Platforms & Apps

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...

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...

May 5, 2011 • Kerry Murdock

Cloud computing is frequently discussed and misunderstood. Among the many hosted, cloud platforms, Shopify is an ecommerce leader.

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...

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.

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...

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, ...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

November 29, 2010 • Armando Roggio

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 (...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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 ...

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 ...