Manage Subscriptions · Subscribe Now · F.A.Q.'s
HOME · Saturday, May 17, 2008
Article Archives (657 articles)
Finding Treasures With Tapestries
Patricia Elkins caught the ecommerce "bug" just like many people do - by successfully selling a few items on eBay. It wasn't long before Elkins was building a dynamic niche business on eBay selling...
How to Waste $4,000
How do you waste $4,000 in a few weeks? Patrick Coughlin knows. In fact, most ecommerce owners can attest to mistakes they made during the early phases of launching their new business.
Coughlin...
Site Search Can Pay Dividends
Improved site search and "recommender" functions not only improve a user's experience at a website, but they can also help improve a site's sales, according to site-search professionals....
10 Tips To Improve Usability
In a brick-and-mortar enterprise, the problem would be so obvious, no one could ignore it. A tangle of abandoned shopping carts full of unpurchased goods means trouble.
"All right," any serious...
Great Ideas Roundtable
"What customers want is information. What makes them happy during their shopping experience is finding what they want, checking out hassle-free and feeling secure with their online payments when...
Need a Stocking Stuffer?
If you're anything like me, your focus dwindles over the holidays. So instead of providing you with tips that you don't have the energy to use, I thought that I'd briefly review some of the books...
Yahoo! Search Marketing Releases New Platform
Yahoo! Search Marketing may have been a pioneer in the pay-per-click industry, but anyone who has ever used its advertiser's interface would probably agree that it has been light-years behind Google AdWords for quite some time. The...
Managing a High-risk Environment
We conduct a lot of website audits in which we go through a website, identify the legal issues and assist clients in effectively managing risks. We seem to be litigating these issues across the...
Do Security Measures Boost Conversion?
Achieving high performance for your ecommerce business is complicated. It requires building an effective combination of trust, convenience and relevance on your website using technology, design,...
Local and Geo-target Searches: How Well Do They Work?
Refining your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising strategies to include geotargeted searches can help a business owner focus promotion efforts and get more bang for the buck. However, not all search engines are created equally when it comes to...
Customer Experience Matters
After more than a decade of ecommerce activity and an arsenal of new technology at our disposal, it's still the basics that most sites haven't mastered. Problems in the checkout process and having...
Lowering Cart Abandonment
With shopping cart abandonment at a high level, ecommerce owners continue to look for ways to motivate shoppers to complete the checkout process.
Research from Shop.org indicates shoppers abandon...
5 Benefits of Using Feeds - How Feeds Can Help Your eBiz
What's a Feed?
Feeds are a way of sharing content. When you make material from your website available for publishing on other sites, you provide them with a feed. Basically, it's a code that lets them post your articles and blogs. There...
Google Takes On Microsoft Office
Google's never made a secret of the fact that its vision of your future computer desktop does not include any Microsoft products. For Google, all you'll need is a browser, an Internet connection, and a Google account - everything else is...
Making Liquidation Work For You
Liquidation is a very scary word for most of us. But the reason we get nervous is just because we really don't understand what liquidation is. One man who is extremely familiar with the process is Bob Nelson, president of Power Retailing...
Accessibility - The Wheelchair Ramp to Your Website
The original creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, dreamed of an information space that was open to everyone on the planet. But like many dreams, imagination took over and the vision became layered with roadblocks that...
Diversify Traffic + Cultivate Subscribers = Win Big in Ebiz
The Amazon River starts as a drop of rain falling into a tiny trickle of a stream way up in the mountains of South America. At its end, the Amazon pumps up to 300,000 cubic meters of water into the Atlantic Ocean every second during the...
A Win-Win Situation: Why Affiliate Marketing Works
Affiliate marketing can be a profitable venture for you, as a merchant or affiliate. It presents you with a great opportunity to increase revenue, and build valuable business relationships....
Get To Know Your .htaccess File
A valuable tool many web developers either don't understand or aren't aware of is the .htaccess file. The file is available only to websites hosted on servers running the Apache web server, which is...
A Closer Look at Microsoft adCenter
Microsoft adCenter was officially launched in May after a nine-month beta period in the U.S. Surprisingly, however, many business owners and advertisers are not aware of its existence, and, among those who are, some are hesitant to try it...
Protecting Your Domain Name
Domain names are addresses. But, of course, a domain name generates traffic, which means it is also a major sales source. The traffic could result from those typing in your name in the address bar of...
Usability Report Card: Hummerpartsclub.com
In this Usability Report Card, we’re taking a look at Hummer Parts Club (Hummerpartsclub.com), an ecommerce store selling accessories for the full range of Hummers. I realize Hummers aren’t as...
Six Tips For The Holidays
With the holiday shopping season upon us, the size of the ecommerce pie increases significantly. Here are some tips to make sure you get your fair slice:
Create seasonal special offers...
This Month: Adding Staff, Computers and Equipment
As any ecommerce merchant knows, there’s more to launching a successful online business than just launching a website.
Patrick Coughlin has owned and operated American Diamond Importers, an independent brick-and-mortar jewelry store...
Sales Tax Initiative Still Initating
Ever since the Supreme Court of the United States put the burden back on the states to come up with a way to collect sales tax on millions of Internet sales, the Streamlined Sales Tax Project (SSTP) has been chipping away at the monumental...
Product Sourcing: Online Consignment Business
Consignment is a simple concept: taking other people’s products and selling them for a percentage of the sale. According to Skip McGrath, of www.skipmcgrath.com, a successful eBay PowerSeller, “[Consignment selling] is the...
SEO Report Card: Coolbugstuff.com
This month I’ve chosen a fun, quirky ecommerce site about insects. Seth Prezant, founder and “bugmaster” (gotta love that title) at Cool Bug, LLC, explains he had an outside company assemble...
Quick Query: Chad Herman
What does Second Bite do for online businesses?
Second Bite gives the merchant the opportunity to remarket to any individual who, for whatever reason, is not able to complete the purchase at the...
Experiencing Server Overload
Each month I talk about things I’ve learned by watching how other store owners run their businesses. Not that I don’t make my own mistakes, but I often try to keep my own embarrassing moments to myself. Until now... I’ve talked...
Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne
What kind of a mind thinks through the concept of starting a retail sales business in which you have no idea what your inventory will be from one day to the next, where the inventory is going to come...
Ongoing Growth Challenges Carolina Rustica
Richard Sexton has parlayed his 10 years of brick-and-mortar success into a dynamic multichannel sales business with Carolina Rustica. With a combination of brick-and-mortar and online sales,...
Tech Support: November 2006
What are Technorati tags and what do they do?
Technorati is a website that provides an index of the web, allowing people to find up-to-the-minute information and web content. One of the ways Technorati achieves this is by using content...
SEO: Choosing a Vendor
Selecting an SEO vendor to help improve your site’s searchengine visibility is fraught with hidden dangers.What if the vendor uses unscrupulous tactics without your knowledge, and you get penalized? What if they make promises that they...
Multichannel Tools
Research indicates that multichannel shoppers are more valuable than customers who shop via a single sales channel, but findings by San Francisco-based firm Modalis Research Technologies show that multichannel buyers expect the company to...
Marketplaces: A Great Entry Point
If a merchant is wanting to begin selling online or take a small step toward diversifying into new sales channels, one of the public marketplaces, namely eBay and Amazon, is typically a safe environment for rookies.
Scot Wingo, CEO of...
Catalogs Make A Comeback
Ecommerce is to traditional business methods what a sci-fi cruiser is to a Model T. It’s all about technology, convenience, responsiveness—up-to-date stuff light years away fromthe sepia-toned days ofmail-order catalogs. Or so it would...
Comparison Shopping Sites
With millions of ready-to-buy consumers turning to shopping comparison sites, experts advise retailers to consider participating in one of the Internet's newest sales channels.
Shopping comparison sites like Yahoo! Shopping,...
What Is Multichannel Selling?
Defining multichannel selling has taken a new twist in recent years, but the end result is the same for merchants — getting products to sell in the hands of potential customers. In the old days...
Why Your Business Should Be Blogging
Whereas letter writing was the primary method of communicating with friends, family, heads of state, and businesses 150 years ago, today's blogs have become a major means of interpersonal and mass communication. Before there was telephone...
Pay-Per-Call: A Smarter Way to Advertise
Pay-per-call has been one of the trends in online marketing recently. In fact, pay-per-performance advertising, overall, is gaining ground as more and more businesses discover the high value...
Flash or HTML: Which to Choose
The question of whether it is better to design a website using Flash rather than using just HTML has sparked many debates among web developers. For the most part, it seems that developers tend to defend what they know, although there are...
Email: How It Works
Email has become one of the primary sources of communication among people in the world today, yet how it works remains a bit of a mystery to many people. In order to shed some light on the subject,...
How To Start a Video Blog
Web logs, commonly referred to as "blogs," came into the mainstream about two years ago.
Not really a newsletter or traditional .html-page publishing, blogs resemble more of a web-based diary where the creator records their thoughts,...
Tech Support: October 2006
I keep hearing about a two-tiered Internet. What is that?
Two-tiered Internet refers to the attempt by major telecommunication companies, who provide the infrastructure for Internet...
Language Translation Creates New Options
For English, press one. Para español, la prensa dos.”
The familiarity of this everyday message shows us how companies are increasingly recognizing the need to alter their business practices to reach new demographics through...
Tech Support: Isolate CSS and Javascript
Last month we discussed the separation of content, design and functionality when it comes to developing a website. We introduced the idea that HTML documents should contain primarily content, with as little markup code as possible. The...
Is Your Data Vulnerable?
Having just returned from the MIVA Conference, I’m sure my editor is quite antsy. I’m late with this column— not due to procrastination. I’ve always got something to say, but after I instructed a session on security for online...
AuctionCheckout.com's John Waldron and Sloane Bouchever
What makes AuctionCheckout different from PayPal?
In the PayPal environment today, if you're selling, the funds from your transactions are going into your PayPal account. PayPal is not a...
Use "Human Optimization" for Search Engines
I read with interest this month that Google has filed a patent to allow it to add a human-review element to their search results. This represents the next step in a series of interesting developments that I have watched closely for the...
Should You Add SEO To Your Marketing Efforts?
Pay-per-click advertising is, no doubt, one of the most effective ways of getting new leads and prospects to come to your website. Within a period of 24 hours, any business—large or small—can...
Ecommerce Articles
- Browse All Articles
- Browse our complete archive of ecommerce articles.
- Accounting, Management & Legal
- Ecommerce articles related to managing a small business including ecommerce accounting, business strategy and legal considerations.
- Conversion & Usability
- Online business articles about converting web site visitors into customers and how to gauge and improve your business website's usability.
- Development & Programming
- Articles to help designers, developers and programmers create successful, search engine friendly ecommerce websites and improve existing ones.
- Hosting, Infrastructure & Software
- Articles for ecommerce businesses about ecommerce web hosting, business infrastructure, business strategy and helpful ecommerce & small business software.
- Interviews & Profiles
- Interviews with prominent ecommerce business personalities and profiles of successful online businesses.
- Inventory & Shipping
- Ecommerce articles about inventory management, ecommerce order fulfillment and product shipping considerations.
- Marketing & Revenue Growth
- Articles relating to online marketing, email marketing and using the Internet to growing your business.
- Search Engine Optimization
- Search engine optimization articles for ecommerce business owners, strategists, marketers and developers.
- Shopping Carts & Online Payments
- Articles covering ecommerce shopping cart platforms and options for choosing an online payment gateway.
- Training & Education
- Tutorials and articles providing training and education for ecommerce business owners and developers of ecommerce websites.
Search Articles
Ecommerce Community
- Ecommerce Blogs
- Read our blogs about ecommerce topics written by industry professionals.
- Community Forum
- Connect with other ecommerce professionals to trade advice and answers in our community forum.
- Podcasts
- Check out our ecommerce podcasts covering topics ranging from interviews to tutorials.
- RSS Content Feeds
- Subscribe to our RSS feeds and have fresh ecommerce content delivered to you.
Ecommerce Resources
- Free Email Newsletter
- Sign up for Ecommerce Notes, our free email newsletter for ecommerce business owners and developers.
- Ecommerce Directory
- Browse our directory of ecommerce products and services, or submit your own listing in our directory.
- Ecommerce Glossary
- Familiarize yourself with terminology or submit terms to help others with our Ecommerce Glossary.
- Events Calendar
- Find out about upcoming ecommerce events or invite other ecommerce professionals by posting your own event.
- Press Releases
- Browse ecommerce related press releases and post your own press release for distribution.
- Ecommerce Store & Back Issues
- Pick up back issues of Practical eCommerce magazine along with other merchandise from Practical Ecommerce
About Practical eCommerce
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Look at frequently asked questions regarded using our website, subscribing to our magazine and more.
- Advertising Information
- Information about advertising in Practical eCommerce magazine, on our website, or in our email newsletters.
- Editorial Sharing
- Learn about options for sharing our content with your visitors, customers or employees.
- About Us
- Learn more about Practical Ecommerce magazine and meet our staff.
- Contact Us
- Contact Practical Ecommerce at any time for more information. We'd love to hear from you.
Copyright 2007 Confluence Distribution, Inc. and Practical eCommerce.
All Rights Reserved.