Page 167 – Practical Ecommerce

Category

Marketing & Advertising
For 2014, What Is Ecommerce Marketing?

February 20, 2014 • Armando Roggio

Marketing, traditionally, has been about communicating the value of a product to potential customers for the purpose of selling that product at a profit. Given this seemingly straightforward proposition, you might ...
Analytics & Data
Landing Page Analysis in Google Analytics

February 19, 2014 • Kevin Webster

Business websites typically have conversion goals for their visitors to act on. Whether it's purchasing a product, filling out a form for more information, or signing up for a webinar, the initial step in the path to goal completion is a landing page, the first page a visitor encounters on the site.
Email & Text Marketing
Using Email Marketing to Generate New Customers; 6 Pointers

February 19, 2014 • Carolyn Nye

For years, email marketing has been the workhorse in the web marketing toolbox. It is relatively inexpensive. And it’s typically very effective for getting subscribers to your site, to shop ...
Social Media
Creating Facebook Ads Using ‘Custom Audiences’

February 19, 2014 • Paul Chaney

One Facebook advertising option you don’t hear much about is Custom Audiences. It helps companies reach current customers and prospects. Only large advertisers could previously participate in Custom Audiences, but ...
B2B
To Implement B-to-B Ecommerce, Empower Marketing not IT

February 18, 2014 • Dale Traxler

In “B-to-B Ecommerce: Big Opportunity, Big Obstacles,” I addressed the challenges manufacturers and distributors face as they initiate and grow their ecommerce operations. One of those challenges is to identify what department ...
Platforms & Apps
New Ecommerce Platform Claims Better Performance, Development

February 18, 2014 • Armando Roggio

A new open source ecommerce platform from a one-time Magento engineer claims it can change online selling for small and mid-sized merchants with a new set of easy-to-use features, mobile-by-default ...
Business > Merchant Voice
7 free ways to keep your customers happy and reassured

February 17, 2014 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

There are a number of things you can do that cost nothing but offer your customers satisfaction, reassurance, and acknowledgement. 1. Keep your customers informed This is such an obvious thing to ...
Design & Dev Tools
WordPress Ecommerce Plugins that Speed Up Redesigns

February 17, 2014 • Joe Robison

In “7 Ecommerce Design Trends for 2014,” we addressed factors that will likely influence ecommerce redesigns in 2014. These include the popularity of images, video, and other rich content, and ...
Conversion
Target Focuses on Trust, Mobile with ‘Awesome Shop’

February 14, 2014 • Armando Roggio

Target’s Pinterest-powered “Awesome Shop” may demonstrate a focus on trust building and mobile commerce — areas that could benefit any online retailer. Target launched its Awesome Shop in December at about ...
Payments
Credit Card Provider Sued for ‘Deceptive’ Tactics

February 13, 2014 • Phil Hinke

Heartland Payment Systems, one of the largest credit card providers in the U.S., stated in a press release that it has filed a federal lawsuit against Mercury Payment Systems, also ...
Business
How to sell your ecommerce business for a high valuation

February 13, 2014 • Manish Shah

I just finished reading Built to Sell, a book by John Warrillow that describes a fictional business owner who is struggling to sell his company. The cover of the book ...
Platforms & Apps
How to Integrate Cloud-based Platforms

February 13, 2014 • Jerry Jao

Ecommerce businesses increasingly rely on cloud-based applications, such as hosted shopping carts, analytics platforms, cloud-based accounting, customer service tools, and more. To operating smoothly, a merchant’s cloud-based apps should integrate with ...
Marketing & Advertising
8 Social Media Lessons from QVC

February 12, 2014 • Samantha Collier

Television shopping channel QVC launched in the U.K. in 1993. It has been hugely successful. QVC (“Quality, Value, Convenience”) excels at building trust in its service and convincing its audience to ...
Social Media
Using a LinkedIn Company Page to Showcase your Business

February 12, 2014 • Paul Chaney

Due to its focus on people in professional occupations, LinkedIn is often the social network of preference for B-to-B ecommerce companies. With more than 277 million members, it is the ...
B2B
4 Keys for Effective B-to-B Ecommerce

February 11, 2014 • Armando Roggio

Business-to-business ecommerce describes Internet-enabled transactions between businesses, such as a manufacturer and a wholesaler, a wholesaler and a retailers, or a wholesaler and a business user. The B-to-B ecommerce market ...
Finance
Amazon 2013 Financial Results Signal Changes in 2014

February 11, 2014 • Marcia Kaplan

After a few dismal quarters, Amazon turned a profit in the pivotal fourth quarter of 2013 and for the full fiscal year, despite losses in the second and third quarters.
SEO Tools
Local SEO for Multiple-location Businesses

February 10, 2014 • Dustin Christensen

Search engine optimization for local businesses can be difficult. That is especially true for companies with multiple locations. But local SEO for small businesses with multiple locations isn’t impossible. It simply requires a highly organized plan based on your business’s goals and geographic priorities.
Social Media
9 Contests on Facebook from Retailers

February 10, 2014 • Sig Ueland

Facebook Page owners can now run promotional contests directly on the Timeline, simply and easily, without high cost and without a third-party app provider. As a result, smaller merchants can ...
B2B
B-to-B Ecommerce: Big Opportunity, with Obstacles

February 10, 2014 • Dale Traxler

Business-to-business merchants face ecommerce challenges that are different from their business-to-consumer counterparts. This has slowed the entry into ecommerce for many B-to-B manufacturers and distributors. Forrester Research projected 2013 B-to-B ecommerce ...
SEO
SEO Performance Reporting in the Datapocalypse

February 7, 2014 • Jill Kocher Brown

Thanks to the major U.S. search engines implementing secure search, the keywords that drive organic search referrals are no longer available for meaningful analysis in web analytics. The SEO datapocalypse ...
User Experience
Don’t Follow Target.com when Redesigning your Ecommerce Site

February 6, 2014 • Chris Goward

If you’re planning on redesigning an ecommerce site, don’t follow the experience of Target.com. The well-known retailer — known for its focus on product design and its communications — launched a ...
Social Media
7 Ways to Use Social Media to Tell Stories

February 6, 2014 • Paul Chaney

The Super Bowl is known for two things: the football game and the commercials that air during it. While this year’s Super Bowl proved to be lackluster in so far as ...
Business
Lessons Learned: Forced Time Off Sews a Passion

February 5, 2014 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

Having multiple sclerosis-like symptoms became a blessing for Shelley Mitchell. Born in Taiwan, she relocated to Melbourne, Australia with her meteorologist father and music-teacher mother when she was 13. Her grandmother had ...
Business
5 Niches for a New Ecommerce Business

February 5, 2014 • Armando Roggio

Starting an online retail business begins with knowing what products to sell. Entrepreneurs have many reasons for starting an ecommerce business. For some, they have a passion for a particular product,
Conversion
16 Inexpensive Ways to Grow Ecommerce Revenue

February 4, 2014 • Dale Traxler

Many ecommerce merchants focus on acquiring new visitors to increase revenue. While that strategy can be helpful, it’s often cheaper to focus on growing revenue from existing shoppers, by improving ...
Schools & Resources
Reading List: Web Retailer’s Andy Geldman

February 4, 2014 • 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 U.K.-based ...
Email & Text Marketing
5 Marketing Emails from Leading Online Retailers

February 3, 2014 • Armando Roggio

Even a cursory review of other retailers’ marketing efforts can spawn ideas to drive your next campaign. Modern marketing is dynamic, multi-faceted, and competitive. On the one hand, marketers seek to ...
Email & Text Marketing
Beginner’s Guide to Email Re-engagement Campaigns

February 1, 2014 • Pamella Neely

“Practice good list hygiene.” That’s common email marketing advice many of us hear regularly. It means to do things like: Remove hard bounces after one try; Remove soft bounces after several tries; Remove subscribers who have been inactive for 12 months.
SEO
SEO as Stand-alone Tactic Is Dead

January 31, 2014 • Jill Kocher Brown

Stop doing search engine optimization as a separate discipline. Instead, make sure all aspects of your online business — content, marketing, site design, architecture — are naturally optimized for search ...
Amazon & Marketplaces > Merchant Voice
Does 2014 mark the beginning of the end for Amazon?

January 31, 2014 • Richard Stubbings

Probably not, but it is certainly going to be a difficult year for Amazon in Europe. Legislation in Europe is significantly different than in the U.S, in two major ways,