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Platforms & Apps
Internet Explorer 10 Is Coming
April 18, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Microsoft released a preview version of its forthcoming Internet Explorer 10 web browser at the MIX11 developer conference in Las Vegas last week. The browser preview provides important insights into what might be a new salvo in the browser wars and could affect how online businesses develop websites and applications.
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Content Marketing
5 Blogging Ideas to Engage Customers
April 12, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Engaging customers with both informative and entertaining content can be a key to keeping them long term and making additional sales. After all, what's better, a customer that buys once, or a customer that keeps on making purchases because your blog content draws them back to your site?...
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Customer Retention
6 Things Consumers Hate About Ecommerce Sites
April 11, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce websites should inspire trust, engage customers, and make it easy to shop — ultimately leading to more sales. Unfortunately, too many online stores fall short in one or more areas. In this article, I am going to describe six things consumers — including me — hate to find on e...
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Social Media
10 Marketers You Must Follow on Twitter
April 5, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Changing consumer behaviors are having a significant effect on marketing tactics and strategies. New social sites, mobile devices, or other advancements are fueling these changes. Just a few years ago no mainstream marketers had budgets for Facebook ads. But now Facebook is a leading o...
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Code
What Makes HTML5 Special?
April 4, 2011 • Armando Roggio
HTML5 promises to make the Internet more functional and interactive. It seeks to transform a World Wide Web of relatively flat, static pages into one filled with web applications —
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Product Pages
10 Compelling Product Descriptions
April 1, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Product descriptions help to sell products. That's an obvious but sometimes overlooked reality. Too often, online merchants are happy to simply copy a manufacturer's product description and call it good. But since that merchant is probably not the only one just copying and pasting, t...
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Design & Development
Cookies Make Shoppers Feel Welcome
March 28, 2011 • Armando Roggio
In web development, a "cookie" stores basic user information on the user's own computer, potentially improving the browsing experience and even making visitors to an ecommerce site feel more welcome. Cookies are often used to save a visitor's username and password so that the visitor d...
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Content Marketing
3 Ideas for Generating Unique Content for Your Ecommerce Business
March 24, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Unique and entertaining content can help engage customers, encourage site traffic and earn your brand top-of-mind recognition. But sometimes, ecommerce entrepreneurs and marketers struggle to find new content ideas. This demand for fresh and one-of-a-kind content may be even more imper...
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Customer Service
The Zappos Effect: 5 Great Customer Service Ideas for Smaller Businesses
March 21, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Zappos, the online retailer, has used incredible customer service to create an extremely loyal customer base. Small ecommerce businesses that want to grow would be wise to take a lesson from Zappos. As an example of Zappos' almost insane customer care, the company has even been known t...
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Product Pages
How to Write Product Descriptions that Sell, Boost SEO Efforts
March 18, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Compelling, informative, and unique product descriptions can help your ecommerce business increase sales. Moreover, original product descriptions can help avoid Google's so-called "Farmer algorithm" penalty, which can affect retailers that copy product descriptions from competitors, or ...
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Platforms & Apps
Mobile Devices to Alter Retail Landscape; 3 Predictions
March 16, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Internet-enabled mobile devices are going to have a huge impact on retail sales in just the next few years, especially affecting small ecommerce businesses. Anytime one discusses the future of a particular industry or where a trending technology or behavior may be taking some segment, ...
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Marketing & Advertising
5 New-Media Ecommerce Marketing Tactics
March 14, 2011 • Armando Roggio
The growth of mobile devices, changes in search engines, social media sites, and new consumer behaviors are affecting the way that online retailers market. And often the creative and dynamic marketing plans win the customers. In this post, I'll describe five dynamic ecommerce marketing...
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Platforms & Apps
Magento Releases Hosted, SaaS Version
March 9, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Magento, the open-source ecommerce platform, officially launched a hosted, software-as-a-service (SaaS) version. The Magento platform — in my view — is one of the most robust and effective ecommerce solutions available. If, in fact, Magento has any drawbacks or weaknesses, it is that ...
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SEO
Google’s ‘Farmer’ Algorithm and What It Means for Ecommerce SEO
March 8, 2011 • Armando Roggio
A massive change to Google's search engine ranking algorithm has recently improved query results, while having a negative effect on businesses that had been "gaming" the system or reusing others' content. The so-called "Farmer" algorithm update went into effect in late February and aff...
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Fraud Prevention
Radical Ideas to Make Credit Card Payments More Secure
March 1, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Credit cards approvals are not completely secure because the information those approvals rely on — cardholder names, card numbers and expiration dates — is static and relatively easy to gather. Focusing on making payment approvals less vulnerable may be more effective than asking cons...
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Platforms & Apps
New Firefox 4 Mobile Released
February 28, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Last week, Mozilla released a new version of its Firefox 4 Beta for Android and Nokia Maemo-based mobile devices that is reported to be more than twice as fast as the devices' native web browsers. Earlier versions of Firefox for mobile have had some challenges with stability and perfor...
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User Experience
10 Effective Mobile Ecommerce Designs
February 22, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Smart phones are everywhere. And — for many ecommerce merchants — it is not enough to have just an ecommerce website. They want an ecommerce mobile site, too. In this article, I have collected ten examples of what I believe are effectively designed mobile ecommerce designs, as viewed f...
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Business
4 Ideas to Cut Costs on Your Ecommerce Business
February 21, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Reducing unnecessary spending will help your ecommerce business become more efficient and could increase its profits. But how do you cut costs right now without harming your business's future? Here are four suggestions for cutting costs now. Not every one of these will be applicable to...
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Business
6 Common Ecommerce Mistakes
February 16, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce businesses can be founded by massive corporations or by families working out of a garage. It provides a relatively level field for everyone to compete. And, like so many businesses, ecommerce operations often find unique ways to succeed. This article's purpose is to help ecom...
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Platforms & Apps
10 Innovative Digital-Download Stores
February 14, 2011 • Armando Roggio
The Holy Grail of ecommerce is to create a product once and sell it over and over again. Many online stores are achieving this goal by focusing on downloadable products like source code, graphics, PDF files, or ebooks just, to name a few of the digital products available. In this arti...
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Business
4 Ways to Waste Money on Your Ecommerce Store
February 8, 2011 • Armando Roggio
The causes of ecommerce failures are diverse, but they frequently end with the proprietor shuttering the operation because it is losing too much money. In this article, I list four activities that I believe can destroy an ecommerce business's bottom line and waste your money. I think th...
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Platforms & Apps
Google Chrome Links to New Web App Store
February 7, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Google recently announced several changes to version 9 of its popular Chrome browser, including closer ties to a web store featuring products that blur the line between websites and web applications further and give ecommerce marketers a new sales channel. Google has said in the past t...
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Platforms & Apps
Firefox 4.1 Will Shun Tracking
January 31, 2011 • Armando Roggio
A personal privacy organization praised new features in several leading browsers last week, singling out the forthcoming Firefox 4.1 as the leader in personal privacy. This latest chapter in the effort to inhibit online tracking may also affect some personalization and behavior driven t...
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Customer Retention
Consider the Subscription Model for New Revenue
January 25, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Selling to a customer once is great. Selling to a customer every year, month, or week is even better. This mantra of sorts — along with apparent growth in consumer demand and several new subscription-specific billing solutions — is creating opportunity for ecommerce entrepreneurs large...
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Platforms & Apps
$5 Marketing, with Fiverr.com
January 24, 2011 • Armando Roggio
How you market your ecommerce business in 2011 may be different than how you marketed in 2010, or before. Unique sites like Fiverr are enabling edgy, entertaining, and engaging ways to reach new customers. On Fiverr, individuals post listings describing what they would do for $5. It's ...
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Platforms & Apps
Google Chrome Will Drop H.264 Codec, Impacting Future of Video
January 18, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Google announced last week that forthcoming versions of its increasingly popular Chrome browser would drop support for the patent-entangled H.264 video codec, potentially making HTML5 more open and available, but also challenging competitors like Apple, which is closely tied to H.264. ...
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Design & Development
The PEC Review: A Pen and Touch Pad to Supplement a Mouse
January 17, 2011 • Armando Roggio
The monitor, keyboard, and mouse are the three most ubiquitous computer peripherals. In fact, it would be hard to image using a computer without them. But consider that prior to the invention of the mouse, most folks thought only of using keyboards or punch cards. So just as the mouse ...
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Conversion
Two Lessons that Groupon Can Teach Ecommerce Merchants
January 13, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Selling products online is a challenge. Ecommerce merchants rarely benefit from spontaneous buys, cannot easily generate emotional buying responses, and face tremendous price competition, since thousands of competitors are only a click away. Nonetheless, many companies — from tiny purv...
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Social Media
Facebook Insights Helps Measure Social Media Efforts
January 10, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Social media marketing can be an effective way to engage customers and, ultimately, sell more products. There have certainly been lots of articles, publications, and webinars that describe tactics you can use in social media campaigns. But there may be comparatively few resources that h...
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Social Media
How to Rescue Posts from Facebook’s Spam Filter
January 4, 2011 • Armando Roggio
In October 2010, Facebook introduced automatic content filtering to business pages (sometimes called Fan pages) in an effort to help stop Wall spammers from successfully posting unwanted or dangerous messages to dozens or even hundreds of pages daily. For social media marketers, the fi...