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Social Media
Moving Beyond Likes on Facebook
June 25, 2012 • Armando Roggio
A new study seeks to better understand how businesses may use Facebook to go beyond just acquiring Likes, to engaging and communicating with customers in effective and measurable ways. The study comes from Internet analysis firm comScore and includes data from comScore's "Social Essent...
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Design & Development
5 Mistakes to Avoid on Ecommerce Sites
June 12, 2012 • Armando Roggio
What makes great ecommerce-site aesthetics, layout, and even features are a matter of opinion. But there are some things that simply are not smart for online retailers. Online retail sites have a distinct job: selling something. While site design can be a matter of taste, I believe th...
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Conversion
Tablets and Phablets Could Boost Value of Ecommerce Video
June 11, 2012 • Armando Roggio
New research shows that tablet users are more likely to watch video. Separately, a new and potentially popular smartphone category may be similar to tablets in video consumption. A report released June 8, 2012 from trend-tracking firm comScore found that tablet users in the U.S. are th...
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Social Media
Ecommerce Marketing on Google+
June 5, 2012 • Armando Roggio
As Google rolls more features and functions into Google+, marketing on the new and fast growing social media network is increasingly important. Last week, Google announced the launch of Google+ Local, which provides users with recommendations and information about local businesses incl...
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Social Media
Who is Using Twitter and Why?
June 4, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Mobile adoption may be driving a surge in Twitter use, according to a major research firm. A report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project released May 31, 2012 said, “Twitter usage is highly correlated with the use of mobile technologies, especially smartphones.” This find...
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Design & Dev Tools
RSS Plumbing with Yahoo! Pipes
May 29, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Yahoo! Pipes is a free content manipulation service that lets you mix and mash up web content using a visual editor that doesn’t require any code writing experience. The Pipes service has been around since February 7, 2007, and is the primarily the work of then Yahoo! Engineers Pasha S...
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Platforms & Apps
Automating Social Media Posts with Dlvr.it
May 23, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Social media campaigns have become a mainstay of ecommerce marketing. Even the smallest of online retailers are likely to have a Facebook page and a Twitter account, and there are indications that social engagement may improve shopper relations and, possibly, sales. But the process of ...
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Conversion
Publishers to Become Ecommerce Merchants?
May 16, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Trends in online commerce, content marketing, and advertising sales may have set the ecommerce and publishing industries on a collision course as both strive for trust, relevance, and profits. U.S. online sales in just the first three months of 2012 were more than double American newsp...
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Platforms & Apps
Bing Goes Social with New Redesign
May 15, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Microsoft's Bing search engine will get a major redesign in the next month, extending the tool's integration with Facebook and introducing a new feature to help searchers get more done. “In 2009, we launched Bing with a simple proposition: people should expect more from a search engine...
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Conversion
Drop Shipping: The Good and The Bad
May 8, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Drop shipping may help online retailers increase sales and profits. But the strategy is not without problems — ranging from gathering product information, managing orders, providing good customer service, and removing poor-performing items. As a business model, drop shipping has online...
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Social Media
Survey Says: Pinterest-like Sites Drive Sales
May 1, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Some 32 percent of respondents to a March survey reported making a purchase after seeing a product on Pinterest or a similar picture and video sharing social media website. Bizrate Insights, which sells customer feedback and ratings solutions to online retailers, surveyed 3,741 online ...
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Social Media
3 Examples of Contest Marketing
April 30, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Contest marketing seeks to give shoppers a positive retailer-related experience, create an affinity for the products a retailer sells, and collect information about shoppers that may help with future sales-oriented marketing campaigns. The idea of giving away hundreds of dollars worth ...
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User Experience
Emphasizing Site Search in Web Design
April 25, 2012 • Armando Roggio
A website's own search engine is fundamental to helping customers find products, make purchases, and have a positive shopping experience. Speaking at an ecommerce conference in Brazil, Ed Huffman, vice president of global sales and business development for SLI Systems, a site search pr...
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Checkout Tactics
3 Tips for Managing Shopping Cart Abandonment
April 24, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Recent studies indicate that 7 out of 10 online shopping carts are exited before a sale is completed. This abandonment rate seems to be rising, as online shoppers become more comfortable comparing prices and other product or service attributes. SeeWhy, a website conversion service, rep...
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Inventory
3 Tips for Deciding What to Sell Online
April 17, 2012 • Armando Roggio
What a merchant sells online has a significant effect on that merchant’s success, including profitability and longevity. New ecommerce entrepreneurs should choose products wisely. According to estimates from Forrester, the research firm, U.S. online retail sales should reach about $278...
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Google Ads
Google AdWords Ad Extensions Basics
April 10, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Google AdWords extensions give potential shoppers more information about a merchant and more options to engage with that merchant before clicking a search ad. Although ad extensions have been around for a couple of years, Google recently added conversion tracking data to extensions, ma...
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Social Media
Pinterest: Choosing Cover Images, Tracking Pins
April 9, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Pinterest released a new feature last week, giving marketers significantly more control over how their companies' Pinterest boards are represented. This new feature allows users to choose the cover images for their pin boards, which serve as a sort of directory for a user's Pinterest p...
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Business
7 Reasons to Start an Ecommerce Business
April 4, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Owning a business can be emotionally fulfilling and financially enriching. Tens of thousands of new ventures are started each year. Ecommerce businesses frequently require less capital and less time to start than brick-and-mortar retail or service operations. So why not get going? Cer...
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Social Media
4 Pinterest Marketing Mistakes
April 2, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Pinterest is a fun social media service that lets users post images and videos, organized into topical boards. The site has great potential for driving traffic to online stores, but it is important not to misuse this potential or alienate users and would-be customers. What follows are ...
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Google Ads
3 Basic Ways to Improve PPC Advertising
March 28, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Pay-per-click advertising is a staple of ecommerce marketing that can play a key role in increasing site traffic and sales when managed well. Pay-per-click advertising can also be very expensive and labor intensive as marketers seek to find the best combination of ad copy, audience, ke...
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Payments
PayPal, Others Envision Payment Convergence
March 26, 2012 • Armando Roggio
The new PayPal Here smartphone-enabled credit card reader is the most recent indication of how electronic payments will likely change, ridding retailers of most industry compliance requirements, enabling simple payment processing solutions, and consolidating multiple or variable proces...
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Conversion
3 Examples of Marketing on the Fringe
March 20, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Unrestrained marketers with blockbuster budgets can come up with some pretty amazing ways to promote products and services. These ideas can inspire small and mid-sized online retailers to market on the fringe. Entertainment marketing is a sub-genre of content marketing that is aimed at...
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Content Marketing
4 Ways to Write Compelling Blog Titles
March 19, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Blog post titles that capture a reader's attention, make strong claims, and solve problems should get lots of clicks, shares, and retweets. Blogging is an important part of any good social media marketing campaign. While writing great blog content — see "Write Better Blog Posts, Pyrami...
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Email Marketing
3 Tips for Better Email Subscription Forms
March 14, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Email subscription forms should be simple and direct, encouraging site visitors to become opt-in participants in email marketing campaigns. Email marketing is one of the best ways that ecommerce businesses have to engage shoppers, introduce new products, and make more sales. But these ...
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Conversion
How to Promote a New Product on Your Ecommerce Site
March 12, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Retailers frequently add new product lines, brands, or even seasonal items. When these fresh items are introduced, marketers call it a product launch. Product launches are important and frequent events in ecommerce marketing that may be managed with a promotional recipe, removing uncert...
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Fraud Prevention
3 Tips for Managing a Store’s Online Reputation
March 6, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce marketers can monitor and maintain their stores' online reputation with regular searches and alerts, social media tracking software, and a commitment to good customer service. Reputation management, which is the practice of listening to and responding to what people say about...
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Social Media
How to Shorten Google+ URLs
March 5, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Google+ business page URLs can be long and unwieldy. But there are a couple of easy ways you can create a short alias addresses that shoppers can remember. At the present, a typical Google+ business page URL looks something like this: https://plus.google.com/u/0/103654589540801342565...
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Google Ads
How to Optimize a Pay-per-click Landing Page
February 29, 2012 • Armando Roggio
A pay-per-click landing page should be a sales conversion engine, tuned to help consummate an order. Landing pages “are one of the strongest tools you have to convert visitors to customers,” wrote Brandon Eley and Shayne Tilley in their book, Online Marketing Inside Out. “Much of your ...
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Content Marketing
Using Content Marketing for Your Ecommerce Business
February 27, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Content marketing seeks to publish high-quality content to engage prospects, earn business, and create repeat customers. In the Internet age, anyone — private or commercial — can publish articles, essays, white papers, newsletters, audio podcasts, games, or videos that have the potenti...
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User Experience
10 Innovative Ecommerce Sites
February 21, 2012 • Armando Roggio
What follows is my view of ten excellent ecommerce sites, each offering innovative ideas in navigation, images, and content marketing. The sites all use the Magento open-source platform, but the ...