-
Checkout Tactics
Ecommerce Know-How: Identify Related Products and Boost Sales
June 29, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Good on-site marketing, such as related-product promotions, encourages emotion-driven "joy buying," potentially boosting per-customer revenue and profit. Online shopping can be both a practical and an emotional activity. Often buyers begin an online shopping experience because they see...
-
Design & Dev Tools
The PeC Review: Adobe Kuler Creates Stunning Colors for Websites
June 23, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Adobe Kuler is a free web application that can help ecommerce site designers select beautiful and communicative color palettes, earning it four-and-a-half stars in "The PeC Review." "Color is such a pervasive part of everyday life that one tends to take it for granted," wrote Ayn E. Cr...
-
Platforms & Apps
Ecommerce Know-How: Picking the Right Shopping Cart
June 22, 2009 • Armando Roggio
An online retailer is an online marketer. Often the difference between a successful online business and a failed one is not the product or products available for sale, but how the product is promoted. As an example, consider the case of Marcel Salathé, a Swiss artist and theoretical bi...
-
Typography & Fonts
Web Design Tips: Cufón is a Fast Font Replacement Solution
June 17, 2009 • Armando Roggio
An easy-to-implement JavaScript called Cufón allows web designers to quickly embed visually interesting fonts on their web pages, opening up new opportunities for typographical design elements. Every medium has constraints. For print, there are things like size, ink density, and paper ...
-
Platforms & Apps
The PeC Review: KompoZer is a Capable, Free Web Authoring System
June 16, 2009 • Armando Roggio
KompoZer is a complete, open-source, and free web authoring system that combines web file management, coding hints, and a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) page editor that is easy for non-technical site owners or designers to grasp. The KompoZer editor has an interesting history...
-
Fraud Prevention
Ecommerce Know-How: Be Ready to Go Beyond PCI DSS Compliance
June 15, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Although ecommerce fraud incidents as related to sales are at historically low rates, online retailers (particularly small ones) should be concerned about credit card information theft and transaction fraud even beyond the familiar Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS...
-
Customer Retention
PeC Traffic Report: Four Good Web Tools to Identify Traffic-Building Trends
June 11, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Participating in trends that matter to your customers can attract significant website traffic, but knowing what trends to follow (or even how to interact with those trends) is a difficult task. In January of this year, Practical eCommerce published a column about developing customer-ce...
-
Amazon & Marketplaces
The PeC Review: Shopster Is a Brilliant Idea That Needs a Little Polish
June 10, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Shopster is a unique combination of a hosted ecommerce cart and a relatively easy supply-chain solution that promises to help many small merchants get up and running with a functional and fully-stocked online retail business. The Calgary, Alberta, Canada-based company provides its cust...
-
Social Media
Ecommerce Know-How: Use Twitter to Build a Community of Loyal Customers
June 9, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Microblogging site Twitter has the potential to be a powerful marketing and brand-building tool for ecommerce businesses interested in engaging their customers and being part of a community. But successful marketing on Twitter, or any microblogging site, requires more than just posting ...
-
User Experience
Web Design Tips: The Laws of Ecommerce Navigation Design
June 4, 2009 • Armando Roggio
CSS, Flash, jQuery, and an arsenal of other powerful web techniques and technologies have unbound website design, creating the opportunity to develop either exceptional user interfaces or really frustrating ones. Furthermore, the growth of "cookie-cutter" ecommerce templates (i.e., “i...
-
Design & Development
The PeC Review: Magento User Guide eBook
June 2, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Magento Commerce is becoming one of the most popular and, perhaps, most exciting ecommerce platforms available. But with all of its online retailing prowess comes some level of complexity that at least a few merchants find daunting. A new ebook seeks to make using this powerful ecommerc...
-
Platforms & Apps
Ecommerce Know-How: Cloud Computing in the Ecommerce Forecast
June 1, 2009 • Armando Roggio
If meteorologists predicted ecommerce and computing trends, the forecast would be at least partly cloudy as more computational and transactional applications join the cloud computing front. But are the wispy clouds on the near horizon the harbinger of a gentle, growth-encouraging rain o...
-
Finance
Ecommerce Know-How: Alternative Financing
May 28, 2009 • Armando Roggio
The United States and much of the western world is in the midst of a recession that has made business credit difficult to find. More than 1 million Americans lost their jobs in the third quarter of 2008, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data released May 19, 2009. And perhap...
-
Social Media
The PeC Review: Tinker Sorts Your Twitter Tweets for Brand-Safe Marketing
May 27, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Tinker sorts and organizes Twitter.com tweets around brands, products, and other topics or events. This potentially gives ecommerce businesses a new, brand-safe way to market via social media and a means of monitoring popular trends. Tinker allows users to create so-called events based...
-
Photography & Video
The Shopping Experience: Envato’s FlashDen Has Broad Selection of Flash Files for Developers
May 22, 2009 • Armando Roggio
FlashDen.net sells Adobe Flash-based plugins, content sliders, animations, preloaders, and menus that web developers can integrate into their designs saving a lot of time. While the site had a great selection of downloadable products, easy navigation, a strong community, and great aes...
-
Inventory
Ecommerce Know-How: Improve Cash Flow by Delaying Suppliers
May 21, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Cash flow can be the strongest indicator of an ecommerce business's success or failure, and properly managing your accounts payable and receivable can be the difference between success or insolvency. Years ago, I read an article that described cash flow as the difference in time betwee...
-
Photography & Video
Web Design Tips: Use this PNG Fix for Attractive Images in Older Browsers
May 20, 2009 • Armando Roggio
For most website designs, the portable network graphic, or PNG, is simply the best available image format. But older, noncompliant versions of the Internet Explorer browser (IE) poorly managed this extensible file format's powerful transparency capabilities, making it hard to design for...
-
Design & Dev Tools
The PeC Review: Microsoft Tool Helps Designers with Internet Explorer Compatibility Problems
May 18, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Designing for Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser has always been a problem as designers were forced to choose between widely accepted Internet standards and what would work in IE. This problem has been exacerbated by the complexity of designers having to maintain various generat...
-
Social Media
The PeC Review: Share This Makes Adding Social Media a Breeze
May 14, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Share This is a JavaScript-based widget that merchants can easily be embedded on their websites, allowing visitors to email web content to friends, send links as text messages, or post the content to a couple dozen social sharing sites like Facebook, MySpace, or Digg. Each week, "The P...
-
Product Pages
Ecommerce Know-How: Writing Product Descriptions that Sell
May 13, 2009 • Armando Roggio
An ecommerce website, boiled down to its dry essence, is a virtual salesman at best and a slow-to-deliver electronic vending machine at worst. Consciously or not, online stores are conceived, designed, and created to sell products while making as little personal contact with a customer ...
-
Technical SEO
PeC Traffic Report: Does Google’s “Vince Update” Favor Big Brands?
May 12, 2009 • Armando Roggio
A recent change to the Google algorithm apparently favors established, well-known brands in some categories, potentially making it harder for small online sellers to compete with large retailers for search engine rankings. The so-called "Vince Update" seems to have taken effect on Janu...
-
Analytics & Data
The PeC Review: Woopra Promises Real-Time Web Analytics and Behavior Tracking
May 7, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Woopra is an innovative web analytics suite that promises to vastly improve the information that website owners can collect and monitor. As customers return to your store, Woopra begins to track behavioral profiles, allowing online merchants to monitor individual customer behavior o...
-
Schools & Resources
12 Good Ecommerce Resources
May 6, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce entrepreneurs frequently earn their profits in small margins, where slight competitive advantages can be the difference between flourishing and floundering. Gaining a competitive advantage can be as simple as trying a new marketing tactic, making a subtle adjustment to your w...
-
Code
Web Design Tips: Adding A Featured Section to Your Site Using jQuery and jFlow
May 6, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Smooth content sliders are widgets that can show clickable product images, Adobe Flash, HTML, or other content, effectively creating a "featured section" in a small amount of space. After researching several "easy" solutions (most of which did not work), I tried the jFlow plugin that ...
-
Customer Retention
Ecommerce Know-How: Six Ways To Improve Your Online Store
May 4, 2009 • Armando Roggio
An online merchant's most important marketing and sales tool is a content-rich, visually interesting, and factually accurate website. In this edition of "eCommerce Know-How," I am going to propose six ways to improve your site, and I am offering these methods exactly five months before...
-
Analytics & Data
Ecommerce Know-How: Four Ways to Measure Print Advertising Effectiveness
April 28, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Print advertising is a waning media vehicle. It has become less effective in the post-interruption era. However, in spite of this decline, printed display advertising and classifieds can still provide a solid return on investment (ROI) for some ecommerce merchants willing and able to me...
-
Google Ads
The PeC Review: Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool Lets You See What Spiders See
April 24, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool can help ecommerce merchants find pertinent keywords specific to a given URL, potentially improving search-engine-optimization and pay-per-click-advertising campaigns. Using URLs from your AdWords account, the Search Based Keyword Tool (SKTool) "dis...
-
Code
Web Design Tips: Converting an Older Table-Based Email Template To CSS
April 23, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Many email templates were developed using older table-based layouts that "break" easily and are very complicated to maintain. Tables in HTML are fantastic for displaying tabular data. But as a layout tool they interfere with some dynamic and rich media elements, cause accessibility cha...
-
Business
Ecommerce Know-How: Self-Employment Tax Requirements
April 22, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce businesses that operate as sole proprietorships, partnerships, and even limited liability companies frequently pass tax liability from the company to the owners and contractors of the business. These owners and contractors must then pay self-employment tax, which is typically ...
-
Platforms & Apps
The PeC Review: “Remember the Milk” A Helpful Organizing Tool
April 20, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce entrepreneurs are busy people who manage suppliers, web marketing, merchandising, accounting, and more. Many of these entrepreneurs keep lists on legal pads or stick dozens of yellow Post-it notes to the sides of their monitors like a mane on a lion. Australia-based Remem...