PEC Staff - Practical Ecommerce - Page 6 of 28

Articles by: PEC Staff

PEC Staff

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.

Shipping & Fulfillment
Changes at the USPS

April 20, 2012 • PEC Staff

Editor's Note: We welcome John Haber as our newest contributor. A shipping and supply-chain authority, he is the founder and CEO of Spend Management Experts, a global shipping and supply-chain consulting firm. His first piece, below, addresses changes at the USPS and how those changes c...
Business
How to Manage Tracking Tags on an Ecommerce Site

April 18, 2012 • PEC Staff

Ecommerce sites track visitor behavior in a variety of ways. One of them is the use of "tags," small pieces of code from third-party websites, such as analytics programs and affiliate marketing partners. An active site can have many tags, and they sometimes conflict with each other. Mon...
Business
Using YouTube Videos to Drive Ecommerce Sales

April 11, 2012 • PEC Staff

The use of video by ecommerce merchants can increase sales. We recently spoke with Ian Hackett, senior director of ecommerce and user experience at TRX Training, a retailer of exercise equipment, about the use of video for product sales. TRX Training has an extensive YouTube channel, ...
Business
Tablets, Smartphones to Change Online Shopping?

April 4, 2012 • PEC Staff

The shift to tablet and smartphone computing will surely change how consumers shop online. We recently spoke with Brian Horakh, founder and CEO of Zoovy, the shopping cart platform, about how this shift will affect ecommerce merchants. Horakh is an ecommerce pioneer — having founded Zo...
Business
App List: Joe Horan of TheBuyFly

March 21, 2012 • PEC Staff

“App List” is a feature where we ask ecommerce professionals to list the apps they have installed on their phones, and tell us why they use them. For this installment,
Business
How to Reduce Ecommerce Shipping Costs

March 14, 2012 • PEC Staff

Strategies and ideas to reduce shipping expense appeal to most every ecommerce merchant. We recently spoke with John Haber, founder and CEO of Spend Management Experts, a shipping and logistics consulting firm, about ways for merchants to reduce their shipping costs. Practical eCommer...
Business
CyberSource Exec on Credit Card Fraud, Steps to Prevent

March 7, 2012 • PEC Staff

Most every ecommerce merchant has experienced credit card fraud. Credit card companies try to prevent payment fraud, of course, and one — CyberSource — publishes a report on the state of payment fraud each year. CyberSource's chief researcher for that report — called, this year, "2012 O...
Schools & Resources
Reading List: Luke van de Paverd of eCommerce Economy

March 2, 2012 • PEC Staff

In “Reading List,” we ask ecommerce professionals to name some of their favorite recent books and blogs and tell us why they read them. For this installment, we corresponded with ...
Schools & Resources
Reading List: Jaime Brugueras of Mineful

February 24, 2012 • PEC Staff

In “Reading List,” we ask ecommerce professionals to name some of their favorite recent books and blogs and tell us why they read them. For this installment, we corresponded with ...
Business
How to Compete on Price Against Large Companies

February 22, 2012 • PEC Staff

Conventional wisdom is that smaller ecommerce merchants cannot compete against larger ones in terms of the prices of their respective products. That may not be necessarily true. We recently spoke with Rodrigo Carvalho, founder and CEO of BlackLocus, a pricing-intelligence service. He ...
Business
What’s an Inappropriate Product Review?

February 15, 2012 • PEC Staff

A recent New York Times story profiled a merchant that sold leather Kindle cases on Amazon. The merchant, according to The Times, then sent letters to its customers offering a free case if the customers posted a review on Amazon. The story created a firestorm of angst concerning reviews...
Schools & Resources
Reading List: Stefan Schmidt of Hybris

February 14, 2012 • PEC Staff

In “Reading List,” we ask ecommerce professionals to name some of their favorite recent books and blogs and tell us why they read them. For this installment, we corresponded with ...
Conversion
Ask an Expert: Better to Sell Retail or Wholesale?

February 13, 2012 • 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 pros and cons of selling products on a retail basis, versus wholesale. The question comes from Jan Hansen, co-owner of Jewels by...
Business
How to Source Products from China, and Sell There Too

February 8, 2012 • PEC Staff

There's no bigger name in the ecommerce industry than Alibaba. It was launched in 1999 in China, but it now services millions of businesses and consumers, offering wholesale and retail products worldwide. We recently spoke with its vice president of global sales and service, Brian Wong,...
Business
Reducing Shipping Costs for Low-Volume Merchants

February 1, 2012 • PEC Staff

The free-shipping era squeezes smaller merchants. They must match the shipping policies of larger competitors, but they don't receive the high-volume shipping discounts that the larger companies do. Smaller merchants must pay more, in other words, for offering free shipping. There's ...
Business
Vat19.com Thrives in 2011, Recap

January 18, 2012 • PEC Staff

We recently spoke with Jamie Salvatori about how his company fared in 2011. He is the founder and owner of Vat19, an established ecommerce business that sells unique gift items. He's also a Practical eCommerce blogger, at "The (eCommerce) Corner Office." Practical eCommerce: How w...
Business
Using Real People to Test a Website

January 11, 2012 • PEC Staff

Knowing how consumers interact with an ecommerce site can be greatly beneficial. There's a company that provides real-time user tests, where humans navigate through a site and record their experiences. The results can identify potential problems, which merchants can then correct to impr...
Business
Multi-store Merchant Recaps 2011

December 30, 2011 • PEC Staff

With 2011 winding down, we recently asked an ecommerce merchant to recap his company's accomplishments for the year. The merchant is Chad Weinman, founder and CEO of Cat5 Commerce, which operates 10 separate online stores — including RunningShoes.com and TacticalGear.com — from its bas...
Business
25 Top Articles for 2011

December 29, 2011 • PEC Staff

As 2011 draws to a close, we've compiled a list of the 25 most popular Practical eCommerce articles for the year, based on the number of page views. Mobile apps were predominantly on the minds of our readers in 2011, taking three of the top four spots. Other subjects of interest includ...
Business
How to Secure a Domain Name in Different Countries

December 7, 2011 • PEC Staff

The notion of expanding an ecommerce business into additional countries is enticing for many merchants. Most every country, however, has its own top-level domain name. There's "co.uk" for the U.K., ".cn" for China, and ".fr" for France, as examples. Should merchants interested in t...
Email & Text Marketing
Email Marketing: How to Prevent, Manage Dormant Lists

November 30, 2011 • PEC Staff

Email marketing remains critical for many ecommerce merchants. But for those merchants with established ecommerce sites — and older email lists — maintaining healthy email open rates and click-through rates can be a challenge. We spoke recently with an email-marketing expert on how, ex...
Marketing & Advertising
Ask an Expert: For SEO, Better to Host Videos On-site?

November 30, 2011 • 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 hosting videos for search engine optimization purposes.
Business
Email Deliverability: Blacklists, ISP Blocks, Spam Triggers

November 23, 2011 • PEC Staff

Email marketing is critically important to many ecommerce merchants. But what happens if a merchant's email is blocked by an Internet service provider? Or, worse yet, what happens if the merchant's name or IP address lands on a so-called "blacklist"? Email deliverability was the topic...
Business
New Custom, Top-Level Domains Coming; From ‘Widget.com’ to ‘.Widget’

November 17, 2011 • PEC Staff

The range of possible domain names is about to greatly increase. That's because ICANN, the authoritative body over Internet domain names, is about to add new custom top-level domains — the portion to the right of the period — that could include brand names and other customized names. ...
Conversion
How to Test Multiple Variables on an Ecommerce Site

November 9, 2011 • PEC Staff

Ecommerce merchants strive to increase the number of visitors to their sites that actually purchase products. Increasing those conversions frequently requires experimenting with new approaches. Merchants can test which of these experiments increase sales, and which do not. The testing c...
Business
SEOmoz CEO on Raising Venture Capital

November 2, 2011 • PEC Staff

There's no more prominent search-engine-optimization company than SEOmoz. It offers tools for managing search engine rankings that many companies consider essential. The founder of SEOmoz, Rand Fishkin, is notable for his transparency on matters related to running the company. This w...
Business
Interview: Yahoo! Small Business General Manager

October 19, 2011 • PEC Staff

There's no more pioneering platform in the ecommerce business than Yahoo!. Its shopping cart powers thousands of ecommerce stores, and its hosting and other small business services help over a million companies. But Yahoo! is changing — the recent departure of its CEO being one indicat...
Business
Back Office Complexities of Selling on Multiple Channels

October 12, 2011 • PEC Staff

Proponents of selling retail products across multiple online channels don't often discuss the back office reality of managing it all. Merchants who sell on, say, (a) their own ecommerce sites, (b) Amazon, (c) eBay and (d) Facebook must update — on four separate websites — stock quantit...
User Experience
How to Make Category Navigation Dynamic

October 11, 2011 • PEC Staff

Sophisticated site search helps consumers find products on ecommerce sites, and therefore increases sales. But site search can also work with faceted category navigation to help consumers too. To explain it, we are joined by Scott Zielinski, co-founder of SearchSpring, a leading search...
Business
X.commerce: An eBay, PayPal, Magento ‘Ecosystem’?

October 4, 2011 • PEC Staff

The notion of combining an online marketplace with a payment platform, a shopping cart and a robust backend is not new. But when the marketplace is eBay, the payment platform is PayPal, the cart is Magento and the backend is GSI Commerce, that is news. eBay calls this new collaboration ...

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