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
11 Google Business-Class Apps and Services
April 27, 2011 • PEC Staff
Google releases a steady stream of tools and apps for businesses. And although free versions exist, they are limited in their scope and function. Many of those same tools are offered at a business-class level for a price. Here is a list of many of the business-class apps available from...
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Inventory
10 Ways to Save Money on Inventory
April 26, 2011 • PEC Staff
Online retailers purchase and manage inventory. The prices they pay for the inventory, the quantities they carry, and the inventory commitments they make can drastically affect their profits. We recently asked three seasoned ecommerce merchants for money saving inventory tips. The merc...
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Business
CartSpan Founder on Peachtree Accounting Integration
April 25, 2011 • PEC Staff
Virtually all merchants utilize accounting software. They typically transfer sales and customer data from their shopping carts to that software. For many merchants, this transfer requires the manual exporting of data from the cart, and the manual importing of it to the accounting softwa...
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Conversion
Do-It-Yourself Awareness-Building for Your Products
April 22, 2011 • PEC Staff
For a merchant just starting out, building an awareness with potential customers that your products even exist can be a daunting task. But there are many tools — and some strategies — that can help give a smaller merchant a louder voice to compete with already established brands. Trade...
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Business
Google’s First Quarter Financial Results a ‘Juggernaut’
April 22, 2011 • PEC Staff
Not since Microsoft’s heyday in the 1990s has a tech company so thoroughly dominated an industry as Google dominates the search business. Google released its first quarter 2011 financial results last week and the numbers show a company with near historic — no joke — profit margins, buc...
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Design & Development
Notable Views: Mobify CEO on Mobile Commerce
April 20, 2011 • PEC Staff
Editor's Note: "Notable Views” is a series where we ask leading experts to address critical, ecommerce-related topics. For this installment, we corresponded with Igor Faletski, a mobile-commerce authority and CEO of Mobify, a mobile development firm. "Retailers Retool Sites to Ease Mo...
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Conversion
25 Advertising Networks for Online Businesses
April 20, 2011 • PEC Staff
Google’s AdSense and AdWords are two of the most widely used advertising platforms for online business. And although Google facilitates a massive amount of traffic online, there are dozens of other ad networks that ecommerce businesses can take advantage of. Here are twenty-five popul...
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Schools & Resources
Reading List: SteelHouse CEO Mark Douglas
April 19, 2011 • PEC Staff
In “Reading List,” we ask ecommerce professionals to name some of their favorite books and blogs and tell us why they read them. For this installment, we corresponded with Mark ...
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Business
Deceptive Credit Card Practices, Part 2
April 14, 2011 • PEC Staff
Credit card veteran Phil Hinke knows a thing or two about payment-processing rates. He has been in the credit card industry since 1994, with NaBanco, First Data Corporation, and Heartland ...
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Conversion
11 Shopping-Search Engines to Sell Your Products
April 14, 2011 • PEC Staff
Listing your products with shopping-oriented search engines can be a great way to attract new customers. Many shopping search engines are free, but some require a fee and come with varying levels of control and interaction with your products and with customers that buy through the shopp...
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Schools & Resources
Reading List: DYMO Endicia Founder Amine Khechfe
April 13, 2011 • 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 ...
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Conversion
22 Analytics Tools for Online Businesses
April 13, 2011 • PEC Staff
Measuring the behavior of a site’s visitors is crucial to understanding what works and what doesn’t. With these 22 analytics tools, you can analyze your site’s traffic – see which products are popular, which blog posts are most clicked, where your visitors are coming from and how long t...
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Design & Development
Optimizing an Ecommerce Site for Mobile Devices, Part 4: Implementation and Launch
April 11, 2011 • PEC Staff
Editor's Note: In September 2010 we published "Volunteer for a Free Mobile-Optimized Ecommerce Site," soliciting merchants to volunteer for a mobile optimization case study in which we follow the process of creating a mobile site step-by-step. Dozens of merchants submitted their sites, ...
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Email & Text Marketing
Irritating Your Customers with Facebook, Twitter and Email
April 8, 2011 • PEC Staff
Businesses have more tools to communicate with their customers than ever before. There's email, text messaging, Twitter, Facebook, blogs and websites — and those are just the most widely used tools. But with all those tools comes additional responsibility. Your customers should feel en...
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Business
Google’s ‘Orphaned Books’ Litigation; Effect on Digital Sales
April 7, 2011 • PEC Staff
The balancing of copyright law with the dissemination of information on the Internet can sometimes become tangled. And nowhere is that more evident than in the recent so-called "orphaned books" settlement, which involves Google's attempt to scan and distribute the content of out-of-prin...
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Business
Notable Views: Credit Card Veteran on ‘Onerous’ Processing Rates
April 6, 2011 • PEC Staff
Editor’s Note: “Notable Views” is a new series where we ask leading experts to address critical, ecommerce-related topics. For this installment, we corresponded with Phil Hinke, a credit-card processing veteran ...
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Business
Streamlined Sales-Tax Director on Efforts to Simplify
April 4, 2011 • PEC Staff
Attempts to simplify the administration and collection of Internet sales taxes in the United States may be the most daunting task in the ecommerce industry. There are thousands of state, county and municipal taxation districts and each has its own tax rates and rules. One organization t...
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Marketing & Advertising
15 Services to Manage Your Social Media Activity
April 1, 2011 • PEC Staff
Social media can help ecommerce businesses. And although social media sites — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube — are cost-free, they are not time-free. In fact, managing just a single social network business page can be a full-time job, not to mention managing three or four on multi...
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Conversion
What’s an Ecommerce Brand? An Expert Explains
March 30, 2011 • PEC Staff
Cindy Ratzlaff is an expert on branding. She worked in the marketing industry for over twenty years, having developed the marketing and publicity campaigns for more than 150 New York Times bestselling books. She spearheaded the successful campaign for The South Beach Diet international ...
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Business
Credit Card Pioneer on Lowering Processing Expense
March 28, 2011 • PEC Staff
Credit card processing can be one of the most confusing parts of ecommerce for many merchants. The rates fluctuate widely and the monthly statements are hard to follow. And yet, credit card processing is key to virtually every ecommerce business. To help us understand how merchants can ...
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Schools & Resources
Reading List: Ji Kim of DiJiPop
March 25, 2011 • 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. In this installment, we corresponded with ...
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Business
Our Guide for Do-It-Yourself Product Photography
March 23, 2011 • PEC Staff
Hiring models and production crews to shoot products can be costly. And with the onset of affordable, high-quality digital camera equipment, as well as just a little ingenuity you can set up your own photo studio. Here are some tips and guidelines on how to achieve that professional pr...
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Marketing & Advertising
48 Facebook Pages for Businesses
March 23, 2011 • PEC Staff
Facebook is not just a social forum to share pictures with friends anymore. Businesses are pushing traffic to their ecommerce sites, increasing brand awareness and now making sales on Facebook stores. I looked at the top ten brands on Facebook with the most Fans as analyzed by All Face...
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Platforms & Apps
Miva Merchant President on Acquisitions, SaaS Moves
March 22, 2011 • PEC Staff
Miva Merchant launched its shopping cart in the late 1990s and the company's evolution continues. An independent investor group acquired Miva Merchant in 2007, and executives there have since been evolving that product to a hosted platform, enhancing the company's revenue, and generally...
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Marketing & Advertising
What’s Your Facebook Strategy?
March 18, 2011 • PEC Staff
There are two sides to the growing discussion of how ecommerce merchants can best use Facebook. One side recommends the setting up a self-contained shopping cart on Facebook, where consumers ...
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Schools & Resources
An Introduction to Flash Cookies; How to Manage Them
March 16, 2011 • PEC Staff
The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) proposed "Do Not Track" legislation has generated a lot of interest in how websites track visitor behavior. In this article, I am going to introduce Flash cookies and explain how they may be used to violate consumer's privacy. What Is a Flash Cookie...
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Schools & Resources
Reading List: 1SaleADay CEO Ben Federman
March 15, 2011 • PEC Staff
In “Reading List,” we ask ecommerce professionals to name some of their recent books and blogs and tell us why they read them. In this installment, we corresponded with Ben ...
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Design & Dev Tools
30 Yahoo! and Bing Tools for Ecommerce Businesses
March 15, 2011 • PEC Staff
Google may have the biggest impact on the web overall with tools and products that have become indispensable. But Google’s competitors, Yahoo! and Bing, offer a wide array of free tools that ecommerce merchants often underutilize. Take advantage of all the tools that every major search ...
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Business
Lessons Learned: Kathy Seigler with Ecommerce Superstores
March 11, 2011 • PEC Staff
”Lessons Learned” is a series where we ask ecommerce business owners to share their experiences and advice. For this installment, we interviewed Kathy Seigler, CEO and president of Ecommerce Superstores, a Bowling Green, Ky.-based online retail brand with six niche online shops: CoolCo...
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Schools & Resources
Reading List: iGoDigital President Eric Tobias
March 11, 2011 • 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 ...
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