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Design & Dev Tools
The PEC Review: Buffalo Technology’s HD-HX2.0TU3 External Hard Drive
May 24, 2010 • Armando Roggio
One of the computer industry's greatest apocryphal tales has Microsoft founder Bill Gates telling a newspaper in 1981 that "640K is more memory than anyone will ever need." The story is false, and Gates has been adamantly denying the quote for nearly three decades. But false as it is,...
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Customer Retention
Using Offsite Trust Marketing to Build Site Traffic
May 19, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Consumers buy from online retailers they trust, and unfortunately, nearly half of American consumers probably don't trust your business. Data from the Edelman Trust Barometer shows that in 2009 only 36 percent of Americans surveyed said that they thought U.S.-based companies were trust...
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Technical SEO
The PEC Review: Speedtest.net
May 17, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Most ecommerce merchants are digital natives, spending hours each day online, managing orders, marketing, or just staying ahead of the competition. When so much of your working day is spent on the Internet, even modest changes in upload and download speeds can have a major impact on pr...
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Business
Ecommerce Video Production
May 11, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Product videos have been shown to increase conversions rates on ecommerce sites. Online retailer eBags famously tested some 210 product videos on its site beginning in 2007. The test compared conversion rates for products with video against conversion rates for the same products withou...
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On-page SEO
The PEC Review: Page Speed
May 10, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Site performance or speed is a key factor in improving sales conversions. How quickly your website loads may be the difference between making a sale or losing a potential customer. For example, 52 percent of respondents to a 2009 study from Akamai and Forrester Research said that page ...
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Business
The PeC Review: AVG LinkScanner Identifies Malicious Code
May 3, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Seventy-one percent of websites that contain malicious code or malware are actually legitimate sites that have been compromised, according to web and data security firm, Websense. What's more, 61 percent of the top 100 sites on the Internet were infected at some point in 2009. Malware ...
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Email Marketing
The PEC Review: GetResponse’s Email-to-Speech Service
April 26, 2010 • Armando Roggio
In 2009, there were approximately 90 trillion emails sent, or about 13,200 emails for every one of the world's 6.8 billion residents. This is according to data from web monitoring firm Pingdom and the U.S. Census Bureau. Narrowed to likely email recipients, this staggering data indica...
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Social Media
The PeC Review: Firefox TwitterBar Add-on
April 19, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Social media is one of the most cost effective ways that an online merchant can attract new customers and build relationships with existing ones. In social media, the aim is to become generally interested in your customers, including what they do and how they feel about the world. That...
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Photography & Video
The PEC Review: TinEye Reverse Image Search Locates Competitors, Protects Copyright
April 12, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Product photography is an essential part of ecommerce merchandising. Customers like to see what they're buying, after all. Many manufacturers and distributors supply stock product imagery for merchants to use, and other retailers will invest in professional and unique product photograp...
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Design & Dev Tools
Demandware Launches Marketplace to Speed Integrations
April 8, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Connecting and integrating an ecommerce platform with third-party services and solutions can be one of the most costly and time consuming parts of any ecommerce site development. This week, ecommerce platform maker Demandware launched a new marketplace called LINK, which gives develope...
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Conversion
Online Shoppers Wait Two Days to Buy
April 7, 2010 • Armando Roggio
The average online shopper delays making a purchase by almost two days after initially visiting a retail site, according to data from a leading Internet security company. After monitoring the shopping behavior of 163 million consumers completing 2.52 million transactions, McAfee SECURE...
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Fraud Prevention
The PEC Review: CRE Secure Eases PCI Concerns
April 5, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Protecting customer credit card data and then telling customers that you're doing so should be a top priority for online retailers this year. First, protecting your customers' data is an ethical responsibility. If you're selling products online and accepting credit card data, you shoul...
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Content Marketing
Make Friends and Boost Sales with a Content Marketing Strategy
April 1, 2010 • Armando Roggio
More than half of consumers surveyed in a 2009 study said that how much they trusted a merchant affected how likely they were to make a purchase. The findings, which were part of a ChannelAdvisor survey, are not surprising. In fact, it is almost common sense that shoppers don't like to...
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Shipping & Fulfillment
The PEC Review: Shipwire Fulfillment Services
March 29, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Starting an ecommerce business is no small endeavor. A would-be online entrepreneur must manage every aspect of the business, from selecting products and vendors to marketing. What's more, there is significant competition. As marketing and business guru Seth Godin says, "You can't out...
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Code
Five Handy HTML Tags To Help Your Ecommerce Business
March 24, 2010 • Armando Roggio
There is an analogy between driving a car and operating an ecommerce business. With a car, you need to know a few basic things, like how to steer, accelerate, and brake. Likewise, the manager or owner of an online retail business really only needs to know how to process orders, manage customer service, and keep up with the accounting.
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Design & Dev Tools
The PEC Review: LABjs for Better Site Performance
March 15, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Many small- to medium-sized online retailers are entrepreneurial companies. Their owners and employees often have diverse responsibilities, and it is common for a single person to handle multiple tasks, such as customer service, email marketing, order processing and website design. Unf...
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Analytics & Data
The Metrics for Video Success
March 9, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Many online stores have begun to include product videos aimed at boosting sales conversions, reducing shopping cart abandonment, and lowering product return rates. But not all product-related videos are the same, and merchants will need some metrics for measuring which videos are, in fa...
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Platforms & Apps
The PEC Review: Chimpified Connects Two Powerful Platforms
March 8, 2010 • Armando Roggio
There are thousands of ecommerce-related products and services that small- to mid-sized merchants can use to improve their businesses. But often the challenge to engaging these products and services is not funding, or even the products' capabilities. Instead, it is the difficulty associ...
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Product Pages
The PEC Review: RateVoice Offers Product Reviews with Social Twist
March 3, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Adding product reviews to your ecommerce site will boost sales, drive additional traffic, and help you optimize your product catalog. In 2007, when PETCO added customer product reviews to its site, this purveyor of pet products enjoyed a 49 percent increase in sales conversions for its...
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Design & Development
Five Web Design Concepts Ecommerce Merchants Need to Know
February 23, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Editor's Note: Ecommerce merchants operate businesses using complex technologies. We launched our "Need to Know" series to help merchants obtain a basic understanding of these technologies, recognizing that most merchants are not web developers or programmers. In this installment, contr...
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Platforms & Apps
The PeC Review: LemonStand is One Sweet Cart
February 22, 2010 • Armando Roggio
The shopping-cart platform that an online business chooses can have a significant impact on its sales success. Select a cart that is too simple or basic and it may not scale as your company grows or it may not offer the features you need to cross-sell, merchandise, or engage loyal cust...
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Photography & Video
Putting Video On Your Ecommerce Site, A Webinar Preview
February 18, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Product-oriented videos help shoppers understand what they are buying, reduce shopping cart abandonment, and boost conversion rates by as much as 30 percent. Perhaps because of these reasons, ecommerce video is increasingly popular. Forrester Research, for example, estimated that 65 pe...
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Marketing & Advertising
The PeC Review: Google Buzz a No-brainer
February 15, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Google recently announced a new social media tool that is integrated into the company’s popular Gmail service. Google Buzz seeks to make it easier to start and follow social media-like conversations ...
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Fraud Prevention
The Technical Side of PCI DSS
February 9, 2010 • Armando Roggio
What merchants don't know about the technical side of protecting customer data can be costly. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) describes 12 system and procedural requirements for securing customer credit card data that is transmitted, processed, or stored by a...
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Photography & Video
The PeC Review: Shotfarm Streamlines Use of Manufacturers’ Photography
February 8, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Compelling product photography is a must for online merchants. Without a good visual representation of the products a store is selling, customers probably won't buy. Generally speaking, online stores have two basic ways to get product images: (1) take the photos, or (2) use the stock i...
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Business
The PeC Review: eStore-Opoly Game for Family Businesses
February 1, 2010 • Armando Roggio
The smallest ecommerce businesses are often family operations. An entrepreneurial family member starts selling online. Before long a spouse is helping to manage the accounting and teen-aged children are processing orders. Sharing the work becomes an outgrowth of sharing a life under on...
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User Experience
Four Strategies to Improve Shopper Experience
January 28, 2010 • Armando Roggio
How we shop is going to change. Digital interactivity at brick-and-mortar stores, mobile commerce, and rich Internet applications are going to have a significant effect on shopper experience in the next few years. But most of the changes to the shopper experience will not come overnigh...
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Design & Development
The PeC Review: Google’s Translator Toolkit
January 25, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce makes the world smaller. Or, so it might seem. Shoppers in Budapest can by products from the U.S., while an American teen could be downloading folk music from a site in Nepal. What's more, expanding your customer bases to include potential shoppers from around the world can s...
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Social Media
The PEC Review: The Social Media Marketing Book
January 18, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Some 70 percent of shoppers trust consumer opinions posted online. Facebook has more than 350 million users. By some estimates, Twitter will have 26 million users by the end of this year. And YouTube is the third most popular website on the Internet, bar none. Social media cannot be ig...
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Social Media
Social Media Webinar Sparks Hundreds of Questions
January 14, 2010 • Armando Roggio
There was news this week that Pepsi planned to forgo a Super Bowl Ad in favor of investing $2 million into social media marketing. With so much focus on connecting to customers via social communities, it was little wonder that attendees to the Practical Ecommerce "Social Media 201: Ho...