Richard Stubbings
Prior to moving to Norwich, England, Richard Stubbings had 20 years IT experience — designing and building major computer applications. He then set up a bookshop concentrating on science fiction, crime, and horror. He soon started selling horror and movie-related figures alongside the books. The shop, called Kulture Shock, went online in 2000. Over the years, he used numerous shopping carts and the ecommerce site (which he has since sold) grew to be successful.
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Magento Go: going going gone
July 9, 2014 • Richard Stubbings
I have always had my doubts over hosted ecommerce solutions. I have never used them. Recently I have been thinking that I was wrong and that they are a viable ...
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SEO
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Merchant Voice
Beware SEO and other scams
June 4, 2014 • Richard Stubbings
One of the first signs that your website is being noticed, and improving its search engine rankings, is the flood of emails from search engine optimization companies telling you that ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
How to win a price war
May 8, 2014 • Richard Stubbings
As the Internet continues to grow, and more consumers are becoming web savvy, ecommerce sales likewise increase. It is inevitable that many (indeed most) shoppers are driven by price. They ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Are you really improving your site with this recommendation?
April 3, 2014 • Richard Stubbings
Across the Internet in forums and indeed on this site there is plenty of advice regarding how to improve your ecommerce business. Whilst all advice is offered with the best intentions,
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Adapt or die
March 5, 2014 • Richard Stubbings
Once you have a successful ecommerce site and the orders are flowing, by all means congratulate yourself for achieving what many do not. But do not rest there. The most ...
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Amazon & Marketplaces
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Merchant Voice
Does 2014 mark the beginning of the end for Amazon?
January 31, 2014 • Richard Stubbings
Probably not, but it is certainly going to be a difficult year for Amazon in Europe. Legislation in Europe is significantly different than in the U.S, in two major ways,
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Local Business
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Merchant Voice
Ecommerce expanding into brick-and-mortar
January 6, 2014 • Richard Stubbings
When I first started in ecommerce, it was as a way of expanding my brick-and-mortar business as a second sales channel. I was not the only one. It seemed to ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Multichannel order management packages
December 9, 2013 • Richard Stubbings
I use Magento and sell on my own site, six Amazon country sites, and Ebay. That’s a total of eight channels. I would be lost without a package that merged ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Further Christmas thoughts
November 5, 2013 • Richard Stubbings
It is impossible to ignore Christmas this time of year. It is the single most important season for most ecommerce sites. This is why there are already two excellent columns ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Magento 1.8 Is Here: Upgrade or Not?
October 2, 2013 • Richard Stubbings
Magento 1.8 has finally been released. When Magento first came out, releases were frequent. But this time it has been over a year since 1.7 came out. It was beginning ...
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Checkout Tactics
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Merchant Voice
Reducing Cart Abandonment
September 6, 2013 • Richard Stubbings
The most important part of any ecommerce site is the checkout: the collection of money from your customers. You have spent time and money getting customers to your site, you ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Which Cart Should I use ?
August 3, 2013 • Richard Stubbings
All too often these days I see posts on forums of the type "I want to open an ecommerce shop, what cart should I use?" Then there are dozens of different replies from people all recommending their favourite solution. Rarely does anyone ask the original poster what they are planning to s...
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SEO
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Merchant Voice
SEO and Magento Ecommerce
July 8, 2013 • Richard Stubbings
Magento has been labelled as very Search Engine friendly, but what does this mean? Why is this important? The bottom line for any Ecommerce site is selling products. The idea is (or should be) to make money. In order to do this you have to get people to visit your site, and once there ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Growing Pains
June 8, 2013 • Richard Stubbings
Being successful comes with its own problems. As your customer base grows and your orders come in higher volumes, you need to expand to carry on. Sooner or latter you need to recruit staff to help carry the workload. This is a massive step. No matter how much effort you put into selecti...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Price Fixing Cartels
June 3, 2013 • Richard Stubbings
As the rise of the bedroom sellers continue, a new problem has arisen. Suppliers have gotten into the act. Now whilst some suppliers do not care who they sell to, nor how low retailer margins go, other suppliers are more and more concerned about maintaining the quality value of their pr...
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Amazon & Marketplaces
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Merchant Voice
The dreaded Amazon A-Z claim
May 6, 2013 • Richard Stubbings
When you get an Amazon A-Z claim, you must not reply instantly. Your response must be carefully considered, to put your side in the best possible light. You only get one chance to reply. It is best if you do this after you fully investigate and you have calmed down.
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Never Forget The Customer
April 5, 2013 • Richard Stubbings
Ecommerce is a service industry. We should never forget that customers come first. We should always consider what a customer actually wants from us. With Ecommerce we build a site, we build admin systems and procedures, and we try to make everything efficient so we can send out the goo...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
The Dreaded Bedroom seller and how to beat them
March 8, 2013 • Richard Stubbings
. With the rise and rise of Ebay and Amazon, comes the “bedroom” seller. It may be more accurate to call them hobby sellers. All Ecommerce retailers know them. They are the sellers who undercut you and sell at cost or less. They appear, hang around for a few months, and then vanish. In...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Ecommerce in the shrinking world.
February 14, 2013 • Richard Stubbings
I heard on the news tonight that the EU and the USA have started talks on a free trade agreement. No doubt this will take many years to agree, but it is a sign that the world is shrinking and international trade is growing. Many Ecommerce sites are ahead of the game in international tra...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Learn from your Christmas Experience
January 5, 2013 • Richard Stubbings
Its January. The Christmas rush is over. The Christmas money has been spent, and the website sales are slowly dying. The number of orders have dropped off the proverbial cliff, as expected. Now is the time to review the web site. Taking into account the previous year's business and how...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Minimising “lost” Deliveries over Christmas
December 1, 2012 • Richard Stubbings
One of the often forgotten costs of Ecommerce is theft. Either in transit, or “never arrived”. In the current recession too many chancers try to fund their Christmas from the retailer's pocket. Obviously we do everything we reasonably can to minimise this, but no matter what we do, ther...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Magento and multi channel selling
November 3, 2012 • Richard Stubbings
These days it is not enough to have a single web site. The E-commerce market keeps evolving and you have to move with it to keep up. When I first started 15 years ago, it was relatively new. It was an extension to your B&M store that brought in extra income. So you have two sales c...
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Amazon & Marketplaces
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Merchant Voice
The Perils of Amazon Re-Pricing Software – or Beware Amazon Being Helpful
October 4, 2012 • Richard Stubbings
When Amazon first opened their market place to third party sellers, it was mainly books. These sellers had catalogues of tens of thousands of titles, sometimes hundreds of thousands. The competition was fierce and very much price driven. Sellers had little or no chance of competitively ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Oh No, Its Christmas Again
September 6, 2012 • Richard Stubbings
Its September, and Christmas is coming. Like many gift retailers Christmas is our busiest time of the year. Orders double, then triple, then go through the roof. It is a very hectic time of year. It is always better to plan ahead. No doubt you will concentrate in what to stock, and what...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
If You Build It They Will Come – Not Unless You Work On It
August 3, 2012 • Richard Stubbings
I often see posts on forums from optimists who want to set up a web site and make money. They seem to have that great optimism that any Ecommerce web site will be a success and save their business, or make them lots and lots of money. The sad fact is that the vast majority of new web ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Not the Top Ten Extensions for Magento
June 29, 2012 • Richard Stubbings
When you first install Magento the temptation is to go to Magento Connect and look at all the possible extensions. There are literally thousands of them. The next step is to Google things like “best Magento extensions”, or “top 10 ..” or “recommended ….” just to try to whittle down the ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Shared hosting is best for Magento
May 30, 2012 • Richard Stubbings
Yes, you read that right. I firmly believe that the best hosting for most Magento sites is shared hosting. All too often when you look around for a host for your Magento store, hosting companies say things like “you cannot run Magento in a shared environment”, “Magento is resource hungr...
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Amazon & Marketplaces
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Merchant Voice
Magento, Multi Store and SEO
May 6, 2012 • Richard Stubbings
One of the biggest challenges to Search Engine Optimisation for any Ecommerce site is the range and variety in the stock. All SEO tutorials and teach yourself books seem to assume you are selling a small range. Typically 'widgits'. They talk about doing keyword analysis on widgets, find...
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SEO
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Merchant Voice
SEO and Selecting a Magento Theme
April 7, 2012 • Richard Stubbings
One of the best ways to implement any cart is to select a template that is close to what you want your site to look like, and then use a professional designer to tailor it to your unique needs. Magento has literally thousands of templates and it can be a little daunting finding one for ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Put Retail back on the Agenda
March 6, 2012 • Richard Stubbings
The English have been called a nation of shopkeepers, and I guess that this is in part true. We still have a significant number of independent retailers surviving, even thriving, in spite of fierce competition from supermarkets and large national chains. We stay ahead of them because we...
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