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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...
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Fraud Prevention
The PeC Review: VeriSign Badge and EV SSL Instill Trust
January 11, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Customers want to feel safe when they make online purchases. They need to know that the credit card or account data they are providing to the merchant is transmitted and handled in a secure way. To protect customer information, an online merchant will comply with the Payment Card Indus...
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Platforms & Apps
The PeC Review: Use Dropbox for File Storage and Team Collaboration
January 4, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Many small and midsized ecommerce businesses use virtual offices, meaning that shipping and logistics might be in Kentucky near the FedEx hub, web development could be managed in Italy, and the online store's marketing and customer service teams may be in Oklahoma. What's more, many of...
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Conversion
The PeC Review: Using Gmail For Your Business
December 28, 2009 • Armando Roggio
For many online retailers, customer service is managed via email or chat. When a customer has questions or concerns, that customer often replies to a transactional email or submits a contact form, launching an engagement experience that is completely managed online, without face-to-face...
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Payments
The PeC Review: PayPal’s Website Payment Pro is a Good Value for Small Merchants
December 18, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce is not possible without online payment processing. You might have the best products. You might have the best website. But, if customers cannot order and pay for products online, you’re not in the ecommerce business. PayPal’s Website Payments Pro is an all-in-one payment proc...
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Fraud Prevention
The PeC Review: Filtrbox for Reputation Management
December 11, 2009 • Armando Roggio
An increasingly social Internet has transformed Facebooking moms, tweeting trend-followers, and Digging teens into powerful brand and product influencers. And as your ecommerce business grows, you should be concerned about what these social Internet influencers are saying regarding yo...
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Platforms & Apps
The PeC Review: Crucial Webhosting Offers Value and Service
December 4, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Most small-to-midsized online retailers don’t own their own web servers. Instead,these companies rent space on servers at data centers around the globe—a practice we commonly call “web hosting.” An online merchant’s web host can have a significant effect on business success. For examp...
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Checkout Tactics
The PeC Review: WinBuyer Puts Competitors’ Prices on Your Pages
November 30, 2009 • Armando Roggio
By some estimates, 94 percent of online shoppers will invest at least some time comparing prices before they make a buying decision. That comparison process often takes shoppers to as many as four different online retailers and a price comparison engine or two, but now one vendor is off...
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Email Marketing
Emailer Provider GetResponse Releases Robust API Library
November 23, 2009 • Armando Roggio
GetResponse, an email marketing solution, announced a new application programming interface (API) aimed at helping small-to-medium sized businesses integrate their platforms with the company's email marketing tools. The new GetResponse Developer Zone includes some 30 API hooks that ma...
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Design & Dev Tools
The PeC Review: FormSpring for Easy Form-building
November 20, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Read any online marketing book, blog, or journal—Practical eCommerce included—worth its salt, and you’ll be told to “know your customer.” In ecommerce, getting to know your customer and building rapport with that customer takes time. It also takes an exchange of information that is of...
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Social Media
‘New Community Rules’ Is An Introduction to Social Media Marketing
November 16, 2009 • Armando Roggio
An increasing number of online retailers are recognizing that it is possible to earn more money and have happier customers simply by engaging those customers in authentic and personal ways. When an industry is in its infancy (such as ecommerce was just a few years ago) it is possible t...
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Business
The PeC Review: Onehub Enables Virtual Collaboration
November 13, 2009 • Armando Roggio
As an online merchant’s business grows, it is important to add new staff that will manage such things as operations, fulfillment, marketing, design, and customer service. But adding staff and growing an ecommerce business does not necessarily mean leasing office space and hiring locally...
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User Experience
The PeC Review: MyBuys Personal Recommendations
November 6, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Offering shoppers personalized product recommendations can increase conversion rates and profits while fending off shopping cart abandonment. Onsite product merchandising—the idea of cross-, up-, and down-selling to shoppers—is a potent tool for ecommerce marketers that often takes th...
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User Experience
The PeC Review: SLI Offers Superior Search
October 30, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Research indicates that as many as 60 percent of online shoppers use a merchant's search feature to navigate the website. With so many potential customers typing keywords rather than using a site's navigation hierarchy, advanced search features are not just nice to have. They are a comp...
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Amazon & Marketplaces
PeC Review: Sellit Makes Marketplaces Social
October 23, 2009 • Armando Roggio
A new "self-promotion" tool lets merchants selling on Yahoo!, CafePress, Etsy, or Cartfly promote their products on leading social media sites, access a social media advertising network, and post a Flash-based widget on their blog or other sites. Sellit is a "bolt-on" solution that pr...
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Platforms & Apps
The PeC Review: TrialPay Creates Additional Revenue
October 16, 2009 • Armando Roggio
A payment and promotion platform originally built to boost conversion rates for merchants selling downloadable software may also help all types of online retailers increase sales. If your typical affiliate marketing program had a hip big brother, his name would be TrialPay. Aimed at cu...
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Analytics & Data
The PeC Review: ClearSaleing Ties Profit to Marketing Tactics
October 9, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce marketers want to generate the greatest possible revenue from every promotional dollar invested. But tracking or measuring exactly how each ad, each promotion, or each press release affects shoppers can be allusive. ClearSaleing provides a platform that helps companies accura...
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Social Media
Ecommerce Know-How: Consider YouTube Promoted Video
October 7, 2009 • Armando Roggio
YouTube Promoted Video lets ecommerce merchants combine the power of television commercials with pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. Internet video is one of the fastest growing media forms in the world. From June to August 2009, American Internet video consumption grew from 19.4 billion to...
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Customer Retention
The PeC Review: SeeWhy.com Helps Capture Exiting Shoppers
October 6, 2009 • Armando Roggio
A six year-old, real-time analytics firm seeks to help online merchants boost conversions by enabling stores to follow up with potential customers after those shoppers leave the site or abandon the shopping cart. According to SeeWhy, sending shoppers a customer-service-oriented email a...
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Analytics & Data
Ecommerce Know-How: Avoid The Last Click Effect
October 2, 2009 • Armando Roggio
As ecommerce marketers strive to get the best return for every dollar they invest, there is a danger that they will fall prey to the last click effect, attributing all of a campaign's success to just the last interaction a customer has before arriving on site or making a purchase. The ...
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Platforms & Apps
The PeC Review: BadCustomer.com Makes Good Business
October 1, 2009 • Armando Roggio
A free service protects merchants from bad customers—both malicious and foolish—saving time, frustration, and money. Ecommerce merchants love customers and love providing good customer service. It is at the industry's heart. But some customers are not so loveable and knowing who they ar...
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User Experience
The Shopping Experience: ChristianBook.com Needs Breadcrumbs
September 30, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Christian Book Distributors (CBD) and its website, ChristianBook.com, has become largest catalog and online seller of Christian books and products in the world. Two teenaged brothers, Ray and Steve Hendrickson, founded it in 1978, in Massachusetts. The brothers launched the company, ac...
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Conversion
Shop.org 2009 Summit Round Up
September 28, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Exhibitors, attendees, and speakers at last week's Shop.org Annual Summit were encouraged and excited about the future of ecommerce, both in terms of growth and technology. In fact, walking around the convention center at the Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas seemed to make everyone fee...
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Conversion
Yahoo! May Sell Small Business Unit, Focus on Core Business
September 25, 2009 • Armando Roggio
The Yahoo! small business services unit, which includes the hosted ecommerce platform used by thousands of online merchants, may soon be sold, clearing the way for Yahoo! to focus on its core businesses, according to published reports. News that Yahoo! had garnered some interest for th...
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Design & Dev Tools
The PeC Review: StoreSync Lets You Manage Your Ecommerce Business On Your iPhone
September 23, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce can be a 24 hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week business. For many small-to-medium sized merchants, providing great customer service means paying close attention to their businesses, even after normal business hours. A new iPhone application assists with monitoring orders, inventory,...
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SEO Tools
Ecommerce Know-How: Optimizing Your Site for Microsoft Bing
September 22, 2009 • Armando Roggio
The Microsoft, Yahoo! search deal announced in July still faces legal hurdles, but as more details have become available, it is clear that the companies' combined search share has—for the first time in perhaps a decade—created some real competition for Google. Depending on which poll o...