Category

Design & Development

The nuts and bolts of an ecommerce site are design and development. We address design innovation and trends — including layouts, colors, photography, logos, video, and more. We explain the basics of code — HTML, CSS, JavaScript — as well as platforms, themes, plugins, open source, and related topics.

Code | Design & Dev Tools | Platforms & Apps | Schools & Resources | Typography & Fonts | User Experience

Design & Dev Tools
The PEC Review: Feedingo Organizes Feeds, Keeps Me Informed

August 23, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Informed ecommerce entrepreneurs must stay on top of industry news, web trends, and best practices. To achieve this, some wander around the web from one blog or site to another, or they absorb dozens of email newsletters. It would be better if all of the best blog posts, articles, and...
Design & Development
Databases: What Online Merchants Need to Know

August 19, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Editor's Note: We continue our "Need to Know" series, where we explain complex web topics on an executive-level, "need to know" basis. For this installment, Contributing Editor Armando Roggio explains relational databases. The "Need to Know" Series Five Web Design Concepts Ecommerce ...
Design & Development
Synchronized Applications Transformed Two Businesses

August 17, 2010 • PEC Staff

InkJetSuperstore.com and Wrigleyville Sports were once losing customers and sales. Now they are both successful and growing. In fact, just prior to a recent Practical eCommerce webinar, InkJetSuperstore.com CEO Ilan Douek spilled the beans about his prior day’s order volume. It was more...
Design & Development
Google Docs: Word Processing, Collaboration, More

August 17, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons

Google offers a variety of useful free tools merchants can use in place of other more costly software. One of these is Google Docs, a free word processing tool with plenty of room for file storage and many unique tools unmatched by other word processors. The most important of these is t...
Platforms & Apps
The PEC Review: Shopify

August 16, 2010 • Armando Roggio

There are nearly 600 different shopping cart solutions to choose from. While many of these carts are functional, a relative few rise to the top in terms of their ease of use, how much creative freedom they allow, and how well they help a merchant present their products. Shopify is on...
Platforms & Apps
ProStores Upgrades Platform, Simplifies Store Design and Management

August 12, 2010 • PEC Staff

Editor's Note: Ecommerce service providers frequently launch new, interesting products, or issue upgrades to existing ones. We address these new products and upgrades periodically, and in this installment Contributing Editor Lisa Morgan explains eBay Prostores' new upgrade to its hosted...
Platforms & Apps
Getting Started in Ecommerce: What’s a Shopping Cart?

August 11, 2010 • Armando Roggio

The ecommerce shopping cart is a software package that accepts customer payment and shipping information and facilitates the distribution of that information to merchants, payment processors, or others. At the surface, an ecommerce shopping cart is really something that every beginning...
Design & Dev Tools
The PEC Review: Mockingbird, for Wireframes

August 9, 2010 • Armando Roggio

In terms of website design, wireframes serve as a visual guide to page structure and interface. Web designers use wireframes in much the same way that builders use an architect's blueprints. It is certainly possible to build a website without a wireframe, just like it is possible to bu...
Platforms & Apps
The PEC Review: Comodo Dragon, A Web Browser

August 2, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce merchants are digital natives. They live, in a sense, online, operating their businesses, marketing, and even servicing customers on the World Wide Web. But the Internet can be a wild place, and sometimes digital natives become a little too comfortable with their surroundings...
Design & Development
Great User Experience Is More than a Pretty Ecommerce Site

July 29, 2010 • PEC Staff

Many ecommerce merchants think of user experience in terms of the user interface. They take great pains to optimize the aesthetic appearance of their sites with the goal of increasing conversions. Yet, it’s often the less sexy backend issues that are driving customers away, and increa...
User Experience
Screen Readers: Eight Frequently Asked Questions

July 27, 2010 • PEC Staff

Editor's Note: The article below discusses screen readers, the software that reads aloud text on a computer screen. Screen reader software allows visually handicapped consumers to use Internet sites. To help text-reading consumers understand what a visually-handicapped user experiences,...
Design & Development
The PEC Review: IETester for Browser Testing

July 19, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce entrepreneurs and marketers must pay careful attention to website analytics. Like conscientious doctors watching a patient for any sign of improvement, site owners and marketers study many details of visitor data, including which web browsers those visitors are using. Thanks...
Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: nsCommerceSpace by Network Solutions

July 16, 2010 • Kate Monteith

There are nearly 600 online shopping carts. And each week we feature one, interviewing both the cart's developer and a customer. "Cart of the Week" is not a review or an evaluation, but rather an opportunity to learn about a shopping cart from the people who build it and use it. This w...
Design & Development
Not PCI Compliant? No Problem

July 14, 2010 • Kerry Murdock

By Practical eCommerce's count, there are nearly 600 English-language shopping carts. These include hosted carts, licensed software carts and open-source carts. There are small ones with just a few clients, and large ones with tens of thousands of clients. But, as of July 14, only 40 o...
Design & Development
8 Questions on Cloud Computing

July 13, 2010 • PEC Staff

Traditional web hosting assumes that customers pay for a fixed amount of storage space and a fixed amount of bandwidth. But the traffic to many websites varies, and storage and bandwidth needs fluctuate over time. For those websites, cloud computing, or cloud hosting, could save them ...
Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: FatFreeCartPro by E-junkie

July 9, 2010 • Kate Monteith

This week, we'll hear from Robin Kohli, founder and lead developer for E-junkie, the company behind FatFreeCartPro, an online shopping cart. E-junkie is headquartered in New Delhi, India, with its support team based in Tucson, Ariz. According to Kohli, there are roughly 9,000 merchants using FatFreeCartPro, “As well as a couple thousand other users who are in the trial period
Schools & Resources
Booklist: Invodo CEO Craig Wax

July 6, 2010 • Nic Murdock

In “Booklist” we ask Internet professionals about the books and blogs they read, and why. For this list, we asked Craig Wax, CEO of Invodo, an ecommerce video company. Wax leads ...
Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: Digital River’s CCNow

July 2, 2010 • Kate Monteith

This week, we'll hear from Brant Pallazza, vice president of marketing for Digital River, the parent company of the online shopping cart known as CCNow. Digital River is based in Minneapolis, Minn., and its CCNow ecommerce platform serves roughly 10,000 users. We'll also hear from a CCNow customer, Buddy Carr.
Platforms & Apps
The PEC Review: Magento 1.3 Sales Tactics Cookbook

June 28, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Not everyone that downloads Magento can, frankly, figure it out since the platform's effectiveness comes with certain a level of complexity.
Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: DesignCart

June 25, 2010 • Kate Monteith

There are more than 500 online shopping carts. And each week we feature one, interviewing both the cart's developer and a customer. "Cart of the Week" is not a review or an evaluation, but rather an opportunity to learn about a shopping cart from the people who build it and use it. Thi...
Design & Development
What’s a Video Codec?

June 21, 2010 • PEC Staff

Editor's Note: Most observers agree that video enhances an ecommerce site and likely increases its conversion rate. But there are many different video formats, and the terminology surrounding the use of video can be daunting. To help us sort through some of these complexities, we contin...
Design & Development
Prebuilt Ecommerce Templates Save Money, Says AlgoZone’s CEO

June 17, 2010 • PEC Staff

Ecommerce merchants frequently incur development fees to obtain specific features or appearances for their websites. But there are also prebuilt templates that can do this, at prices much less than custom-built solutions. One maker of these is AlgoZone. It offers hundreds of ready-mad...
Code
What Are AJAX and Dynamic JavaScript?

June 16, 2010 • Joseph C. Dolson

Editor's Note: Ecommerce merchants operate businesses using complex technologies. We launched our "Need to Know" series to help merchants obtain a basic understanding of these technologies, recognizing that most merchants are not web developers or programmers. In this installment, contr...
Code
HTML5 Video: 12 Frequently Asked Questions

June 14, 2010 • PEC Staff

Editor's Note: Many observers believe the new version of HTML, called HTML5, will change online video because of the <video> tag that the new version contains. But, there are many unresolved details involving HTML5 video, and we asked a video expert about some of these. The exper...
Code
HTML5: The Future of Online Video?

June 9, 2010 • Justin Foster

If you pay attention to online video, chances are you’ve heard of HTML5. It could be the next big technology that will change online video as we know it. Apple’s Steve Jobs famously stated several weeks ago, in his "Thoughts on Flash" letter, that Apple prefers HTML5 video to Adobe’s F...
Design & Development
May Survey Results: Analytics, Gmail Most Popular Google Products

June 8, 2010 • Nic Murdock

A monthly survey conducted by Practical eCommerce polled readers about the importance and trustworthiness of Google products. The May 2010 survey asked four questions about Google products, with a comment section for each response. Readers who completed the survey, and then provided us...
Design & Development
Ten Steps to Migrate Your Site to a New Ecommerce Platform

June 7, 2010 • Michael Stearns

A milestone in the growth of your ecommerce business is when you realize you have outgrown your current web platform and need to upgrade. Maybe you nailed it the first time around and picked a terrific, scalable platform. But oftentimes, first-time site owners opt for the low cost, set-...
Design & Development
Mobile Payment Processors Extend Reach with AppNinjas

June 2, 2010 • PEC Staff

The rise of mobile devices is affecting ecommerce. More consumers are using these devices to shop online and more merchants are using them to collect payments. We recently spoke with two experts in the credit card business about processing payments on mobile devices. They are John Waldr...
Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: King Cart Services

May 28, 2010 • Kate Monteith

This week, we'll hear from Marshall Dudley, the founder and owner of King Cart Services. The company is based in Knoxville, Tenn., and its ecommerce platform currently serves roughly 1,000 users. We'll also hear from a customer, A. P. Jones of All Predator Calls, an online store based in St. George, Utah that sells a variety of wildlife calls and related hunting accessories.
Design & Dev Tools
The PEC Review: Buffalo Technology’s HD-HX2.0TU3 External Hard Drive

May 24, 2010 • Armando Roggio

One of the computer industry's greatest apocryphal tales has Microsoft founder Bill Gates telling a newspaper in 1981 that "640K is more memory than anyone will ever need." The story is false, and Gates has been adamantly denying the quote for nearly three decades. But false as it is,...

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