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
20 Tools to Run a Small Business
February 16, 2015 • Sig Ueland
A small business owner assumes many functions — marketing, sales, human resources, information technology, and research and development. Fortunately, there are some terrific online tools to help you perform most ...
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Platforms & Apps
20 Collaboration Tools for Small Businesses
January 19, 2015 • Sig Ueland
Small businesses that rely on teamwork can enhance their organization with a variety of helpful online tools. Here is a list of collaboration tools to meet the needs of small businesses.
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Platforms & Apps
13 Innovative Mobile Commerce Apps
January 12, 2015 • Sig Ueland
Mobile commerce is no longer a novelty. According to an IBM report, mobile accounted for 45 percent of all online traffic during the 2014 holiday season, and online sales from ...
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Platforms & Apps
Ecommerce SaaS Platforms Easy to Launch, Sophisticated
November 5, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Software-as-a-service platforms offer a nearly complete foundation for operating an online store, be it a business-to-consumer retailer or a business-to-business seller. It’s never been easier to launch a sophisticated, effective ...
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Platforms & Apps
Miva President on Ecommerce Longevity, Innovation
October 28, 2014 • PEC Staff
Miva is both a pioneering early day shopping cart and a progressive, innovative platform. Its president, Rick Wilson, recently spoke with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock to discuss, among other topics,
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Platforms & Apps
17 New Ecommerce Themes for WordPress
October 13, 2014 • Sig Ueland
To start an online store with WordPress, take advantage of the abundance of ecommerce themes. Thanks to the active community of developers working on WordPress, new themes are often available. Here ...
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Platforms & Apps
SEO 201, Part 5: Evaluating Ecommerce Platforms
October 10, 2014 • Jill Kocher Brown
This is the fifth installment of my “SEO 201″ series, following: “Part 1: Technical Rules”; “Part 2: Crawling and Indexing Barriers”; “Part 3: Enabling Search-engine Spiders”; “Part 4: Architecture Is Key.” All ecommerce platforms claim ...
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Platforms & Apps
25 Top U.S. Mobile Apps in 2014
September 15, 2014 • Sig Ueland
Mobile is now the leading digital platform in the U.S., primarily due to the growth of mobile app usage. In its latest mobile app report, digital trend-tracking firm comScore lists the ...
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Platforms & Apps
Yahoo Launches Updated, Competitive Ecommerce Platform
August 14, 2014 • Armando Roggio
With the aim of helping small businesses get started online, build a thriving company, and grow to be a successful enterprise, Yahoo has relaunched its venerable software-as-a-service (SaaS) ecommerce platform,
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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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