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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Design & Development
How To Start a Video Blog
October 7, 2006 • PEC Staff
Web logs, commonly referred to as "blogs," came into the mainstream about two years ago. Not really a newsletter or traditional .html-page publishing, blogs resemble more of a web-based diary where the creator records their thoughts, posts links or responds to questions. Initially, bl...
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Business
Website Profile – Satellite Radio Superstore
October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
Matt and Amiee Moffett launched the Satellite Radio Superstore three years ago have an quickly built their site into one of the top 10 independent retailers for XM Radio. Sales ...
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Business
Scene7’s Sheila Dahlgren
October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
Scene7 is another leading company in the image management business. Scene7 provides services that can improve the product display features on ecommerce sites including zoom and pan features, online catalogs ...
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Business
Equilibrium’s Sean Barger
October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
Equilibrium is one company in the marketplace that automates imaging solutions and offers various display options including zoom and pan features. Sean Barger, CEO of Equilibrium, says there’s been a ...
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Conversion
Language Translation Creates New Options
October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
For English, press one. Para español, la prensa dos.” The familiarity of this everyday message shows us how companies are increasingly recognizing the need to alter their business practices to reach new demographics through multilingual communications. No speak English According to t...
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Design & Development
AuctionCheckout.com’s John Waldron and Sloane Bouchever
October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
PeC: What makes AuctionCheckout different from PayPal? In the PayPal environment today, if you're selling, the funds from your transactions are going into your PayPal account. PayPal is not a financial institution. They can freeze those funds. AuctionCheckout “Blue” is an auction-chec...
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Conversion
Should You Add SEO To Your Marketing Efforts?
October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
Pay-per-click advertising is, no doubt, one of the most effective ways of getting new leads and prospects to come to your website. Within a period of 24 hours, any business—large or small—can appear at the top positions for any keyword that’s applicable to their business. However, it d...
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Conversion
Tradeshows The Right Way
October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
For online retailers, tradeshows are an incredible opportunity to source goods, connect with wholesalers and manufacturers, and expand their product lines. There is a right way and a wrong way to attend tradeshows. To get the most out of your experience, you need to prepare. Your first...
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Conversion
Tuning Up Your Checkout Process
October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
One of the most important factors to optimizing conversion is fine tuning the shopping cart and checkout process. Sales are won or lost within this crucial component of your site, and it is critical to examine the data that will unlock the mysteries of visitor behavior within this proce...
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Conversion
Usability Report Card: Headsets.com
October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
Earlier this year, Headsets.com was calling the checkout button "save to cart." We commented on this horrid usability, and the company let us know it made a change when they redesigned the site. Headsets.com is selling mostly to small to medium businesses, so the site must appeal more t...
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Business
Satellite Radio Superstore Finds Success
October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
Three years after launching Satellite Radio Superstore, Matt and Aimee Moffett’s online business is pushing $3 million in sales and their company was recently named one of the top 10 independent retailers by XM Radio. Satellite Radio Superstore is an authorized XM satellite radio deale...
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Business
Striking Gold With Diamonds
October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
Patrick Coughlin knows that brick-and-mortar businesses need to think outside the box if they want to improve their bottom lines. Coughlin has owned and operated American Diamond Importers, an independent jewelry store in St. Clair, Mich., for almost 15 years. St. Clair is a small, idy...
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Conversion
Forums Offer Interactivity
October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
If you're looking for an easy way to make your business’ website more interactive, consider adding a bulletin board or a forum. They’re different names for the same thing, an application you can add to your site allowing visitors to leave messages and interact with each other. You can e...
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Design & Development
Using RSS To Expand Your Online Exposure
October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
Rarely in the last 10 years has there been a technology with so much potential to explode your business’s online exposure for such little cost. Real Simple Syndication (RSS) makes it easy for non-techies to automatically display targeted third-party content on their websites and blogs w...
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Design & Development
Product Images Matter
October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
One distinct advantage to a brick-and-mortar store has over a business in the virtual world is that customers can touch the products on the racks and shelves at the local mall. Local retailers know that if they can get you to touch a product, you are more likely to leap from shopper to ...
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Design & Development
Podcasting Can Increase Brand Awareness
October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
It seems like it was just yesterday that entrepreneurs were advised to start blogging for the purpose of marketing their businesses. Now, there’s a whole new technology out there that’s a growing, but viable, option for cultivating your brand online: podcasting. What is "podcasting?" ...
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Business
MyEmma.com’s Clint Smith
September 25, 2006 • PEC Staff
Clint Smith, co-founder of Emma, discusses several important tips to improve email campaigns and addresses that age-old question of whether an email should use images or not. This podcast ...
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Design & Development
Free Alternative to Microsoft Office
September 25, 2006 • PEC Staff
Anyone who ever priced the Microsoft Office Suite knows it represents a significant investment. A quick check of the Compusa.com website shows Microsoft Office Standard costs $399 and Microsoft Office Professional will set you back $449. Now, this doesn't discount the value of the softw...
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Business
Four Things You Should Know Before Starting an eBiz
September 25, 2006 • PEC Staff
Renowned ebiz author Sydney Johnson created the now-famous Auction Genius courses to aid people wanting to create their own ebusinesses. She shares some important tips for anyone looking to learn the online retail industry: Tip 1—Start Small Many of Johnson’s students are eager to div...
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Conversion
Ten Ways to Grow Your Online Store Sales, Part 3
September 18, 2006 • PEC Staff
We covered the importance of keywords and content in our first installment and we covered customer testimonials, offering multiple payment options, diversifying sales channels and conducting pay-per-click campaigns in our last installment. In this, our final installment, we'll look at a...
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Business
KEMP’s CEO Kevin Mahon
September 18, 2006 • PEC Staff
Kevin Mahon, founder and CEO of KEMP, and Peter Melerud, the company’s marketing and business development officer, talked with Practical eCommerce’s Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis about what a load balancer ...
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Business
Delightful Deliveries’ Eric Lituchy
September 11, 2006 • PEC Staff
Eric Lituchy is the founder and CEO of Delightfuldeliveries.com, a leading site for gift baskets and unique gift items, such as gourmet food items and desserts. Given how important product ...
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Conversion
Ten Ways to Grow Your Online Store Sales, Part 2
September 11, 2006 • PEC Staff
We covered the importance of keywords and content in last week's installment. Today, let's take a look at four more important ways to grow your online sales: customer testimonials, offering multiple payment options, diversifying sales channels and conducting pay-per-click campaigns. Cu...
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Marketing & Advertising
The Truth About Optimization
September 11, 2006 • PEC Staff
Gaining good positioning with the search engines is one channel for increasing your online business — but it’s not an end in itself. Your ultimate goal isn’t to increase traffic, but to increase sales, and thereby, profit margins. Will Reynolds of SEO consulting firm Thinkseer.com, shed...
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Business
ChristmasNightInc.com Brings Light to the Holidays
September 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
If you are an admirer of nativity sets on the lawns of homes and churches during the Christmas season, chances are you seen a product from Christmasnightinc.com. Claire Henderson launched the business about seven years ago and has carved out a unique niche selling life-size scenes of t...
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Payments
The Rising Tide of Alternative Payment Systems
September 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
Alternative-payment systems are flowing into the payment processing industry. During the last two years, many new options have been announced, re-announced, tested, trialed, released or re-released. Many others are in development. Marc Abbey, a Partner of First Annapolis Consulting, sa...
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Platforms & Apps
Shopping Cart Checklist
September 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
We’ve assembled a checklist to help you narrow your shopping cart requirements. The checklist is divided into six areas: function, shipping issues, payment processing, support, technical considerations and report generation. Function Is there a limit to the number of categories or pr...
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Design & Development
The Future of Ecommerce Solutions
September 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
PeC: Given the trends in the marketplace, what do you see on the horizon for ecommerce solutions? Chowdhary: "This is such a dynamic field. Every day is a new day in the world of ecommerce. We see a lot of things, and looking in the near future, there are many different things that I...
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Platforms & Apps
Hosted Shopping Cart Solutions
September 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
PeC: How would you describe the merits of a hosted solution compared to various software solutions that are in the marketplace? Krakovsky: I think it starts with the fundamental premise that people start businesses to sell products and services to customers, not necessarily deal wit...
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Platforms & Apps
Getting to the Heart of the Cart
September 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
If you came to this article hoping we’d tell you exactly which shopping cart you should choose for your business, you will be disappointed. We don’t know. However, thanks to the expertise of a pair of industry veterans, the process of choosing a shopping cart is about to get easier for...
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