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
15 Productivity Apps for Your Google Chromebook
August 15, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Google Chromebook and its browser-as-operating-system approach to computing have put the spotlight on web-based applications. The Chromebook's Chrome OS represents a completely new approach to computing. On a traditional Mac or Windows-based computer, there is the operating system on t...
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Platforms & Apps
Goodsie Helpful for Beginning Entrepreneurs
July 21, 2011 • Armando Roggio
A new ecommerce platform helps novice ecommerce entrepreneurs get up and running quickly, but it limits choices and, perhaps, creates some marketing challenges. Goodsie — which costs $15 per month — uses a simple web interface and a well-defined set of options to help would-be merchant...
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Platforms & Apps
15 Mobile Retail Apps that Enhance Customer Experiences
June 24, 2011 • Sig Ueland
Retail businesses are building mobile apps that do much more than just display products for sale. Mobile apps can shape the in-store experience, empower the purchasing process, and create interesting and dynamic ways to interact with the customer. Here is a list of mobile apps created ...
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Platforms & Apps
34 Ecommerce Themes for WordPress
June 22, 2011 • Sig Ueland
A WordPress ecommerce theme can take a regular blog and transform it into a dazzling online storefront. Find the theme that’s right for you, then customize it to create your unique store. This is a list of ecommerce themes for WordPress. There are free themes, if you’re just getting st...
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Platforms & Apps
20 QR Code Tools and Uses
June 16, 2011 • Sig Ueland
With quick response codes, businesses and organizations are finding new ways to deliver information and interact with consumers. When you scan a QR code with your smartphone application, you can receive product information. But QR codes can also link to web content, video, social medi...
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Platforms & Apps
25 Great Magento Themes
June 15, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Magento is one of the most popular ecommerce platforms with thousands of live shops, including major retailers. The platform, which eBay recently purchased, also has a vibrant developer community that creates easy-to-integrate themes and modules. In this article, you find a list of 25 ...
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Platforms & Apps
35 Android Apps to Run Your Business
June 10, 2011 • Sig Ueland
In this mobile world, iPhone gets all the love. There are over 400,000 different apps for Apple’s iOS, compared to approximately 200,000 apps for Google’s Android OS. However, according to a recent study by mobile analytics group Distimo, there are now more free apps available for Andro...
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Platforms & Apps
24 Ecommerce Plugins for WordPress
June 2, 2011 • Sig Ueland
Once WordPress was just a place to blog. Then came over fourteen thousand plugins. Today WordPress is a highly customizable platform, with everything you need to run your ecommerce business. Here is a list of 24 plugins to help you run your business on WordPress. These plugins will hel...
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Platforms & Apps
10 Essential Shopping Cart Features
June 1, 2011 • Armando Roggio
There are hundreds of ecommerce platforms that online merchants can choose from. The differences between these carts can be significant, so knowing what features matter is important. In this article, you'll find a list ten "must-have shopping cart features" that either improve the shop...
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Platforms & Apps
16 Live Meeting and Webinar Platforms
May 18, 2011 • Sig Ueland
With web conferencing you can reach a broad audience, whether it’s a 25-person live meeting or a 2,500-person webinar. Here is a list of live-conferencing services. Many of these distinguish between smaller meetings and larger webinars, offering services for both categories. While t...
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Platforms & Apps
Cloud Computing Future of Web, Says Shopify Exec
May 5, 2011 • Kerry Murdock
Cloud computing is frequently discussed and misunderstood. Among the many hosted, cloud platforms, Shopify is an ecommerce leader.
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Platforms & Apps
Ubuntu Linux: A User-Friendly, Desktop Operating System
May 4, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Last week, Canonical — the open-source development firm — released a new version of its Ubuntu Linux operating system, seemingly aimed at offering casual Windows and Mac users a feature-rich alternative. Although it is certainly a bit of hyperbole to say that Ubuntu 11.04 will send Ap...
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Platforms & Apps
Internet Explorer 10 Is Coming
April 18, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Microsoft released a preview version of its forthcoming Internet Explorer 10 web browser at the MIX11 developer conference in Las Vegas last week. The browser preview provides important insights into what might be a new salvo in the browser wars and could affect how online businesses develop websites and applications.
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Platforms & Apps
Miva Merchant President on Acquisitions, SaaS Moves
March 22, 2011 • PEC Staff
Miva Merchant launched its shopping cart in the late 1990s and the company's evolution continues. An independent investor group acquired Miva Merchant in 2007, and executives there have since been evolving that product to a hosted platform, enhancing the company's revenue, and generally...
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Platforms & Apps
Mobile Devices to Alter Retail Landscape; 3 Predictions
March 16, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Internet-enabled mobile devices are going to have a huge impact on retail sales in just the next few years, especially affecting small ecommerce businesses. Anytime one discusses the future of a particular industry or where a trending technology or behavior may be taking some segment, ...
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Platforms & Apps
Magento Releases Hosted, SaaS Version
March 9, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Magento, the open-source ecommerce platform, officially launched a hosted, software-as-a-service (SaaS) version. The Magento platform — in my view — is one of the most robust and effective ecommerce solutions available. If, in fact, Magento has any drawbacks or weaknesses, it is that ...
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Platforms & Apps
New Firefox 4 Mobile Released
February 28, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Last week, Mozilla released a new version of its Firefox 4 Beta for Android and Nokia Maemo-based mobile devices that is reported to be more than twice as fast as the devices' native web browsers. Earlier versions of Firefox for mobile have had some challenges with stability and perfor...
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Platforms & Apps
10 Innovative Digital-Download Stores
February 14, 2011 • Armando Roggio
The Holy Grail of ecommerce is to create a product once and sell it over and over again. Many online stores are achieving this goal by focusing on downloadable products like source code, graphics, PDF files, or ebooks just, to name a few of the digital products available. In this arti...
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Platforms & Apps
Google Chrome Links to New Web App Store
February 7, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Google recently announced several changes to version 9 of its popular Chrome browser, including closer ties to a web store featuring products that blur the line between websites and web applications further and give ecommerce marketers a new sales channel. Google has said in the past t...
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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...