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Conversion
Online Purchase Cycle in 2014 Messy; Not a Funnel
April 16, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Mobile, social, and the cacophony of modern interruption marketing has transform the retail path to purchase, and forced retail marketers to focus on building lasting relationships that benefit customers. It is,
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Business
Heartbleed Bug Impacts Online Retailers, Ecommerce
April 10, 2014 • Armando Roggio
The so-called Heartbleed bug is a serious flaw in some versions of popular, open-source security software used to protect encrypted data like passwords or payment card information during online transactions.
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Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for May 2014
April 8, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Content marketing seeks to create and publish useful or entertaining content like articles, photographs, videos, or similar that will attract, engage, and retain customers. But good content marketing doesn’t just ...
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Marketing & Advertising
Lowe’s Innovative Vine Campaign a Year Later
April 4, 2014 • Armando Roggio
In April 2013, Lowe’s, the second largest home improvement retailer in the world, got a lot of attention when it released a series of six-second, how-to videos on Vine. The ...
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Email Marketing
Treat New Email Subscribers Right, Profits Will Follow
April 1, 2014 • Armando Roggio
How an online seller welcomes new email subscribers can impact (a) sales, (b) future engagement with the new subscriber, and (c) even the how Internet service providers and email clients ...
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Email Marketing
Gmail’s Automatic Unsubscribe May Help Email Marketers
March 31, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Last month, Google started to display a prominent “unsubscribe” link on open Gmail messages, giving Gmail users a fast and easy way to disengage. This new link could help marketers ...
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Platforms & Apps
Navigating 2014’s Crowded Ecommerce Platform Market
March 25, 2014 • Armando Roggio
The ecommerce platform market is crowded with effective, feature-rich solutions, making it challenging for new or growing ecommerce businesses to know which solution is best for them. Ecommerce platforms are the ...
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Conversion
8 Essentials for High-converting Site Search
March 20, 2014 • Armando Roggio
About 30 percent of ecommerce visitors use site search to navigate. These shoppers may be 50 percent more likely to make a purchase. It seems that would-be customers who choose to ...
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Email Marketing
Responsive Design for Ecommerce Marketing Emails
March 18, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Roughly one-half of email is now opened on mobile devices like the Apple iPhone or the Android-powered Samsung Galaxy S4. There is significant research indicating that between 70 and 80 percent ...
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Platforms & Apps
PrestaShop 1.6 Adds Improved Business Intelligence, Other Features
March 13, 2014 • Armando Roggio
PrestaShop 1.6 is scheduled for official release on March 17, 2014. It adds several new features to the popular open source ecommerce platform, including easier access to key performance indicators ...
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Local Business
4 Reasons Small Brick-and-mortar Retailers Need an Online Store
March 12, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Small, brick-and-mortar retailers should also sell online to stay competitive and meet customer expectations. Ecommerce and physical-retail commerce are merging; businesses that exist in shopping centers and malls are expected to ...
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Business
Staples Increases Online Efforts, not Brick-and-mortar
March 10, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Office supply retailer Staples announced March 6 that it would close 225 brick-and-mortar retail stores by 2015, in part, focusing investments and marketing on the online channel. The move may ...
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Marketing & Advertising
5 Ways to Use Vine for Ecommerce Marketing
March 4, 2014 • Armando Roggio
More than one in three retailers use the Vine micro-video publishing app as part of their content marketing campaigns. These short-video marketing pioneers use Vine to showcase products, entertain, build ...
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Marketing & Advertising
For 2014, What Is Ecommerce Marketing?
February 20, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Marketing, traditionally, has been about communicating the value of a product to potential customers for the purpose of selling that product at a profit. Given this seemingly straightforward proposition, you might ...
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Platforms & Apps
New Ecommerce Platform Claims Better Performance, Development
February 18, 2014 • Armando Roggio
A new open source ecommerce platform from a one-time Magento engineer claims it can change online selling for small and mid-sized merchants with a new set of easy-to-use features, mobile-by-default ...
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Conversion
Target Focuses on Trust, Mobile with ‘Awesome Shop’
February 14, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Target’s Pinterest-powered “Awesome Shop” may demonstrate a focus on trust building and mobile commerce — areas that could benefit any online retailer. Target launched its Awesome Shop in December at about ...
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B2B
4 Keys for Effective B-to-B Ecommerce
February 11, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Business-to-business ecommerce describes Internet-enabled transactions between businesses, such as a manufacturer and a wholesaler, a wholesaler and a retailers, or a wholesaler and a business user. The B-to-B ecommerce market ...
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Business
5 Niches for a New Ecommerce Business
February 5, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Starting an online retail business begins with knowing what products to sell. Entrepreneurs have many reasons for starting an ecommerce business. For some, they have a passion for a particular product,
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Email Marketing
5 Marketing Emails from Leading Online Retailers
February 3, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Even a cursory review of other retailers’ marketing efforts can spawn ideas to drive your next campaign. Modern marketing is dynamic, multi-faceted, and competitive. On the one hand, marketers seek to ...
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Email Marketing
5 Ways to Boost Email Open Rates
January 30, 2014 • Armando Roggio
A small increase in email open rates can significantly impact an online retailer’s sales and profit. In its 2013 Statistical Fact Book, Direct Marketing Association estimated that email marketing could have ...
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User Experience
What Is Flat Design?
January 24, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Flat design is a web and application interface design philosophy aimed at creating simple, usable interfaces that are both aesthetically attractive and functionally easy to use, regardless of where the ...
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Customer Retention
Seek Repeat Customers to Drive Ecommerce Profits
January 22, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Growing a successful ecommerce business may depend on earning repeat business from a relatively small number of loyal shoppers, according to a new report. The top 1 percent of a typical ...
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Conversion
How to Launch New Products on an Ecommerce Site
January 20, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Retailers add new products frequently. For the most part these products may be as simple as adding a new line of sweaters to the women’s section on the site or ...
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Schools & Resources
7 Ecommerce Design Trends for 2014
January 14, 2014 • Armando Roggio
As more online retailers seek to provide a good mobile shopping experience, expect to see a significant number of site redesigns in 2014. These redesigned sites are likely to follow ...
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Business
Finding Business Motivation in Industry Leaders
January 10, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Starting and running a business can require a level of commitment that few people understand or experience. Entrepreneurs may find the motivation needed for all of that commitment in the ...
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Content Marketing
Build an Ecommerce Content Marketing Strategy for 2014
January 7, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Content marketing provides customers with genuinely useful information that can solve problems, aid decision making, or simply answer questions — all in the hope that shoppers are more likely to ...
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Business
Ecommerce Marketplace Opportunities for 2014
January 3, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay allow Internet retailers to present products, market, and sell to potential customers that may have otherwise been difficult to acquire. In 2014, there many ...
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Business
5 Keys to Mobile Ecommerce Optimization in 2014
January 2, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Web traffic estimates from several trend analysis firms, including comScore, predict that mobile Internet traffic will outpace traffic from desktop or large laptop devices in 2014, further demonstrating just how ...
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Marketing & Advertising
2014 Ecommerce Marketing Checklist
December 25, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce marketing is a continually evolving field wherein the marketing tactics that worked last year may not be effective in the coming year. What follows is a checklist of sorts. Look ...
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Shipping & Fulfillment
4 Tips for Better Ecommerce Returns and Exchanges
December 19, 2013 • Armando Roggio
More than 60 percent of online shoppers returned or exchanged at least one item in 2013, up from about 51 percent in 2012. Importantly, about 95 percent of customers will ...