Spiders
Most of us are familiar with the term “search engine spider” and at least understand that they have something to do with how search engines index websites. The purpose of this article is to help...
Does A Proxy Server Keep Me Anonymous On The Internet?
No. And that is that. Unless you are a very talented hacker, there is no such thing as anonymity on the Internet. A common misconception about anonymous proxy servers is that they allow you to surf...
Three Basic Steps Can Curb Credit Card Fraud
A loss of $15,000 in diamonds during the height of the Christmas-buying frenzy would be enough to make most people sing the holiday blues. Not Pat Coughlin.
Coughlin has owned and operated...
Beware Of Online Legal Advice
I get a report every day of many of the important judicial decisions relating to Internet and ecommerce law. I have to review a court’s decision in detail before I begin to understand the ruling,...
How Is An Atom Feed Different From An RSS Feed?
An Atom feed is very similar to an RSS feed in that it is a lightweight XML format allowing for easy syndication of web content. In fact, most RSS readers and news aggregators will be able to read...
Google Analytics' Security Warnings
The subject of security warnings with Google Analytics is one that has been frequently brought up by our readers, and was something that I ran into when I launched the last Practical eCommerce...
What Can Digg.com Do For My Online Business?
Digg.com is probably best called a social networking news site. The idea behind Digg.com, and other sites like it, is that users submit web pages they have bookmarked or "dugg." After a certain...
The Struggle To Create A Successful eBusiness
It's a good thing Mother Parkinson, a librarian, told her boys that people would never buy books from somebody on the Internet. Otherwise, we might not have Peapod, the quintessential online...
Switching Shopping Carts Is Part of A Growing Ebusiness
Organize.com began in 1998 in Riverside, Calif., as Organize Everything — one convenient place to shop for storage and organization solutions. For those who have a garage or closet in need of some...
Don’t Let Selling Internationally Scare You
Matt Alper launched Copshoes.com three years ago from his living room in San Antonio, Texas. His idea was to sell specialized shoes and boots to police, firemen and security personnel. Now, three...
Is Your Checkout Button Causing Problems?
For this month's edition of the Usability Report Card we have chosen Quel Objet, a site specializing in French products for the home. Quel Objet means "What a thing!" according to the site's "about...
Site Search: Multiple Options Help Customers
Five sites have built dynamic businesses in unique niches
What is a high performer?
Some people may define that purely based on gross revenue numbers or by having a 30 percent pretax profit...
Site Owners Describe Changes for 2007
Dan Wickwares, Buyer/Webmaster
WEBSITE: Wickswares.com
SELLS: Candle, bath, body and soap-making supplies
ANSWER: Our growth for the last four years has been by word-of-mouth. We will be...
Video Tutorial: Eliminating Dynamic URLs with Mod_Rewrite
Get started using Mod_Rewrite to clean up your website's dynamic URLs with this video tutorial presented by Practical eCommerce's online director Brian Getting. We'll look at using simple...
High Performer Series: Beautiesltd.com
It was supposed to be a quiet, part-time business to give a couple of prospective retirees something to do. Fifteen years later, Bill Kenerson and Deb Venman have created a beehive of activity...
SEO and Email Launch New Product
As with many great products in the marketplace, the diaper caddy was conceived out of necessity. Melissa Bramlage, a mother of two, needed a product that could hold all the essential baby care items...
High Performer Series: Appliancepartspros.com
Roman Kagan has built a successful niche business selling hard-to-find appliance parts to do-it-yourself types around the country. The site was launched in 1999 featuring about 300 products and...
Can VoIP Help My Business?
Major telecommunication companies and start-ups alike are trying to establish themselves in the rapidly expanding VoIP marketplace. That hasn't escaped the notice of many people within the Internet...
High Performer Series: Drsfosterandsmith.com
A Foster & Smith catalog is a familiar sight at the home of a pet owner. Whether a household includes dogs, cats, birds, reptiles or other animals as pets, Foster & Smith has been a resource for...
What You Didn't Know About Payment Systems
What you don't know can truly hurt your online business. This has never been more true than when you set out to choose an Internet payment systems. It's not so much that making a wrong decision can...
Is The Mobile Web Right For Your Ecommerce Business?
Among the topics of conversation for those who make 2007 business technology predictions is the extent to which the "mobile web" — cell phones and other devices that access the Internet for...
Preparing Your Website For Mobile Devices
With the growing number of consumers using mobile devices, such as cell phones and PDAs, to access the Internet, it's important to make sure your website can be accessed by potential customers using...
Ecommerce Companies: You Are Responsible for Sales Taxes
One of the most common misconceptions for ecommerce retailers is that sales taxes are not due on Internet transactions. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ecommerce retailers, in fact, are...
Video Tutorial: Creating an RSS Feed
Learn how to create a simple RSS feed in this tutorial by Practical eCommerce's Online Director Brian Getting. Walk through creating the XML file needed to establish a syndicated feed, and a look at...
Quick Query: Restaurants & Email Marketing
Abby Weaver is the marketing director for Fajita Grill (Fajitagrill.com), a small restaurant with locations in Oswego and Fulton, New York, that successfully uses email marketing and its website to...
SEO: To Buy Links, or Not to Buy Links?
If Google engineer Matt Cutts had his druthers, buying links would become an extinct SEO practice.
Cutts has addressed the topic of link-buying on a number of occasions on his blog...
Outsourcing Pay-per-click
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a long-term, time-consuming endeavor. Business owners that are serious about search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns, and who want those efforts to lead to strong...
Identify your KPIs
One of the things I love about Internet marketing is that it is so measurable. But I understand that for many web marketers, it's a challenge to dig through the sheer amount of data that is available...
Ten Simple Ways to Get Sued
Want to stay out of trouble? Unless you have been sued before you probably have no idea how expensive, time consuming, and emotionally draining it can be. A little legal preventative maintenance can...
SEO Report Card: Freshpair.com
This month marks the one-year anniversary of the SEO Report Card. During this time, I have received many kind words from both readers and report card recipients — words of gratitude and...
Welcome to the New Practical eCommerce
Practical eCommerce is changing, growing and improving.
Our new website is bigger, more interactive and completely free. This follows from user recommendations and from dynamic changes in the...
Protecting Intellectual Property
You may not realize it, but you deal with intellectual property (IP) every day. If you own a website, that website is your intellectual property. The way you deal with IP — yours and others — can...
Fraud-Proofing Your Ebiz
I know a business that had its website hacked: Its entire customer database was hijacked and thousands of customer credit card numbers were stolen at the same time.
In the following months, the...
The Three Best Website Traffic Sources
Not a day goes by that any serious website owner doesn't wonder how to get more traffic to his site.
This intense desire to generate more clicks makes virtually any online entrepreneur easy prey...
What is Viral Marketing?
I flipped on VH1 recently and sat enthralled as a rap artist with colorful language skills hosted "Web Junk 20" where they played 20 videos plucked from the web and played them on cable TV.
Last...
Quick Query - Michael J. Katz
Do ecommerce businesses do a good job of marketing to existing customers?
One of my favorite questions to ask somebody is, "What do you do now to systematically stand in front of the people you already know?" I always get a sort of...
Usability Report Card: eBladestore.com
The team at eBladestore.com asked us to review its site for usability issues. eBladestore sells knives of all types and sizes through a basic, three-column storefront. There are several good things...
Craigslist.com's Craig Newmark
Back in the mid-20th Century, painters like Ellsworth Kelly and Agnes Martin were making names for themselves practicing a form of art emphasizing extreme simplification of presentation - primary...
SEO Report Card: Scrappopotamus.com
It is time for another MIVA Merchant-powered ecommerce site to get picked apart. I will try to be gentle. This month's "selectee" has the coolest name - Scrappopotamus. It is a pretty nice-looking...
Internet Explorer 7 is Coming
The upcoming release of the Windows Vista operating system also means the impending release of the full version of the web browser Internet Explorer 7. Like most website developers, I toughed out a brief bout of panic as memories of the...
Tech Support - December 2006
I'm confused by all the prices out there for domain-name registration. My hosting company occasionally offers free domain name registration, yet I see some other companies charging up to $29.99...
SEO Toolkit
If you consider that search engine optimization (SEO) is a scientific discipline, then you'll agree that obtaining empirical measurements using a comprehensive suite of tools is an absolute must....
Selling After Dec. 25
For the majority of online stores, the holiday shopping season is what makes an entire year’s worth of work pay off. With the bulk of shopping taking place the first two weeks of December, it’s...
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