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Email Marketing
Text Messaging Effective for Retailers
August 9, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Short message service communications — text messaging — may help online retailers deliver better customer service and represent an important marketing opportunity. Worldwide there are more than 4.3 billion SMS-enabled mobile devices and in the U.S. approximately 96 percent of smartphon...
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Fraud Prevention
What to Do When Your Site Gets Hacked
August 7, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Hackers attack sites of all sizes, from massive enterprises to small, family-run online retailers. When an attack occurs, there are steps any business owner can take to stop the attack, get things cleaned up, and get back to doing business. Having your site hacked is a painful, emotion...
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Design & Development
Multiscreen Ecommerce: Dos and Don’ts
August 1, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Online shoppers use a variety of devices — smartphones, tablets, laptops, personal computers, and televisions — to discover and buy products online. In response, ecommerce businesses need a multiscreen strategy for both marketing to potential customers and providing those shoppers with ...
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Local Business
3 Ways Showrooming Could Affect Ecommerce
July 30, 2013 • Armando Roggio
New survey data about “showrooming” may reveal weaknesses or trends that could have important implications for online or multi-channel retailers in at least three areas: product prices, product information, and customer service. About 43 percent of Internet-using American adults have “...
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Email Marketing
New Gmail Tabs Impact Email Marketing, Expert Says
July 26, 2013 • Armando Roggio
MailChimp, a popular email marketing solutions provider, says that the new Gmail tabs that are intended to help users clean up their inboxes have negatively impacted open rates for email marketing campaigns, but that there is no need to panic. Google began introducing its new tabbed Gm...
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Local Business
Ecommerce and Brick-and-mortar Retail Converge
July 24, 2013 • Armando Roggio
While there may still be plenty of room for pure-play ecommerce businesses, retailers with physical stores should look to expand online as consumers stop seeing a distinction between shopping online and in a store. Increasingly, physical retail outlets are being transformed into a sort ...
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Design & Development
Mobile Ecommerce Sites Should Be Fast and Robust
July 22, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Internet users, and online shoppers specifically, want fast and robust online experiences regardless of whether they are using a desktop computer or the most basic smartphone. Ecommerce businesses competing in this era of the emerging mobile web must take steps to provide useful and ric...
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Business
5 Things I Wish I Knew Before Opening an Ecommerce Business
July 18, 2013 • Armando Roggio
You might be prepared to open an online retail business. You have the funding, cash flow planned, inventory managed, and even a marketing campaign ready to launch. But there are some other things you’ll want to know before you start doing business. U.S. ecommerce sales grew 13 percent ...
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Social Media
4 Tips for Better Contest Forms
July 16, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Contest marketing is a good way to engage potential customers, increase your social media fan base, give folks positive things to say about your store, and collect data that can improve both your business’s bottom line and your customers' online experiences. Consider for a moment just ...
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Marketing & Advertising
5 Ways to Get More Site Traffic
July 10, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Online stores need shoppers and getting more potential customers to visit an online retailer’s site is an important part of ecommerce marketing. Many Internet merchants rely primarily on search engine optimization to drive traffic — and spend a lot of time focused on good title tags. T...
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Inventory
4 Tips for Finding your Ecommerce Niche
July 5, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Finding your ecommerce niche is an exercise in discovering passions, solving problems, networking, and testing for supply, sales, and competition viability. But once discovered, marketing and selling products to a niche can lead to online retail success. Nearly anything can be sold onl...
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Platforms & Apps
Ecommerce Platforms: Design Control vs. Ease of Launching
July 3, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Online shoppers judge an Internet retailer’s trustworthiness and a product’s value based, at least in part, on how good a site or product detail page looks. Given its importance, one might think that design control would be an essential part of every available ecommerce platform. But ma...
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Amazon & Marketplaces
Selling on Marketplaces: 4 Common Mistakes
June 28, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Marketplaces like Ebay and Amazon can be a boon for the bottom line since they present your products to millions of interested shoppers. But a huge audience also means that mistakes can be glaring and costly. Amazon gets something like 21 million visitors a day and more than 100 millio...
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Email Marketing
Cart-abandonment Email Best Practices
June 25, 2013 • Armando Roggio
An abandoned shopping cart is like a broken promise. For the merchant, there is a lost sale and unclaimed revenue. For the shopper, there is an unfulfilled need or want. Fortunately, a quick series of cart abandonment emails may renew that promise, helping both the customer and the reta...
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Staffing
5 Considerations for Choosing a Developer or Designer
June 24, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Software developers and website designers can be an extension of your online store’s marketing and branding team since these professionals have a significant amount of influence over how your ecommerce site looks and functions. Choosing an individual freelancer or agency to do design o...
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Checkout Tactics
Reviewing the Checkout Process of 10 Leading Online Retailers
June 19, 2013 • Armando Roggio
The checkout process is the last step in completing an online transaction and making a sale. A well-planned checkout experience can significantly boost conversions. Leading online retailers have made their checkouts more adaptive, rewarding registered users, and giving site visitors ple...
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Local Business
How to Sell Online if You Already Have a Physical Store
June 14, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Small brick-and-mortar retailers can find new customers, experiment with new products, and generally grow their business when they start selling online. For established retailers, the first steps toward ecommerce often begin with product preparation, software selection and integration, ...
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Business
One-third of U.S. Adults Own Tablets
June 12, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Thirty four percent of American adults now own a tablet computer like the Apple iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab, Google Nexus, or Amazon Kindle Fire, up from 18 percent last year. This doubling in U.S. tablet penetration will almost certainly impact ecommerce. Since 2010, the Pew Research Cen...
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Shipping & Fulfillment
3 Tips for Starting a Drop-ship Online Store
June 7, 2013 • Armando Roggio
An ecommerce entrepreneur with passion and great supplier relationships can earn good profits without making large investments or holding lots of product inventory. Drop shipping allows retailers to sell products without holding actual inventory. When a customer places an online order ...
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Shipping & Fulfillment
The Perfect Return Merchandise Authorization System
June 6, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Sometimes the shoe just doesn’t fit. Or maybe it was the wrong color. Most every ecommerce business deals with product returns and exchanges, and the ecommerce platform processing those returns often dictates how smoothly the exchange or return goes. A return merchandise authorization ...
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Social Media
Facebook Promoted Post Generates Sales, Traffic
May 28, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Although recent studies demonstrate that social media sites like Facebook work best to augment other ecommerce marketing campaigns, anecdotal data from a small Facebook ad test demonstrated that the promotion could boost both direct traffic and sales. “In its most recent [Ecommerce Qua...
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Social Media
Don’t Focus on Social Media Traffic
May 24, 2013 • Armando Roggio
New data from a leading marketing optimization firm indicates that social media is not a significant traffic driver for online merchants, but traffic may not be the only indicator of success for social media marketing. Social media represented about 1.55 percent of traffic to ecommerce...
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Design & Development
3-part Mobile Commerce App Strategy
May 23, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Purchases from smartphones and tablets reached $5.9 billion in the U.S. for the first three months of this year. comScore and the U.S. Commerce Department each reported that mobile commerce sales, excluding things like groceries, airplane tickets, and automobiles, accounted for 11 perce...
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Cross-border Selling
Cross-border Ecommerce Can Reduce Closeouts, Clearance
May 17, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Seasonal or discontinued products sitting in inventory limit cash flow and may make it more difficult for merchants to invest in newer, faster-selling or higher-margin products. While many retailers discount or close out these products, there may be an opportunity to maintain higher mar...
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User Experience
Optimizing an Ecommerce Site for Mobile Shopping
May 14, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Improving how quickly a page loads and how easy it is to use that page once it has loaded might be one of the most important things online merchants can do to help tablet and smartphone shoppers and take part in the mobile commerce trend. Mobile commerce may have reached between $5.7 a...
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Cross-border Selling
5 Quick Tips for Shipping Internationally
May 10, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Cross-border online sales may account for a significant portion of total ecommerce orders in just the next few years, according to some reports. But for many small online retailers the task of actually shipping a package internationally and understanding all of the associated rules, reg...
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Design & Development
Mobile Commerce Grows 31 Percent in Q1
May 7, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Mobile ecommerce sales rose 31 percent in the first quarter of 2013 as tablet-fueled, couch commerce is rapidly becoming the most popular form of online shopping with the so-called multi-channel shopper. Data from the IBM Online Retail Index and the U.S. Department of Commerce suggeste...
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Shipping & Fulfillment
7 Ways to Improve a Customer’s Shipping Experience
April 30, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Shipping can be one of the most stressful parts of an online transaction. The customer has already paid for a product, but does not actually have it in hand. And the retailer — devoted to excellent customer service — has no control over the carrier. In spite of this, there are some co...
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Design & Development
3 Important Mobile Commerce Trends
April 26, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Tablet-based purchases, an explosion in video watching, and shopping activity of men are among the hottest mobile commerce trends that could impact how online retailers market and sell. Mobile commerce — mcommerce — is the fastest growing retail segment as more shoppers make purchases...
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Amazon & Marketplaces
Marketplaces: How to Sell More in 2013
April 23, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Online marketplaces like Etsy, eBay, and Amazon offer retailers profitable, high-volume sales channels that can significantly improve the bottom line. But as more businesses discover and use these marketplaces, competition increases, meaning businesses need to market well in these chann...