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Product Pages
3 Tips for Encouraging Product Reviews
October 15, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Online product reviews can be an influential form of marketing, with the potential to help merchants make more sales. Properly encouraging reviews includes making reviews obvious on a site, giving reviewers expert status and prestige, and making it very easy to review products. There i...
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Customer Retention
5 Ways to Attract New Customers
October 10, 2012 • Armando Roggio
For ecommerce merchants, new customers mean new business. There are many customer-acquisition tools available to online retail marketers. Five of the best can be pay-per-click advertising, email marketing, social media marketing, marketplaces, and contest marketing. 1. Buy Pay-Per-Cli...
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User Experience
3 Tips for Better Online Merchandising
October 8, 2012 • Armando Roggio
The way that products and buying opportunities are presented on an ecommerce site can have a significant impact on sales. Making good merchandising choices especially around how search results are managed, how complementary products are displayed, and how the site's hierarchy is arrange...
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Content Marketing
10 Great Retailer Blogs
October 2, 2012 • Armando Roggio
A retail blog can be an effective way to engage customers, improve branding, and boost traffic. Blogs give retail sites content that may be linked to or shared across social networks, via email, or through search engines. Customers who find blog posts informative, entertaining, or help...
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Social Media
A Social Media Marketing Paradox?
October 2, 2012 • Armando Roggio
A new study finds that social media influences just one percent of ecommerce transactions, meaning that thousands of merchants could be, potentially, wasting valuable marketing dollars. But consumers and small and mid-sized retailers are claiming social success. Is there a social media ...
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Payments
Swipe Fee Settlement Bad, Retailers Say
September 25, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Several retail trade groups and merchant advocates intend to fight a pending antitrust settlement that has Visa and MasterCard paying merchants some $7.2 billion in cash and discounts. The groups claim that the court-approved agreement would perpetuate unfair trade practices, cripple in...
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Design & Development
Top Retailers Going Mobile Fast
September 24, 2012 • Armando Roggio
America's top retailers, including Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, and Target, are enjoying significant mobile traffic as 4 in every 5 smartphone owners access retail ecommerce sites in a typical month. Internet trend tracking firm comScore reported the results of a July 2012 study last wee...
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Conversion
Using Lookbooks to Inspire Shoppers
September 18, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Lookbooks are collections of photographs complied to promote a particular clothing or product line. In the past, fashion designers, photographers, and other artisans have used lookbooks to promote their work, get jobs, or just plain sell. But more recently lookbooks have evolved a bit t...
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Customer Retention
Supercharge Your Search Results Page
September 17, 2012 • Armando Roggio
An effective on-site search experience will likely help Internet merchants sell more products. About 43 percent of online shoppers will use a site's own search to find products and make buying decisions, according to a study from Marketing Sherpa. Separately, a Jupiter Research study s...
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Social Media
Google+ For Business Now in Apps
September 11, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Recently Google released a set of Google+ features that encourage collaboration within an enterprise. These new features will be available to the company's current Google Apps for Business customers on a trail basis at least through the end of 2013. The Google Apps for Business suite i...
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Customer Service
Live Chat Can Improve Service, Sales
September 10, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Live chat can be an effective ecommerce conversion tool, providing customers with answers and help just when they’re making a buying decision, and for support questions. For example, "Laura" wanted to buy a shirt for her husband, but did not understand how the color and size options wo...
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Conversion
3 Ideas for Halloween Marketing 2012
September 4, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Halloween is typically the second most important holiday for retailers. It is expected to drive more than $7 billion in U.S. retail sales beginning in September, if 2011 was an indicator. The ghoulish holiday is not limited to costumes, candy, and the odd decoration; rather America's o...
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Platforms & Apps
Installing Software on Ubuntu Linux
September 3, 2012 • Armando Roggio
The Ubuntu Linux software installation process is more like visiting a mobile app store than following a traditional Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS X process. “On Windows, you might have to root around on a website to find an .exe file to download or go to a store and buy a CD with ...
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Amazon & Marketplaces
Top 10 Comparison Shopping Tools of 2012
August 28, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Shopping comparison sites and services let online shoppers compare products' attributes and prices in a relatively neutral environment. These services also give merchants a channel to market to some of the web’s savviest consumers. Several companies track and analyze shopping compariso...
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Platforms & Apps
Touring the Ubuntu Unity Desktop
August 27, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Ubuntu 12.04 is an alternative to the Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X operating systems. It features a functional and intuitive desktop environment. Ubuntu's Unity desktop has similarities to both Windows and OS X, meaning that users considering the switch to Ubuntu should not have m...
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B2B
Use a PIM to Manage Cross-Channel Product Details
August 21, 2012 • Armando Roggio
As an online retail business grows, managing product data can become a monumental task. Product information management solutions can help keep track of product data — descriptions, photography, and even pricing information — improve accuracy, and ensure good customer shopping experience...
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Influencers & Affiliates
3 Ways to Help Affiliates Pin Products
August 20, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Merging affiliate marketing with photo sharing on social media sites may help online retailers boost site traffic and sales whilst earning loyal patrons. Affiliate marketing is pay-per-performance marketing wherein merchants reward affiliates — sometimes called "publishers" — that driv...
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Inventory
3 Tips for Making Better Product Decisions
August 16, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Purchasing inventory wisely is an important part of any online retail business, since buying too little of a product might leave virtual shelves bare just when shoppers want something and buying too much can diminish capital and restrict cash flow. Often the secret to making better pur...
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Platforms & Apps
Microsoft Office Alternatives for Ubuntu Linux
August 13, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Maintaining spreadsheets, composing business documents, or even building slide-style presentations are a mainstay of modern business, including small and mid-sized online retail operations that often depend on the Microsoft Office suite to compete these tasks. The dependency on Office ...
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Conversion
Observations on Marketing to Men
August 7, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Male shoppers may be more difficult to reach with Internet marketing than their female counterparts in an era focused on social sites and so-called gender-neutral media. Sites like Facebook and Pinterest have rightly become a major focus for Internet marketers. In the case of Facebook,...
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Social Media
5 Tips for Pinterest Pin-to-Win Contests
August 6, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Pinterest is the most important new social sharing site in 2012, giving online marketers both a new way to engage potential customers and a means of boosting sales. Although there have been conflicting reports of just how Pinterest is impacting business fundamentals like sales, the gen...
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Business
Will U.S. Online Sales Tax Mandate Hurt Small Business?
August 1, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Struggling states and some brick-and-mortar retailers have reinvigorated an effort to mandate that online merchants collect sales taxes for all U.S. jurisdictions, whether or not those retailers actually have operations there. The most recent legislation is the so-called Marketplace Fa...
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Social Media
7 Tips for Pinterest Pinning
July 30, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Social sharing site Pinterest has grown to 12 million users and sparked a new surge in social marketing. Some online businesses are hoping to use Pinterest as a way to engage customers and make sales. As with any form of marketing there are some best practices that may make a business'...
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Business
To Maintain Productivity, Keep Some Margin
July 25, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Online retailers are accustomed to thinking about margin in a purely financial sense — as the difference between what an item costs and the amount at which it is sold. There are, however, other areas of an online retail business that need margin too. Margin may be thought of as a borde...
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Business
5 Reasons to Consider Ubuntu for Your Small Business
July 24, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Ubuntu is a Linux-based operating system focused on ease of use, simplicity, and security. This operating system is a good alternative to either Microsoft Windows or Apple's OS X, and may help small businesses get improved performance while saving money. Although some small business ow...
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Customer Service
Be a Customer Service Superhero, Like Ron Burley
July 16, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Customer concerns, complaints, and problems give online merchants an opportunity to build lasting customer relationships and boost word-of-mouth marketing. Providing super customer service can make your business a hero to your customers. The classic “Adventures of Superman” television ...
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Social Media
14 Pinterest-Like Sites for Product Promotion
July 9, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Popular photography and video tagging site Pinterest and its many clones have sparked a product-photo sharing frenzy that may present a good marketing opportunity for retailers. Pinterest and similar sites allow users to “pin,” “fancy,” “tag,” and “tap” images and videos in a manner ve...
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Amazon & Marketplaces
Setting Up an Amazon Webstore
July 5, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Amazon offers a software as a service ecommerce platform with solutions ranging from a quick shopping cart for individual sellers and small businesses to enterprise level services. What's more, Amazon promises that its Webstore solution is both good quality and easy to use. Is that re...
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Design & Dev Tools
Qwiki’s New Video Creator May Have Ecommerce Applications
July 2, 2012 • Armando Roggio
A New York-based rich-media technology firm has released a new platform that may make it easier for online retailers to produce product-detail videos with little more than product images and a microphone. Qwiki first announced its Creator platform in May 2012 and set up a private beta ...
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Social Media
Putting a Dollar Value on Fans, Friends, and Followers
June 27, 2012 • Armando Roggio
According to studies from diverse research and analysis firms around the globe, a Facebook Fan is worth $136.38, a Twitter follower is worth $2.00, and a would-be friend on Pinterest is worth, perhaps, $5.00. Unfortunately, as concise and direct as these figures might seem when used a...