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
Firefox 4.1 Will Shun Tracking
January 31, 2011 • Armando Roggio
A personal privacy organization praised new features in several leading browsers last week, singling out the forthcoming Firefox 4.1 as the leader in personal privacy. This latest chapter in the effort to inhibit online tracking may also affect some personalization and behavior driven t...
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Platforms & Apps
$5 Marketing, with Fiverr.com
January 24, 2011 • Armando Roggio
How you market your ecommerce business in 2011 may be different than how you marketed in 2010, or before. Unique sites like Fiverr are enabling edgy, entertaining, and engaging ways to reach new customers. On Fiverr, individuals post listings describing what they would do for $5. It's ...
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Platforms & Apps
Google Chrome Will Drop H.264 Codec, Impacting Future of Video
January 18, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Google announced last week that forthcoming versions of its increasingly popular Chrome browser would drop support for the patent-entangled H.264 video codec, potentially making HTML5 more open and available, but also challenging competitors like Apple, which is closely tied to H.264. ...
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Platforms & Apps
Cart Talk: BetterWorldBooks.com Exec on Custom ASP.net Shopping Cart
December 24, 2010 • PEC Staff
Merchants have almost 600 online shopping carts to choose from, including hosted carts, licensed carts and open-sourced carts. Each week in “Cart Talk” we interview a merchant that uses a ...
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Platforms & Apps
Cart Talk: HipsAndHair.com Owner on the Yahoo! Shopping Cart
December 17, 2010 • PEC Staff
With close to 600 ecommerce shopping carts on the market, merchants have a lot to choose from. Each week in “Cart Talk,” we interview a merchant that uses a particular cart — including hosted carts, licensed carts and open-sourced carts — to get frank, real-world feedback on its use: wh...
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Platforms & Apps
Cart Talk: Seventh.Ink Owner on LemonStand Shopping Cart
December 10, 2010 • PEC Staff
Merchants have almost 600 online shopping carts to choose from, including hosted carts, licensed carts and open-sourced carts. Each week in “Cart Talk” we will be interviewing a merchant that ...
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Platforms & Apps
Cart Talk: SuburbanHomeRecords.com CEO on ‘Limited Pressing’ Shopping Cart
December 3, 2010 • PEC Staff
Editor’s Note: “Cart Talk” is our new, weekly discussion about shopping carts with the merchants that use them. For this inaugural installment, we visit with a merchant that sells both ...
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Platforms & Apps
Opera 11 Launches Tab Stacking
November 29, 2010 • Armando Roggio
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Platforms & Apps
The PEC Review: Yahoo! Clues, for Trend Tracking
November 29, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Yahoo! has released a new trend-tracking tool that identifies what users looked for before and after a particular search term and estimates those users' annual incomes, potentially providing online retailers with good customer intelligence. Search marketing, whether via pay-per-click (...
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Platforms & Apps
The PEC Review: Yahoo! Meme for Microblogging, Sharing
November 22, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Social media marketing is proving to be an effective way to engage customers and improve sales for online stores. The social media landscape is, at least for the moment, dominated by two major services, Facebook and Twitter. But there are many other services that offer the possibility ...
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Platforms & Apps
RockMelt, The Next Social Browser?
November 19, 2010 • Armando Roggio
RockMelt is a new web browser that integrates with Facebook so that every page can be quickly shared and every post from a friend discovered. RockMelt is built using Chromium, which is the open-source web browser project that underlies Chrome; so it performs almost as well as the speed...
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Platforms & Apps
The PEC Review: Wufoo Online Form Builder
November 15, 2010 • Armando Roggio
In the Internet age, consumers encounter web forms with regularity. There are registration forms, login forms, contact forms, customer service forms, survey forms, content submission forms, package tracking forms, or checkout forms on just about every website. Web forms are, as such, o...
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Platforms & Apps
Become an Opera Power User in 3 Steps
November 2, 2010 • Armando Roggio
The Opera browser offers one of the most innovative user experiences available. Clearly the browser is a trendsetter. It was the first to introduce tabs, the first to maximize the page-viewing area and minimize controls, and it continues to include new features and new ways for users t...
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Platforms & Apps
The PEC Review: Use Jira for Bug Tracking, Project Management
October 25, 2010 • Armando Roggio
As ecommerce businesses grow from entrepreneurial startups to mid-sized retailers, they can become much more complex to manage. As a startup, the operation was likely managed by one or two people. Fixing website glitches was pretty straightforward. You saw something wrong. You fixed it...
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Platforms & Apps
Managing Pop-Ups in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome
October 22, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce professionals spend many hours each day online. They monitor their businesses, check email, market products, post to social media sites, watch the competition, or otherwise do any one of a hundred business-related activities. Into the midst of this online experience come pop-ups — ads, forms, controls, whatever.
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Platforms & Apps
8 Keyboard Shortcuts for Internet Explorer 9
October 12, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 is a modern, fast, and efficient web browser that will speed up the web for its users. But, if you really want to get the most out of this new and vastly improved web browser, you've got to take advantage of keyboard shortcuts. Every browser has keyboar...
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Platforms & Apps
5 Essential Firefox Add-ons
October 5, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Mozilla's Firefox web browser helped pioneer the concept of browser add-ons and extensions, making custom web surfing experiences and tools possible. The Firefox Add-on directory includes more than 13,000 browser extensions. According to Mozilla, the browser's various add-ons have be...
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Platforms & Apps
The PEC Review: Libsyn for Video, Audio Podcasting
September 27, 2010 • Armando Roggio
From product or how-to videos to expert audio podcasts, many online merchants use multimedia to help sell products and engage customers. Examples of ecommerce companies using video and audio abound, but they include REI and Maker SHED. Yet, both of these examples are from relatively ...
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Platforms & Apps
The PEC Review: Internet Explorer 9
September 20, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Microsoft released a preview of its Internet Explorer (IE) 9 web browser on September 15, promising users "a more beautiful web." Historically, Microsoft's IE browsers are widely used by Internet novices and widely hated by Internet regulars. Web developers, ecommerce merchants, and ...
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Platforms & Apps
The PEC Review: Firefox 4 Panorama
September 13, 2010 • Armando Roggio
On average, Americans spent about 56 hours on the Internet in June 2010, according to a recent Nielsen Wire report. Ecommerce merchants, whose workplace is on the web, likely spend many more hours online than the average user. With so much time spent online, a web browser's features an...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.