Page 102 – Practical Ecommerce

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Technical SEO
13 Ways to Kill Organic Search Traffic

April 15, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown

Skill and effort influence organic search success. But any number of actions can harm search engine optimization efforts. In this post, I’ll describe 13 SEO blunders that I’ve seen over ...
Email & Text Marketing
15 Essential Elements of Every Marketing Email

April 13, 2018 • Carolyn Nye

A timely email promotion is an easy and cost-efficient way to kick-start sales. But in the haste of a tight turnaround or deadline, it’s easy to make email composing mistakes, to miss crucial elements or even errors and typos. In this post, I'll offer a checklist of 15 items that every marketing email should have. Print it and use it for your email deployments.
Content Marketing
7 Key Details to Enhance an Ecommerce Blog

April 12, 2018 • Marcia Yudkin

Many ecommerce merchants publish a blog. But they don’t always assess its overall effectiveness. Has it boosted sales? Does it generate reader engagement? In this post, I’ll review a strategy for ...
Marketing & Advertising
How to Write Text Ads in AdWords, for Ecommerce

April 12, 2018 • Armando Roggio

AdWords, Google’s advertising platform, is the engine driving online sales for many small and mid-sized ecommerce operations. Sellers that want to get the most from text ads in AdWords should ...
Amazon & Marketplaces
Ecommerce Briefs: Walmart, Amazon Vie for Flipkart; Etsy and Adidas Refocus

April 11, 2018 • Marcia Kaplan

“Ecommerce Briefs” is my occasional series of news and developments from online merchants. In this installment, I’ll address the competition between Walmart and Amazon to acquire Flipkart, India’s dominant marketplace. I’ll ...
Analytics & Data
Does Facebook’s Data Debacle Impact Advertisers?

April 11, 2018 • Michael Stancil

Facebook is an enormously powerful advertising tool. There is no better mix of users, placements, and targeting. Sure, you have keywords with Google, and even audiences, but not with the ...
Business
Lessons Learned: Battic Door Thrives in Energy Conservation

April 10, 2018 • Jennifer D. Meacham

Massachusetts-based Battic Door is 15 years in the making. With a credit-card investment of $5,000, owner Mark Tyrol has turned his home-insulation ideas into $1.5 million of annual sales. “I found ...
Marketing & Advertising
How to Create Video Ads That Sell

April 9, 2018 • Armando Roggio

Direct response video ads on YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, and similar platforms have the potential to drive shoppers to your ecommerce site and help your company sell more. While the creative substance ...
Platforms & Apps
11 Free WordPress Ecommerce Themes for 2018

April 9, 2018 • Sig Ueland

The world’s most popular content management system, WordPress, has a lot to offer anyone who wants to open an online store. There’s a constant stream of new themes, many of ...
Customer Service
16 Must-have Features for Live Chat Implementation

April 8, 2018 • Pamela Hazelton

Once considered an add-on that made communication easier for the consumer and business, live chat is now a staple for most online stores. That’s because waiting on the phone and ...
Analytics & Data
Spy on Competitors to Improve Products and Promotions

April 6, 2018 • Anna Kayfitz

Spying on your ecommerce competition can help with product pricing and marketing strategy. The first step is to identify all competitors no matter how large or small. Once you’ve compiled ...
Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for May 2018

April 5, 2018 • Armando Roggio

Whether your business launches a new video series, composes a post about filmmaker Wes Anderson, or features any of the month’s many holidays, there is no shortage of content marketing ...
Analytics & Data
Getting Started with Google Tag Manager, for Ecommerce

April 4, 2018 • Morgan Jones

Many websites lose reporting from one of their marketing or analytics platforms. The culprit is usually the removal of tags during updates to the sites. Tags are critical for ecommerce merchants. But they add clutter to websites. That's the purpose of Google Tag Manager — to manage tags and contain them in a single JavaScript snippet on all pages.
Business > Merchant Voice
Pros and cons of meeting with suppliers

April 4, 2018 • Peter Keller

The primary reason to not visit my suppliers is I do not care about them. For example, if I am drop shipping from a supplier that is significantly larger than FringeSport, there may be no need to cultivate a relationship. The main reason, however, to visit suppliers is to build relationships. If you treat suppliers like you're doing one-time deals, they're going to treat you in the same way.
Analytics & Data
Facebook’s Data Scandal Affects Ecommerce Companies

April 3, 2018 • Robert Brady

Facebook is facing a public relations nightmare surrounding its collecting and sharing of user data. Here is the short version. A Cambridge professor used a Facebook survey app to obtain profile ...
Conversion
How to Supercharge Product Reviews on WooCommerce

April 3, 2018 • Curtis McHale

It is no secret that product reviews can help merchants increase sales. Reviews are proof that others found a product valuable, or not. WooCommerce provides the structured data to display rating stars in search results. But product reviews, properly utilized, can do much more. They can greatly increase conversions. In this post, I'll address four WooCommerce extensions that supercharge product reviews.
Design & Dev Tools
20 Helpful Alexa Skills for Merchants

April 2, 2018 • Sig Ueland

Alexa skills are voice apps that enhance Alexa-driven devices. With the right skills enabled, Alexa can help merchants tracks sales, get industry-related news and tips, monitor communications, organize tasks, and ...
Business
The Next Generation of Ecommerce Management

April 2, 2018 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce is disruptive. It has changed the way millions of people shop. But the management of many ecommerce businesses has not evolved. It often operates, seemingly, as an old-world dictatorship or a fiefdom. What follows are several ideas to organize and manage an ecommerce business in 2018 and beyond. Some of these are concepts may seem revolutionary. But, then again, so is ecommerce.
Platforms & Apps
Ecommerce Product Releases: April 1, 2018

April 1, 2018 • Sig Ueland

Here is a list of product releases and updates for March from companies that offer services to online merchants. There are updates on artificial intelligence, subscription services, new marketplaces, shopping actions and experiences, delivery tracking, and augmented reality. IBM launches new artificial intelligence platform. IBM has launched Cloud Private for Data, an integrated data science, data engineering, and app-building platform, along with Data Science Elite Team, a no-charge consultancy that advises clients on their artificial-intelligence roadmaps.
Business
March 2018 Top 10: Our Most Popular Posts

March 30, 2018 • PEC Staff

What follows are our 10 most popular articles for March 2018, recognizing that articles we published earlier in the month are more likely to make the list than later ones. How ...
SEO
6 Spring Cleaning Tips for SEO

March 30, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown

It’s spring, and that means it’s time to peer into your site to find the often-overlooked items that drag down natural search performance. In our homes, we tend to put off cleaning the closets, dusting the baseboards, and clearing the spider webs out of the hard-to-reach places. Similarly, some aspects of search engine optimization we tend to put off for another day. Today is the day for SEO spring cleaning! These six steps will make your site shine, and boost its natural search performance in the process.
Design & Development
Are PWAs the Future of Mobile Commerce?

March 29, 2018 • Armando Roggio

Compared to a typical, mobile-optimized web page, progressive web apps may give mobile shoppers a better browsing and buying experience while helping online sellers earn more sales and profit. It is for these reasons, progressive web apps — PWAs — may be the next phase of mobile web optimization.
Finance
ICOs Are the Newest Form of Alternative Funding

March 28, 2018 • Marcia Kaplan

If words like cryptocurrency, cryptocoin, Bitcoin, and blockchain befuddle you, you're not alone. Even the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is having a hard time keeping up with all the new alternative funding mechanisms. The latest funding craze is an Initial Coin Offering, an "ICO," which is a new form of crowdfunding using cryptocurrency.
Schools & Resources
Reading List: Roxanne Abercrombie with Whoson

March 28, 2018 • PEC Staff

In “Reading List,” we ask ecommerce professionals to name some of their favorite books and blogs and tell us why they read them. For this installment, we corresponded with Roxanne ...
Analytics & Data
3 Ways Customer Data Drives Ecommerce Conversions

March 27, 2018 • Anna Kayfitz

Data is important to ecommerce businesses. But many are not sure how to use it — to collect, analyze, and make meaningful changes to their business. The key ecommerce data is easy to obtain, however. It comes from customers. In this post, I'll review how to apply basic customer metrics to improve your ecommerce sales.
Marketing & Advertising > Merchant Voice
Newsletter frustrations result in new target audience

March 27, 2018 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

Last month I noticed declining subscriptions across my three email newsletters. To offset the reduction, I decided to revise my signup popup box. I've used popup discount offers on other retailers’ websites. So I decided to do the same on mine: offering a discount to new email subscribers. I asked my developer to revise my existing newsletter popups on both websites — My Wedding Décor and My Event Décor — to include a 15 percent discount for subscribers’ first orders.
Cross-border Selling > Merchant Voice
Yandex.Market, in new joint venture, seeks non-Russian sellers

March 27, 2018 • Maksim Komonov

A leading Russian bank and the largest online Russian marketplace have announced a joint venture that will likely improve cross-border ecommerce. Sberbank is the largest and most trusted saving bank in ...
Design & Dev Tools
3-part Plan to Minimize the Impact of Site Outages

March 26, 2018 • Eric Davis

“The site is down.” Few things worry developers as much as outages, especially on ecommerce sites where every minute represents lost revenue. But outages happen. To minimize their impact, plan for them.
Amazon & Marketplaces
17 Amazon Seller Tools to Find Profitable Products

March 25, 2018 • Connor Gillivan

As an Amazon merchant, I'm always looking for the next best product to sell — a high-potential item that no seller has discovered. In this article, I will share 17 Amazon seller tools that help source new products. Select a tool from the list, put together a standard process, and hand it off to a team member. Keep the process running at all times. It will increase your chances of finding that next best product.
Social Media
High-performing Facebook Ad Placements (in 4 Steps)

March 23, 2018 • Michael Stancil

In 2018, Facebook ads can appear on Facebook itself, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and the Audience Network. Facebook is no longer a one-option platform. Advertisers must now keep a close eye on how their ads render on all platforms. Otherwise, you might be wasting money. Consider Instagram and Messenger, for example.