PEC Staff
Practical Ecommerce is a leading online magazine for ecommerce businesses. Its mission is to provide independent editorial and commentary to help merchants of all sizes.
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Platforms & Apps
ProStores Upgrades Platform, Simplifies Store Design and Management
August 12, 2010 • PEC Staff
Editor's Note: Ecommerce service providers frequently launch new, interesting products, or issue upgrades to existing ones. We address these new products and upgrades periodically, and in this installment Contributing Editor Lisa Morgan explains eBay Prostores' new upgrade to its hosted...
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Conversion
The Future of Your Conversion Funnel
August 12, 2010 • PEC Staff
As online merchants we all want to attract and retain as many profitable customers as possible at the lowest cost. However, the way we’re marketing ourselves may be getting in the way. In a recent webinar we discussed a few common pitfalls as they relate to branding, competition, part...
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Conversion
Holiday Tips for 2010, Part 2
August 6, 2010 • PEC Staff
The 2010 holiday season is nearly here. With that in mind, Practical eCommerce is publishing a few good holiday-selling tips each week. Our second installment, provided by experienced ecommerce professionals, is below. Plan Ahead for Holiday Rush “Make sure all of your website improve...
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Conversion
Survey Results: How Important Is Video in Ecommerce?
August 5, 2010 • PEC Staff
Practical eCommerce polled readers in July about the use of video in ecommerce. We wanted to know how many of our readers have posted product videos on their ecommerce sites, and if not, why. The July 2010 survey asked four questions about ecommerce video usage, with a comment section ...
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Business
Lessons Learned: 877MyJuicer.com Changes Platforms, and Evolves
August 3, 2010 • PEC Staff
“Lessons Learned” is an occasional series in which we ask ecommerce business owners to share their experiences, good and bad. For this installment, we visited with Andrew Casey, founder and CEO of 877MyJuicer.com, a Del Mar, Calif.-based seller of juicers and other health-related and ki...
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Design & Development
Great User Experience Is More than a Pretty Ecommerce Site
July 29, 2010 • PEC Staff
Many ecommerce merchants think of user experience in terms of the user interface. They take great pains to optimize the aesthetic appearance of their sites with the goal of increasing conversions. Yet, it’s often the less sexy backend issues that are driving customers away, and increa...
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Conversion
Holiday Tips for 2010, Part 1
July 29, 2010 • PEC Staff
The 2010 holiday season is nearly here. With that in mind, Practical eCommerce will publish a few good holiday-selling tips each week. Our first installment, provided by experienced ecommerce professionals, is below. Create Holiday Landing Pages Create custom landing pages for your em...
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Business
Merchant Profile: David Sasson of OverstockArt
July 27, 2010 • PEC Staff
You could argue that a center of the online retail art world is in Kansas. That's where OverstockArt.com is located, and in nine years it has grown to be a leading online retailer of original art reproductions. Its founder and CEO, David Sasson, has guided the business from its inceptio...
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User Experience
Screen Readers: Eight Frequently Asked Questions
July 27, 2010 • PEC Staff
Editor's Note: The article below discusses screen readers, the software that reads aloud text on a computer screen. Screen reader software allows visually handicapped consumers to use Internet sites. To help text-reading consumers understand what a visually-handicapped user experiences,...
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Marketing & Advertising
Ask an Expert: Will My Facebook Store Help with Search Engine Optimization?
July 22, 2010 • PEC Staff
"Ask an Expert" is an occasional feature where we ask ecommerce experts questions from online merchants. For this installment, we address a question about the search engine implications from selling on Facebook. The question comes from Brian M. Almashie, vice president of ecommerce for ...
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Conversion
Gearing Up for the 2010 Holiday Season
July 21, 2010 • PEC Staff
If you haven’t started thinking about the 2010 holiday season, now is the time. The economy is still shaky, customers remain fickle, and if you’re not prepared you could miss out on the most important shopping season of the year. Thanks to technological advances, we now have more info...
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Conversion
TheFind.com CEO: ‘We Index Every Product from Every Store’
July 21, 2010 • PEC Staff
Specialized shopping search engines are becoming increasingly important for consumers. Among the largest of these shopping engines is TheFind, which receives more than 25 million visits per month. The products of most ecommerce merchants are likely already featured on that site, as the ...
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Email & Text Marketing
Tools to Combine Email Marketing with Social Media
July 19, 2010 • PEC Staff
If you’ve been selling online for any amount of time, you know how valuable email marketing can be, especially among existing customers. And you may also have pages set up on at least a couple of popular social networks, and you might have a blog. Once separate, these forms of marketi...
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Marketing & Advertising
Ask an Expert: Why Isn’t Google Indexing All of My Site’s Pages?
July 15, 2010 • PEC Staff
"Ask an Expert" is an occasional feature where we ask ecommerce experts questions from online merchants. For this installment, we address a question about getting pages from an ecommerce site fully indexed by Google. It comes from Robert Mobberley, CEO of Performance Motorcare Products,...
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Design & Development
8 Questions on Cloud Computing
July 13, 2010 • PEC Staff
Traditional web hosting assumes that customers pay for a fixed amount of storage space and a fixed amount of bandwidth. But the traffic to many websites varies, and storage and bandwidth needs fluctuate over time. For those websites, cloud computing, or cloud hosting, could save them ...
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Business
Lessons Learned: Rob Holzer with S&S Worldwide
July 13, 2010 • PEC Staff
"Lessons Learned" is an occasional feature where we ask seasoned ecommerce professionals about their experiences in online retailing. For this installment, we've asked Rob Holzer, emarketing manager with S&S Worldwide, a 100-year-old company that sells craft kits, games, educational...
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Business
Intuit Exec Discusses QuickBooks 2010, Possibility of New Shopping Cart
July 7, 2010 • PEC Staff
Many ecommerce merchants use QuickBooks, or are at least familiar with it. There is a new version of QuickBooks that includes new document management, online banking, and other features. To discuss QuickBooks 2010 and other Intuit products, we spoke with Alex Hood, product management le...
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Business
Internet Inventions Covered by Patent Law, Says Supreme Court
July 1, 2010 • PEC Staff
The Bilski case involved, potentially, a dramatic shift in U.S. patent law. It's been awaiting decision by the U.S. Supreme Court since the fall of 2009, and earlier this week, the Court rendered its opinion. The case involved the scope of potential patents, and whether an invention mus...
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Amazon & Marketplaces
Alibaba CEO on Acquisition of Vendio, Social Commerce, Product Sourcing
June 29, 2010 • PEC Staff
Alibaba is a huge force in global, business-to-business ecommerce. The company is based in China and it links millions of wholesale suppliers with businesses that resell those products. The company ...
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Business
Language Translation: Focus on Local Ethnic Audiences, Says Expert
June 28, 2010 • PEC Staff
There are more consumers that don't speak English than those that do. We wondered the best way for ecommerce merchants to reach those non-English-speaking prospects. Merely translating a website is only part of the challenge. To help us understand all of the issues surrounding language ...
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Email & Text Marketing
Tips for Formatting HTML Emails in Microsoft Outlook
June 23, 2010 • PEC Staff
Roughly one-third of all email recipients use Microsoft Outlook. But that program famously distorts HTML-formatted emails when other email clients, such as Yahoo!, Gmail, and Thunderbird, render the same email messages differently. The result is that email marketers, such as ecommerce ...
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Business
Bilski Case to Change U. S. Internet Patents?
June 22, 2010 • PEC Staff
Innovation on the Internet depends on the ability by entrepreneurs to protect intellectual property. Google, Amazon and other Internet companies have received many U.S. patents that protect, seemingly, processes or methods of doing business. But that protection could be threatened by a ...
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Design & Development
What’s a Video Codec?
June 21, 2010 • PEC Staff
Editor's Note: Most observers agree that video enhances an ecommerce site and likely increases its conversion rate. But there are many different video formats, and the terminology surrounding the use of video can be daunting. To help us sort through some of these complexities, we contin...
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Design & Development
Prebuilt Ecommerce Templates Save Money, Says AlgoZone’s CEO
June 17, 2010 • PEC Staff
Ecommerce merchants frequently incur development fees to obtain specific features or appearances for their websites. But there are also prebuilt templates that can do this, at prices much less than custom-built solutions. One maker of these is AlgoZone. It offers hundreds of ready-mad...
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Code
HTML5 Video: 12 Frequently Asked Questions
June 14, 2010 • PEC Staff
Editor's Note: Many observers believe the new version of HTML, called HTML5, will change online video because of the <video> tag that the new version contains. But, there are many unresolved details involving HTML5 video, and we asked a video expert about some of these. The exper...
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Business
Google TV Ads Help Online Gift Merchant
June 9, 2010 • PEC Staff
When it comes to marketing, many merchants think of pay-per-click ads, or search engine optimization or even email newsletters. But one merchant has successfully used television advertising. He is Jamie Salvatori, founder and owner of VAT19.com, a retailer of unusual gift items. He use...
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Conversion
Videos Help Consumers, Says Invodo CEO
June 3, 2010 • PEC Staff
Nearly every ecommerce merchant who uses product videos reports that it increases sales. But there are disagreements as to what to include in a product video, how to produce it and where to show it. Invodo is a company that specializes in assisting merchants with product videos, and i...
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Design & Development
Mobile Payment Processors Extend Reach with AppNinjas
June 2, 2010 • PEC Staff
The rise of mobile devices is affecting ecommerce. More consumers are using these devices to shop online and more merchants are using them to collect payments. We recently spoke with two experts in the credit card business about processing payments on mobile devices. They are John Waldr...
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Conversion
10 Questions on Product Recommendations
May 27, 2010 • PEC Staff
Many merchants use automated product recommendations to increase sales and conversions. These recommendations are usually dynamically generated on an ecommerce site, and they are typically based on the purchase habits of a particular customer, or a group of customers. Strands Recommend...
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Payments
Credit Card Veterans Focus on iPhone, Mobile Payments
May 26, 2010 • PEC Staff
The rise of mobile devices is affecting ecommerce. More consumers are using these devices to shop online and more merchants are using them to collect payments. Two experts in the ...
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