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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Business
SEO and Email Launch New Product
January 24, 2007 • PEC Staff
As with many great products in the marketplace, the diaper caddy was conceived out of necessity. Melissa Bramlage, a mother of two, needed a product that could hold all the essential baby care items in one convenient location. It seemed that every time she needed to change her child's d...
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Business
High Performer Series: Appliancepartspros.com
January 22, 2007 • PEC Staff
Roman Kagan has built a successful niche business selling hard-to-find appliance parts to do-it-yourself types around the country. The site, Appliancepartspros.com was launched in 1999 featuring about 300 products and in seven years has grown to showcase more than 1 million parts for 17...
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Business
Can VoIP Help My Business?
January 22, 2007 • PEC Staff
Major telecommunication companies and start-ups alike are trying to establish themselves in the rapidly expanding VoIP marketplace. That hasn't escaped the notice of many people within the Internet telephone business, who anticipate 2007 could be a banner year for the technology. VoIP ...
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Business
Zimini.com’s Robert Carlton
January 19, 2007 • PEC Staff
Zimini offers a digital couponing and promotion platform to provide merchants and marketers with a robust set of geographic, demographic, and interest-based targeting tools. If you’re an online or brick-and-mortar ...
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Business
High Performer Series: Drsfosterandsmith.com
January 17, 2007 • PEC Staff
A Foster & Smith catalog is a familiar sight at the home of a pet owner. Whether a household includes dogs, cats, birds, reptiles or other animals as pets, Foster & Smith has been a resource for more than two decades for pet owners to purchase supplies and products. Three veter...
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Fraud Prevention
What You Didn’t Know About Payment Systems
January 17, 2007 • PEC Staff
What you don't know can truly hurt your online business. This has never been more true than when you set out to choose an Internet payment systems. It's not so much that making a wrong decision can harm your business irreparably (although, it can); it's that there is so much information...
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Design & Development
Is The Mobile Web Right For Your Ecommerce Business?
January 15, 2007 • PEC Staff
Among the topics of conversation for those who make 2007 business technology predictions is the extent to which the "mobile web" — cell phones and other devices that access the Internet for information and ecommerce — will gain traction in the United States. In parts of Europe and Asia...
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Business
Ecommerce Companies: You Are Responsible for Sales Taxes
January 15, 2007 • PEC Staff
One of the most common misconceptions for ecommerce retailers is that sales taxes are not due on Internet transactions. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ecommerce retailers, in fact, are responsible for sales taxes and are subject to penalties and fines for the failure to pay th...
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Conversion
Quick Query: Restaurants & Email Marketing
January 10, 2007 • PEC Staff
Abby Weaver is the marketing director for Fajita Grill (Fajitagrill.com), a small restaurant with locations in Oswego and Fulton, New York, that successfully uses email marketing and its website to boost sales. PeC: When did Fajita Grill launch its website? Weaver: Even before we op...
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Business
Web.com’s Jeff Stibel
January 10, 2007 • PEC Staff
Jeff Stibel is the CEO of Web.com, a company providing an all-in-one hosted solution for business owners wanting to launch a website. Jeff discusses how easy it is for a ...
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Conversion
Outsourcing Pay-per-click
January 8, 2007 • PEC Staff
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a long-term, time-consuming endeavor. Business owners that are serious about search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns, and who want those efforts to lead to strong sales, must realize the implementation of PPC is not something to take lightly. To achie...
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Business
Protecting Intellectual Property
December 11, 2006 • PEC Staff
You may not realize it, but you deal with intellectual property (IP) every day. If you own a website, that website is your intellectual property. The way you deal with IP — yours and others — can directly impact the success of your business. What's Intellectual Property? Registered pa...
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Fraud Prevention
Fraud-Proofing Your Ebiz
December 11, 2006 • PEC Staff
I know a business that had its website hacked: Its entire customer database was hijacked and thousands of customer credit card numbers were stolen at the same time. In the following months, the hackers did their best to steal as much as they could from this business through a number of...
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Business
Creativegood.com’s Ed Dawidowicz
December 4, 2006 • PEC Staff
What is one sure-fire way to reduce shopping cart abandonment? Ed Dawidowicz, senior consulting director for Creativegood.com, provides his advice in the second part of an interview with Practical eCommerce’s ...
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Conversion
The Three Best Website Traffic Sources
December 4, 2006 • PEC Staff
Not a day goes by that any serious website owner doesn't wonder how to get more traffic to his site. This intense desire to generate more clicks makes virtually any online entrepreneur easy prey to many of the traffic schemes and scams that pervade the Internet like conmen on a carniva...
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Conversion
What is Viral Marketing?
December 4, 2006 • PEC Staff
I flipped on VH1 recently and sat enthralled as a rap artist with colorful language skills hosted "Web Junk 20" where they played 20 videos plucked from the web and played them on cable TV. Last night I saw that Bravo Channel now airs a show called "Outrageous and Contagious Viral Vide...
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Conversion
Quick Query – Michael J. Katz
December 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
<strong>Do ecommerce businesses do a good job of marketing to existing customers? </strong> One of my favorite questions to ask somebody is, "What do you do now to systematically stand in front of the people you already know?" I always get a sort of embarrassed si...
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Business
SLI Systems’ Shaun Ryan
December 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
Shaun Ryan, CEO of site-search provider SLI Systems, discusses distinctive aspects of his product with Practical eCommerce’s Mitch Bettis. The two discuss the benefits of faceted search, learning navigation, the ...
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Conversion
Usability Report Card: eBladestore.com
December 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
The team at eBladestore.com asked us to review its site for usability issues. eBladestore sells knives of all types and sizes through a basic, three-column storefront. There are several good things about this site, including a quality site-search function. While the site has a basic, cl...
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Business
Finding Treasures With Tapestries
December 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
Patricia Elkins caught the ecommerce "bug" just like many people do - by successfully selling a few items on eBay. It wasn't long before Elkins was building a dynamic niche business on eBay selling one-of-a-kind tapestries. The business has grown to more than $500,000 in sales, and it'...
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Business
How to Waste $4,000
December 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
How do you waste $4,000 in a few weeks? Patrick Coughlin knows. In fact, most ecommerce owners can attest to mistakes they made during the early phases of launching their new business. Coughlin has owned and operated American Diamond Importers, an independent brick-and-mortar jewelry s...
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Business
Demandware’s Stephan Schambach
December 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
Stephan Schambach, CEO of Demandware, provides a host of helpful tips to improve a customer’s experience at your website in a recent interview with Practical eCommerces Mitch Bettis. Schambach also ...
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Conversion
Site Search Can Pay Dividends
December 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
Improved site search and "recommender" functions not only improve a user's experience at a website, but they can also help improve a site's sales, according to site-search professionals. Converting visitors into buyers frequently hinges on a site's ability to quickly and correctly get ...
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Conversion
10 Tips To Improve Usability
December 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
In a brick-and-mortar enterprise, the problem would be so obvious, no one could ignore it. A tangle of abandoned shopping carts full of unpurchased goods means trouble. "All right," any serious business owner would ask, "What's going on here? What am I doing wrong?" Three questions ar...
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Conversion
Great Ideas Roundtable
December 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
"What customers want is information. What makes them happy during their shopping experience is finding what they want, checking out hassle-free and feeling secure with their online payments when providing their personal information. What makes them unhappy is when they can not complete ...
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Conversion
Yahoo! Search Marketing Releases New Platform
December 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
Yahoo! Search Marketing may have been a pioneer in the pay-per-click industry, but anyone who has ever used its advertiser's interface would probably agree that it has been light-years behind Google AdWords for quite some time. The interface is cumbersome, slow and just plain difficult ...
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Conversion
Local and Geo-target Searches: How Well Do They Work?
December 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
Refining your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising strategies to include geotargeted searches can help a business owner focus promotion efforts and get more bang for the buck. However, not all search engines are created equally when it comes to managing a localized campaign. Geo-targeting i...
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Business
Customer Experience Matters
December 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
After more than a decade of ecommerce activity and an arsenal of new technology at our disposal, it's still the basics that most sites haven't mastered. Problems in the checkout process and having products that are too hard to find remain among the top issues that irritate customers and...
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Business
Siteworx’s Adelle Emery
December 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
What makes customers unhappy at a website? Adelle Emery, director of customer experience at Siteworx, answers the question and gives website owners tips on how to improve the customer’s experience ...
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Checkout Tactics
Lowering Cart Abandonment
December 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
With shopping cart abandonment at a high level, ecommerce owners continue to look for ways to motivate shoppers to complete the checkout process. Research from Shop.org indicates shoppers abandon their cart during checkout more than 75 percent of the time. Imagine 75 percent of the gro...
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