Michael A. Cox
Michael A. Cox is a former writer for Practical Ecommerce.
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Platforms & Apps
NetSuite Aims to Increase eCommerce Efficiencies
December 17, 2008 • Michael A. Cox
Ten years ago, Evan Goldberg was grousing at Oracle Chief Larry Ellison about the lack of an ecommerce business management software bundle. Ellison challenged Goldberg to do something about it, and the result is NetSuite.
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Business
Pirated Software Rampant Among Personal Computer Users
September 18, 2008 • Michael A. Cox
To somebody who has never owned or made his living creating and licensing intellectual property, it may not be a big deal. Really, who is it going to hurt when someone downloads a piece of software without paying for it and uses it for personal gain? Or, what’s the harm when a kid down...
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Business
Profile: Credit Card Veterans Will Target Experienced Merchants
September 2, 2008 • Michael A. Cox
If you’ve got John Waldron and Sloane Bouchever in a three-way on the phone, the best strategy is try and stay out of the way and take copious notes – better yet turn on a recorder. When these two highly successful and motivated online business pros get to talking about merchants and cr...
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Business
Dr. J’s Pet Project
July 11, 2008 • Michael A. Cox
To be honest, it was a little embarrassing to be the daughter of an entrepreneur who was trying to start up a mail order livestock supply business back in 1975. Ruth Jeffers was a little girl when her dad, Dr. Keith Jeffers, decided to provide a higher level of service to his cattle cl...
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Platforms & Apps
Magento Shopping Cart and 20,000 Friends
June 18, 2008 • Michael A. Cox
Roy Rubin held the cyber equivalent of a barn raising and had several thousand of his closest friends over for the event. Of course, everyone actually stayed home and did the work from their own little cubicles, kitchen tables, laptops on airplanes and Blackberrys on bar tops.
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Design & Development
Internet Security: The Seatbelt Is In The Trunk
April 30, 2008 • Michael A. Cox
Suppose you took delivery on your new car and the salesman told you, as you signed the order, that the seatbelt, antilock brakes, and the airbags were in a box in the trunk and that if you want to be safer you might want to have an expensive expert install them. That would be about the ...
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Design & Development
Interview: Ex-hacker Mitnick On Avoiding Fraudsters
March 31, 2008 • Michael A. Cox
You know that hidden bomb shtick in the movies? There's a bomb that's going to go off and kill a gazillion people. First, the good guys have to find it. Then they have to figure how to get into to it to disarm it. Then they almost have it disarmed when they discover a booby trap they ...
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Business
Enterprise Zones: Ecommerce Catches A Break
October 31, 2007 • Michael A. Cox
For anyone who doesn’t think ecommerce is a viable part of the world economy and plays a role in job creation and tax base expansion, here’s a flash: Ecommerce businesses are now eligible, at least in Oregon, for special tax incentives when they locate in enterprise zones, which are geo...
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Business
A Lender Or Borrower Be Is Prosper.com
October 15, 2007 • Michael A. Cox
The increased difficulty for people and small businesses to acquire decently priced loans, or loans at all, created a vacuum in the money business in recent years. Chris Larsen, the man who gave us E-Loan.com beat Mother Nature to the punch in filling the void. It occurred to him that...
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Business
Caveat Vendor: PCI Is Here
October 3, 2007 • Michael A. Cox
Here’s one of those cold chill up your spine thoughts: Every day, there are at least two new threats to data security developed by identity thieves and Internet system hackers. And it never stops. Security pros slam and lock one gate and the hordes find another chink and slither through...
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Business
No Fear For Blinds.com
September 19, 2007 • Michael A. Cox
Jay Steinfeld can’t really tell you where his core values came from. Maybe it was instinctive. Maybe it wasn’t. Regardless, as the years went by, three core values in particular became more and more what drove him in life and in business. Steinfeld: I wanted to be a pioneer, a leade...
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Business
Interview: UPS V.P. On Shipping Technology
July 11, 2007 • Michael A. Cox
When Jordan Colletta talks about the way we used to ship and track and deliver goods before it became a way of life for thousands of e-entrepreneurs, he knows what he's talking about. For three years, starting in 1975, he was one of those guys you see running in and out of businesse...
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Business
If Your ‘Baby Is Ugly,’ Fix It
May 29, 2007 • Michael A. Cox
You know those little spur-of-the-moment, do-it-on-a dare things that occasionally bring about permanent change Something like that happened to Shirley Tan. There she was in her third year at Golden Gate College in San Francisco, at work on a degree in international business. A friend...
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Business
Toolking.com: From eBay To A $31M Empire
May 9, 2007 • Michael A. Cox
If you order pliers from Toolking.com, you really can't just order pliers. You need to know what kind. Do you want locking pliers? Needle nose pliers? Tongue-and-groove pliers, slip-joint pliers, linesman's pliers, diagonal cutting pliers, electrician's pliers, hose clamp pliers, super-...
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Business
Profile: Competing Against Major Companies
February 23, 2007 • Michael A. Cox
In the Green Mountains of Vermont, there are legends. There is, for instance, the legend of Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys — patriots to a fault, if a little rough around the edges. Part of their lore includes the "taking" of Fort Ticonderoga over in New York. Allen and his ba...
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Business
The Struggle To Create A Successful eBusiness
February 5, 2007 • Michael A. Cox
It's a good thing Mother Parkinson, a librarian, told her boys that people would never buy books from somebody on the Internet. Otherwise, we might not have Peapod, the quintessential online supermarket serving about 260,000 customers from Boston to Milwaukee and from Washington, D.C., ...
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Business
Craigslist.com’s Craig Newmark
December 1, 2006 • Michael A. Cox
Craig Newmark is the founder of the intensely successful Craigslist.com. As far as he is concerned, less is definitely more when it comes to website design and his business.
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Conversion
Sales Tax Initiative Still Initiating
November 1, 2006 • Michael A. Cox
Ever since the Supreme Court of the United States put the burden back on the states to come up with a way to collect sales tax on millions of Internet sales, the Streamlined Sales Tax Project (SSTP) has been chipping away at the monumental task of getting 50 states and more than 7,000 t...
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Amazon & Marketplaces
Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne
November 1, 2006 • Michael A. Cox
A doctorate in philosophy from Stanford University probably helps Founder, CEO, and Chairman Patrick Byrne deal with the daily esotericism that goes with running a company like Overstock.com ...
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Business
Thralow.net’s Daniel Thralow
October 1, 2006 • Michael A. Cox
In December of 1996, Daniel Thralow (pronounced Trah-low) sold one pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses on the Internet. Thralow: A local guy said to me, “I’m starting this little group of websites. Give me a hundred dollars and I’ll build you a web page.” So we built this little web page—it ha...
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Business
Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson on ‘The Long Tail’
September 1, 2006 • Michael A. Cox
Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, calls the phenomenon “The Long Tail,” which happens to be the title of his bestseller. Anderson, a physicist, turned economist, turned editor and author, wasn’t talking about the long tail wagging the dog, although that is exactly what has happened in a marketplace turned upside-down by something he learned studying statistics.
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Business
Website Profile: Selling Fish Makes Online Niche
August 1, 2006 • Michael A. Cox
In Meredith Wilson's The Music Man, the opening number has a gang of traveling salesmen pattering cleverly about how a salesman’s got to know the territory and his products. Professor Harold Hill was declared a fake — he didn’t know the territory. When it comes to selling salmon, wild ...
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Business
Jupiter Research’s Patti Freeman Evans
August 1, 2006 • Michael A. Cox
Patti Freeman Evans has been in the ecommerce industry before the beginning. For the past 19 years she has been creating customer-centric ecommerce sites, integrating channels effectively, developing innovative marketing initiatives and ensuring high-standard customer service and order-...
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Business
AbeBooks.com Co-founder Rick Pura
July 1, 2006 • Michael A. Cox
Rick Pura just finished writing the software code for "Rick’s Search Engine." He thinks it works pretty well, and he may go into the search engine business. He knows he can write good software; it was he and Keith Waters who engineered the database and system that powers the best-used-b...
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Business
Givens Books Partners with AbeBooks.com
July 1, 2006 • Michael A. Cox
When most of us think about an ecommerce website, we think of a place with pictures and descriptions of inventory, which a shopper can toss into a virtual shopping cart and buy with a mouse click. With the advent of portals such as Abebooks.com, there are esellers who don’t have carts. ...
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Business
BuySafe.com Founder Steve Woda
May 31, 2006 • Michael A. Cox
For every person who shops on the Internet, there are hundreds of others who don’t – who won’t. They don’t want to. They feel, with some justification, that doing so would lead to the nightmares...
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Business
Clear Block! TracksideSales.com Rides The Mainline
May 31, 2006 • Michael A. Cox
Clear Block is a railroad signal, indicating that the block of track ahead is clear and no train wrecks are in the offing. Joe Derouin, a 48-year-old who loves trains, dreamed of being in the model-railroad business. He got the “clear block” call from his wife Jeanne almost eight years ...
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Business
Greatlookz.com: Persistence Pays for Zoovy Store Owner
May 1, 2006 • Michael A. Cox
"I always wanted to be a pioneer coming across the plains in a covered wagon,” says Marion Keisling. However, there is not much need for covered wagon driving these days, so Keisling has done her pioneer thing in the ecommerce business. She runs a company called Greatlookz.com and does...
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Business
Zoovy CEO David Steel
May 1, 2006 • Michael A. Cox
The song, the one by Leroy VanDyke in 1959, tells about a boy from Arkansas who longs to be an auctioneer. He went off to school and learned how to say things like, “Thirty dollar bid it now, thirty-five Will you gimmie thirty-five, To make it thirty-five, to bid it a thirty-five Who wo...
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Fraud Prevention
eCommerce Fraud: Build a Human Firewall
April 1, 2006 • Michael A. Cox
There is a fellow from Europe named Kevin Mitnick, who can find your Social Security number online in 15 seconds. He was the hacker who was elevated to “computer terrorist” status by the FBI and Interpol. They caught him and put him in jail for five years, but there are thousands like h...
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