Jennifer D. Meacham - Practical Ecommerce

Articles by: Jennifer D. Meacham

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Jennifer D. Meacham

Jennifer D. Meacham

Jennifer D. Meacham is an entrepreneur, journalist, and book author who comes to Practical Ecommerce as a strategist for websites big and small. She hails from Revenue, an international business magazine for internet performance marketers where she served as managing editor, and The Seattle Times, where as staff reporter she covered everything from online ticket sales to business growth trends.

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Business
Lessons Learned: $15,000 Name Boosts SpyGuy.com

June 24, 2018 • Jennifer D. Meacham

SpyGuy.com sells security systems — hidden cameras, surveillance detectors, audio recorders. The company is located in Richardson, Texas, near Dallas. Allen Walton’s ecommerce site brings in roughly $1 million per year.
Business
Lessons Learned: Hollywood Mirrors Has a Good Problem

May 9, 2018 • Jennifer D. Meacham

With less than two years online, U.K.-based Hollywood Mirrors has a good problem: keeping up with demand. “I should have ordered more stock, instead of being cautious.” Adam Watson, founder of Hollywood ...
Business
Lessons Learned: Battic Door Thrives in Energy Conservation

April 10, 2018 • Jennifer D. Meacham

Massachusetts-based Battic Door is 15 years in the making. With a credit-card investment of $5,000, owner Mark Tyrol has turned his home-insulation ideas into $1.5 million of annual sales. “I found ...
Design & Dev Tools
Product Video: Easy Distribution Tools

December 31, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

Editor's Note: This is part four in our special report on “Video for Ecommerce,” where we describe real stories of online merchants creatively using video to drive sales and grow their brands. Previous installments are linked in below. What’s next once you’ve added product videos to yo...
Design & Development
Video in a Snap: Easy Video Creation Techniques

December 24, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

Editor's Note: This is part three in our special report on “Video for Ecommerce,” where we describe real stories of online merchants creatively using video to drive sales and grow their brands. Previous installments are linked in the "Related articles" section, below. Practical eCommer...
Conversion
Innovative Video Use Increases Conversions for Merchants

December 8, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

Editor's Note: This is part two in our special report on “Video for Ecommerce,” where we describe real stories of online merchants creatively using video to drive sales and grow their brands. Visitors to RMTracking.com are greeted by a video host, positioned unobtrusively in the lower ...
Conversion
Video Boosts Online Sales, Merchants Confirm

November 19, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

With the holidays ahead, and a new inflatable fruit cake product selling only sparsely, Seattle toy store Archie McPhee this week is setting out to drive online sales with an explanatory video. It’s apparently working. Within 12 hours of launching the video ad campaign, sales for th...
Conversion
Automated Chat Captures Prospects After They Leave A Site

November 3, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

UpSellit’s SMARTagent promises to automatically bring shoppers back to your site and close potential sales. It’s part user-engaged action, part automated chat, and part sales-floor closer. UpSellit CTO and president Chris Wampler said that e-retailers who add it to their sites could exp...
Conversion
Interactive Chat Improves Sales, Customer Service

October 30, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

Memorysuppliers.com offers more than just electronic-device memory cards. It also offers one-to-one, 24-hour-a-day chat. With four people dedicated to chat and email responses, Memorysuppliers.com is one of thousands of ecommerce companies adding chat to its marketing and customer se...
Design & Development
Mobilizing The Web With Cascading Style Sheets

October 16, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

Benjamin Chui isn’t taking ecommerce sitting down. The founder of Ben’s Bargain Center is striding through San Francisco’s financial district, with a smartphone in his hand and one of three mobile versions of his ecommerce website on tap. For his site Bensbargains.net, the transition t...
Design & Development
Mobile Commerce: 800 Million Untapped Users

October 9, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

Web-capable mobile handsets and their nearly 800 million users worldwide represent a significant and largely untapped market for ecommerce retailers. Selling by phone is a concept almost as old as Alexander Graham Bell, but in the 21st century mobile commerce (m-commerce) might be more...
Conversion
Trigger-Based Email Marketing Improves Sales and Customer Experience

October 2, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

Trigger marketing is the next step for the critical ecommerce function of automated email communications. While traditional automated emails follow newsletter sign-ups and orders, trigger marketing sends emails for other events such as particular search patterns, customer birthdays, hol...
Conversion
Web Widgets Come Of Age For Ecommerce Sites

September 30, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

For executives like Braden Hoeppner, director of web sales for optical store Coastalcontacts.com, today’s web widgets are a fast and easy way to improve customer service and create interest. Thanks to the widget behind Coastalcontacts.com’s “Tell a friend” link, “we got more features t...
Design & Development
Open-Source Alternatives To Microsoft Office, Part II

September 17, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

In part I of this series we looked at why the use of open-source software is now gaining momentum. Here, we take a look at some of the most-recognized open-source alternatives to Microsoft Office “Light” desktop MS Office alternatives KOffice is one “light” answer to Microsoft Office ...
Design & Development
Open-Source Alternatives To Microsoft Office, Part I

September 15, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

Ten years ago, a tiny software community launched free Microsoft-like programs for those with UNIX or Linux computer operating systems. A few months ago, this software community—known as KDE—rolled out its first free Office-style software for Windows users. It’s a competitive first fo...
Conversion
Employing Social Media

September 3, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

This job posting arrived in my email inbox yesterday: “Responsibilities: Create and maintain MySpace, Live Spaces, Facebook, Bebo, MOG, Twitter, Loopt, Wikipedia, and other profiles; gather content for social profiles; and report on the effectiveness of social site placement.” Pay is u...
Design & Development
The Challenges of Extended Validation SSLs

August 27, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

This piece, part two in Practical Ecommerce’s series on the new Extended Validation SSL certificates, looks at the challenges still to face for consumer-wide adoption of EV SSL. Part one of the series is an interview with an EV SSL expert at Comodo, an EV SSL issuer. Online shoppers kn...
Design & Development
Interview: Comodo Exec On Extended Validation SSL Certificates

August 22, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

Like its SSL precursor, EV SSL certification encrypts customer inputted information and marks the page with a yellow padlock icon. Unlike SSL, this new form of certification comes with much more vetting and a bonus “green bar” in the URL area of most web browsers that clearly indicates ...
Conversion
Offer Multiple Currencies To Facilitate International Sales

August 8, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

To cater to an international clientele, multi-currency processing is the way to go. “In addition to Internet usage growing much faster outside the U.S., countries that have the strongest purchasing power are also outside the U.S. – like those in the European Union,” says Melissa Jones...
Conversion
Decline In Dollar Creates Opportunities For U.S. Merchants

August 6, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

With the U.S. dollar’s decline, buying American-based products online just got a lot cheaper for the rest of the world’s slew of Internet shoppers. Internet users outside the U.S. now account for 80 percent of the world’s online population, with rapidly developing countries experiencin...
Business
SBA Financing for Ecommerce Firms

July 28, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

Working into the evening, Sterling Savings banker Michael Williams wraps up another day of SBA lending in Portland, Ore.’s “Silicon Forrest.” As business development officer for Sterling Savings’ SBA division, Williams knows firsthand the issues faced by ecommerce sites looking for an S...
Platforms
Shopping Cart Functionality Can Increase Sales

June 25, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

The tenet of customer service in the online shopping process is simple: the more you engage potential customers, and provide links relevant to their needs, the more they’ll buy and the longer they’ll remain a customer. As it turns out, the solution to that challenge may be as simple as ...
Platforms
Third-Party Integrations Make Shopping Carts Easier To Use

June 23, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

By day Sean Dupuis is a courier for FedEx. By night, he sends out packages of his own: boxes of boots and moccasins and sheepskin bags for his bustling website business called Sheepskin and Things. Stretched thin, he’s able to get it all done because his shopping cart and its third-part...
Platforms
Shopping Carts And Search Engines

June 18, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

When searching for “educational toys” on Google, at No. 5 on the list you’ll find BrainwavesToys.com—up from No. 78 a year ago. Michael Stebbins, co-founder of the business, employed a series of search engine optimization (SEO) strategies within his cart to achieve this result. “A lot ...
Fraud Prevention
Many Effective Tools to Detect Stolen Credit Cards, Part 3 of 3

May 5, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

This is the third and final installment in a series outlining and explaining tools to identify and prevent credit card fraud. Previously, we discussed different methods of verification and geographic order tracking. Here are a few more methods you can use to combat fraud. Fraud scoring...
Fraud Prevention
Effective Tools to Detect Stolen Credit Cards, Part 2 Of 3

May 5, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

Many online merchants are already on board with fraud-detection technology. To fill in the gaps, here is part two of a comprehensive list of fraud detection strategies. Previously we discussed authorization and address and credit card verification. Here are five more ways to catch fraud...
Fraud Prevention
Effective Tools to Detect Stolen Credit Cards, Part 1 Of 3

April 30, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

There are hundreds of branded tools that ecommerce merchants can turn to for help in catching fraudulent credit card orders. Some tools are free, and some come bundled or offered as additional features in payment processing systems like Authorize.net and Google Checkout. Others can be s...
Fraud Prevention
Credit Card Fraud: How Big Is The Problem?

April 23, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

Reports of website data breaches, identity theft and credit card fraud are increasingly in the news. But is the problem as widespread as the coverage suggests? Anyone who collects payments or customer information online runs the risk of being targeted by thieves. However, the likeliho...
Business
Insuring Against Fraud, Data Breaches

April 17, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

A few insurance companies provide policies for credit card fraud and data breaches, covering both a merchant's hard cost of fraudulent sales and any liability for data breaches. AIG, the publicly-traded insurance company, was one of the first. AIG's insurance policy AIG has offered W...
Business
Merchants Liable For Data Breaches

April 17, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

What do online merchants Art.com, Geeks.com and Bananas.com have in common? They're three in a small, but growing, list of ecommerce sites hacked for their customer's credit card data. Not only are there legal ramifications for not protecting customers' private data, but breached comp...