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...

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...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

January 3, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Managing an online retail business, even a very small one, can be more labor intensive than some might imagine. Even in the smallest of sole proprietorships, there is accounting to be done; state sales tax to be collected, reported, and paid; vendor price lists to keep track of; a webs...

December 28, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Microsoft announced a major vulnerability in all versions of the popular Internet Explorer (IE) web browsers that makes it possible for malicious websites to hijack a visitor's computer. Microsoft said that it did not believe that any serious criminals were either using or previously w...

December 27, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Successful online retailers are often customer-focused service companies rather than just purveyors of products. Put another way, many successful retailers are successful not just because of the products they offer or the effectiveness of their marketing, but rather because they do a g...

December 21, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Google has released a new updated version of its popular Chrome web browser that supports the WebGL extension to HTML5, making it possible to render 3D graphics in a web browser without the use of a plug-in. Google's inclusion of WebGL in Chrome helps the browser catch up to Firefox an...

December 20, 2010 • Armando Roggio

The telephone, like it or not, is an integral part of every business — whether you're speaking with suppliers about shipments, having a teleconference with your web developer, or following up on a customer service question. I am not a big fan of telephones — except for the mobile ones ...

December 16, 2010 • Armando Roggio

In the past year, mobile commerce has doubled in volume and by 2015 consumers could be spending nearly $24 billion per year from Internet-enabled mobile devices in the U.S. alone. The mobile commerce market must be taken seriously, explained TRUSTe's director of mobile products Janet J...

December 14, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Microsoft announced that its forthcoming Internet Explorer (IE) 9 web browser will include an opt-in anti-tracking feature that will block third-party content, and even prevent programs like Google Analytics from working. This is on the heels of a U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) rep...

December 13, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Online merchants should never forget that their core business is selling products. But it can be an effective marketing tactic to offer other services to potential customers. Examples of offering more than just products abound. They include things like the how-to articles, blogs, enter...

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.