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Customer Retention
3 Ecommerce Personalization Strategies
February 20, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Personalized product recommendations may help shoppers discover products or services more quickly and boost ecommerce sales conversions. There are, perhaps, a few possible definitions of personalization. For some, “personalization is about engaging customers using technology in ways th...
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Customer Retention
4 Ways to Improve Ecommerce Conversions with Better Landing Pages
February 14, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Better landing page content and design may boost ecommerce conversions. A small difference in an online merchant's conversion rate can make a huge difference in that merchant's profit. Consider an online retailer with about 20,000 monthly visits and an average order value — sometimes c...
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Customer Retention
3 Tips for Getting Started with Subscriptions
February 13, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Product and service subscriptions give ecommerce businesses a reliable flow of revenue, predictable inventory requirements, and the opportunity to cut costs. Transitioning from a traditional retail model to a subscription service can be done in small measured steps. What follows are th...
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User Experience
4 Ways Tablets Could Affect Ecommerce Design, Marketing
February 7, 2012 • Armando Roggio
The meteoric rise in tablet computer sales could affect how online retailers market in 2012, including driving changes in site design, site features, content, and advertising. Global tablet computer shipments leapt to 26.8 million units in the fourth quarter of last year, setting new s...
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Social Media
You Can’t Buy Real Followers and Fans
February 6, 2012 • Armando Roggio
You cannot buy real Fans and followers. The practice of purchasing Twitter followers and Facebook Fans is called "cherry blossoming." It will not improve an online store's business and could destroy a merchant's reputation. Social media marketing has become a requirement for many retai...
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Customer Retention
Fake Reviews, a Despicable Practice?
January 31, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Online retailers have an ethical and legal responsibility to customers to advertise and market in an honest and legitimate fashion. But sometimes the line separating an excellent marketing idea from a despicable or even illegal business practice is not perfectly clear. Ecommerce market...
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Conversion
PetFlow.com: Customer Focus, Business Savvy Drives Success
January 30, 2012 • Armando Roggio
PetFlow is a subscription-based ecommerce business that sells pet food, including heavy bags of it, overcoming logistic and service challenges. The company is expected to have more than $20 million in sales in 2012, succeeding in an industry where others have failed, and demonstrating ...
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Conversion
3 Things to Love About Quarterly.co
January 25, 2012 • Armando Roggio
A new ecommerce business delivers curated gifts to its customers on a subscription basis and exemplifies some of the most exciting new trends in ecommerce. Quarterly.co — which Zach Frechette, co-founder of Good Magazine, created — does at least three things very well. So well, in fact...
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Content Marketing
3 Content Lessons from Top Performing Blogs
January 23, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Blogs are a good way to engage customers, offer more than products, and attract visitors to a site. Great blogs are often the result of great content in the form of a well-written post, an illuminating infographic, or an excellent video. People are attracted to the substance of the co...
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Conversion
How to Analyze Your Ecommerce Competitors
January 17, 2012 • Armando Roggio
In online retailing, an accurate and current competitive analysis accesses rival merchants' strengths and weaknesses relative to a seller's own operations, providing a significant advantage or identifying opportunities. For small and mid-sized online retailers, a basic competitive anal...
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Social Media
How to Use Pinterest for Your Ecommerce Business
January 16, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Learning the ins and outs of popular social sharing site Pinterest takes only minutes, but can have a positive effect on ecommerce marketing. Pinterest may be the hottest property in social media sharing, with a growth rate that rivals Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. It also has the po...
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Finance
Buying Sites to Boost Traffic
January 12, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Purchasing and maintaining established, niche websites may help online retailers increase site traffic and sales. Boiled down to its essence, much of online retail marketing is devoted to increasing site traffic in the hope that more visitors will ultimately lead to more sales and more...
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Social Media
Use Pinterest to Raise Consumer Interest
January 10, 2012 • Armando Roggio
The visually-oriented social bookmarking site, Pinterest, lets users share pictures and video, and presents a new opportunity for online retailers to engage potential customers. Pinterest generated more than 11 million visits during a single week in December 2011, according to Experian...
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Staffing
Try Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for Inexpensive Labor
January 9, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Amazon's Mechanical Turk crowd-sourcing marketplace has been online since November 2005 and serves as a way of getting humans to perform common, repeatable tasks that computers have not yet mastered. For ecommerce, the Mechanical Turk service can help produce product descriptions, sor...
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Conversion
U.S. Online Holiday Sales Reach $37 Billion, Set Record
January 6, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Deep discounts and free shipping fueled a record setting November-to-December holiday shopping season for online merchants in 2011 in the U.S., according to a new report. Cyber Monday also saw an extraordinary $1.25 billion in sales. "The 2011 online holiday shopping finished with slig...
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Social Media
Social Media Users Look for New Products and Offers, Survey Finds
January 3, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Social media users connect with companies on sites like Facebook to learn about new products, find exclusive offers and contests, or just play games, according to a new survey of about 1,300 consumers. Consumers also have high expectations for online customer support. The Chief Marketi...
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Email Marketing
Segmenting Email Lists for 2012
January 2, 2012 • Armando Roggio
When ecommerce marketers make their New Year's resolutions, they should include improved email segmentation and personalization. Email segmentation is simply the idea of organizing email-marketing lists so that each group of recipients receives a relevant, even personalized, marketing ...
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Conversion
5 Effective Online Marketing Tactics for 2012
December 26, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Marketing techniques that worked in the past may be far less successful in this emerging era of mobile devices, personalization, and social media. What follows are five suggestions for potentially potent marketing tactics for the coming year. These are not wholly new techniques, but r...
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Google Ads
Formatting a Product Spreadsheet for Google Merchant Center
December 20, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Google has created a service that helps online retailers list and submit products to Google's Product Search, Product Ads, and Commerce Search offerings. This service, called "Google Merchant Center," can accept a data feed of product information. In this article, you'll find a descrip...
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Platforms & Apps
10 Great Licensed Shopping Carts
December 19, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Licensed ecommerce platforms are often the most flexible and powerful "shopping carts" available to online retailers, but they can demand more in terms of expenses and development time. Licensed shopping carts — or, perhaps more accurately, ecommerce platforms — are hosted on a merchan...
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Email Marketing
Email Marketing: 3 Tips for Recovering from Content Mistakes
December 13, 2011 • Armando Roggio
The email send button and the content of the message it represents are powerful marketing tools that launch a message directly to thousands of potential customers at once. But when there is a mistake in the email message — a broken link, misspelled word, an incorrect date — an emergenc...
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Platforms & Apps
8 Great SaaS Shopping Carts
December 9, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Hosted, software-as-a-service (SaaS) ecommerce solutions allow small online retailers to open functional online stores with a minimum in capital expense. While there are many good SaaS shopping carts on the market in the end of 2011, here are eight carts that are among my personal favor...
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Social Media
Add the Twitter Tweet and Follow Buttons without Hiring a Developer
December 8, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Twitter is an important site for ecommerce marketers that want to encourage shoppers to share products and pages. Fortunately, the service is easy to integrate into a retail site without even hiring a developer. In this article, you'll learn how to add both the Twitter Tweet and the Tw...
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Fraud Prevention
Beware of DDoS Attacks on Ecommerce Sites
December 6, 2011 • Armando Roggio
With the holiday shopping season in full swing, some Internet security experts are worried that ecommerce sites may be especially vulnerable to distributed denial of service attacks from hackers, thieves, or even unscrupulous competitors. A distributed denial of service — DDoS — attac...
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Social Media
3 Ways Social Media Affects Brands
December 1, 2011 • Armando Roggio
The continued growth of social networking and blog sites is having an effect on brands and how those brands are marketed. According to an October study from The Nielsen Company and its social media affiliate, NM Incite, “60 percent of consumers researching products though multiple onli...
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Business
Become a Google Chrome Power User
November 25, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Google Chrome is rapidly becoming one of the most popular web browsers for Internet professionals — thanks to an impressive set of features and short cuts. Learning and using just a few of these time saving tidbits could boost productivity and avoid problems. Here are some tips and tri...
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Customer Retention
‘Retargeting’ Can Boost Conversions; A Primer
November 22, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Using behavioral retargeting to aim online display and pay-per-click advertisements at shoppers already familiar with a brand or some particular products could significantly boost sales conversions, with some estimates suggesting that retargeted consumers are 70 percent more likely to m...
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Shipping & Fulfillment
5 Reasons to Consider Drop Shipping
November 21, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Drop shipping is an order fulfillment strategy where the retailer does not keep products in inventory, but relies on wholesalers or manufacturers to actually ship orders to customers. This arrangement has several advantages that make it attractive to online merchants. When a customer p...
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Fraud Prevention
3 Types of ‘Return Fraud’ to Monitor this Holiday Season
November 14, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Return fraud, which is expected to cost brick-and-mortar retailers $3.48 billion this holiday season, could also snag online merchants — significantly increasing costs and chargebacks. Return fraud takes several forms but three stand out as real concerns for ecommerce. They are: (1) wa...
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Platforms & Apps
7 Worthy Magento Extensions
November 11, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce merchants often add features and functions to their sites to increase sales and performance. In this article, you'll find seven worthy extensions for Magento — the ecommerce platform — that address common ecommerce-related tasks. Some of these work best with the free Magento ...