Category

Conversion

Fewer than 5% of visitors to an ecommerce site typically convert to customers. In this Conversion category, we offer insights to increase that percentage. Our expert contributors address ratings and reviews, social proof, site search, product page enhancements, product descriptions, checkout options, live chat, and much more — anything to help close online sales.

Analytics & Data | Checkout Tactics | Customer Retention | Customer Service | Photography & Video | Product Pages

Customer Retention
PeC Traffic Report: Four Good Web Tools to Identify Traffic-Building Trends

June 11, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Participating in trends that matter to your customers can attract significant website traffic, but knowing what trends to follow (or even how to interact with those trends) is a difficult task. In January of this year, Practical eCommerce published a column about developing customer-ce...
Conversion
Webinar: 7 Key Strategies For Improving Online Merchandising

June 10, 2009 • PEC Staff

First broadcast on June 9, 2009, "Key Strategies For Improving Online Merchandising" featured Jay Shaffer, Vice President of Marketing for Infopia, as he shared methods for proven online merchandising success. Specifically, Shaffer explained seven key strategies for improving online me...
Conversion
Ping.fm Makes Social Media Strategy Easy

June 9, 2009 • Sarah Worsham

Once you’ve figured out exactly what you want to do as far as social media, it can seem like a chore to implement a plan. You may have several different social media networks you want to update at once and you’re not always near a computer. Ping.fm provides a service where you can updat...
Conversion
Pay-per-click Report Card: BuyAndWalk.com Has Opportunity for Growth

June 8, 2009 • Greg Laptevsky

BuyAndWalk.com sells footwear for men, women and children. The owner contacted Practical eCommerce with a request to review his pay-per-click advertising campaigns. He spends about $1,000 per month on pay-per-click advertising, with 99 percent of those monies invested into Google AdWord...
Conversion
Increase Conversion Rates by Identifying Funnels and Goals

June 3, 2009 • Michael Stearns

Let's assume you have an ecommerce website and you have been successful in getting traffic to it. A next logical step is to focus on your conversion rate and determine what you can do to improve it. To do this, glean clues about user behavior by analyzing the conversion and abandonment ...
Conversion
Building Your Brand. Part 2: How to Write a Brand Positioning Statement

June 2, 2009 • Dan Wilson

Every time customers experience your brand, you want them to remember what you do, why it is important to them, and why it is unique to you. By developing a clear expression of what is important to your customers and unique to you
Conversion
Ten Great New Ecommerce Ideas for June 2009

May 29, 2009 • Ankush Agarwal

Each month, Practical eCommerce asks industry insiders to share a great, innovative idea that could help an ecommerce company. Here’s what ten of them had to say for the June 2009 installment. Set Yourself Apart with Visual Security "Making your commitment to security known by your cu...
Conversion
Constant Contact Continues to Add Customers, Increase Cash Flow But Loses $1 Million

May 28, 2009 • PEC Staff

Constant Contact, the email-marketing firm, reported revenues of $28.1 million for the three months ended March 31, 2009, up roughly $10 million, or 55 percent, from the same period in ...
Photography & Video
The Shopping Experience: Envato’s FlashDen Has Broad Selection of Flash Files for Developers

May 22, 2009 • Armando Roggio

FlashDen.net sells Adobe Flash-based plugins, content sliders, animations, preloaders, and menus that web developers can integrate into their designs saving a lot of time. While the site had a great selection of downloadable products, easy navigation, a strong community, and great aes...
Conversion
Attract Qualified Traffic with Content Syndication

May 21, 2009 • Jan Riley

Stop focusing on getting tons of traffic to your ecommerce store. Instead, shift to getting the right kind of traffic that will produce visitors who can turn into buyers. Syndication is perhaps the most powerful tool to help produce qualified traffic. Syndication means taking one piece ...
Conversion
Pay-per-click Advertising: Top 6 Rookie Mistakes

May 20, 2009 • Greg Laptevsky

Here is a quick list of the top 6 pay-per-click advertising mistakes that I’ve seen. I suggest that you print this list and go through it before you start your next pay-per-click campaign. Check for Strange Keywords. You may have accidentally typed-in or pasted an incorrect keyword in...
Photography & Video
Web Design Tips: Use this PNG Fix for Attractive Images in Older Browsers

May 20, 2009 • Armando Roggio

For most website designs, the portable network graphic, or PNG, is simply the best available image format. But older, noncompliant versions of the Internet Explorer browser (IE) poorly managed this extensible file format's powerful transparency capabilities, making it hard to design for...
Conversion
Take the Survey and Predict the Future of eCommerce

May 14, 2009 • PEC Staff

What do you think will happen in ecommerce over the next five years? A Practical eCommerce survey asks if big box stores such as Walmart will overtake small-to-mid-sized online retailers. Do you believe leading brands will eventually dominate the web? And, which technologies do you thin...
Product Pages
Ecommerce Know-How: Writing Product Descriptions that Sell

May 13, 2009 • Armando Roggio

An ecommerce website, boiled down to its dry essence, is a virtual salesman at best and a slow-to-deliver electronic vending machine at worst. Consciously or not, online stores are conceived, designed, and created to sell products while making as little personal contact with a customer ...
Conversion
Social Media: Create a Strategy for Your Online Store

May 13, 2009 • Sarah Worsham

Most of us are familiar with Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and other social networking sites. There has been quite a bit of coverage on how to use them, but how should an online merchant create an overall social media strategy? First, Determine Your Goals The first step to any social medi...
Conversion
Survey Results: Advertising is Important, Pay-per-click Most Effective

May 11, 2009 • PEC Staff

Respondents to an April 2009 Practical eCommerce survey overwhelmingly said that pay-per-click advertising was an effective way to promote an ecommerce store and improve sales. Those same respondents also declared advertising an important part of their ecommerce business. The survey fo...
Analytics & Data
The PeC Review: Woopra Promises Real-Time Web Analytics and Behavior Tracking

May 7, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Woopra is an innovative web analytics suite that promises to vastly improve the information that website owners can collect and monitor. As customers return to your store, Woopra begins to track behavioral profiles, allowing online merchants to monitor individual customer behavior o...
Customer Retention
Ecommerce Know-How: Six Ways To Improve Your Online Store

May 4, 2009 • Armando Roggio

An online merchant's most important marketing and sales tool is a content-rich, visually interesting, and factually accurate website. In this edition of "eCommerce Know-How," I am going to propose six ways to improve your site, and I am offering these methods exactly five months before...
Conversion
Online Marketing Overview: Where to Best Invest

May 4, 2009 • Jeff Muendel

I was contacted by a gentleman in the music industry who wanted advice regarding online marketing for his website. He seemed to have strong old-school marketing ties, but also knew that efforts surrounding social media and search engine optimization were important things to consider. ...
Conversion
Conversion Review: “It’s In The Stars” Needs Help

May 1, 2009 • Alan Cox

"Conversion Review" is a high level evaluation of a website that a company has submitted for assessment. When doing a review, we analyze the website as if we were a potential customer with a typical usage scenario. We then assess how well the site does at converting visitors into buyers...
Conversion
Ten Great New Ecommerce Ideas for May 2009

April 29, 2009 • Ankush Agarwal

Each month, Practical eCommerce asks industry insiders to share a great, innovative idea that could help an ecommerce company. Here’s what ten of them had to say for the May 2009 installment. Optimize Comparison Shopping Engine Feeds "Start inexpensively with Google Base. When the fee...
Conversion
Amazon Reports Q1 2009 Sales, Asks “What Recession?”

April 29, 2009 • PEC Staff

Last week, Amazon.com announced quarterly sales of $4.89 billion, up 18 percent from the first quarter of 2009. While many factors contributed to the company's strong quarter and more than $1.14 billion gross profit, Amazon executives pointed to strict inventory management and better th...
Conversion
Link Article Marketing to Purchase-Related Keywords

April 28, 2009 • Jan Riley

Article marketing has been around since the beginning of the Internet, seemingly. It is practically free (if you write the articles yourself); it builds trust; and it attracts customers and influences people while they are in the process of making a buying decision. The Proof is in th...
Analytics & Data
Ecommerce Know-How: Four Ways to Measure Print Advertising Effectiveness

April 28, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Print advertising is a waning media vehicle. It has become less effective in the post-interruption era. However, in spite of this decline, printed display advertising and classifieds can still provide a solid return on investment (ROI) for some ecommerce merchants willing and able to me...
Conversion
eBay Earnings Release Not Entirely Good News

April 27, 2009 • PEC Staff

Last week, eBay announced first quarter 2009 revenue of $2.02 billion, a $171.6 million year-over-year decrease. While PayPal, Classifieds and Skype performed well, according to eBay, delivering year-over-year revenue growth, text and graphical advertising revenues were flat compared to...
Conversion
Pay-per-click Advertising: Yahoo! Targeting Gets More Focused

April 17, 2009 • Lisa Wehr

Companies are frequently looking for ways to position their products in front of consumers that will most likely result in a conversion or a purchase. While there are several different options for targeting pay-per-click campaigns, the recent advances in Yahoo!’s audience targeting capa...
Customer Retention
Ecommerce Know-How: Developing a Postcard Campaign

April 15, 2009 • Armando Roggio

A postcard marketing campaign can be inexpensive, and it could increase your store's sales next month. Almost every weekday at about 2 p.m., I trot out to my mailbox, wave at the retired Marine smoking cigarettes on his porch across the street, and collect my U.S. mail. I sort out the...
Conversion
Selling (And Socializing) On Facebook

April 14, 2009 • Sarah Worsham

Facebook offers ecommerce companies an opportunity to both market their products and connect with their customers. Traffic to Facebook has increased by 149% from February 2008 to February 2009, according to Hitwise, and it’s not just from the young crowd. Visitors over age 35 have incre...
Conversion
Survey: Ecommerce Merchants Report Extremes in Sales Growth

April 13, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Online shopkeepers willing to indicate how their sales were doing in 2009 generally reported extremes, with sales either rising or falling by more than 10 percent, according to a new Practical eCommerce survey. Practical eCommerce asked a group of its readers how their 2009 sales had f...
Conversion
Is Twitter an Ecommerce Tool?

April 9, 2009 • Jeff Muendel

I hear it a lot. People say they know they should use Twitter for marketing purposes, but the idea of “Twittering” doesn’t sit well with them. On a personal level, I have no interest in letting the world know what I’m doing hour-to-hour, much less moment-to-moment. But Twittering on beh...

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