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Social Media
Buffer: Timesaving Social Sharing and Management Application

April 8, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Sharing content to social networks typically happens in one of two ways: by clicking a social sharing button found on many blogs and websites, or by using a social media management platform such as HootSuite. Buffer, a new social sharing application, combines both of these functions. ...
Schools & Resources
17 Education Sites for Web Merchants

April 8, 2013 • Sig Ueland

Web merchants wear many hats, such as entrepreneur, marketer, accountant, and technologist. If you need help developing some of your ecommerce skills, there are plenty of free resources available online. Here is a list of education sites for ecommerce entrepreneurs. These sites provid...
Marketing & Advertising
Google Shopping Feed: 3 Things You Should Be Doing

April 5, 2013 • Mary Weinstein

Editor's Note: We welcome Mary Weinstein as our newest contributor. She will address selling on comparison-shopping engines, marketplaces, and other channels. Weinstein is an account manager for CPC Strategy, a comparison shopping-engine consulting firm for ecommerce merchants. Her fi...
Business
Ecommerce Priorities Depend on Lifecycle

April 5, 2013 • Dale Traxler

Knowing your business's lifecycle is important. Before you invest in a new ecommerce platform, or make decisions based on the latest ecommerce trends, be sure you know where you are in the lifecycle of your business. Why is the business lifecycle important? There are many reasons. ...
Business > Merchant Voice
Never Forget The Customer

April 5, 2013 • Richard Stubbings

Ecommerce is a service industry. We should never forget that customers come first. We should always consider what a customer actually wants from us. With Ecommerce we build a site, we build admin systems and procedures, and we try to make everything efficient so we can send out the goo...
Platforms & Apps
4 Reasons Every Retailer Should Have a Mobile App

April 3, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Mobile applications resonate with shoppers, are easy to implement, come with a variety of abilities and purposes, and are becoming the standard for online retailers. There are at least four reasons nearly every retailer should offer a mobile application. Mobile commerce is among the fa...
Finance
SWOT Analysis for Ecommerce Companies

April 3, 2013 • Marcia Kaplan

A SWOT analysis — Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats — is something many MBA students learn. Unfortunately, businesses frequently treat SWOT like geometry: one of those things you learn but never use again.
Social Media
5 Social Marketplaces for Merchants and Shoppers

April 2, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Social marketplaces promote interaction between merchants and their customers, and enable product discovery in a social environment where shoppers can rely on the influence of friends to help them make informed shopping decisions. One successful social commerce model is bazaar-style ma...
Google Ads
PPC Advertising: 5 Daily Activities to Grow Profits

April 2, 2013 • Scott Smigler

My company recently surveyed 100 small and mid-sized online retailers that do not outsource the management of their Google AdWords campaigns. We asked a simple question, "How often do you manage your AdWords account?" According to the survey results, which are summarized in the graphi...
Influencers & Affiliates
2 Affiliate Promotion Case Studies

April 1, 2013 • Carolyn Kmet

Affiliate-marketing managers frequently offer bonus incentives to drive sales or increase traffic. My firm recently tested two different bonus-incentive strategies, both of which were successful. This article describes them. Plus-Size Fashion Retailer: Style Consultation and Gift Card...
Business
March 2013 Top 10: Our Most Popular Posts

March 29, 2013 • PEC Staff

Each month we compile a list of the ten most popular articles we published that month, based on the number of page views. Here are our ten most popular articles for March 2013, recognizing that articles we published earlier in the month are more likely to make the list than later ones. ...
Photography & Video
Learning from Infomercials for Product Demonstration

March 29, 2013 • Jason Lawrence

Perhaps the easiest advertisers to brush off are the ones behind television infomercials — those talking-head, late-night sales pitches complete with low-budget graphics and mind-numbing sound effects, enticing us to buy a $29.99 kitchen gadget we don’t need at 2 a.m. What could they k...
3 Changes to Facebook Pages: Replies, Cover Photos, Hashtags

March 28, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Facebook made two recent changes that affect Pages and is considering another. The two recent changes are the addition of threaded replies in comments and a change to the cover photo policy. The anticipated change is the use of Twitter-style hashtags. 1. Replies and Threaded Comments ...
Design & Development
7 Ways Mobile Commerce Will Change Retail

March 28, 2013 • Armando Roggio

As the online and offline worlds converge, mobile commerce has the potential to eclipse desktop-based ecommerce and, perhaps, even replace a significant portion of traditional retail shopping. Mobile-driven online sales in the U.S. are expected to reach $2.12 billion in 2013 and explod...
Social Media
4 Tools to Simplify the Blogging Process

March 27, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Bloggers can spend a lot of time selecting topics and researching and writing the posts. Here are four tools I use to speed up the research process. Used in the ...
Conversion
6 Uses of Big Data for Online Retailers

March 27, 2013 • Gagan Mehra

In "Understanding Big Data for Ecommerce," we provided a primer on the growth of data and its implications for ecommerce merchants. This article will add to that post by explaining Big Data in more detail and presenting its most common uses for ecommerce sites. There are many definitio...
Conversion
Ecommerce Site Search Evolves, without Google

March 26, 2013 • PEC Staff

Ecommerce site search — including Google's announcement that it is dropping its Commerce Search platform — is our topic today. Dr. Shaun Ryan, CEO of SLI Systems, a leading site search provider, is our guest. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce's Kerry Murdock. Practical Ecommerce: Go...
Business > Merchant Voice
Why we abandoned Amazon and eBay

March 26, 2013 • Jamie Salvatori

In business, you must always be on the lookout for so-called Black Swan events. This may seem a bit illogical, but the point is that everything you rely upon in business has the potential to completely upend or destroy your business. Many years ago, my business sold a driver’s educatio...
Conversion
10 Ways to Compete Against Large Ecommerce Companies

March 26, 2013 • Dale Traxler

When I owned a small ecommerce business, I sometimes felt unable to compete against larger companies. Ad budgets were tight; working capital to fund inventory was sometimes limited to cash from current sales. Hiring or outsourcing to find the right graphic artists or web designers was t...
Schools & Resources
15 New Ecommerce Books for Spring 2013

March 25, 2013 • Sig Ueland

Spring is here and so are new ecommerce books. Here is a list of new ecommerce and Internet-marketing books for spring 2013. There are new titles on creating viral content, delivering customer support, emulating the success of business mavericks and top brands, and several books on soci...
Conversion
Harnessing Big Data for Small Businesses

March 22, 2013 • PEC Staff

An ecommerce merchant deals with data. There’s revenue, profit, customers, traffic, order values, Likes, followers: lots of data. One company that helps merchants sort through this data and analyze it is SumAll. Its CEO and co-founder, Dane Atkinson, recently spoke with Practical Ecomme...
Business
Ask an Expert: Necessary to Pay Sales Commissions for Online Orders?

March 22, 2013 • PEC Staff

"Ask an Expert" is an occasional feature where we ask ecommerce experts questions from online merchants. For this installment, we address a question about paying commissions to a sales staff for online orders. It comes from George Sajonian, owner of Viva Performance, a seller of automot...
Schools & Resources
Reading List: Retention Science’s Jerry Jao

March 21, 2013 • 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 Jerry ...
Conversion
5 Key Day-to-day Ecommerce Functions

March 21, 2013 • Dale Traxler

As ecommerce owners, we frequently look for something new to help our businesses grow. This could be a magical analytical tool that deciphers why conversion rates are lower this year than last. Or, it could be a new, exclusive product that becomes a worldwide best seller. Certainly ...
Amazon & Marketplaces
5 Tips for Increasing Amazon Sales by 50 Percent

March 20, 2013 • Armando Roggio

The Amazon marketplace gives online retailers big and small the opportunity to sell to millions of potential customers, significantly increase sales, and acquire loyal shoppers. Competition on Amazon can be fierce. By some estimates, Amazon receives nearly 90 million unique visitors ea...
Social Media
Pinterest Adds Analytics Component

March 20, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Pinterest launched business pages a few months ago, which allow companies to create accounts specifically related to their websites. Last week, Pinterest took another step toward increasing the value it provides businesses by adding an analytics component. "Bloggers, businesses, and...
User Experience
How to Make your Site Mobile Friendly, Part 1

March 20, 2013 • Kathleen Fealy

According to a recent study from Pew Internet & American Life Project, 46 percent of Americans use smartphones. Small to medium-size businesses are searching for cost-effective solutions for capturing this audience and for making their websites more mobile-friendly.
Analytics & Data
Effective Analytics: Using the Right Tool for the Job

March 19, 2013 • Tim Wilson

Web analytics platforms are rich sources of data for marketers and ecommerce managers. But it is a mistake to treat them as the only source of information. There are many others — many of which are inexpensive or free — that complement web analytics and are better at answering certain t...
Social Media
6 Alternatives to Google Reader

March 19, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Google announced last week that it is retiring Google Reader, its longstanding RSS feed reader application, citing a decrease in use. The announcement created a furor across the Internet. Deliberating Google’s ...
Email & Text Marketing
5 Tests to Improve your Email Marketing

March 18, 2013 • Carolyn Nye

For email marketers, there are several key tests that will improve a campaign, and an ongoing program. Here are five basic testing strategies to optimize your email marketing efforts. Subject Line Testing Many marketers believe that a subject line’s purpose is simply to get people to...