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Marketing & Advertising
4 Predictions for 2015 Holiday Shopping Season
September 23, 2015 • Armando Roggio
Earlier shopping, ecommerce sales growth, improved email marketing, and mobile commerce will be among the most important ecommerce trends during the 2015 Christmas shopping season, which lasts from the end of ...
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Marketing & Advertising
4 Tips for Small-business Retail Marketing for 2016
September 16, 2015 • Armando Roggio
Given limited information, time, and money, small retail business owners and marketers must decide which ad formats and promotions merit investment. Their growth depends on making good choices. But what ...
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Conversion
The Case for Registering Online Shoppers
September 11, 2015 • Armando Roggio
With the addition of one unobtrusive form field, online retailers may provide shoppers with a better ecommerce experience and possibly earn loyal customers. Unfortunately, to enjoy this additional ecommerce success,
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Marketing & Advertising
4 Tips for a Successful Holiday Pop-up Shop
September 9, 2015 • Armando Roggio
Short-term holiday pop-up shops can boost sales, help test a new channel, reduce Christmas inventory, and even help online brands grow. The pop-up retail trend is not particularly new. In the ...
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Email Marketing
Plan Cyber Monday 2015 Email Now
September 3, 2015 • Armando Roggio
On Cyber Monday, online shoppers will endure an email deluge as nearly every retailer sends some special offer to its active subscribers. A last minute Cyber Monday email planned Sunday ...
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Design & Development
3 Google Sheets Functions to Track Competitors, More
September 1, 2015 • Armando Roggio
Google Sheets can monitor competitors’ prices, capture news headlines, and devour data from websites, CSV files, and more. The tool helps small business owners and marketers gain a competitive advantage. Google ...
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Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for September 2015
August 27, 2015 • Armando Roggio
In September, content marketers can publish posts about community events, distribute product lookbooks, and promote Christmas shopping guides to engage shoppers. Content marketing is the process of creating, publishing,
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Email Marketing
Learn to Design Responsive Email Templates this Weekend
August 25, 2015 • Armando Roggio
With some experience in HTML and CSS, you can learn to design your own responsive email templates in just about a weekend. With your fresh new skills, take control over how your email marketing messages look on nearly any device.
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Marketing & Advertising
Content Marketing: Let Hemingway Help
August 19, 2015 • Armando Roggio
Online retail marketing requires a steady flow of written content. Entrepreneurs and small-business marketers must write product descriptions, blog posts, email offers, and social media updates to be competitive. One way to ...
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Design & Development
Apple.com Redesign Pushes Ecommerce Site Trends
August 14, 2015 • Armando Roggio
Apple’s August 2015 website redesign emphasizes visual communication and advances several site design trends. Large photographs, meaningful graphics, and useful video abound. When Apple.com relaunched on August 6, 2015, many ...
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Email Marketing
6 After-order Emails to Boost Ecommerce Sales
August 12, 2015 • Armando Roggio
When online retailers use email to market to loyal customers, those stores are applying one of their most effective marketing tools to some of their richest sales prospects. Repeat customers are ...
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Marketing & Advertising
5 Storytelling Mistakes That Content Marketers Must Avoid
August 6, 2015 • Armando Roggio
Content marketing has the potential to engage shoppers and develop loyal, repeat customers. But when marketers tell misleading stories or waste someone’s time there may be a negative impact on business too. Some marketers believe
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Conversion
A Great Number of Products Requires Great Search
August 4, 2015 • Armando Roggio
As an online store’s product catalog grows it becomes increasingly important to provide site visitors with a robust and feature-rich search solution to help them find just the right product ...
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Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for August 2015
July 30, 2015 • Armando Roggio
Your August content marketing could be a blend of real-life seriousness, product promotion, food, listicles, and drones. Content marketing is durable stuff. The useful or entertaining articles, images, and videos
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Design & Development
Monitor Competitor Prices with Python and Scrapy
July 29, 2015 • Armando Roggio
Monitoring competitors’ prices and product lineups can help online retailers win pricing battles; optimize sales and special offers; and track product trends over time. For many small ecommerce businesses, however, keeping tabs on the competition is a painful, manual process.
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Marketing & Advertising
Launching a New Ecommerce Product? Research Marketing Options (Carefully)
July 24, 2015 • Armando Roggio
New product introductions require a blend of creativity and number crunching. Do it well and your online business will generate sales and profits; do it poorly and you could be wasting money on underperforming ads. Online retailers offering unique
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Business
Shoppers Turn to Small Online Retailers for Unique, Hard-to-find Items
July 22, 2015 • Armando Roggio
When online shoppers cannot find niche products at big box stores or large ecommerce shops, they seek out small Internet retailers. Online stores like Amazon and Walmart carry thousands of products. These and similar massive online retailers
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Conversion
7 Ways To Improve Ecommerce Category Filters
July 17, 2015 • Armando Roggio
Filtered navigation, which narrows search results or listings on a product category page, may help online shoppers quickly find or discover products, improving the shopping experience for
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Content Marketing
Your Content Marketing Is a Joke (Or It Should Be)
July 14, 2015 • Armando Roggio
Content marketing helps many companies attract new customers, build lasting relationships with existing customers, and sell more. If your company is using content, but not
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Photography & Video
Online Retailer’s Guide to Photo Copyrights
July 10, 2015 • Armando Roggio
Using product or lifestyle images on an ecommerce site without permission from the photograph’s creator or copyright holder is a crime that — in the United States — carries up to $150,000 penalty. So the next time you’re tempted
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Business
Free and Easy Returns Build Customer Loyalty
July 8, 2015 • Armando Roggio
Shoppers have generally come to expect online stores to offer returns, refunds, and exchanges for items that are defective, damaged, or otherwise not as expected. And when retailers don’t have ...
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Product Pages
How to Optimize Ecommerce Product Images for Faster Pages, High Conversion
July 6, 2015 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce product photography must convey an item’s value and functionality while inspiring shoppers to buy. Whenever possible, product images should also be lean and fast loading.
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Amazon & Marketplaces
6 Things to Love About eBay Product Pages
July 3, 2015 • Armando Roggio
Founded in 1995, eBay is one of the original ecommerce pioneers. So it would stand to reason that as eBay has gone from startup to earning more than $17.9 billion ...
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Business
How to Serve Empowered Ecommerce Shoppers
June 30, 2015 • Armando Roggio
Online retailers are doing business in the era of empowered shoppers. This competitive environment pits massive omnichannel retail enterprises against even the smallest of family-run, garage-based sellers. Shopping has fundamentally changed ...
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Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for July 2015
June 26, 2015 • Armando Roggio
Patriotism, projects, smooches, and even summertime activities can drive your company’s contact marketing campaigns this July, boosting site traffic and, ultimately, sales. When businesses create, publish, and distribute content with the ...
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Marketing & Advertising
4 Ways to Grow Ecommerce Traffic in 2015
June 24, 2015 • Armando Roggio
Unique site visits — the number of individuals that frequent a website — are a proxy of sorts for an online business’s new customer acquisition. If month-to-month a site has more unique visitors, it stands to reason
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Business
APIs Bring Ecommerce to Any Page, Service
June 22, 2015 • Armando Roggio
Application programming interfaces (APIs) from payment processors and service providers make it possible, if not easy, to bring ecommerce to essentially any page or any service. Often the first thing that ...
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Conversion
7 Ways to Improve Ecommerce Site Navigation
June 17, 2015 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce site navigation should help shoppers find products quickly and easily. Good navigation improves the online shopping experience and helps merchants increase sales and profits. Website design includes a combination of user experience ...
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Business
How to Buy a Small Ecommerce Business on Flippa
June 15, 2015 • Armando Roggio
Flippa is a leading marketplace for buying and selling websites, including active online stores, those with established site traffic, revenue, and profit. One of the sites available at auction on Flippa at the ...
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Email Marketing
Email Marketing Evolving to Personalization, Behavior
June 10, 2015 • Armando Roggio
Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools available to modern marketers. It is vital for most businesses. But what makes email marketing effective is changing in response to ...