Page 190 – Practical Ecommerce

Category

Typography & Fonts
17 Typography Resources

October 1, 2012 • Sig Ueland

Your customers spend time looking at your site's text, so you'd better make sure your fonts look the way you want. Here is a list of typography resources and tools. There are sites to purchase fonts and access free fonts, typography resources to inspire your design, CSS tools to style ...
Google Ads
Primping Your Holiday Pay-per-click Promotions

September 28, 2012 • Scott Smigler

A passive approach to pay-per-click advertising often results in missed opportunities. But achieving optimal returns from your PPC campaigns isn’t complex. For holiday PPC promotions, maximizing profits means doing three things well. Create a calendar. Plan your holiday promotions wit...
Technical SEO
SEO: Putting Navigation to Work

September 28, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Navigation does more than shuttling customers around your site. In addition to its obvious usability and design functions, navigation can be optimized to improve organic search traffic. Well-optimized navigation strengthens the flow of link popularity throughout your site while sending ...
Email & Text Marketing
Ask an Expert: Appropriate to Send Remarketing Emails to Guest Shoppers?

September 27, 2012 • 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 sending remarketing emails to consumers who abandon shopping carts. It comes from Kenny Kelly, general manager of Shops.com, an Okla...
Conversion
Managing Your Ecommerce Sales Funnel, Part 2

September 27, 2012 • Dale Traxler

Editor's Note: This is part two of a two-part series on improving the conversion rate of an ecommerce site by managing its sales funnel. Part one, "Managing Your Ecommerce Sales Funnel," we published previously. An ecommerce sales funnel refers to the steps involved in converting a tar...
Business
Using Past Customers to Help New Shoppers

September 26, 2012 • PEC Staff

Ecommerce merchants strive to answer questions from shoppers. Relevant, helpful answers presumably increase conversion rates. We recently spoke with George Eberstadt, founder and CEO of TurnTo, about his company's system that relies on past customers to answer questions from prospectiv...
Social Media
Twitter Launches Redesign with New Header Image

September 26, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Twitter recently launched a redesign of the profile page, which includes a new header image that sits atop a user's feed stream. The image resembles Facebook’s Timeline cover image and provides merchants with a unique opportunity to showcase their brands. How to Set Up a Header Image ...
Marketing & Advertising
5 Keys to Social Commerce Success

September 25, 2012 • Gagan Mehra

Many companies use social media sites to facilitate ecommerce sales. Some of them have attempted to sell products directly on Facebook. Others use social media to spur traffic and sales at their own ecommerce sites. The results of these collective efforts have been mixed. Some large...
Payments
Swipe Fee Settlement Bad, Retailers Say

September 25, 2012 • Armando Roggio

Several retail trade groups and merchant advocates intend to fight a pending antitrust settlement that has Visa and MasterCard paying merchants some $7.2 billion in cash and discounts. The groups claim that the court-approved agreement would perpetuate unfair trade practices, cripple in...
Technical SEO
Using Meta Tags for Search Engine Visibility

September 25, 2012 • Lorrie Thomas Ross

Search engine optimization continually evolves to include new tactics. But classics like meta tags are still important. Making the most of your meta tags can be a small step that can make a large difference in your overall web marketing.
Design & Development
Top Retailers Going Mobile Fast

September 24, 2012 • Armando Roggio

America's top retailers, including Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, and Target, are enjoying significant mobile traffic as 4 in every 5 smartphone owners access retail ecommerce sites in a typical month. Internet trend tracking firm comScore reported the results of a July 2012 study last wee...
SEO
SEO Ranking Forecast: 74 and Sunny

September 21, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

One of the hardest aspects of search engine optimization is determining whether changes in your site’s organic search results are based on changes to your own site or external influences like algorithm changes. SEOmoz created MozCast weather report to help answer this question, and tod...
Email & Text Marketing
5 Holiday Email Marketing Tips

September 20, 2012 • Carolyn Nye

For ecommerce businesses, September is crucial for planning a successful holiday-sales season. For email marketing, starting the planning now will allow more time for last minute changes and time-sensitive promotions. Below, I'll offer five tips to make the most from your holiday email...
Business > Merchant Voice
Mimic Amazon at your own peril

September 20, 2012 • Jamie Salvatori

Amazon is the largest internet retailer. Copy them and you, too, could end up just like them. Do this at your own peril! In their most recent quarterly results (Q2 2012), Amazon turned in “impressive” results of $7 million in net income on $12.83 billion in sales. That’s the equivalent...
Conversion
Managing Your Ecommerce Sales Funnel

September 19, 2012 • Dale Traxler

Editor's Note: This is part one of a two-part series on improving the conversion rate of an ecommerce site by managing its "sales funnel." An ecommerce business has a sales funnel. Business-to-business sales funnels are generally more complex than business-to-consumer ones. But the bas...
Social Media
7 Social Shopping Sites to Sell Products

September 19, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Social shopping sites can assist consumers to find products. You are likely familiar with popular sites that fit into this category — Etsy, Fab.com and Pinterest, in particular. But here are seven others that may be used by smaller retailers to list products for sale. 1. Blomming En...
Social Media
Top 20 Viral Marketing Videos

September 18, 2012 • Sig Ueland

If you want to find brand videos having an impact, follow what's being shared. Here is a list of the top 20 shared marketing videos over the last thirty days. Included in this list are non-profit organizations, political campaign videos, and an education documentary. This information...
Conversion
Using Lookbooks to Inspire Shoppers

September 18, 2012 • Armando Roggio

Lookbooks are collections of photographs complied to promote a particular clothing or product line. In the past, fashion designers, photographers, and other artisans have used lookbooks to promote their work, get jobs, or just plain sell. But more recently lookbooks have evolved a bit t...
Business
Lessons Learned: Eco-friendly Products Require the Right Ettitude

September 17, 2012 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

Melbourne-based Phoebe Yu is CEO and founder of Ettitude, an Australian ecommerce site that sells eco-conscious clothing and household goods. Yu’s first role after completing her bachelor's degree at Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade was as a sales and marketing executive for Shangh...
Customer Retention
Supercharge Your Search Results Page

September 17, 2012 • Armando Roggio

An effective on-site search experience will likely help Internet merchants sell more products. About 43 percent of online shoppers will use a site's own search to find products and make buying decisions, according to a study from Marketing Sherpa. Separately, a Jupiter Research study s...
Business > Merchant Voice
12 tips for creating a great customer birthday program

September 16, 2012 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

What’s the one thing people are most fond of, after their name? Their birthday! Annual events like Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day roll around every year, and while not everyone celebrates them, everyone has a birthday. Even if something like 19 million people (7 billion ...
Design & Development
Choosing an Integrated Ecommerce System; 4 Steps

September 14, 2012 • Dale Traxler

Editor's Note: This is part three of a three-part series on the advantages of an integrated, all-in-one ecommerce platform. The previous installments, "The Benefits of an Integrated Ecommerce System" and "Defining Your Integrated System Requirements," we published previously. Last week...
On-page SEO
SEO: Using Automated Landing Pages

September 14, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Marketing automation tools make creating landing pages a snap. They focus on making it more efficient to deliver relevant content to relevant individuals at relevant times via email and paid search campaigns. So why not use them to create landing pages for search engine optimization cam...
Schools & Resources
Learning from Bad Web Design

September 14, 2012 • Drew Coffin

Recognizing bad web design is often easy. But it can be difficult to know what makes it bad. In this article I will give you examples of bad web design and explain what good design practices could be used instead. Note that many of these examples are extreme cases of bad web design and there is more than one mistake in each example image.
Conversion
Understanding Affluent Male Online Shopping Behavior

September 13, 2012 • Marcia Kaplan

When ecommerce was in its infancy, consumers used the Internet to purchase basic items such as books and CDs that usually didn't involve size, quality, color, or style issues. Shoppers knew what they were getting and choices were based almost solely on price. Slowly, the array of goods ...
Payments
How to Lower Credit Card Processing Costs and Obtain Better Terms, Part 2: Attitude

September 12, 2012 • Phil Hinke

This article is "Part 2" 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" we published last month. Note that this series is specific to ecommerce merchants. It can be used as a general guide b...
Social Media
Twitter Advertising for Small Business

September 12, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Twitter offers two affordably priced advertising options for smaller businesses: "Promoted Accounts" and "Promoted Tweets." Promoted Accounts. Twitter looks at your current followers and then finds people with similar interests. When it discovers a match, Twitter recommends you in th...
Social Media
Google+ For Business Now in Apps

September 11, 2012 • Armando Roggio

Recently Google released a set of Google+ features that encourage collaboration within an enterprise. These new features will be available to the company's current Google Apps for Business customers on a trail basis at least through the end of 2013. The Google Apps for Business suite i...
Platforms & Apps
18 Gmail Productivity Plugins

September 11, 2012 • Sig Ueland

The right plugin can transform Gmail from a standard email program into a productivity powerhouse, capable of managing your communications and professional networks. Here is a list of productivity plugins for Gmail. There are plugins to schedule emails, track correspondence, manage so...
Conversion
Using Real-Time Data in Google Analytics

September 10, 2012 • Jaime Brugueras

One of the downsides to Google Analytics was that, until last year, it provided historic, day-old data. Google corrected that when it released "Real-Time" as part of its broader analytics package. Here’s how you can use Real-Time to improve your retail performance. Using Real-Time A...