Page 120 – Practical Ecommerce

Category

Marketing & Advertising
User-generated Content Drives Awareness, Sales

February 2, 2017 • Vanessa Penagos-Pino

Exposing products and services to prospects is a challenge for many companies. With user-generated content, your customers do the selling for you. Whether it’s through online reviews, social media posts,
Influencers & Affiliates
Affiliate Marketing: Time to Adopt Attribution Rules?

February 1, 2017 • Greg Hoffman

Deciding who should receive affiliate-marketing commissions is increasingly important. Ecommerce merchants have watched as the affiliate channel evolved and coupon and loyalty sites quickly became the dominant publishers with little ...
Google Ads
Using AdWords’ New ‘Responsive Ads’ Format

February 1, 2017 • Robert Brady

As of yesterday, January 31, Google AdWords no longer allows advertisers to create or edit standard text ads. This should not come as a surprise. In September, Google announced the January ...
Technical SEO
SEO: How to Quickly Reverse a Traffic Downtrend

January 31, 2017 • Hamlet Batista

During a website redesign, re-platform, or domain change, it is not uncommon to see a reduction in organic search traffic. The panic generally starts weeks after trying one thing after ...
Conversion
Ecommerce Product Reviews Help Shoppers in Era of Distrust

January 30, 2017 • Armando Roggio

Product reviews and ratings help ecommerce shoppers make important buying decisions. Small online retailers, particularly those selling unique items, should encourage reviews and listen to customer feedback. “Consumers have long relied ...
SEO Tools
13 Free Tools to Test Website Speed

January 30, 2017 • Sig Ueland

Regularly testing the speed of your website is a good way to catch bottlenecks and improve the experience of visitors. Here is a list of free tools to test websites. There ...
Business > Merchant Voice
3 early mistakes in building my business

January 29, 2017 • Peter Keller

When I talk to entrepreneurs who have a “side hustle” — a side venture to their full-time employment — many times they ask when to leave their “safe” job and ...
Business > Merchant Voice
The challenge of setting up a second website

January 28, 2017 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

There must be many businesses that launch with a specific customer target market in mind, and then receive orders from quite different groups. When I launched My Wedding Décor in April ...
SEO
SEO How-to, Part 1: Why Do You Need It?

January 27, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization is part science and part art. But the foundational principles of SEO are straightforward. Still, before I can address how to practice SEO, I should explain what it is and why it’s important.
Amazon & Marketplaces
Using Amazon to build an ecommerce brand

January 27, 2017 • Phil Masiello

I love Amazon, both as a consumer and as a seller. There isn’t a more effective place to launch a brand and learn about consumer behavior than the Amazon marketplace. In ...
Customer Retention
5 Reasons to Offer Ecommerce Subscriptions

January 26, 2017 • Armando Roggio

The ecommerce subscription model offers retailers several operational benefits, including relatively better marketing results, higher customer retention rates, improved margins, easy inventory management, and less expensive shipping. Subscription ecommerce businesses take ...
Technical SEO
Using Caching (and Hardware) to Improve Page Speed

January 25, 2017 • Eric Davis

In “3 Backend Fixes to Increase Page Speed,” my article last month, I explained that caching can be applied to many areas of an ecommerce website. In this post, I’ll ...
Customer Service
13 Chatbots on Facebook Messenger, for Merchants

January 24, 2017 • Sig Ueland

Since the launch of Facebook’s Messenger platform last April, over 34,000 chatbots have been written, using simulated texting and chat interfaces to interact with users. Chatbots don’t require users to install ...
Conversion
8 Ways to Encourage Ecommerce Customer Loyalty in 2017

January 23, 2017 • Armando Roggio

Loyal, repeat customers boost an ecommerce company’s bottom line without requiring expensive marketing campaigns or intensive customer service. Repeat customers convert at a higher rate than first time buyers. Repeat customers ...
Marketing & Advertising
Real-time Pricing Affordable for Smaller Merchants

January 22, 2017 • Gagan Mehra

Most retailers change product prices infrequently. But larger companies, such as Amazon, Jet, and Sears, continually adjust prices in real time. Now smaller merchants can also benefit from real-time pricing and promotions.
Link Building
SEO: Be Community-centric to Earn Links

January 20, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization requires a unique blend of relevance and authority. Relevance is more easily mastered, but authority requires the community of people that is interested in the things you ...
Product Pages
Generate Product Descriptions with Natural Language Software

January 20, 2017 • Armando Roggio

Software solution providers are using templates and product data, such as brand name, price, and specifications, to automatically generate thousands of ecommerce product descriptions in practically no time. Ecommerce product descriptions ...
Customer Service
Want to Please Shoppers? Respond Quickly

January 19, 2017 • Pamela Hazelton

In “5 Ways to Draw Shoppers In, and Keep Them,” one of my posts last year, I addressed how you have about eight seconds to get an online shopper’s attention.
Email & Text Marketing
Understanding Email and Data Appends, for Marketing

January 18, 2017 • Carolyn Nye

Marketing professionals often ask me about email and data appends. Both can help grow new email subscribers and improve the information about existing ones. In this article, I’ll describe how ...
Business
Legal: Protecting Against Idea Misappropriation Claims

January 17, 2017 • John Di Giacomo

Ideas are cheap. But ideas can also help an ecommerce company improve its products and services. Often a merchant’s customers or partners are in the best position to provide such ...
Schools & Resources
12 Blogs on Medium for Merchants

January 16, 2017 • Sig Ueland

Medium, the social publishing platform, has been in the news recently for abandoning traditional ad-driven publishing (and shuttering its offices in New York and Washington, D.C., and laying off 50
Content Marketing
Content Marketing May Boost Customer Lifetime Value

January 15, 2017 • Armando Roggio

Business-to-consumer content marketing that focuses on providing useful, informative, or entertaining information may play a role in retaining customers and, thereby, increasing customer lifetime value and profit. Customer lifetime value (CLV) for ...
Amazon & Marketplaces
For Merchants, How to Navigate Amazon’s Marketplace?

January 13, 2017 • Kerry Murdock

The increasing dominance of Amazon has many merchants scratching their heads, wondering how exactly to work with that company, and how that company will impact their own businesses. I recently spoke ...
Technical SEO
SEO: Google Rolls Out Mobile Popup Penalty

January 13, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

Right on schedule, this week Google began rolling out its intrusive mobile popup penalty, aimed at reducing the number of results that take mobile searchers to pages that use large ...
Finance
2016 Holiday Ecommerce Wrap-up

January 12, 2017 • Marcia Kaplan

Despite concerns that political turmoil would dampen holiday spending, ecommerce sales made a strong showing in 2016. Even with a sluggish November start, revenues increased by 11 percent over 2015,
Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for February 2017

January 12, 2017 • Armando Roggio

February 2017 could be a good month for content marketers, thanks to events, holidays, and history. Content marketing is the act of creating, publishing, and distributing content like articles and videos ...
Checkout Tactics
7 Ways to Accelerate Your Online Store in 2017

January 11, 2017 • Pamela Hazelton

More than half of Americans would rather shop online than in physical stores. For the younger crowd, that number is larger — up to 67 percent for consumers in their ...
Platforms & Apps
11 Free Backup Plugins for WordPress

January 10, 2017 • Sig Ueland

If you run a WordPress website, routinely backing it up is one of the most important things you can do to prevent disaster. Fortunately, there are a number of free ...
Amazon & Marketplaces
Implications of Amazon’s Dominance for Brands, Retailing

January 10, 2017 • Jeremy Hanks

Consumers around the world are acquainted with Amazon. I spent $3,607.08 on Amazon in 2016 alone. With 54 million U.S. consumers (64 million worldwide) in its Prime program, Amazon rivals ...
Shipping & Fulfillment
6 Expensive Ecommerce Shipping Mistakes

January 9, 2017 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce shipping mistakes like choosing the wrong service level, using too much packaging, or even not researching what it will cost to ship a given product can cost online retailers ...