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
10 New, Free Ecommerce Themes for WordPress
November 2, 2015 • Sig Ueland
With an abundance of free themes available, WordPress is an ideal platform to start your ecommerce store — without breaking the bank. Here is a list of new ecommerce themes for WordPress.
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Platforms & Apps
16 Mobile Apps for Networking Events
September 7, 2015 • Sig Ueland
Conferences and industry events, such as Practical Ecommerce’s upcoming Ignite 2015, are not only opportunities to learn from the experts, but also ideal places to network with peers. Loading your ...
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Platforms & Apps
14 Tools for Collaborative Brainstorming
August 24, 2015 • Sig Ueland
Harness the creativity of your team with online collaboration tools. Brainstorm and visualize ideas together, regardless of location. Here is a list of tools for collaborative brainstorming. There are online whiteboards ...
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Platforms & Apps
17 Call-to-action Plugins for WordPress
August 17, 2015 • Sig Ueland
If you have a website or blog on WordPress, a call-to-action plugin can help you grab the attention of your visitors and help them to take action. Use call-to-action elements ...
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Platforms & Apps
How to Keep Your WordPress Site Safe from Hackers
August 6, 2015 • Daniel Kedinger
Once open-source software becomes the most widely used content management system on the Internet, it will undoubtedly also become a target for hackers.
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Platforms & Apps
14 Niche Market Business Software Platforms and Apps
July 2, 2015 • Kathleen Fealy
This article presents 14 software platforms and apps that help niche market businesses improve their marketing, heighten customer experience, and manage assets more efficiently. They focus on the following industries: hotel, medical, real estate, financial services, photography, publishing, human resources, HVAC, and contracting.
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Platforms & Apps
WordPress’s WooCommerce Acquisition Could Improve Support, Features
June 4, 2015 • Armando Roggio
The announcement that WordPress’s parent company, Automattic, would purchase WooThemes and its widely used WooCommerce plugin could be good news for online sellers using the ecommerce platform. WooCommerce, which by some ...
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Platforms & Apps
8 Questions before You Choose an Ecommerce Platform in 2015
June 2, 2015 • Armando Roggio
Selling online requires an ecommerce platform. Fortunately, for entrepreneurs there are many good ecommerce solutions available. Selecting which one to use can be a matter of choosing the best option ...
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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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