Page 131 – Practical Ecommerce

Category

Analytics & Data
Using Google Analytics to Value Soft Conversions

April 25, 2016 • Steve Hammer

The fantasy of ecommerce is that every user who visits a site is ready to buy. The data tells us otherwise. More than 90 percent of users leave without purchasing, and the ...
SEO Tools
SEO: 22 Tools, Tutorials for Bing

April 24, 2016 • Sig Ueland

If all of your search marketing efforts are on Google, you could be missing out on Bing. It accounts for roughly 20 percent of all U.S. desktop searches, according to ...
Customer Retention
Use a Blog to Build Loyalty, Increase Conversions

April 21, 2016 • Pamela Hazelton

If you’re relying solely on category and product pages to convert visitors into customers, you’re missing a good opportunity to build a loyal following. Today, more than ever, consumers rely ...
Marketing & Advertising
9 Ecommerce Marketing Skills That Drive Success

April 20, 2016 • Armando Roggio

From pay-per-click advertising to blogging and from search engine optimization to analytics, ecommerce marketing is broad, diverse, and, potentially, complex. The aim is to find those activities, promotions, and tactics ...
Code
What JavaScript Means for Ecommerce Merchants

April 19, 2016 • Eric Davis

Web developers use three core tools when building ecommerce sites: HTML for content and organization, CSS for the design and presentation, and JavaScript for the interaction with backend servers. This article,
Content Marketing
Content Marketing: How to Find Topics

April 19, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Content marketing can be a like a greedy monster. It may be powerful, it may be capable, but it is also hungry, devouring a constant flow of ideas. Every article,
Email & Text Marketing
4 Email-marketing Tips to Drive (More) Sales

April 18, 2016 • Carolyn Nye

There are many ways to increase the effectiveness of email marketing, from testing subject lines and creative to increasing frequency and discounts. In this article, I will review four ways to ...
Business
Electronically-signed Contracts Enforceable?

April 15, 2016 • John Di Giacomo

When Shakespeare wrote “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” he was not writing about electronic signatures. But, thankfully, the law has mostly evolved to no longer ...
Business
6 Principles for Small Business Automation

April 14, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Entrepreneurs and small business managers are hands-on folks. They are often involved in nearly every aspect of the business — from marketing to fulfillment to accounting to website design. At ...
Finance
6 Alternative Funding Resources for Ecommerce Businesses

April 13, 2016 • Marcia Kaplan

Small businesses often struggle to find affordable funds to keep their businesses running. Online lending solutions offer an alternative to conventional bank loans with the advantages of a much shorter ...
Business > Merchant Voice
Are your passwords secure?

April 12, 2016 • Richard Stubbings

As an online merchant, I have to review my company’s security procedures to retain PCI compliance. Whilst I am not sure of the merits of PCI compliance — I cynically ...
Social Media
How to Test and Change Facebook Ads, to Drive Performance

April 12, 2016 • Michael Stancil

When was the last time you updated your advertising copy, such as on AdWords or Facebook ads? If you’re not updating your ads, your frequency — the number of times ...
Product Pages
Create Responsive Ecommerce Product Pages with Bootstrap

April 11, 2016 • Armando Roggio

The Bootstrap framework makes it easy to lay out responsive ecommerce product detail pages. Small business owners and even novice site designers can use Bootstrap to build a professional looking ...
Design & Dev Tools
19 Free Website Design Tools

April 10, 2016 • Sig Ueland

There are plenty of free tools and resources to help with your website design, whether you’re looking for a little flare or you want to build a new site from ...
Business > Merchant Voice
Does your company have a soul?

April 9, 2016 • Eric Bandholz

When they hit a plateau on the growth of their business, entrepreneurs often look at ways to initiate a spark. One of the biggest things that companies overlook is the ...
Google Ads
Leveraging Bid Modifiers for PPC Success

April 8, 2016 • Robert Brady

Setting up a pay-per-click ad account on a search engine requires a lot of work. Consider this simplified checklist, which would be typical of a new campaign launch. Campaign name. Needs ...
Product Pages
How to Grow, Manage Customer Reviews

April 8, 2016 • Pamela Hazelton

A while back I addressed customer reviews and how they can help sell products. Amazon relies on customer reviews to sell everything from nail clippers to high-end appliances. Without ratings and reviews, it ...
Cross-border Selling
Ecommerce in Australia: Cross-border Shopping Common

April 7, 2016 • Gagan Mehra

According to National Australia Bank, online retail spending in Australia increased by 10 percent, to $17.6 billion, in 2015. This compares to roughly $562 billion for China, the country with ...
Conversion
4 Things Add-to-cart Rates Tell an Ecommerce Business

April 6, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Monitoring an ecommerce business’s add-to-cart rate can identify and solve conversion problems, and, ultimately, help an online store earn more. Add-to-cart rates track the percentage of site visitors who add a ...
Payments
Credit-card-processing Negotiating Mistakes, Part 2: Understanding the Offer

April 5, 2016 • Phil Hinke

This is the second installment of a 2-part series on common mistakes I see from merchants, when they negotiate the rates and fees of credit-card-processing providers. In “Part 1: Terminology,
Business > Merchant Voice
Lessons from a corner shop closing down

April 4, 2016 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

You’ve likely seen a few brick-and-mortar shops go out of business in recent times. I recently saw hastily-printed sheets at local ice cream store — called Lick Me — thanking ...
Social Media
14 Social Networks for Ecommerce Merchants in 2016

April 4, 2016 • Sig Ueland

A social network can offer an ecommerce merchant the opportunity to promote a business and even sell some products. Explore new and emerging social networks, along with new features on ...
Marketing & Advertising
4 Reasons Ecommerce Marketing Campaigns Fail

April 3, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Not every social media post, or email message, or advertisement will perform. In fact, marketing campaigns and tactics often fail. So the goal is not necessarily to avoid failure. The ...
Google Ads
SEO: How to Combat Google’s Ad Increase

April 1, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown

In the wake of Google’s move to increase ads at the top of the search results pages while removing side-rail ads, many are focusing on the impact on paid advertising ...
Code
Build Fixed, Responsive Navigation with Bootstrap

March 31, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Bootstrap is an open-source framework for creating responsive, mobile first websites. It can help even novice developers. But many new Bootstrap users have trouble with fixed navbars — navigation headers ...
User Experience
Using Keyboard-only Navigation, for Web Accessibility

March 30, 2016 • Joseph C. Dolson

At many of the web development conferences I attend, there is a talk on how to use an integrated development environment to aid in programming. The speaker will almost invariably ...
Influencers & Affiliates
Affiliate Marketing: Learning from F.T.C.’s Paid Placement Disclosures

March 29, 2016 • Carolyn Kmet

Earlier this March, department store retailer Lord & Taylor agreed to settle U.S. Federal Trade Commission civil charges that it deceived consumers by paying for blog and social media placements.
Analytics & Data
Google Analytics: 3 Ways to Use Transaction Data to Grow Revenue

March 29, 2016 • Steve Hammer

You’d be hard pressed to find an ecommerce operator that didn’t think that revenue was the most important metric. Revenue is easy to track, and most ecommerce platforms integrate revenue ...
Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for April 2016

March 28, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Trials for the upcoming Summer Olympic Games, April Fools’ Day, any number of festivals, math, and even simple spring how-to articles will give content marketers plenty of material to draw ...
Technical SEO
SEO: How Search Engines Work

March 27, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engines trawl the web, sifting through billions of data points to serve up information in a fraction of a second. The access to instant information we’ve come to take ...