Page 170 – Practical Ecommerce

Category

Technical SEO
SEO: Managing Faceted Search

December 13, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown

Faceted site search can help ecommerce shoppers quickly find the products they are looking for. But faceted search can shatter your search engine optimization efforts. What can you do, therefore,
Business
Lessons Learned: Fashionable Maternity Wear Sells

December 13, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

Like most working women yet to become mothers, Tania Tan was blissfully unaware how unfashionable and expensive maternity clothing could be. Tan was raised in Sydney, Australia by her Chinese father ...
Business > Merchant Voice
7 tips to plan for Valentine’s Day gift orders

December 12, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

Christmas is such a major sales period for many online retailers that it can make you overlook Valentine’s Day, which falls barely six weeks later. Here are seven tips to get ...
Social Media
Facebook Wants ‘High Quality’ Content; 8 Tips for Merchants

December 12, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Views from organic Facebook Page posts have been declining. A recent announcement from Facebook explains why. “On a given day, when someone visits News Feed, there are an average of 1,500
Conversion
Use the PIE Method to Prioritize Ecommerce Tests

December 12, 2013 • Chris Goward

In “Top 5 Things to Test in Ecommerce Websites,” my previous article, I addressed the testing priorities that merchants should focus on. However, it’s not realistic to tackle all five ...
Platforms & Apps
Distributed Commerce to Disrupt Online Storefronts?

December 11, 2013 • Dale Traxler

The vast majority of ecommerce transactions occur in a traditional online storefront. Most ecommerce solutions include everything required for placing an order in a single shopping cart or platform —
Email & Text Marketing
5 Email Messages to Send Before Christmas

December 11, 2013 • Armando Roggio

The 2013 Christmas shopping season is nearing its end and online retailers want to capture every possible sale before many shoppers go into retail hibernation in the first quarter. To ...
Business
15 Online Shopping Pet Peeves

December 10, 2013 • Gagan Mehra

Being an avid online shopper, I buy from many ecommerce sites. Most of these sites are helpful and effective. But there are some that have annoying features. Here are my top ...
Finance
Ecommerce Strong on Black Friday, Cyber Monday

December 10, 2013 • Marcia Kaplan

The much anticipated Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping extravaganza showed mixed results with online sales outpacing disappointing brick-and-mortar results. Brick-and-mortar Sales Brick-and-mortar retail sales on Black Friday were disappointing. The tactic ...
Business > Merchant Voice
What can online retailers learn from the Black Friday frenzy?

December 9, 2013 • David Sasson

Every year I make a trip to at least one store during the crazy first hours of Black Friday. I consider this a pilgrimage of sorts. As online retailers we ...
Payments
11 Alternative Payment Options

December 9, 2013 • Sig Ueland

Alternatives to entering credit card numbers can provide customers with more payment choices, streamline checkout for mobile devices, and potentially save merchants money. Here is a list of alternative payment options.
Business > Merchant Voice
Multichannel order management packages

December 9, 2013 • Richard Stubbings

I use Magento and sell on my own site, six Amazon country sites, and Ebay. That’s a total of eight channels. I would be lost without a package that merged ...
Conversion
Ecommerce Profitability: The Critical Second Sale

December 9, 2013 • Charles Nicholls

Acquiring new customers is so expensive for retailers that it wipes out profits from a first-time sale. New analysis from my firm, SeeWhy, of data from Forrester and the U.S.
SEO
SEO: Leveraging Bing’s Pinterest Integration

December 6, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown

Pinterest generates a lot of social media marketing excitement among brands that have visually attractive products to promote. But to date, Pinterest hasn’t offered as much natural search benefit. Bing’s October ...
Google Ads
Using AdWords’ Cost-per-acquisition Flexible Bidding

December 5, 2013 • Matthew Umbro

In May, Google began offering flexible pay-per-click bidding strategies, which allow advertisers to automate bids based upon different goals. For example, advertisers can now target a specific cost per acquisition ...
Schools & Resources
WordPress Accessibility Resources

December 5, 2013 • Joseph C. Dolson

WordPress is the foundation for many websites. Roughly 40 percent of the top 10,000 sites in the world use it, including ecommerce sites, blogs, major online publications, and web applications. Whether you’re ...
Social Media
Does Social Media Impact Ecommerce Sales?

December 4, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Black Friday online sales hit a record of $1.2 billion, according to published reports. But only a very small percentage of those sales could be attributed to social media, says ...
Business
5 Ways Retailers Benefit from ‘Internet of Things’

December 4, 2013 • Gagan Mehra

Most activity on the Internet depends on human interaction. Email, social media, blogs, video, online shopping — it all requires humans. But there’s another, separate use of the Internet that ...
Email & Text Marketing
5 Examples of Email Marketing on Cyber Monday

December 3, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Online sales soared on Cyber Monday, totaling about $2.29 billion in the United States, up approximately 16 percent, according to an Adobe report. Email promotions likely played a role in ...
Social Media
Enforcing FTC Advertising Disclosures for Blogs, Social Media

December 3, 2013 • Carolyn Kmet

Earlier this year, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission updated its disclosure-of-advertising guidelines to include blogs and social media. If you are paying a monetary or product incentive to promote your ...
Business
Learning from BlackBerry and Twitter

December 2, 2013 • Manish Shah

You may have read that BlackBerry’s recent takeover offer of $4.7 billion from its largest shareholder, Fairfax Financial Holdings of Toronto, collapsed on Nov. 4. Only three years ago, the Canadian ...
Marketing & Advertising
The ‘When’ of Ecommerce Marketing

December 2, 2013 • Dale Traxler

Ecommerce marketers are quickly learning how consumers use different devices and when they use them. Marketers know that different age groups and demographics use them differently. City dwellers have different ...
Platforms & Apps
20 Apps for Microsoft SkyDrive

December 2, 2013 • Sig Ueland

SkyDrive is Microsoft’s cloud storage service, similar to Google Drive and Dropbox. SkyDrive comes with some attractive features, such as 7 GB of free storage and mobile apps for iOS,
Business
November 2013 Top 10: Our Most Popular Posts

November 29, 2013 • PEC Staff

Each month we compile a list of the ten most popular articles — based on the number of page views — we published that month. Here are our ten most ...
Shipping & Fulfillment
MasterCard Enters Free Shipping Fracas

November 29, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Global payment firm MasterCard announced that its customers will receive free, two-day shipping from five of the Internet’s leading retailers. MasterCard also offered a premium service that extends the free,
Business
Which multicarrier package processing tool is right for you?

November 28, 2013 • Jordan Lindberg

“Not everybody’s gonna dig what I dig, but I reserve the right to dig it.” – Whoopi Goldberg Like many online retailers, we utilize more than one carrier to fulfill our ...
Conversion
Big Data Requires Focus; Key Ecommerce Metrics

November 28, 2013 • Jerry Jao

Online consumers generate an avalanche of data. Product purchases; Facebook Likes and comments; Twitter follows; Pinterest pins; on-site searches; pages viewed; recommendations; clicks — consumers do it all, from different ...
Social Media
7 Ways Merchants Can Use Twitter’s New Custom Timelines

November 27, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Twitter recently introduced a new feature called custom timelines, which are similar to Twitter lists except that you create them using tweets of your own choosing. “Custom timelines are an entirely ...
Marketing & Advertising
5 Tips for After-Christmas Sales

November 27, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Even if fourth quarter holiday sales broke all records, there would still be some left over inventory that online retailers would like to sell in the days and weeks after ...
Conversion
10 Great Ecommerce Ideas for November 2013

November 26, 2013 • PEC Staff

Practical Ecommerce periodically asks industry insiders to share a great, innovative idea that could help an ecommerce company. Here’s what ten of them had to say for the November 2013