Business
An ecommerce site is a business. Our Management & Finance category addresses online payments, funding needs, employee issues, merchant profiles, key metrics, multichannel and omnichannel strategies, cross-border analyses, inventory management, accounting topics, sales taxes, and much more.
Amazon & Marketplaces | B2B | Cross-border Selling | Finance | Fraud Prevention | Inventory | Local Business | Payments | Shipping & Fulfillment | Staffing-
Local Business
Local Marketing: Position Yourself as a Community Expert
January 25, 2016 • Paul Chaney
In a recent installment of "10 Great Local Marketing Ideas," a monthly series we run here on WMT, Lisa Sanderson, a real estate agent in Stroudsburg, Pa., asked, "Have you ever searched online for information on your local area and couldn’t find what you were looking for exactly?"
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Business
Omnichannel selling: Bigcommerce, Amazon, Facebook
January 21, 2016 • Kenny Kane
In my post last month, I touched on the fact that I was experimenting with omnichannel selling in 2015. If you’re not familiar, omnichannel selling is a fancy way of ...
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B2B
Choosing a B2B Ecommerce Platform: Weighing the Risks
January 21, 2016 • Lori McDonald
When considering a B2B ecommerce platform, it is important to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the software solution you select. There are, in my experience, three types of software ...
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Business
Supplier Representatives Can Help Online Retailers Grow
January 17, 2016 • Armando Roggio
It is an important milestone for online retailers when they graduate from ordering solely and often blindly with wholesale catalogs or on B2B websites to working with a skilled supplier ...
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Business
Small Retailers Better Able to Adopt Unified Commerce
January 13, 2016 • Armando Roggio
More than three quarters of retailers, including large, established chain stores, plan to unify or connect the software that manages their sales and fulfillment across multiple sales channels — in ...
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Local Business
4 Local SEO Predictions for 2016
January 13, 2016 • Bill Hartzer
There is never a shortage of articles about predictions for the new year, and the same holds true where SEO is concerned. Here is my list of predictions for 2016 — four in all — that will affect local SEO. Review them and start making plans to address the upcoming changes.
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Technology stack for Beardbrand
January 12, 2016 • Eric Bandholz
I’ve always appreciated other companies opening up about their business. So I’d like to share a bit of details on our technology platform. As of January 2016, our business is ...
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Business
‘Native’ Advertising Subject to New F.T.C. Regulations
January 11, 2016 • Elizabeth Lewis
The rise of so-called “native” advertising on websites has prompted the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to issue standards on the presentation and content of that advertising. After almost two years ...
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Shipping & Fulfillment
Reducing ‘Waste’ in Ecommerce Fulfillment
January 6, 2016 • Michael Manzione
One of the best ways to improve profitability in your warehouse is to reduce or eliminate waste. I addressed this in my last article, “Streamline Ecommerce Fulfillment with 5S Methodology,”
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Business
Should Online Retailers Offer Senior and Military Discounts?
January 5, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Discounts for special consumer groups, like senior citizens and those with military service, may help online retailers increase sales and build loyalty. But offering these types of discounts online can ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
The perils of pre-orders
January 3, 2016 • Richard Stubbings
A few years ago, much of my business was built on customers ordering products in advance of the products’ release. Pre-orders allowed us to know what the likely demand was ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
You lose money under-promising and over-delivering
January 2, 2016 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth
There seems to be a well-meaning but misguided belief that as online retailers we should under-promise and over-deliver to make our customers more loyal. But I don’t believe this to be ...
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Business
2015 Top 25: Our Most Popular Posts of the Year
December 24, 2015 • PEC Staff
As 2015 draws to a close, we’ve compiled a list of our 25 most popular articles of the year, based on the number of page views. Popular subjects included search engine ...
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Inventory
Inventory hiccups highlight 2015
December 23, 2015 • Kenny Kane
As 2015 comes to a close, it is a good time for self-evaluation. Hopefully, you’ve met or exceeded your revenue goals, and come in under on the expense side. Regardless ...
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Business
Absence of U.S. Regulation Leads to Web Accessibility Lawsuits
December 15, 2015 • Armando Roggio
In the absence of clear U.S. government regulation or even clear guidance, there have been many web accessibility lawsuits that simultaneously bring attention to web accessibility and, perhaps unfairly and ...
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Business
Avoiding Legal Liability from Holiday Gifts and Parties
December 14, 2015 • Elizabeth Lewis
As the holiday season approaches, business owners often consider gifts, company parties, and other forms of rewards for a year of hard work and relationships — and hope for additional ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Selling on Amazon: my company’s strategy
December 11, 2015 • Eric Bandholz
The elephant in the room when it comes to ecommerce is Amazon. The assumption among many merchants and their customers is that you have to be on Amazon or you ...
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Cross-border Selling
November Holiday Ecommerce Sales Go International
December 10, 2015 • Marcia Kaplan
The final tally for the November holidays is in. Adobe Digital reported that Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday online spending at American ecommerce sites reached $11 billion, a 15 percent ...
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B2B
3 Ways to Build B2B Relationships with Ecommerce
December 9, 2015 • Lori McDonald
When it comes to building relationships, B2B ecommerce is different than B2C. There is still an individual relationship — there’s always a person on the other side. However, in B2B ...
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Staffing
How to Hire an SEO Pro, for Ecommerce
December 4, 2015 • Jill Kocher Brown
Hiring search engine optimization professionals is tricky. SEO requires a rare combination of business, marketing, creative, and technical skills. For an ecommerce business, where a significant portion of customer acquisition ...
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Business
8 Ways to Boost Average Order Value
December 3, 2015 • Armando Roggio
An increase in the average order value for an online retailer has a strong correlation to an increase in profit. When an ecommerce retailer can sell more on each order,
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Amazon & Marketplaces
Getting Sales Tax Setup Right on Amazon
December 3, 2015 • James Thomson
Every seller on Amazon has the responsibility of paying sales tax in those U.S. states where it has tax nexus. When the tax isn’t paid, that seller builds a tax ...
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Finance
Sales Report: 2015 Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday
December 2, 2015 • Marcia Kaplan
Who won the November 2015 holiday sales battle? Online merchants. Shoppers opted to buy online rather than fight the crowds in brick-and-mortar stores. Brick-and-mortar sales on Thanksgiving Day dropped to $1.8
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Shipping & Fulfillment
Streamline Ecommerce Fulfillment with 5S Methodology
November 30, 2015 • Michael Manzione
Whether your order volume is 10 orders a day or 10,000 and whether you’re shipping orders from a garage, small warehouse, or a large automated facility, you can benefit from learning and ...
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Merchant Voice
The beauty of compound revenue growth
November 24, 2015 • David Sasson
When my company had sales of just $66,000 a year, I thought, “How will we ever get to a million dollars?” When we got to that level, I thought, “How ...
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Business
Slack app frees me from my desk
November 20, 2015 • Kenny Kane
I’ve written about using third-party apps on my Bigcommerce store. But there are many apps that merchants can use regardless of their ecommerce platform. One of my favorites is Slack,
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Business
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Merchant Voice
YouTube: The coolest social media platform
November 19, 2015 • Eric Bandholz
YouTube is the coolest social media platform. I don’t know why it gets overlooked in the business community. If you ignore YouTube, you are missing out on a great community.
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B2B
Using Facebook Ads for B2B Targeting
November 18, 2015 • Michael Stancil
If you had asked online marketers a couple of years ago to name the best channel for B2B targeting, most would not have said Facebook. In fact, it wasn’t until early ...
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Amazon & Marketplaces
How to Sell an Amazon Marketplace Business
November 16, 2015 • James Thomson
Most Amazon sellers have enough on their plates keeping their businesses running and maintaining sales and profits. But no matter how long a merchant lasts on Amazon, there may come a ...
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Business
Successful Ecommerce Entrepreneurs Love the Process as Much as Profits
November 11, 2015 • Armando Roggio
Small business owners presumably create their ventures with the aim of making profit. Some want to supplement an income. Others want to replace one. But if an entrepreneur doesn’t enjoy ...