Page 134 – Practical Ecommerce

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Business > Merchant Voice
What’s the future for smaller ecommerce retailers?

February 10, 2016 • Richard Stubbings

With the growing dominance of Amazon and Ebay for everyday consumer items, what future is there for the smaller ecommerce business? Amazon and Ebay both emphasize price. Many shoppers on those sites ...
Email & Text Marketing
Email: Main Street Marketing Tool of Choice

February 10, 2016 • Charles Gaiennie

Email marketing is a mainstay for Main Street businesses. It is the perfect tool for such a scrappy group as you who must be resourceful while creatively growing your company.
Business > Merchant Voice
Beardbrand’s photography process

February 9, 2016 • Eric Bandholz

Photography should be a high priority for ecommerce merchants. There are tons of guides on how to take great photographs. This article won’t be one of those. Instead, I hope ...
Content Marketing
7 Tips for Being a Better Writer, for Content Marketing

February 9, 2016 • Armando Roggio

This year, content will continue to be one of the most important forms of marketing in nearly every industry — from semiconductors and software right to ecommerce and retailing. Gurus,
Platforms & Apps
How to Build a Small Business Website Using Squarespace

February 9, 2016 • Daniel Kedinger

Squarespace is an easy to use platform for building a small business website, to get up and running in a relatively short time frame. It contains a variety of beautifully-designed starter templates that make adding and editing content a simple procedure. Squarespace also provides an ecommerce solution, to sell products or collect donations.
Business
How to Set Retail Discounts, for Ecommerce

February 8, 2016 • Armando Roggio

One-day sale, holiday sale, Presidents’ Day sale, or just about any sale you can imagine: Online retailers frequently offer top-grade products at a discount, broadcasting these specials via email or ...
Local Business
6 Local Business Online Marketing Essentials

February 8, 2016 • Paul Chaney

There are many online marketing avenues that a local small business could take, but which are essential and stand the best chance of ensuring success? After all, business owners have a limited amount of time to pursue marketing activities, so they need to focus on those that are most productive.
Social Media
15 Top Retailers and Products on Pinterest

February 8, 2016 • Sig Ueland

Pinterest wants to be an ecommerce platform. The inspiration-focused social network is steadily releasing its Buyable Pins, which let people purchase using a credit card or Apple Pay without having ...
Checkout Tactics
7 Ways to Add a Personal Touch to Your Ecommerce Site

February 7, 2016 • Pamela Hazelton

How do online businesses add that personal touch when face-to-face communication isn’t possible? Online shoppers seek in-person experiences even when the store is miles away. This goes beyond offering live ...
Keyword Research
SEO: Using Keyword Research to Better Your Business

February 5, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown

Which products and attributes do your shoppers want most? How could your navigation help consumers find what they want faster? What content areas should you focus on? Where should you ...
Local Business
10 Great Local Marketing Ideas for February 2016

February 5, 2016 • Web Marketing Today

Each month, Web Marketing Today gathers advice from marketing experts, to help local businesses market online with greater impact. This month, we focus on real estate and share ten great ideas from Realtors and other industry-related marketing professionals.
Conversion
Understanding Google Analytics Attribution Models

February 4, 2016 • Sharon Mostyn

Does everyone who comes to your site complete the sale on the first visit? Look at the Google Analytics Path Length report in the Multi-Channel Funnels report. Is “1” the only path length shown? If your answered "no" to either of these questions, then you need to know about Google Analytics attribution models.
User Experience
Common Web Accessibility Problems on Leading Ecommerce Sites

February 4, 2016 • Armando Roggio

From missing alternative text to redundancy, several of the Internet’s leading ecommerce sites have potential web accessibility problems, which might make it difficult for shoppers with disabilities. In the absence of ...
Google Ads
Using Facebook’s New Dynamic Product Ads

February 3, 2016 • Robert Brady

As ecommerce has become mainstream, the number of products available to buy online has increased. For goods like shoes, which typically are tried on for size, sites like Zappos came ...
Social Media
3 Facebook Ad Segments That Increase ROI

February 3, 2016 • Michael Stancil

Are you running ads on Facebook that are performing just average? What if you could get a greater return on investment without spending more? Facebook’s segmentation features can help. In this ...
Conversion
14 Unconventional Valentine’s Day Promotions, to Inspire

February 3, 2016 • Kathleen Fealy

Valentine’s Day is easy for restaurants, hotels, and flower and candy shops, but what about businesses that don’t promote love and romance?
Business
8 Low-cost IoT Vendors for Retailers

February 2, 2016 • Gagan Mehra

In “‘Internet of Things’ Helping Ecommerce Merchants,” I explained how IoT could make smaller retailers more efficient and save money. This post takes IoT a step further, by listing affordable ...
Conversion
Benefits vs. Features: Understand the Difference, Boost Sales

February 2, 2016 • Phil Frost

If you want to increase your sales without investing more in driving new customers to your website, then you need to boost your conversion rate, the number of website visitors who make a purchase.
Social Media
Will Ads on Instagram Reduce Organic Reach?

February 1, 2016 • Samantha Collier

Instagram has become one of the most popular social media apps, with over 400 million active monthly users and 80 million photos uploaded daily. Instagram’s move to open up advertising ...
Code
Crawl Your Ecommerce Site with Python, Scrapy

February 1, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce business owners and managers have many good reasons to crawl their own websites, including monitoring pages, tracking site performance, ensuring the site is accessible to customers with disabilities, and ...
SEO
For SEO Success, Build into Core of Company

January 29, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization isn’t a project you can do once. For lasting success, SEO needs to be built into the core of how you manage your ecommerce business. Fifteen years ago ...
Conversion
January 2016: Most Popular Articles

January 29, 2016 • Web Marketing Today

Each month, we compile a list of the ten most popular articles published during the month, based on the number of page views. Here are the ten most popular for January 2016, recognizing that articles published earlier in the month are more likely to make the list than later ones. As you can see, our 2016 trends articles topped the list.
Local Business
4 Content Ideas to Improve Local SEO

January 28, 2016 • Bill Hartzer

Local SEO isn’t just about optimizing your business website any longer. It’s about maintaining a healthy presence online within the community and engaging with your customers and prospects through your site and on social media.
Business > Merchant Voice
Unfair taxes squeezing my U.K.-based business

January 27, 2016 • Richard Stubbings

I am based in the U.K. Some of the challenges that affect my ecommerce business at first appear different from U.S. businesses. But, in fact, many of these challenges apply ...
Social Media
Understanding Facebook Page Insights: Part 1

January 27, 2016 • Rodney Hess

Facebook Page Insights is an essential tool for monitoring and evaluating your Facebook marketing efforts. There are many other online tools that provide deeper analytics and surveillance solutions, but Facebook Insights gives a basic rundown of how your page, its posts, and even those of your competitors, are performing.
Content Marketing
6 Content Marketing Tactics for Ecommerce Merchants

January 27, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Content marketing can describe many things — from short blog posts published on a company’s own site to long-form articles or even ebooks. It can encompass a video published on ...
Influencers & Affiliates
‘Co-opetition’ Comes to Affiliate Marketing

January 26, 2016 • Carolyn Kmet

The Performance Marketing Association promotes the growth and practices of the affiliate marketing industry. The PMA recently published a free whitepaper exploring the notion of “co-opetition” as it applies to affiliate ...
Conversion
5 Signs of Conversion Leaks on Ecommerce Sites

January 26, 2016 • Gagan Mehra

Conversion is critical for ecommerce merchants. Most retailers hover around a 2 percent conversion rate. Many of the techniques to improve conversion focus on the checkout flow. While checkout should be ...
Design & Development
15 Questions to Ask a Web Designer

January 26, 2016 • Daniel Kedinger

If you are looking for a web designer to help with your next small business website, ask the following questions, to avoid major issues during the project.
Business > Merchant Voice
Lessons from changing ecommerce platforms

January 25, 2016 • David Sasson

My company, overstockArt, recently changed ecommerce platforms. It was a complete change of our website, not just look and navigation, but the entire underlying technology. We switched from the Yahoo store ...