Jamie Salvatori
Jamie Salvatori is founder and owner of Vat19.com, a unique gift store dedicated to finding and promoting the most "curiously awesome" products on the planet.
Jamie has a degree in computer science and a decade worth of practical experience in photography and videography.
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Merchant Voice
7 tips for building your YouTube channel
April 10, 2015 • Jamie Salvatori
My company’s YouTube channel has roughly 1.2 million subscribers. Here are seven pointers that have helped us reach that number. 1. Determine Your Goals for the Channel First, it’s important to decide ...
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Merchant Voice
Should merchants accept Bitcoin?
September 1, 2014 • Jamie Salvatori
I was recently asked if ecommerce merchants should accept Bitcoin. My answer is a resounding “yes.” I can think of only a few minor downsides and many major upsides to ...
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Merchant Voice
7 ways to lose less money on shipping
June 27, 2014 • Jamie Salvatori
Shipping sucks. It’s expensive, time consuming, fraught with peril, expensive, undervalued by your customers, and did I mention that it’s getting more expensive by the day? You can thank Amazon for ...
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Merchant Voice
You’ll always lose a price war
May 6, 2014 • Jamie Salvatori
Competing on price is a stupid tactic because it’s easy. Any idiot can undercut his competitors. Making money with this tactic, however, is rare. Only a few companies can pull ...
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Merchant Voice
Beware retargeting
March 5, 2014 • Jamie Salvatori
Advertising is a pain in the butt. It’s expensive. It requires constant maintenance, and it’s not always measurable. In our industry, though, we tend to think that we can determine ...
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Merchant Voice
Please start shipping internationally
January 17, 2014 • Jamie Salvatori
Our international orders represent approximately 15 to 20 percent of our total sales. That’s huge. We achieved this level of success through a variety of simple tactics, which I’ll outline ...
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Merchant Voice
Are you using social media all wrong?
October 30, 2013 • Jamie Salvatori
Social media is probably the worst advertising vehicle for small ecommerce merchants I’ve found. Well, perhaps advertising on a park bench would be worse, but social media is pretty darned ...
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Merchant Voice
Sell banner advertising? Yeah. Sell banner advertising.
September 19, 2013 • Jamie Salvatori
You should sell ads on your e-commerce site. I’ve yet to find evidence that putting banner advertising on your e-commerce site to be a bad thing. I know it sounds counter ...
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Merchant Voice
Content is King and Time is Your Queen
August 23, 2013 • Jamie Salvatori
In your business, you must focus on two things: content and time. They are both equally important and inextricably intertwined. Great content will never go out of style. Seriously, there’s a ...
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Merchant Voice
Thinking of starting a business? Think again!
July 31, 2013 • Jamie Salvatori
I’ve been running my own small business for over a decade and I often speak with people who are thinking about starting their own business. Listening to their expectations usually results in my shaking my head later and thinking, “They have no idea what they’re getting themselves into!”...
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Merchant Voice
Credit Card Processing Sucks
June 20, 2013 • Jamie Salvatori
Credit cards are cool. They make online shopping possible. But credit card processing, the system by which money moves from a customer to a merchant, totally sucks. It sucks for three reasons: cost, liability, and security. Let’s outline each in their stunning absurdity. Credit card ...
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Merchant Voice
Internet Sales Tax Isn’t About Fairness
April 26, 2013 • Jamie Salvatori
If you listened to the politicians tell it, the story of main street retailers needing online stores to charge and collect sales tax is all about fairness. To again quote McEnroe, “You cannot be serious!” Here’s the “argument” presented by stupid politicians as proxy for the main stree...
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Merchant Voice
Why we abandoned Amazon and eBay
March 26, 2013 • Jamie Salvatori
In business, you must always be on the lookout for so-called Black Swan events. This may seem a bit illogical, but the point is that everything you rely upon in business has the potential to completely upend or destroy your business. Many years ago, my business sold a driver’s educatio...
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Merchant Voice
Is Affiliate Marketing Dead?
February 22, 2013 • Jamie Salvatori
This is going to be a short blog post and for that I will apologize up front. But, I intended for this to be more of a comment-driven exploration than a “this is how you do this” type of blog post. Recently, we switched affiliate network providers (to one of the most respected in the ...
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Merchant Voice
How to negotiate successfully
January 20, 2013 • Jamie Salvatori
In business, almost everything is negotiable. The key to successful negotiating, however, is figuring out when to spend time and energy negotiating and how to maximize your negotiations. In the business of e-commerce, your biggest expense is typically COGS (cost of goods sold). And as ...
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Merchant Voice
Building traffic the right (aka hard) way
November 16, 2012 • Jamie Salvatori
Building an online business starts with traffic. Without traffic, you have no purpose. So, how does one do this? It will take a long time, a lot of hard work, and probably a bit of luck. But you can do it. My website currently receives nearly 50% of its visitors via direct traffic. Thi...
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Merchant Voice
Mimic Amazon at your own peril
September 20, 2012 • Jamie Salvatori
Amazon is the largest internet retailer. Copy them and you, too, could end up just like them. Do this at your own peril! In their most recent quarterly results (Q2 2012), Amazon turned in “impressive” results of $7 million in net income on $12.83 billion in sales. That’s the equivalent...
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Merchant Voice
The Free Traffic Myth
July 6, 2012 • Jamie Salvatori
The obsession over search engine result page (SERP) placement stems from the erroneous thought that traffic gained via this source is free. It isn’t. The cost associated with ranking well for competitive terms is outrageous. Not only will you spend countless hours researching keywords,...
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Merchant Voice
You’ve got a search box, right?
July 4, 2012 • Jamie Salvatori
Users who use search on your website convert at a much higher rate than those who don’t. On my website, the difference is striking. Visits with search convert about 500% higher than those without search. Please remember, though, that correlation does not imply causation. The simple ac...
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Merchant Voice
10 Ways to Make Your Video Not Suck
May 15, 2012 • Jamie Salvatori
As I’ve pointed out in previous blog posts, I know a few things about video production. Photography and videography are a passion of mine. So, listen up, please! Nearly every tutorial that explains “how” to create a video is dead wrong. Crumple them up and toss them in the bin. Why? Be...
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Merchant Voice
How we increased our international business 40%
April 18, 2012 • Jamie Salvatori
We increased our international business 40% recently. Our international packages, prior to this change, represented approximately 9.6% of all shipments. Since we made this change, they now account for 13.4% of all packages shipped. We accomplished this by lowering our shipping prices....
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Merchant Voice
My Love/Hate Relationship with Product Reviews
March 7, 2012 • Jamie Salvatori
I don’t have product reviews on my website. I may add them at some point. However, I’m quite conflicted about it. My stance may seem odd since the big players in that space would cite years of research showing that adding product reviews to your website will increase your conversion r...
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Merchant Voice
There is no magic bullet for success.
February 9, 2012 • Jamie Salvatori
Soap box time! I feel like ranting a bit today. I really bristle when I read articles claiming “The 7 Tips to SEO dominance” or “10 ways to effectively market your business” or “Top 5 Mistakes That Will Kill Your Business”. It’s as if there are magic potions to running an online busines...
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My favorite tools and services
January 25, 2012 • Jamie Salvatori
I use a variety of software in my day-to-day activities running an e-commerce company. Here is a list of my favorites. Hopefully, it’s useful to you as well! Photoshop - If you don’t know how to use any flavor of image editing software, you shouldn’t be in the e-commerce game. As I’ve ...
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Merchant Voice
How we achieved 99% accuracy in order fulfillment
December 21, 2011 • Jamie Salvatori
No matter how much time, effort, and money you put into promoting your business and converting visitors into buyers, you’ll never create repeat customers if you screw up fulfillment. This is partly why I hate out-sourced fulfillment and drop-shipping. Once you lose control over this mo...
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Merchant Voice
No Video is (far) better than a bad video
November 6, 2011 • Jamie Salvatori
I know a few things about video. While my formal schooling taught me computer science, my father is a professional cinematographer. He taught me how to take photographs and eventually how to shoot and create video. Before I got involved in e-commerce, my business (for about 7 years) wa...
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Merchant Voice
The Death of Free Shipping
September 21, 2011 • Jamie Salvatori
My highschool economics teacher preached, “There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch”. This holds true for shipping costs. In fact, the costs of shipping are rising faster than inflation. I see our shipping rates rising much faster than increases in the cost of our products. So, if you...
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Merchant Voice
How to Make Your Customer Service Shine
August 19, 2011 • Jamie Salvatori
As a small e-commerce store, you can’t compete against the big boys in many arenas. However, one arena where you can outduel them in is customer service. By definition, you are a specialist in your product category and therefore should be an expert in all things that you sell. You can...
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Merchant Voice
Mistakes I Wish I Had Never Made
July 20, 2011 • Jamie Salvatori
We all know the saying, “If I knew then what I know now, I’d be much better off”. I was thinking about that the other day and decided to put together a list of mistakes I’ve made during my e-commerce life. I had to shorten the list to just 6 items because there’s only so much room on th...
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Merchant Voice
Top 7 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Outsource Fulfillment
June 10, 2011 • Jamie Salvatori
The allure of outsourced fulfillment (such as Amazon’s FBA program) is strong. But, don’t get sucked in by the hype! In any business, you never outsource anything that you can do better or more efficiently yourself. If you don’t think you can make your fulfillment operation more effic...
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