December 7, 2010 • Armando Roggio

The free Opera web browser includes a built-in and feature-rich email client that lets you surf the web, subscribe to feeds, and manage your email from a single platform. There are a number of excellent email clients available, including Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, Mac OS X Mail, and...

December 6, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Internet users conduct billions of web searches every month. In fact, comScore reported that Americans alone queried Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and other search engines some 18.6 billion times in October 2010. What's more, the number of searches is growing. comScore reports that Americans ...

November 29, 2010 • Armando Roggio

November 29, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Yahoo! has released a new trend-tracking tool that identifies what users looked for before and after a particular search term and estimates those users' annual incomes, potentially providing online retailers with good customer intelligence. Search marketing, whether via pay-per-click (...

November 22, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Social media marketing is proving to be an effective way to engage customers and improve sales for online stores. The social media landscape is, at least for the moment, dominated by two major services, Facebook and Twitter. But there are many other services that offer the possibility ...

November 19, 2010 • Armando Roggio

RockMelt is a new web browser that integrates with Facebook so that every page can be quickly shared and every post from a friend discovered. RockMelt is built using Chromium, which is the open-source web browser project that underlies Chrome; so it performs almost as well as the speed...

November 16, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Mozilla Labs Messaging Group has released a new Firefox extension that makes it simpler to share content from around the web on Facebook and Twitter. Social media marketing seeks to make new or more loyal customers by engaging with them, not just pushing products. Usually, social marke...

November 15, 2010 • Armando Roggio

In the Internet age, consumers encounter web forms with regularity. There are registration forms, login forms, contact forms, customer service forms, survey forms, content submission forms, package tracking forms, or checkout forms on just about every website. Web forms are, as such, o...

November 8, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Managing a small-to-midsized retail business often includes tracking, updating, and storing a lot of information. Spreadsheets filled with vendor pricing, co-op advertising submission forms, project documents, wireframes for a website redevelopment,

November 5, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Every major web browser allows users to conduct a web search directly from its address bar. But Opera and Firefox take this convenient shortcut a step further, allowing folks to search several different sites or engines directly from a single spot. For professionals who work on the Int...

November 2, 2010 • Armando Roggio

The Opera browser offers one of the most innovative user experiences available. Clearly the browser is a trendsetter. It was the first to introduce tabs, the first to maximize the page-viewing area and minimize controls, and it continues to include new features and new ways for users t...

November 1, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Video is one of the most potent ways to market and sell products online. In fact, some merchants have reported increases in conversions rates of 20 percent or more when they ...

October 25, 2010 • Armando Roggio

As ecommerce businesses grow from entrepreneurial startups to mid-sized retailers, they can become much more complex to manage. As a startup, the operation was likely managed by one or two people. Fixing website glitches was pretty straightforward. You saw something wrong. You fixed it...

October 22, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce professionals spend many hours each day online. They monitor their businesses, check email, market products, post to social media sites, watch the competition, or otherwise do any one of a hundred business-related activities. Into the midst of this online experience come pop-ups — ads, forms, controls, whatever.

October 19, 2010 • Armando Roggio

From managing cookies to clearing your browser cache, there are essential tasks that every web surfer needs to know. Think of it this way. Many professionals and entrepreneurs use a web browser like Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) to access web-based email, conduct research, or even...

October 18, 2010 • Armando Roggio

A successful ecommerce business is an dynamic blend of products, pricing, operations management, customer service, marketing, and web technology. And an ecommerce entrepreneur or manager must monitor each and every ...

October 12, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 is a modern, fast, and efficient web browser that will speed up the web for its users. But, if you really want to get the most out of this new and vastly improved web browser, you've got to take advantage of keyboard shortcuts. Every browser has keyboar...

October 11, 2010 • Armando Roggio

For nearly a month, microblogging powerhouse Twitter has been rolling out a new user interface aimed at making the service the "best way to discover what's new in your world." Twitter is already one of the most popular social media sites with more than 165 million registered users, acc...

October 5, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Mozilla's Firefox web browser helped pioneer the concept of browser add-ons and extensions, making custom web surfing experiences and tools possible. The Firefox Add-on directory includes more than 13,000 browser extensions. According to Mozilla, the browser's various add-ons have be...

October 4, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Product videos, how-to demonstration, and entertainment marketing are just three examples of how ecommerce marketers are using the Internet's broadcasting power to engage customers. Examples of each sort of video are abundant. Magellan's Travel Supplies and Swimwear Boutique use profes...

September 28, 2010 • Armando Roggio

The Opera web browser allows web surfers to use quick, predetermined mouse movements to complete many common browsing tasks, such as going back to a previous page, opening new tabs, or reloading a page. Once users become familiar with these mouse gestures, they can surf the web potenti...

September 27, 2010 • Armando Roggio

From product or how-to videos to expert audio podcasts, many online merchants use multimedia to help sell products and engage customers. Examples of ecommerce companies using video and audio abound, but they include REI and Maker SHED. Yet, both of these examples are from relatively ...

September 20, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Social marketing has emerged as one of the best ways to connect with consumers online. And tracking how well your business's social media marketing is performing has become a vital measurement of ecommerce marketing measurement. Yet with so many metrics and statistics to follow, it can...

September 20, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Microsoft released a preview of its Internet Explorer (IE) 9 web browser on September 15, promising users "a more beautiful web." Historically, Microsoft's IE browsers are widely used by Internet novices and widely hated by Internet regulars. Web developers, ecommerce merchants, and ...

September 13, 2010 • Armando Roggio

On average, Americans spent about 56 hours on the Internet in June 2010, according to a recent Nielsen Wire report. Ecommerce merchants, whose workplace is on the web, likely spend many more hours online than the average user. With so much time spent online, a web browser's features an...

September 10, 2010 • Armando Roggio

September 8, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Performance metrics can help ecommerce businesses measure progress and assess financial and marketing health. But with so much data available from tools like Google Analytics, it can be hard to know what to measure or even what those measurements mean. With this in mind, I put together...

September 6, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Contest marketing is an excellent way to engage customers, build brand, and get leads for newsletters and other promotions. And in the age of social media marketing, an online contest can garner thousands of entries. Unfortunately some popular social media sites, like Facebook, prohib...

August 30, 2010 • Armando Roggio

The very letters and words on a web page can help build a brand and engage customers. Thanks to better browser support and several new services, the Internet is being filled with rich and diverse fonts even now. For years, so-called web safe fonts—meaning the most common fonts supporte...

August 26, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Last week, the Mozilla Foundation released a new version of its Firefox 4 web browser. The new version offers better performance, improved tab management, more HTML5 video support, synchronization, and ...