Page 189 – Practical Ecommerce

Category

Social Media
How to Set Up a YouTube Channel

October 23, 2012 • Paul Chaney

A "Channel" is YouTube's equivalent of a Facebook page. You must create a YouTube Channel to upload videos, comment on videos, or create "playlists" — collections of different videos by topic. In this article I discuss how to set up a YouTube Channel, to help market your business. ...
Amazon & Marketplaces
Getting Started with eBay

October 23, 2012 • Armando Roggio

eBay is a global marketplace and an opportunity for online sellers, including businesses as small as garage-based, family operations — or as large as major ecommerce merchants. In the second quarter of 2012, eBay's marketplace helped to sell approximately $3.1 billion in clothing, shoe...
Email & Text Marketing
Email Marketing: Analyzing J.C. Penney’s New Approach

October 22, 2012 • Carolyn Nye

J.C. Penney has received a lot of press for the many changes made by its new CEO, Ron Johnson, who came from Apple. As a J.C. Penney email subscriber, I have noticed its email program has become more engaging. The subject lines are more compelling. The emails contain unique and interest...
Analytics & Data
Understanding Segmentation in Google Analytics

October 19, 2012 • Tim Wilson

Gary Angel, one of the sharpest digital analytics practitioners, regularly cites the benefits of segmenting traffic in Google Analytics. He says, “In every case, as you think about [specific metrics for your site], segmentation is an excellent first step for choosing the right explanat...
Social Media
YouTube’s Time Watched Algorithm Update

October 19, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

In the past, YouTube measured a video’s popularity based on the number of clicks it received. Last Friday the video search giant changed its algorithm — here's the blog post at YouTube — to take the time spent watching a video into account. As a result, ecommerce sites wanting to attrac...
Business
Lessons Learned: T-shirt Retailer Launches in Dorm Room

October 18, 2012 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

You’d think running a fledgling beer t-shirt business as a finance and marketing student would get you extra points with your New York University lecturers. But instead, in 2004, it ...
Conversion
Envisioning Your Business in 2022

October 17, 2012 • Dale Traxler

I delivered a speech last week to a group of ecommerce business owners about the process of developing business strategies. As I was preparing my presentation, I tried to envision what an online shopping experience might be in 10 years — in the year 2022. Last week, in "Descriptive Pr...
Social Media
Pinterest: Tap Shared Interests for Ecommerce Sales

October 17, 2012 • Paul Chaney

How many times have you purchased a product just because one of your Facebook friends did? Likely, your answer is, "Not very often." As retailers, we make a mistake to think that people rely exclusively on their social graph — the network of friends on social networks. More often, they...
Conversion
2 Keys for Terrific Ecommerce Customer Service

October 16, 2012 • Shirley Tan

Acquiring new customers is much harder than keeping existing ones. Providing terrific customer service will encourage repeat orders, and loyalty. This article will address two key components of effective customer service for ecommerce businesses: telephone accessibility, and creating a ...
Social Media
Is Pinterest the Best Social Platform for Ecommerce?

October 16, 2012 • Armando Roggio

Pinterest may owe its popularity to human nature. Early this year, Monetate, the shopping-personalization firm, made headlines when it pronounced that Pinterest was reshaping social commerce and could be a leading source of social media traffic to online retail sites. And even if the M...
Social Media
17 Social Media Cheat Sheets

October 15, 2012 • Sig Ueland

These days, small businesses use a variety of social media sites in their marketing efforts. Cheat sheets are a helpful way to keep the functionality of each site straight. Here is a list of cheat sheets for the major social media sites. There are infographic tools to identify keyboard...
Product Pages
3 Tips for Encouraging Product Reviews

October 15, 2012 • Armando Roggio

Online product reviews can be an influential form of marketing, with the potential to help merchants make more sales. Properly encouraging reviews includes making reviews obvious on a site, giving reviewers expert status and prestige, and making it very easy to review products. There i...
Keyword Research
SEO: Marshaling Your Keyword Army

October 12, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Content optimization for search engines seems straightforward. You research the keywords that your customers use most frequently and you use them on your site in the places that matter most to search engine algorithms. But deciding which keywords to apply to individual pages when you’re...
Payments
How to Lower Credit Card Processing Costs and Obtain Better Terms, Part 3: Preparation

October 11, 2012 • Phil Hinke

This is "Part 3" in a four-part series on how to lower your debit and credit card costs and obtain more favorable terms and conditions. "Part 1: The Basics" and "Part 2: Attitude" we published previously. Note that this series is specific to ecommerce merchants. It can be used as a g...
Conversion
Marketing to the Online Hispanic Consumer

October 11, 2012 • Marcia Kaplan

Can you afford to ignore 33.5 million U.S. Internet users? Probably not. It might be a bit more difficult to market to the Hispanic population but it's certainly worthwhile. Hispanics have substantial purchasing power and they shop online. Over 50 million people in the U.S. are of Hispa...
Customer Retention
5 Ways to Attract New Customers

October 10, 2012 • Armando Roggio

For ecommerce merchants, new customers mean new business. There are many customer-acquisition tools available to online retail marketers. Five of the best can be pay-per-click advertising, email marketing, social media marketing, marketplaces, and contest marketing. 1. Buy Pay-Per-Cli...
Business
Descriptive Product Content Produces Sales

October 9, 2012 • Dale Traxler

My wife and I are opening a new business. We are buying a lot of equipment, and I’ve spent more time shopping on ecommerce sites than I have in several years. As a former merchant, I judged those sites themselves almost as much as I did the products I was researching. And I was amazed a...
Design & Dev Tools
29 New Tools to Develop Your Site

October 9, 2012 • Sig Ueland

Website owners interested in developing their sites can always find a variety of new resources online. Here is a collection of recent tools to develop your site. There are resources to monitor activity, such as backlinks, downtime, and customer behavior. There are wireframe and mockup...
Social Media
LinkedIn Retools Company Pages

October 8, 2012 • Paul Chaney

LinkedIn recently launched a redesign of its Company Pages. It initially offered the redesign to a few select companies. But last week, it made the redesign available to all businesses. LinkedIn described it all in a blog post. Merchants should consider updating their company pages to ...
Platforms & Apps
10 Free Content Curation Platforms

October 8, 2012 • Kevin Webster

Many businesses are embracing content curation — the process of collecting, commenting on, and linking to the content of others. The premise is find relevant articles, tips and tools that your prospects and customers would find valuable, and then share them on a platform that you brand.
User Experience
3 Tips for Better Online Merchandising

October 8, 2012 • Armando Roggio

The way that products and buying opportunities are presented on an ecommerce site can have a significant impact on sales. Making good merchandising choices especially around how search results are managed, how complementary products are displayed, and how the site's hierarchy is arrange...
User Experience
Smartphones, Tablets Account for 1 in 8 Visits

October 5, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

One in eight pages accessed on the Internet in the U.S. today are viewed on mobile devices, according to a report by comScore. Mobile phones account for 9 percent of Internet visits and tablets make up another 4 percent. It begs the question: What sort of experience are those mobile use...
Amazon & Marketplaces > Merchant Voice
The Perils of Amazon Re-Pricing Software – or Beware Amazon Being Helpful

October 4, 2012 • Richard Stubbings

When Amazon first opened their market place to third party sellers, it was mainly books. These sellers had catalogues of tens of thousands of titles, sometimes hundreds of thousands. The competition was fierce and very much price driven. Sellers had little or no chance of competitively ...
Conversion
6 Essential Google Analytics Features for Every Retailer

October 4, 2012 • Jaime Brugueras

Google Analytics can help focus your business on its most profitable areas, and can also help attract more customers while spending less money in the process. Here are six valuable features that Google Analytics can provide your online retail operations. With these tools, you can make ...
Conversion
Multichannel Selling a Necessity

October 3, 2012 • Dale Traxler

Selling products across multiple channels is a growing trend for ecommerce merchants. If you rely on a single online store, you will likely to be left behind, because consumer-shopping behaviors are changing rapidly. This article examines sales and marketing channels that are now ava...
Social Media
The 4-Step Social Media Content Strategy

October 3, 2012 • Paul Chaney

In a crowded online marketplace where smaller retailers are forced to vie against large ones, creating useful content is one way to garner consumer attention and trust. This is especially true when it comes to attracting prospects in social media. At the recent Dreamforce 2012 confere...
Keyword Research
5 SEO Keyword Research Sources in Google

October 3, 2012 • Chris Silver Smith

Many search marketers are intimidated by the keyword research phase of search engine optimization. They falsely assume that it requires purchasing expensive subscriptions to tools, or hiring experts. However, Google provides a wealth of data that you can leverage if you know where to look. Read on for five fantastic sources of keyword ideas in Google itself.
Content Marketing
10 Great Retailer Blogs

October 2, 2012 • Armando Roggio

A retail blog can be an effective way to engage customers, improve branding, and boost traffic. Blogs give retail sites content that may be linked to or shared across social networks, via email, or through search engines. Customers who find blog posts informative, entertaining, or help...
Social Media
A Social Media Marketing Paradox?

October 2, 2012 • Armando Roggio

A new study finds that social media influences just one percent of ecommerce transactions, meaning that thousands of merchants could be, potentially, wasting valuable marketing dollars. But consumers and small and mid-sized retailers are claiming social success. Is there a social media ...
Influencers & Affiliates
How to Set Affiliate Marketing Commissions

October 1, 2012 • Carolyn Kmet

Before launching an affiliate program, merchants should establish their default commission structures. This is the base commission rate that will apply to all of your standard affiliates. You will still be able to customize terms for individual affiliates, but your base commission rate...