Page 103 – Practical Ecommerce

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Local Business
SEO: Store Locators Good for Bots, Good for Shoppers

March 23, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown

If you have more than one physical location, in addition to your ecommerce site, you need a store locator. Slapping all your store addresses on a single web page and calling it done doesn’t cut it for shoppers or for natural search performance. An optimal store locator should be searchable for your customers and also crawlable for the search engines.
Checkout Tactics
Leverage Micro Conversions to Close Sales

March 22, 2018 • Pamela Hazelton

Most visitors to an online store aren’t ready to buy. That’s where micro conversions come into play. They help build the excitement and trust that shoppers need to make a purchase. Micro conversions are smaller actions that indicate a visitor’s interest in what you sell or have to say.
Shipping & Fulfillment
Fulfillment Requirements of Retailer-owned Marketplaces

March 21, 2018 • Stephen Bulger

There are many marketplace options other than Amazon for merchants. We all know about eBay. Big retailers such Walmart, Costco, Home Depot, Best Buy, Nordstrom, and Dick’s Sporting Goods offer marketplaces, too. In this post, I'll address fulfillment requirements of retailer-owned marketplaces.
Fraud Prevention
10 Ways That Artificial Intelligence Helps Merchants

March 21, 2018 • Gagan Mehra

The term "artificial intelligence" refers to software that learns from experience. It mimics the human mind in that it changes responses based on data. Self-driving cars and voice-enabled devices rely on artificial intelligence. Retail businesses can also benefit. In this post, I'll list 10 use cases of how artificial intelligence helps merchants.
Email & Text Marketing
How Does Your Email Marketing Program Stack Up?

March 20, 2018 • Carolyn Nye

Email is the workhorse of direct marketing. The basics have remained consistent for years. Best practices from 10 years ago are still relevant. But email marketing is evolving. Segmentation, personalization, mobile:
Design & Development
6 Plugins to Automate a WooCommerce Store

March 20, 2018 • Curtis McHale

There is so much to manage with an ecommerce store. You need to maintain adequate stock. You have customer issues, server and hosting issues, and software bugs. A store owner should focus on the big picture items, not managing every detail. In this post, I'll address six WooCommerce plugins that can automate details of your store management.
Schools & Resources
11 New Ecommerce Books for Spring 2018

March 19, 2018 • Sig Ueland

Spring is here. And so is a new batch of ecommerce books. There are titles on digital marketing, LinkedIn ads, brand development, standing out in a crowd, and artificial intelligence. I compiled this list using Amazon. From Amazon’s “Books” category, I selected “Business & Money.” From there I chose the “Processes & Infrastructure” sub-category and selected “E-commerce.”
Marketing & Advertising
For Ecommerce, Better to Use Search Ads or Display?

March 19, 2018 • Armando Roggio

For online sellers, digital advertising is not a choice between search ads or display ads, but rather understanding how each of these tools can help generate sales. The term "search advertising" describes placing ads on a search engine results page. Search ads target specific keywords and seek to capture potential customers intent on finding some piece of information or, perhaps, finding a product.
Platforms & Apps
Ecommerce Product Releases: March 18, 2018

March 18, 2018 • Sig Ueland

Here is a list of product releases and updates for mid-March from companies that offer services to online merchants. There are updates on artificial intelligence, last-mile delivery, seed funding, “under $10” products, and crowdfunding.
Keyword Research
SEO: 8 Reasons to Stop the Addiction to Keyword Demand

March 16, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search marketing is all about experimentation — testing and learning. Slavish obsession with the average number of searches per month as a sole metric for optimization or a forecasting revenue will only hurt a natural search program. It’s time to end our addiction to search demand.
Technical SEO
Gzip Compression Could Make Your Site 90-percent Faster

March 16, 2018 • Armando Roggio

Not using gzip on your web server? Your company should be. Enabling gzip compression could improve initial page load times by as much as 90 percent. Your business's faster web pages may even lead to better search engine rankings, an increase in site traffic, and more sales.
Photography & Video
Photo Captions (Greatly) Help Ecommerce Conversions

March 15, 2018 • Marcia Yudkin

“A picture is worth a thousand words.” Many of us conclude that pictures make words unnecessary. We believe images are so explicit and clear that they communicate fully on their own. Too often that’s not true, however. Whether of people or products, photos can be more ambiguous than most people assume.
Local Business
Costco Finally Embraces Ecommerce

March 15, 2018 • Marcia Kaplan

While Walmart, Amazon, Kroger, and Albertson's compete for online supremacy in groceries and household goods, Costco has until recently remained aloof, firmly committed to serving customers at its physical stores. The company, which operates on a membership basis, has 49.9 million member households.
B2B
6 Impressive B2B Ecommerce Sites

March 14, 2018 • Lori McDonald

Offering a compelling ecommerce experience to B2B buyers requires a process of continuous improvement. It can be helpful to examine other B2B ecommerce sites, to learn. Grainger and Amazon Business are often cited as leading examples. But there is also value in learning from smaller, innovative B2B companies. In this post, I'll address six impressive, independent B2B sites.
Staffing
When Hiring an SEO Pro, Look for These 11 Skills

March 14, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown

Hiring a search engine optimization professional is challenging. It’s relatively easy for a would-be practitioner to portray “book-learning” as actual, on-the-job experience. But I’m a firm believer in the importance of soft skills — personal qualities that enable someone to work well in a role with others — in hiring a quality SEO pro.
Technical SEO
How to Quickly Drop Seconds from a Site’s Load Time

March 13, 2018 • Hamlet Batista

There are good reasons to improve your online store’s page speed, especially for mobile. However, I’ve found that improving speed can require a lot of expensive developer work. usually following standard best practices over many months. In this article, I will share simple tricks to eliminate seconds of page load time, in just a few hours.
Code
Enable HTTP/2 for Happier Customers, Better SEO

March 12, 2018 • Armando Roggio

Enabling your company's website to use HTTP/2 could result in better performance, happier customers, and improved rankings on search engines. All of that, in turn, could help your site generate more traffic, more conversions, and more profit. The HTTP/2 standard is a significant update of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol that has been used to connect computers via the internet since 1991.
Design & Dev Tools
19 Free Web Design Tools from Winter 2018

March 12, 2018 • Sig Ueland

Utilizing free resources from the design community is a good way to add value to your website. Here is a list of new web tools and design elements from winter 2018. There are designer and developer apps, fonts, content tools, and more. All of these are free.
Conversion
Target Audiences Can Change (Ask Play-Doh)

March 11, 2018 • Pamela Hazelton

The first step to sell online is to know your target audience. But identifying that audience is not always clear. While you should have an idea of who would want your products, it’s not uncommon to find that your understanding of certain groups of people, along with their shopping habits and expectations, is off. Sometimes way off. And that’s okay.
SEO
5 Ecommerce SEO Tactics to Try Today

March 9, 2018 • Armando Roggio

Search engine optimization seeks to help search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo understand a page's purpose and content in the hope the search engine will serve up a highly-ranked link in search results. An ecommerce business could spend months or even years optimizing search engine traffic. Some SEO techniques require wholesale changes in site structure, a nearly constant flow of new content, or days of keyword research.
Social Media
For Digital Ads, Minimal Text Converts the Best

March 9, 2018 • Michael Stancil

When it comes to digital advertising, less is more. Ad platforms such as Google AdWords, Twitter, and Facebook have character limits. And that's good. No matter how complicated your product or how compelling your offer, brevity nearly always produces more conversions, in my experience.
SEO
SEO: How to Rank against the Heavyweights

March 8, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown

Merchants want to rank number one in Google for search terms that are seemingly important to their business, such as “dog food.” Or “office supplies.” Or whatever popular term describes their products. The problem, however, is that not every company can rank for high-demand keywords. The workaround is to be realistic about ranking potential and develop search engine optimization strategies accordingly.
Analytics & Data
Use Google Analytics to Audit PPC Traffic

March 7, 2018 • Morgan Jones

Pay-per-click advertising is a key revenue driver for many ecommerce businesses. But click costs can be expensive. Ensuring that all clicks are reported accurately in Google Analytics will help make informed decisions. In this post, I'll describe a process for auditing the reporting of PPC traffic in Google Analytics. I'll offer guidance on identifying issues with PPC reporting, with insights for how to troubleshoot and fix reporting errors.
Schools & Resources
Crisis Communications Checklist for Retail Businesses

March 7, 2018 • Armando Roggio

Has your business committed a social media faux pas? An employee, perhaps, did something embarrassing, or maybe your entire industry is getting bad press. How your company communicates through a crisis may impact the entire organization, including profitability and viability.
Design & Development
How to Automate Customer Recognition

March 6, 2018 • Curtis McHale

Consumers who interact with ecommerce companies have many milestones. They spend their first $100. They purchase their 10th product. They spend the 1 millionth dollar with your store. How do you recognize these milestones? What can you do to show appreciation?
Analytics & Data
How to Track Overall Marketing Performance for All Channels

March 6, 2018 • Anna Kayfitz

Marketers typically measure the performance of campaigns and channels. For email, the key metrics could be opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and sales. For pay-per-click ads, it could be cost per click and cost per conversion. But how do you measure your marketing performance overall? And how do you compare channels, such as email marketing to PPC ads to social media?
Business > Merchant Voice
Entrepreneurs fool themselves about productivity

March 5, 2018 • Peter Keller

There is no shortage of advice on how entrepreneurs can be more productive and more effective. Over the years, I have become better at both. But I sometimes believe that I’m being productive when, in fact, I’m wasting time. Here are three ways that entrepreneurs often fool themselves about productivity.
Content Marketing
Content Marketing Can Drive Long-tail SEO

March 5, 2018 • Armando Roggio

A robust content marketing campaign may attract shoppers searching on long-tail keyword phrases, which could generate additional sales. The term “long tail” describes statistical distributions where there are many points, if ...
Platforms & Apps
11 Product Review Plugins for WordPress

March 5, 2018 • Sig Ueland

Gathering reviews and testimonials from shoppers can generate leads and influence the decisions of others. For WordPress users, adding reviews to a website is as easy as adding the right plugin. Here is a list of product review plugins for WordPress.
Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for April 2018

March 4, 2018 • Armando Roggio

Need inspiration for your company's April content marketing? Write about baseball, American filmmaking, holidays, or springtime activities and shopping. Content marketing is the act of creating, publishing, and distributing articles, videos, podcasts, or even graphics with the aim of attracting, engaging, and retaining an audience of customers and potential customers. It is marketing based on reciprocity.