http://www.practicalecommerce.com/authors/8/Michael-A-Cox/ Michael A. Cox is a staff writer for the magazine. He can be reached at mcox@practicalecommerce.com. en-us Copyright 2007 Confluence Publishing Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:34:23 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/rss/ Practical Ecommerce v2.0.1 Ecommerce kmurdock@practicalecommerce.com bgetting@practicalecommerce.com 60 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/760/Magento-Shopping-Cart-And-20000-Friends/ Roy Rubin held the cyber equivalent of a barn raising and had several thousand of his closest friends over for the event. Of course, everyone actually stayed home and did the work from their own little cubicles, kitchen tables, laptops on airplanes and Blackberrys on bar tops. That’s how it goes when you launch a project like developing an open source shopping cart, which is what Rubin and his team at Varien did over the past couple of years. The result is Magento, a shopping the source code of which is yours, free for the download, and which is now loaded on servers around the globe in about 45 languages. Rubin and his team at Varien, a Southern California web and software development company, were absolutely sure that the marketplace needed a shopping cart that had a great foundation – platform – in the kinds of things that ecommerce merchants thought were important. Rubin: We had been involved in the ecommerce industry for sometime and had experienced and seen many of... Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:34:23 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/760/Magento-Shopping-Cart-And-20000-Friends/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/726/Internet-Security-The-Seatbelt-Is-In-The-Trunk/ Suppose you took delivery on your new car and the salesman told you, as you signed the order, that the seatbelt, antilock brakes, and the airbags were in a box in the trunk and that if you want to be safer you might want to have an expensive expert install them. That would be about the time you scream a long string of epithets we cannot print here and go running from the showroom. So how come we all allow our software to be delivered with all the safety features set to a default that allows the porno peddler in Lithuania to store his entire inventory on your computer, not to mention borrowing the username and password to your bank account? And what can we do about it? Those are the kinds of questions that plague men like Clint Kreitner at the Center for Internet Security (CIS). Kreitner is a Naval Academy grad - went to school with John McCain - who served his country for 13 years and then went into the private sector. He ran some very successful IT companies and a... Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:45:30 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/726/Internet-Security-The-Seatbelt-Is-In-The-Trunk/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/704/Interview-Ex-hacker-Mitnick-On-Avoiding-Fraudsters/ You know that hidden bomb shtick in the movies? There's a bomb that's going to go off and kill a gazillion people. First, the good guys have to find it. Then they have to figure how to get into to it to disarm it. Then they almost have it disarmed when they discover a booby trap they have to work around. Then they find the two wires - red and blue. The hero has to snip the blue wire but they both look black under the yellow light. Then he gets lucky. He snips the blue wire. When it comes to Internet fraud, however, some of us don't get so lucky According to master-hacker-turned-security-guru Kevin Mitnick, those layers of resistance set up by the mad bomber ought to be the way everyone thinks when they are trying to keep the bad guys out of their computers, networks and databases. Mitnick, who knows about as much as anyone concerning Internet security, says it is not easy keeping the bad guys out. He says there is no magic bullet (or wire snipper). Mitnick: The system... Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:04:27 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/704/Interview-Ex-hacker-Mitnick-On-Avoiding-Fraudsters/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/597/Enterprise-Zones-Ecommerce-Catches-A-Break/ For anyone who doesn’t think ecommerce is a viable part of the world economy and plays a role in job creation and tax base expansion, here’s a flash: Ecommerce businesses are now eligible, at least in Oregon, for special tax incentives when they locate in enterprise zones, which are geographic areas targeted for economic revitalizing. Tax incentives for retention or relocation of a company have long been the plum held out by cities, counties and states to brick and mortar manufacturing sorts of companies. Bring your wire and cable plant to Blight City, USA and you get a property tax break or maybe even a state income tax deduction. It’s a pretty well established system. But Oregon, with legislation passed in 2001, welcomed the ecommerce industry into the fold with added incentives, on top of the breaks for just being part of those already offered for non-ecommerce industry. In a state where there is no sales tax and government revenues are dependent on property,... Wed, 31 Oct 2007 14:05:40 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/597/Enterprise-Zones-Ecommerce-Catches-A-Break/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/584/A-Lender-Or-Borrower-Be-Is-Prospercom/ The increased difficulty for people and small businesses to acquire decently priced loans, or loans at all, created a vacuum in the money business in recent years. Chris Larsen, the man who gave us E-Loan.com beat Mother Nature to the punch in filling the void. It occurred to him that the eBay model could also be used in the money business. Folks with loan needs, having their needs met by various citizen lenders bidding for their business. LARSEN: We saw the success of eBay for goods and services and we thought, there should be an eBay for money. But when you start getting into the money product it gets pretty complicated, lots of regulatory issues and other problems. But it looked like there was a place in the market to build a sort of eBay for money. Essentially, Larsen was going into the banking business, or more accurately the loan brokering business. And just as essentially, the government, specifically state and federal regulators, would have something to say about... Mon, 15 Oct 2007 09:38:23 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/584/A-Lender-Or-Borrower-Be-Is-Prospercom/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/580/Caveat-Vendor-PCI-Is-Here/ Questions Regarding PCI Compliance? Have a PCI/DSS question for SecurityMetrics’ Brad Caldwell? Email them to Pat Callahan at pcallahan@practicalecommerce.com, and we’ll run the answers in future articles. - PeC StaffHere’s one of those cold chill up your spine thoughts: Every day, there are at least two new threats to data security developed by identity thieves and Internet system hackers. And it never stops. Security pros slam and lock one gate and the hordes find another chink and slither through. Now, here’s another real spine chiller: If they make it through and steal your customer’s data, it is your fault. Two thirds of the states now have laws that make it a prosecutable offense if an ecommerce merchant fails to maintain compliance with data security standards allowing hackers, phishers and other varmints to invade their system. California was, at this writing, close to passing the Consumer Data Protection Act, which would force retailers who compromise data... Wed, 03 Oct 2007 17:52:14 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/580/Caveat-Vendor-PCI-Is-Here/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/571/No-Fear-For-Blindscom/ Jay Steinfeld can’t really tell you where his core values came from. Maybe it was instinctive. Maybe it wasn’t. Regardless, as the years went by, three core values in particular became more and more what drove him in life and in business. Steinfeld: I wanted to be a pioneer, a leader — I liked to try new stuff. My second core value is experimentation without fear of failure. And the third is continued improvement. I don’t think I learned those from any one person or book or seminar. I always knew that you couldn’t get anywhere without experimentation, and that if you were going to experiment you would have to learn that failure is OK. Of course, you can’t be a pioneer without trying new stuff. Steinfeld will tell you he had failures here and there, but to him they were little more than signposts that pointed the way to success. Steinfeld first started “experimenting” in retail sales back in junior high and high school, which was when he first... Wed, 19 Sep 2007 20:42:44 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/571/No-Fear-For-Blindscom/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/519/Interview-UPS-VP-On-Shipping-Technology/ When Jordan Colletta talks about the way we used to ship and track and deliver goods before it became a way of life for thousands of e-entrepreneurs, he knows what he's talking about. For three years, starting in 1975, he was one of those guys you see running in and out of businesses and up and down driveways with packages. He was “UPS brown” before brown was cool. But while he was driving and running in New Orleans, he wasn't just schlepping packages; he was thinking. He thought about better ways and better systems. He kept thinking and talking and working and trying to help this big shipping company stay ahead of the curve. Next thing you know, he'd become a vice president in charge of making shipping a little bit more friendly for the tens of thousands of ecommerce customers who depend on UPS to meet their customer demands. His complete title is "vice president, customer technology marketing." Ask him what that means, and his high standing in the UPS Toastmaster Club... Wed, 11 Jul 2007 11:17:41 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/519/Interview-UPS-VP-On-Shipping-Technology/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/489/If-Your-Baby-Is-Ugly-Fix-It/ You know those little spur-of-the-moment, do-it-on-a dare things that occasionally bring about permanent change? Something like that happened to Shirley Tan. There she was in her third year at Golden Gate College in San Francisco, at work on a degree in international business. A friend had some space in the newly-opened San Francisco Gift Center, and he made her an offer she couldn't refuse. Tan: He said, "Why don't you put something in this space — I'm only using half of it. You don't have to pay me rent until you start making money." That was how he got me; I didn't have to pay him rent. I didn't know if I would make money, but when you're 20 you don't know anything. I was just doing it to kill time. The young entrepreneur — a native of Guam who had come to the mainland because she was a big city gal and wanted more than the little speck of rock in the western Pacific could offer — took her friend up on his offer. A month later, the trap was sprung. Tan: I... Tue, 29 May 2007 08:25:02 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/489/If-Your-Baby-Is-Ugly-Fix-It/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/478/Toolkingcom-From-eBay-To-A-31M--Empire/ If you order pliers from Toolking.com, you really can't just order pliers. You need to know what kind. Do you want locking pliers? Needle nose pliers? Tongue-and-groove pliers, slip-joint pliers, linesman's pliers, diagonal cutting pliers, electrician's pliers, hose clamp pliers, super-grip gripping pliers, welder's pliers, specialty pliers, fence pliers or fuse pullers? Well, you get the idea. One thing that sets man apart from every other living thing on the planet is his ability to make and use tools. What sets Tool King apart from almost every other place you can buy tools is, well, just about everything the company does. Around 17,000 or so tools sell on the Toolking.com and Toologics.com websites. To make that happen, the company relies on an infrastructure of 30 people and a state-of-the-art warehousing and fulfillment system. The brand has appeared on the "Inc. 500" list three times and is now the go-to place for tool users worldwide. Don Cohen, a Michigan native and a... Wed, 09 May 2007 10:25:54 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/478/Toolkingcom-From-eBay-To-A-31M--Empire/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/424/Competing-Against-Major-Companies/ In the Green Mountains of Vermont, there are legends. There is, for instance, the legend of Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys — patriots to a fault, if a little rough around the edges. Part of their lore includes the "taking" of Fort Ticonderoga over in New York. Allen and his band of 83, with Benedict Arnold tagging along, knocked on the fort gate one day and called out the British dcommander, demanding the key to the fort. The colonel acceded, and a revolution got a jump start. Now there is another legend in Vermont — in Waitsfield, to be exact. In this one, a fellow named Bob Stiller frequently bought coffee in a little coffee roaster's shop, and he loved every sip of it. He loved it so much he offered to buy the place and invest in the prospect of giving the rest of the world the opportunity to have a cup of coffee as good as what he got in Vermont. That little coffee shop is now a $189 million-per-year, publicly-traded company and one of the major forces in... Fri, 23 Feb 2007 15:52:41 -0700 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/424/Competing-Against-Major-Companies/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/404/The-Struggle-To-Create-A-Successful-eBusiness/ It's a good thing Mother Parkinson, a librarian, told her boys that people would never buy books from somebody on the Internet. Otherwise, we might not have Peapod, the quintessential online supermarket serving about 260,000 customers from Boston to Milwaukee and from Washington, D.C., to Long Island, N.Y. Back in 1987, Thomas Parkinson thought selling books online would be a good thing. Mom didn't. Thomas Parkinson, now 46, and his big brother (by two years) Andrew both knew something about the grocery business; both had worked for Proctor & Gamble in sales and marketing. Andrew also spent some time with Kraft foods. Thomas came out of college with a computer degree. They also knew something about the "New York minute" pace that many people maintained. Those double-income families with little time and less inclination to crawl the aisles of a grocery store two or more times a month would gladly pay a small fee to have their groceries shopped and delivered to them. But... Mon, 05 Feb 2007 11:00:44 -0700 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/404/The-Struggle-To-Create-A-Successful-eBusiness/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/372/Craigslistcoms-Craig-Newmark/ Back in the mid-20th Century, painters like Ellsworth Kelly and Agnes Martin were making names for themselves practicing a form of art emphasizing extreme simplification of presentation - primary colors, basic forms, fewer details. This simple approach had devotees in other realms as well; architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe adopted the motto "Less is more." His buildings were basic, functional, uncomplicated. It was a minimalist movement. Minimalism has always had devotees, and it had critics who said the lack of "real design" was not art or was the sign of an untrained mind. A latter-day devotee of minimalism is Craig Newmark. Newmark is the founder of the intensely successful Craigslist.com, and, as far as he is concerned, less is definitely more when it comes to website design and his business. Craigslist is minimalist by design, or perhaps the lack thereof, since the only thing the self-proclaimed nerd from New Jersey wanted to provide his visitors was service and convenience... Fri, 01 Dec 2006 00:01:08 -0700 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/372/Craigslistcoms-Craig-Newmark/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/339/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 task of getting 50 states and more than 7,000 taxing entities—cities, counties, parishes, villages, etc.—on the same page. Another part of the job was getting who-knows-how-many Internet sellers to comply. Finally, they needed software to make it happen. As the project enters its third year, 44 states have signed on to the project, at least conceptually. However, only a third are full-member states and actively working on collection of Internet-generated sales tax. According to North Dakota State Senator Dwight Cook, president of the project, 13 states are in full-member compliance. Six are in associate-member status as their legislatures work through final legislation issues. Nonetheless, Cook says he is pleased with the progress of the... Wed, 01 Nov 2006 15:23:33 -0700 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/339/Sales-Tax-Initiative-Still-Initating/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/336/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 from or for how much you can sell it? It’s a mind schooled in the rough-and-tumble world of Wall Street finance. It’s the mind of someone who calls himself an “investor by trade.” A doctorate in philosophy from Stanford University probably helps Founder/CEO/Chairman Patrick Byrne deal with the daily esotericism that goes with running a company like Overstock.com, which takes all the stuff nobody else wants (or is able) to sell anymore, and sells it to people all over the world on the Internet. From one day to the next, people use the “O” to buy, sell, package and ship everything from baby clothes to plasma TVs. There is no standard size, shape, weight, cost or sales price. Life at Overstock.com is a daily game of hopscotch, Tiddlywinks and hangman, all rolled into... Wed, 01 Nov 2006 14:23:34 -0700 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/336/Overstock-CEO-Patrick-Byrne/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/311/Thralownets-Daniel-Thralow/ In December of 1996, Daniel Thralow (pronounced Trah-low) sold one pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses on the Internet. A local guy said to me, “I’m starting this little group of websites. Give me a hundred dollars and I’ll build you a web page.” So we built this little web page—it had no photographs, there was no email, no online ordering. All it was, was just one page of text describing our store, and it had an 800 number. That was in November. In December the phone rang in my little store in Duluth and a guy asks, “How much is your Ray-Ban Round Metal. I said, well it’s $112, and he said, “Wow, that’s a great price, I’ll take a pair. So, I started giving him directions to the store. He says, “Can’t you ship them to me?” It had not occurred to Thralow, up to that point, that he was speaking to his first Internet customer, a man from New York who saw that simple little page of text about a sunglasses store in Duluth, Minn. In January ‘97, the Thralows,... Sun, 01 Oct 2006 00:55:00 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/311/Thralownets-Daniel-Thralow/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/281/Wired-Magazines-Chris-Anderson/ In the good old days of rock and roll, one of my tasks, as a program director for a top 40 radio station, was to wade through 300 or 400 new records that came in each week from distributors, record companies and the band playing in the garage not far from my apartment. I would drop the needle on a record, listen for a few seconds and make a snap judgment. I was right on Little Eva’s Locomotion and Petula Clark’s Downtown. I missed a couple like The Kingsmen’s Louie, Louie and an early Beach Boys smash, something about surfing across the USA. In those days it was all about hits, music that could appeal to the broadest possible segment of the market; books that would sell a million copies; products that everyone had to have. But a funny, and quite irreversible, thing happened on the way to the 21st Century. That band playing their own style of music in the garage down the street can now market their music, even if they only appeal to a small group of listeners. They... Fri, 01 Sep 2006 00:10:00 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/281/Wired-Magazines-Chris-Anderson/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/250/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 was declared a fake — he didn’t know the territory. When it comes to selling salmon, wild Alaskan salmon, Trish Kopp and Sara Pozonski had an edge on the world. Both women grew up in the fishing business. They worked on the boats their fathers captained. They are the real thing when it comes to knowing their fish and the people who buy it. Of course, there was a gap in their knowledge of just how big their territory might be when they decided about 18 months ago to go online with fresh/flash-frozen wild salmon filets and steaks. They also sell fresh air-shipped salmon to restaurants and grocery stores in Pennsylvania. While folks from the Alaskan frontier tend to know about adventure, Pozonski and Kopp got another great ride and a few surprises when they become fishmonger... Tue, 01 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/250/Website-Profile-Selling-Fish-Makes-Online-Niche/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/253/JupiterResearchs-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 innovative marketing initiatives and ensuring high-standard customer service and order-fulfillment operations. If her name rings a bell you have probably read her quotes in The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times or seen her on MSNBC. She serves on the Shop.Org board of directors where she runs in some pretty fast company — Lorna Borenstein, vice president of Yahoo!; Matt Corey, vice president of marketing at Golfsmith; Seth Greenberg, chief executive officer at eHobbies; Steve Kahn, vice president of Internet marketing at Victoria’s Secret Direct–– you get the idea. When it comes to understanding what makes ecommerce tick and why it is a force to be reckoned with in the future of retail, few people have the experience, facts, figures and deep understanding that she... Tue, 01 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/253/JupiterResearchs-Patti-Freeman-Evans/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/233/AbeBookscom-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 was he and Keith Waters who engineered the database and system that powers the best-used-book portal on the Internet. Then again, Pura may do something else with his time. To be sure, however, it won’t be government work. "Never Do Government Work Again" was the motto of two IT "database guys" who decided to go into a rather obscure business 11 years ago. Pura and Waters were IT consultants under contract to the provincial government of British Columbia, Canada. Water’s wife owned a bookstore, which she loved. When Pura and his wife would visit the Puras over coffee or a meal, the subject of the bookstore would inevitably come up. Those conversations were the catalyst in setting in motion a journey whereby the two couples would create and build the largest single book-marketing... Sat, 01 Jul 2006 12:31:51 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/233/AbeBookscom-Co-founder-Rick-Pura/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/234/Givens-Books-Partners-with-AbeBookscom/ 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 Abebooks.com, there are esellers who don’t have carts. In fact, some of them don’t even have websites. Givens Books in Lynchburg, Va., has a website, but no shopping cart. They do, however, sell used and rare books on the Internet by listing as many as 3,000 of their best titles at any given time on Abebooks.com. Danny Givens and his sister Ginny Goettler operate Little Dickens and Givens Books, a business started by their father in 1976. DANNY: Dad started the business in a building that used to be a gas station, right next door to where we are today. He was a teacher, and mom would run the store until he came home from teaching, and then he would run the store. They did that for a few years until he could work the store full-time. Danny,... Sat, 01 Jul 2006 11:12:42 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/234/Givens-Books-Partners-with-AbeBookscom/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/213/BuySafecom-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 nightmares others have lived through with identity theft, undelivered merchandise, credit-card fraud – you name it. If you’re in the ecommerce game, you know about abandoned carts. One of the main reasons why folks leave shopping carts at the checkout page is fear – unadulterated terror about their financial security. Steve Woda’s own mother has that fear, too, and he is doing everything he can to help her and millions of others who would like to shop on the Internet to be comfortable buying that hardto- find product or sending that gift to a loved one without the hassle of crawling the real mall. Woda himself got burned in an eBay transaction, to the tune of about $400. And that is how BuySafe.com came into being. PeC: How did you conceive of the idea of creating a... Wed, 31 May 2006 13:25:51 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/213/BuySafecom-Founder-Steve-Woda/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/214/Clear-Block-TracksideSalescom-Rides-The-Mainline/ Clear Block is a railroad signal, indicating that the block of track ahead is clear and no train wrecks are in the offing. Joe Derouin, a 48-year-old who loves trains, dreamed of being in the model-railroad business. He got the “clear block” call from his wife Jeanne almost eight years ago. “I thank God everyday for my wife. It was she who supported me and made it possible to live this dream. If it weren’t for her we wouldn’t be talking about this; that girl made all the difference. Not a lot of guys have had the luck I had,” Joe says. What Jeanne’s support allowed was for Joe to spend virtually every waking second of his life working with model trains. Along the way, he acquired a partner, Gary Paulino, an electrician who also happened to be very savvy about ecommerce. Between the three of them, they are growing a business that will finally allow Joe to take a salary from after seven years of work. Joe has been a model railroader since he was six years old.... Wed, 31 May 2006 01:14:13 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/214/Clear-Block-TracksideSalescom-Rides-The-Mainline/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/191/Zoovy-CEO-David-Steel/ The song, the one by Leroy VanDyke in 1959, tells about a boy from Arkansas who longs to be an auctioneer. He went off to school and learned how to say things like, “Thirty dollar bid it now, thirty-five Will you gimmie thirty-five, To make it thirty-five, to bid it a thirty-five Who would bid it at a thirty-five dollar bid?” And he said it in about a second and a half. Well, nowadays, that boy from Arkansas or anywhere else doesn’t have to be a fast talker or an auction school grad’ to cash in on the love affair people have with bidding on things for auction. In fact he could be what lots of us lovingly call a nerd—slow talking, computer code writin’ fellows who understand how things like eBay and Overstock work and can make improvements on those concepts. David Steel and Brian Horakh are two such people. Steel designed networks and Horakh, with a photographic memory, wrote code. They started a company called Zoovy—the last, “five letter, three vowel... Mon, 01 May 2006 12:00:00 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/191/Zoovy-CEO-David-Steel/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/192/Greatlookzcom-Persistence-Pays-for-Zoovy-Store-Owner/ "I always wanted to be a pioneer coming across the plains in a covered wagon,” says Marion Keisling. However, there is not much need for covered wagon driving these days, so Keisling has done her pioneer thing in the ecommerce business. She runs a company called Greatlookz.com and does about $1 million per year in revenue. She sells everything from red hats to lace parasols to tea towels. It’s a far cry from the corporate world, where she was a marketing executive for Castle & Cook Company, a real estate firm. It would seem that selling homes is way different than selling tiger-stripped cowboy hats and beaded coin purses that look like watermelon wedges. Then again, maybe it’s not that different. It is still about market testing, customer service, and being cost effective. You’ve heard this before, “I started in my living room six years ago.” For Keisling, that was in the Sacramento, Calif., suburb of Sonora. I got intrigued with eBay, so I started... Mon, 01 May 2006 12:00:00 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/192/Greatlookzcom-Persistence-Pays-for-Zoovy-Store-Owner/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/170/eCommerce-Fraud-Build-a-Human-Firewall/ There is a fellow from Europe named Kevin Mitnick, who can find your Social Security number online in 15 seconds. He was the hacker who was elevated to “computer terrorist” status by the FBI and Interpol. They caught him and put him in jail for five years, but there are thousands like him, who spend their hours, days, and lives in search of the mother lode of information. There also are less sophisticated folks who dive in dumpsters and trash cans for receipts, bills, anything that might bear sensitive information. They steal an identity and with that, they steal your money. Mitnick doesn’t “hack” anymore, he is banned for life from surfing the web. He makes his money now from the people he used to victimize, the big companies whose systems he used to break into. Mitnick teaches people how to avoid being hacked. And guess what. He doesn’t talk much about firewalls or secure portals or encryption keys; he talks a lot about people. In a Reuters news story in early March,... Sat, 01 Apr 2006 12:00:00 -0700 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/170/eCommerce-Fraud-Build-a-Human-Firewall/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/178/AuthorizeNet-President-Roy-Banks/ The credit card industry has come a long way since 1951, when Diners Club issued a credit card to about 200 members, which they could use at any of 27 restaurants in the New York City area. Then in the 1960s Bank of America began issuing Bank Americard, then came MasterCharge, American Express and the rest, as they say, is history. In 1970, that little magnetic strip was added and credit cards began part of the Information Age. A merchant with a simple reader based on the same technology as a magnetic tape player could transmit a transaction to a central clearing point over a phone line. Credit cards became the payment vehicle of choice for phone-order merchants, catalog-sales companies and others where the customer could not write a check or present cash to make a purchase. Fast-forward to the age of the Internet and you enter a time when credit cards, debit cards, electronic checks and new forms of digital currency are accepted by tens of thousands of merchants who sell... Sat, 01 Apr 2006 12:00:00 -0700 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/178/AuthorizeNet-President-Roy-Banks/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/155/MIVA-CEO-Craig-Pisaris-Henderson/ The concept is as old as sales itself. Somebody delivers qualified customer leads to you and you pay them for each lead. It is up to you to convert that lead into a sale. It’s not too hard to comprehend. Prior to the mid-90s, in the normal sales world, lead generation was done with door-to-door calls, telephone cold calls, direct mail, and word-of-mouth. When folks started selling things on the Internet, in the early 90s, getting qualified customers to come to your online store presented pretty much the same marketing test that the so-called brick and mortar stores had: Getting sales leads or customers through the door or past a mouse click required work. And it was not an exact science. Rudimentary search engine ‘bots crawled around the web gathering information on what was out there on the ‘Net. You put “socks” in the search term and you got a few thousand pages about everything from baseball teams to cute kittens to, sometimes, footwear. Then in late 90’s two companies... Wed, 01 Mar 2006 12:00:00 -0700 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/155/MIVA-CEO-Craig-Pisaris-Henderson/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/157/RecoverySuperStorecom-Offers-a-Web-of-Support/ Elvis Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi. So was Anthony Baggett. Elvis reached the pinnacle of success and then died of drug abuse in 1977. Anthony was a success and an addict, but his story is different—it’s one of hope. Anthony Baggett was, by all measure, a successful advertising and Internet marketing businessman in Tupelo. But, as happens in life sometimes, something went wrong, and he found himself in a downward spiral, riding the plummeting vehicle of substance abuse. He had become an addict and it began to take its toll on his life, family and business. When he hit bottom and made a choice to get back on track, the Tupelo, Mississippi, chapter of the National Association on Alcohol and Drug Dependency (NAADD), provided the support and motivation for Anthony to get clean and stay that way. Now, his advertising, marketing and Internet skills are in payback mode. It seems somehow fitting that in the Mississippi town where the late King of Rock and Roll, was... Wed, 01 Mar 2006 12:00:00 -0700 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/157/RecoverySuperStorecom-Offers-a-Web-of-Support/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/141/Baron-Bob-Wonderfully-Wacky-Marvelously-Successful/ Bob Brooks got a business education at the prestigious Johnson Wales University in Rhode Island. Now he runs a $1-million-a-year ecommerce company on the Internet. It all makes perfect sense and all seems to be as it should. But to borrow a phrase from broadcast legend Paul Harvey, “now you need to know the rest of the story”. Type “Baron Bob” into Google and the first thing you see is a link to BaronBob.com and WonderfullyWacky.com. This is where you can buy, among other things, the dancing Caddyshack Gopher, Anger Management Dolls and Talking Napoleon Dynamite Plush Dolls. There are about a thousand weird and wacky gift ideas on Baron Bob’s site, some of the very popular ones you, well, you have to go to the site to see. So a guy in New Jersey gets a big time business degree to sell whoopie cushions on the Internet? How does that happen? The circus came to town… PeC: You're not going to do that “ran away with the circus” story are you? Oh... Wed, 01 Feb 2006 12:00:00 -0700 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/141/Baron-Bob-Wonderfully-Wacky-Marvelously-Successful/