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Article Archives (653 articles)
PPC Expense: What Is A Customer Worth?
When determining how much to spend on a pay-per-click campaign, an etailer should first calculate what a customer is worth to his business.
Getting a customer to purchase a single product isn’t...
Website Profile: Selling Fish Makes Online Niche
In Meredith Wilson's The Music Man, the opening number has a gang of traveling salesmen pattering cleverly about how a salesman’s got to know the territory and his products. Professor Harold Hill...
SEO: Harness the Power of CSS
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a technology popular with web developers who care about web standards and accessibility. But it should also be a technology embraced by anyone who cares about SEO....
SEO Report Card: KayakFishingStuff.com
In many ways this site was a breath of fresh air. From an SEO standpoint, Kayak Fishing Stuff is doing a number of things right, and it shows in their No. 1 rankings in Google for “kayak fishing,"...
JupiterResearch's Patti Freeman Evans
Patti Freeman Evans has been in the ecommerce industry before the beginning. For the past 19 years she has been creating customer-centric ecommerce sites, integrating channels effectively, developing...
Email Marketing Fosters Long-Term Relationships
The use of email is changing the way businesses communicate with their customers. Rather than using email solely to offer products for sale, many businesses now use it to communicate helpful information to shoppers who request it. This...
Product Sourcing: The Skinny on Government Auctions
Are government auctions really a good source for purchasing products for resale? The answer to that is they can be, but you have to know what you are doing.
Where do government auctions get their products?
Government auctions can...
Use In-store Kiosks to Promote Website
When was the last time you were shopping for an item you just had to have, only to discover when you got to the store you couldn’t buy it in the color or size you wanted? If you are like most retail shoppers, you have experienced an...
Trademark Registration
This article will be the first of three covering trademarks, copyrights and patents. The decision as to whether to register each is based upon unique business considerations. For trademark registration, there is a process to go through in...
Pay-Per-Call: New Player on the Scene?
Online advertising is heating up and growing quickly in popularity. However, many companies are missing out if they don’t have a website or if their services are not fit to be sold over the web.
Fortunately, a new version of paid...
Rethinking Conversion Rates
When I'm not writing for Practical eCommerce, I spend my professional life running a “boutique” web-consulting firm. As a result, I get involved in numerous sales meetings. I’ve noticed...
Quick Query: Bill Van Wyck
What is RedRoller.com?
What Travelocity does for travel, RedRoller does for shipping packages. The site is built to look and feel like an etravel site. Shipping for small businesses is a...
Email: Confidentiality Required
I get thousands of emails each day. A good majority are spam, and I use Cloudmark (the best system I’ve found) for filtering them. Being in business, however, I still have to take the time to scan them all, making sure I’m not missing...
Tech Support: August 2006
My web host has different bandwidth levels depending on the price. How can I compute what my ecommerce site's bandwidth needs are?
Bandwidth can be a tough one to understand for most people. I like to use the analogy of a water pipe...
Use Scripting for Dynamic Websites
One of the first tasks when planning a website is to develop a strategy for delivering content and functionality to visitors.
Since a website is a collection of HTML documents, the most basic approach is to simply code the information...
Web Design: Function Trumps Form
A well-designed site is important, but it will not be the key factor in determining your sales success.
It's not uncommon for a business owner to turn to a design-oriented person to help create a website for his company. That may,...
Website User Agreements
Website user agreements establish the terms under which the relationship between a visitor and a site is governed. A common practice for small websites is to "borrow" language and attempt to customize the terminology to fit their needs....
Five Great Conversion Tips
These conversion tips can be implemented by a business owner in just a few days with the possible aid of a competent web programmer. When implemented, the tips can make a profound difference on the conversions rates of an ecommerce...
There's More to Conversion Than a Sale
Consider the long and short of e-retailing. As competition rises and tracking becomes more sophisticated, ecommerce merchants are looking for more ways to improve their sales performance. The answer may lie in how they define success....
Turning Visitors Into Customers
It may be the most common problem ecommerce businesses face: plenty of traffic but few sales.
Converting visitors into customers is a blend of both art and science and, once it’s understood, it’s a skill that will reap rewards for a...
SEO Report Card: Zearth.Blogspot.com
Since this month’s article is on blogs and SEO, it makes sense for me to evaluate an etailer’s blog for this month’s SEO Report Card. Zearth.com’s staff operates a blog at zearth.blogspot.com, although they are relatively new to...
AbeBooks.com Co-founder Rick Pura
Rick Pura just finished writing the software code for "Rick’s Search Engine." He thinks it works pretty well, and he may go into the search engine business. He knows he can write good software; it...
Measuring Conversion Success
An ecommerce site with 6 to 9 percent of its visitors making purchases can be considered a success, according to conversion experts.
With an industry standard hovering around 1 to 2 percent, most...
How To Steal Credit Card Numbers
At SecurityFocus.com, Internet programmers can post the details of various software bugs to assist other professionals. These software bugs could include shopping carts, payment gateways, Unix code...
Integrating Bricks and Mortar with eCommerce
Today‘s shopper expects convenience. Merchants integrating brick-and-mortar stores, ecommerce sites and catalogs will increase repeat purchase rates and achieve higher levels of customer satisfaction.
In any multi-channel retail...
Tips & Tricks for Discovering Lowcost Keywords
Keywords are considered the lifeline of any successful pay per click campaign. If you select the wrong ones, you can zip through your entire advertising budget without getting anything in return. If you choose the right ones, you can beat...
Showcase Products Via Podcasts
I’m addicted to the They Might Be Giants podcasts. I'm convinced they helped sell tickets for their latest tour by offering up free music, coupled with tour advertisements, in their weekly...
Quick Query - Jane Paolucci
Why is conversion important to ecommerce businesses?
Ecommerce businesses are constantly seeking new ways to enhance their websites to drive incremental revenue, reduce costs associated with...
Web Design: Multiple Roles
A web redesign project is not a one-man assignment. Certainly technology has made it possible for a single graphic designer or programmer to build a site, but not a high conversion site (in my humble...
Control Panels Simplify Tasks
Every website needs to be hosted somewhere, and every web developer will need access to the hosting server in order to perform tasks such as setting up email accounts, managing databases and creating FTP (file transfer protocol) accounts....
Givens Books Partners with AbeBooks.com
When most of us think about an ecommerce website, we think of a place with pictures and descriptions of inventory, which a shopper can toss into a virtual shopping cart and buy with a mouse click. With the advent of portals such as...
Tech Support - July 2006
I’m contemplating either DSL, cable or a T-1 line for my business. How can I determine which Internet connection is best for my company?
While DSL, cable and T-1 lines all provide a high-speed, "always on" connection to the Internet,...
Tech Support: June 2006
What’s the difference between a web server and an email server?
In this case, both the web server and the email server are software packages that provide services, rather than referring to a hardware server that is running these...
SEO: Blogging Your Way To The Top
Search engines, Google in particular, seem to love blogs. This is in part due to the fact that search engines rely heavily on links for their ranking algorithms, and the blogosphere is rich with interlinkages. Bloggers constantly link to...
Attracting The Right Traffic
Gaining just one percent more sales or leads from your visitors can significantly impact your bottom line, yet the common practice of improving website conversion often focuses exclusively on...
Personalization Lures Customers
Everyone likes the personal touch, and these sites offer their customers the ability to personalize unique gifts for friends and loved ones. Creative, personalized gifts and speedy service will lure their customers back.
PhotoWow.com...
What's Selling, What's Hot and How to Find It
Are you searching for the next trendy gadget to sell at your online store? Many people are looking to catch lightning in a bottle, but locating trends in the marketplace requires thought, research...
Itching to Expand Your Product Niche?
After years of tinkering in his woodshop making bird houses, Bob said to himself, “I ought to be selling these bird houses on the web.” After construting a quick website, www.birdhousesbybob.com, for example, is open for business, and,...
Product Sourcing: What Not to Do
One thing an entrepreneur shouldn’t do is search online for “wholesale supplier” or “drop ship” when trying to locate a wholesale partner. This is according to Chris Malta, founder and CEO of Worldwide Brands, Inc.
“You can...
Drop Shipping: Pros and Cons
Drop shipping remains a hot topic among etailers but, even though it has many benefits, it isn’t the best option for every business.
A drop shipper is a product supplier who is willing to ship individual orders. Usually when products...
RSS Can Help Your eCommerce Business
Last month we introduced the technology commonly called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and explained how it is being used to distribute online content. This month we will look at how ecommerce business owners can use RSS to improve their...
Show Off Your Products
I just got my email alert on the latest kitchen styles from IKEA (www.ikea.com). The site’s not the easiest to shop – mostly because you really have to know what you’re looking for – but it boasts a vast amount of interactive...
Privacy Policies
Even at the turn of the 17th century, Francis Bacon had it right: knowledge is power. Today, we are in the midst of the information age and, in relation to customer management and relationships, in the beginning stages of an age of...
Are You an Ego Marketer?
“Ego marketing” might sound like the latest fad from those who brought you such buzzwords as “customer relationship management” and “sales force automation,” but it isn’t. Ego marketing...
Tools of the Trade
Welcome to our first installment of “Programming Notes,” a column designed to help novice web designers and developers with some of the challenges that they may face. Creating and maintaining a website requires someone to be familiar...
Grow Profits by Split-Testing Ads
Successful business owners and marketing professionals know that great results from advertising are rarely owed to luck and guessing. Whether they specialize in online or offline promotion, they have known for years that the secret to...
Quick Query: ProStores' Julian Green
In January 2005, eBay Inc. purchased Kurant’s StoreSense, an online ecommerce provider. Using Kurant’s technology, eBay subsequently launched ProStores, an ecommerce solution for small to...
Black Hat SEO
Search engine spammers – also known as “black hatters” – never prosper. Sooner or later, they get caught. And when they do, it’s almost never pretty. Consequences can include ranking penalties, removal of the site’s...
BuySafe.com Founder Steve Woda
For every person who shops on the Internet, there are hundreds of others who don’t – who won’t. They don’t want to. They feel, with some justification, that doing so would lead to the...
Sourcing Options for eCommerce Firms
Finding products to sell remains one of the hottest topics for online entrepreneurs, and it’s the top question eBay Radio gets from its listeners, according to Chris Malta, Product Sourcing Editor for The eBay Radio Show and Founder and...
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