Platforms & Apps
Our coverage of platforms and apps includes innovations and updates to shopping carts, content management systems, mobile shopping, digital-product selling, headless commerce, social media, and much more.
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Platforms & Apps
4 WordPress Maintenance Companies, to Help Site Owners
July 17, 2014 • Joe Robison
WordPress ecommerce owners must keep their sites updated and maintained. Over the past few years, services have sprung up to address this problem. Whether you’re a site owner with no ...
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Platforms & Apps
When to Avoid WordPress Ecommerce
July 1, 2014 • Joe Robison
With more than 600 ecommerce platforms, it can be difficult to choose the best one for your business. WordPress is a leading content management system, with popular ecommerce plugins. But ...
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Platforms & Apps
7 Things that Make WooCommerce Compelling
April 24, 2014 • Armando Roggio
WooCommerce is, arguably, the most popular and important WordPress ecommerce plugin. Its ease of use, features, and flexibility make it a leading ecommerce platform, capable of rivaling even the best ...
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Platforms & Apps
3 Things to Know About WooCommerce
April 23, 2014 • Armando Roggio
WooCommerce is a popular WordPress plugin, designed to transform WordPress into a capable ecommerce platform. The plugin has many superb features and capabilities, but there are also at least three ...
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Platforms & Apps
WooCommerce Leads Ecommerce Platform Pack in April 2014
April 18, 2014 • Armando Roggio
WooCommerce, the popular WordPress ecommerce plugin, had nearly 260,000 active sites indexed with BuiltWith, a web technology profiling tool, as of April 14, 2014, about 37,000 more sites than its ...
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Platforms & Apps
17 Chrome Apps to Run your Business
March 31, 2014 • Sig Ueland
Google’s Chrome Web Store offers apps to streamline the Chrome experience, providing a small business with tools to thrive using cloud-based solutions. Here is a list of apps to run your ...
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Platforms & Apps
Navigating 2014’s Crowded Ecommerce Platform Market
March 25, 2014 • Armando Roggio
The ecommerce platform market is crowded with effective, feature-rich solutions, making it challenging for new or growing ecommerce businesses to know which solution is best for them. Ecommerce platforms are the ...
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Platforms & Apps
PrestaShop 1.6 Adds Improved Business Intelligence, Other Features
March 13, 2014 • Armando Roggio
PrestaShop 1.6 is scheduled for official release on March 17, 2014. It adds several new features to the popular open source ecommerce platform, including easier access to key performance indicators ...
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Platforms & Apps
New Ecommerce Platform Claims Better Performance, Development
February 18, 2014 • Armando Roggio
A new open source ecommerce platform from a one-time Magento engineer claims it can change online selling for small and mid-sized merchants with a new set of easy-to-use features, mobile-by-default ...
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Platforms & Apps
How to Integrate Cloud-based Platforms
February 13, 2014 • Jerry Jao
Ecommerce businesses increasingly rely on cloud-based applications, such as hosted shopping carts, analytics platforms, cloud-based accounting, customer service tools, and more. To operating smoothly, a merchant’s cloud-based apps should integrate with ...
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Platforms & Apps
Rewards, Risks of Changing Ecommerce Platforms
January 27, 2014 • Dale Traxler
There are many reasons that ecommerce companies change platforms. As their business grows and market conditions change, ecommerce firms sometimes replace components or the entire platform to remain competitive. But replatforming ...
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Platforms & Apps
20 New Ecommerce Themes for WordPress
January 13, 2014 • Sig Ueland
With its wide variety of ecommerce themes, WordPress makes it easy to get a shop up and running in no time. Here is a list of new ecommerce themes for WordPress.
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Platforms & Apps
7 Top WordPress Plugins of 2013
December 17, 2013 • Joe Robison
WordPress continues to be a dominant content management system. Nearly every WordPress site relies on plugins for added functionality. But with the overwhelming number of plugins, it’s difficult to know which ...
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Platforms & Apps
Distributed Commerce to Disrupt Online Storefronts?
December 11, 2013 • Dale Traxler
The vast majority of ecommerce transactions occur in a traditional online storefront. Most ecommerce solutions include everything required for placing an order in a single shopping cart or platform —
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Platforms & Apps
20 Apps for Microsoft SkyDrive
December 2, 2013 • Sig Ueland
SkyDrive is Microsoft’s cloud storage service, similar to Google Drive and Dropbox. SkyDrive comes with some attractive features, such as 7 GB of free storage and mobile apps for iOS,
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Platforms & Apps
4 Managed WordPress Hosting Providers
November 20, 2013 • Joe Robison
Managed WordPress hosting came about because many WordPress sites, from small time bloggers to large businesses, wanted more security and support than was provided by standard hosts. They wanted expertise ...
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Platforms & Apps
Hosted Mobile Platforms Quick, Easy to Implement
November 18, 2013 • Dale Traxler
Consumers increasingly conduct product research on smartphones. But actual online purchases are typically done on desktops, laptops, and, now, tablets. There are many reasons for this, but mostly it is that ...
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Platforms & Apps
4 Popular WordPress Ecommerce Platforms
October 16, 2013 • Joe Robison
Most products for sale online are straightforward, with variations mainly in colors and sizes. WordPress ecommerce plugins can be an easy, inexpensive way to sell these items. If you already ...
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Platforms & Apps
Ecommerce Platforms: Design Control vs. Ease of Launching
July 3, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Online shoppers judge an Internet retailer’s trustworthiness and a product’s value based, at least in part, on how good a site or product detail page looks. Given its importance, one might think that design control would be an essential part of every available ecommerce platform. But ma...
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Platforms & Apps
4 Comment Systems: Pros and Cons
June 27, 2013 • Drew Coffin
In “What to Look for in a Comment System,” I described features like comment moderation, analytics, social integration, and dashboard settings. In this post I will review four popular comment systems and discuss the highlights of each.
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Platforms & Apps
Multichannel Case Study: Gap Inc.
June 21, 2013 • Dale Traxler
As a small online retailer, you may ignore the strategies of larger, multichannel brands. But if you investigate what these larger companies are doing to deliver a consistent multichannel experience, you will learn how to compete with them. If your operations are online only, you risk ...
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Platforms & Apps
25 Apps for Dropbox
April 15, 2013 • Sig Ueland
Dropbox is a cloud-storage service. Similar to Google Drive and SkyDrive, Dropbox lets you access and sync files across all your devices. While Dropbox only offers 2GB of initial free storage — Google Drive offers 5GB, SkyDrive offers 7GB — it expands free storage for completing a few s...
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Platforms & Apps
4 Reasons Every Retailer Should Have a Mobile App
April 3, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Mobile applications resonate with shoppers, are easy to implement, come with a variety of abilities and purposes, and are becoming the standard for online retailers. There are at least four reasons nearly every retailer should offer a mobile application. Mobile commerce is among the fa...
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Platforms & Apps
22 New Ecommerce Themes for WordPress
March 11, 2013 • Sig Ueland
WordPress is a content management system that’s popular for blogging. But with an ecommerce theme, you can use WordPress to launch a storefront. Here is a list of new ecommerce themes for WordPress. There are free and premium themes, loaded with features to customize your site. Many o...
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Platforms & Apps
7 Must-have WordPress Plugins for Business Sites
January 3, 2013 • Armando Roggio
WordPress plugins extend the popular content management system’s capabilities and, in many cases, improve its performance. While each site may wish to use a different combination of plugins, there are simply some of these extensions that every business must have.
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Platforms & Apps
Mobile Commerce: Website or App?
January 1, 2013 • Dale Traxler
According to Forrester Research, mobile commerce sales will grow from $10 billion in 2012 to $32 billion in 2016, accounting for more than 7 percent of total ecommerce sales. With the adoption of smartphones and tablets accelerating worldwide, that percentage could be even higher. For...
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Platforms & Apps
10 Free Content Curation Platforms
October 8, 2012 • Kevin Webster
Many businesses are embracing content curation — the process of collecting, commenting on, and linking to the content of others. The premise is find relevant articles, tips and tools that your prospects and customers would find valuable, and then share them on a platform that you brand.
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Platforms & Apps
18 Gmail Productivity Plugins
September 11, 2012 • Sig Ueland
The right plugin can transform Gmail from a standard email program into a productivity powerhouse, capable of managing your communications and professional networks. Here is a list of productivity plugins for Gmail. There are plugins to schedule emails, track correspondence, manage so...
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Platforms & Apps
Installing Software on Ubuntu Linux
September 3, 2012 • Armando Roggio
The Ubuntu Linux software installation process is more like visiting a mobile app store than following a traditional Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS X process. “On Windows, you might have to root around on a website to find an .exe file to download or go to a store and buy a CD with ...
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Platforms & Apps
The Benefits of an Integrated Ecommerce System
August 30, 2012 • Dale Traxler
Editor's Note: This is part one of a three-part series on the benefits of an integrated, all-in-one ecommerce platform. The second installment is "Defining Your Integrated System Requirements." The third is "Choosing an Integrated Ecommerce System; 4 Steps." I am consulting with a com...