-
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...
-
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...
-
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 ...
-
Shipping & Fulfillment
Comparing UPS, FedEx, and USPS: Which is Best Now?
November 8, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Shipping costs are an ongoing challenge for ecommerce merchants, who compete head-to-head over free shipping and seek to avoid shopping cart abandonment. Given this competitive environment, knowing which carrier is best can be a huge advantage. In March, L.L. Bean announced that it wou...
-
Platforms & Apps
An Overview of Magento Go
November 7, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Magento Go is the software-as-a-service ecommerce platform from Magento, a leading open-source ecommerce solution. Magento Go may be an attractive choice for some online merchants. SaaS or hosted ecommerce platforms generally offer a few advantages for merchants. First, many of the he...
-
Shipping & Fulfillment
5 Reasons to Consider Fulfillment Services
November 4, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Accounting, purchasing, marketing, and operations are all areas that online and multi-channel merchants must manage. Fortunately there is a growing class of service companies that allows sellers to outsource product receiving, inventorying, packing, and shipping. Fulfillment services a...
-
Customer Retention
Engage Online Customers with SoLoMo
October 27, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Borrowing a strategy and a catch phrase from mobile applications, marketers can use social, local, and mobile (SoLoMo) promotions together to better engage customers. The term "SoLoMo" used to refer to a mobile smartphone application that combined social networking with some form of lo...
-
Design & Dev Tools
Designing Web Forms for Better Conversions; 5 Tips
October 24, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Web forms are the final hurdle shoppers and site visitors must traverse before registering for a newsletter or making a purchase. Even small improvements in the form can make a ...
-
Email Marketing
Writing Excellent Email Subject Lines
October 20, 2011 • Armando Roggio
A well written email subject line can increase open rates and, potentially, increase conversions. An email with a poorly written subject will probably get deleted. Subject line composition is as important to an email-marketing program as earning subscribers and providing great content ...
-
User Experience
Lessons from the Amazon Redesign
October 17, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Changes in Amazon's graphic design and how it displays navigation menus offer a few basic lessons about site-presentation trends that may help small and mid-sized online merchants with their own site designs. Arguably, the Amazon website was long overdue for a redesign.
-
Conversion
5 Holiday Marketing Ideas to Boost Sales
October 13, 2011 • Armando Roggio
The holiday shopping season runs from the end of October to the end of the year, and it can represent as much as 20-to-40 percent of a retailer’s total annual ...
-
Conversion
Holiday Sales to Grow 2.8 Percent?
October 10, 2011 • Armando Roggio
The National Retail Federation has estimated that overall 2011 holiday sales — brick-and-mortar and online — will grow 2.8 percent reaching some $465.6 billion compared to $453 billion in 2010. The NRF uses a complex economic model that includes data from across the U.S. and world econ...
-
Platforms & Apps
The 10 Best Blogging Platforms in 2011
October 5, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Online merchants are competing for customer attention and loyalty in an Internet landscape where people create their autobiographies across social networks and businesses have to discover a reason to be relevant in that narrative. Blogging, which some suggest is a waning art for indivi...
-
Design & Dev Tools
10 Tools to Boost Your Ecommerce Business
October 3, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Crowd sourcing, infrastructure-as-a-service, and even marketing intelligence solutions can help small and mid-sized businesses to grow and become more profitable. It is a cliché, perhaps, to say that business is always changing, but nonetheless the way business is conducted does change...
-
Customer Retention
5 Tips for Better Landing Pages
September 28, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Landing pages are important online marketing tools and keys to conversion. So almost anything that a marketer can do to improve a landing page's performance will also improve the bottom line. A landing page may be defined as a page on your website where visitors are sent to prompt a co...
-
Analytics & Data
>
Merchant Voice
10 Web Analytics Solutions for Ecommerce Merchants
September 26, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Web analytics tools seek to monitor and report on the interaction between Internet users and specific websites or marketing initiatives for the purpose of improving those interactions. This definition is a ...
-
Customer Retention
Understanding Basic A/B Testing
September 21, 2011 • Armando Roggio
A/B testing is a method for measuring the relative effectiveness of certain page content or marketing promotions. When properly applied, A/B testing may help marketers significantly improve conversion rates and establish a culture of improvement. In 2009, blogger Dustin Curtis conducte...
-
Conversion
4 Lessons From the Google Ebookstore
September 19, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Google's electronic bookstore took months to plan and is considered by some to be a viable competitor to respected brands like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The crisp clean site has at least four valuable lessons to share with seasoned ecommerce professionals and new entrepreneurs alik...
-
Marketing & Advertising
Nearly 1-in-3 Adults Use Location-Based Services
September 15, 2011 • Armando Roggio
According to a report released last week, 28 percent of American adults use some form of location-based service, either on a mobile device or via a social network. The report from ...
-
Business
Style Guides for the Digital World
September 12, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Written communications are a vital part of ecommerce marketing. How a business presents itself in words may affect how that business is perceived. With this in mind, it is a ...
-
Marketing & Advertising
Adult Internet Users Are Socialites, Study Finds
September 6, 2011 • Armando Roggio
According to a new study, 65 percent of American adult Internet users have interacted on a social media site like Facebook, Google+, or LinkedIn, supporting the often cited importance of social media marketing. The social networking report from the Pew Internet & American Life Proj...
-
Photography & Video
Google’s New WebP Image Format Could Improve Load Times
September 5, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Web graphics, particularly photos, are beginning to evolve. But more change is needed as the requirements for both speed and beautiful design intensify. A new, royalty-free format hopes to provide ...
-
Marketing & Advertising
Podcasting Engages Shoppers; Steps for Getting Started
September 1, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Podcasting can be an effective way to engage shoppers and encourage brand or site loyalty, resulting in more sales. What's more, podcasting is relatively easy and inexpensive for businesses small and large. Nearly any marketer can start podcasting almost immediately. If one needs more ...
-
Social Media
6 Tools to Manage Your Social Media Marketing
August 29, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Social media marketing is one of the most-discussed marketing tactics in the ecommerce industry. Many companies are devoting a greater percentage of resources and effort into engaging customers and prospects ...
-
Email Marketing
3 Tips to Boost Email Conversion Rates
August 24, 2011 • Armando Roggio
According to published reports, some 92 percent of American adults use email. Many of them are subscribers to one or more email newsletters or product alerts. So it is little ...
-
Email Marketing
Create RSS-to-Email Campaigns with MailChimp
August 22, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Email is one of the most potent tactics in the ecommerce marketer's toolbox. Recent studies — which I addressed last week — indicate that email is a favorite activity for adult American Internet users. MailChimp, a leading email-marketing service provider, has a terrific feature that a...
-
Email Marketing
Email and Search Still Top User Activities, Study Shows
August 17, 2011 • Armando Roggio
American adults are more likely to email and search than any other online activities, according to the results of a recently released survey. The Pew Internet & American Life Project has been monitoring online behavior for nearly a decade. Most recently, Pew Internet found that ema...
-
Platforms & Apps
15 Productivity Apps for Your Google Chromebook
August 15, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Google Chromebook and its browser-as-operating-system approach to computing have put the spotlight on web-based applications. The Chromebook's Chrome OS represents a completely new approach to computing. On a traditional Mac or Windows-based computer, there is the operating system on t...
-
Google Ads
Google Study Finds PPC Traffic ‘Incremental’ to Organic
August 11, 2011 • Armando Roggio
A new Google study reports that pay-per-click ads tend to generate new site visitors and do not simply divert traffic from organic search result links, as some marketers have feared. PPC ...
-
Email Marketing
How Email Marketing Can Help SEO
August 9, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Creating valid HTML email newsletters and announcements with a canonical link element may help marketers boost search engine optimization. The canonical link element, which is often referred to as rel="canonical," (pronounced rel canonical, no "equals") is a way of describing the pref...