Page 192 – Practical Ecommerce

Category

User Experience
Evaluating Mobile Strategies for Ecommerce Sites

August 15, 2012 • Dale Traxler

This article is my annual check-in on the evolving impact of mobile technologies on ecommerce. I wrote a blog post, "Going Mobile - A Year Later," in August 2011 as a follow-up to my post from May 2010 titled "Going Mobile" when I first realized that mobile shopping was becoming a reali...
Social Media
Barebones Social Media Marketing

August 14, 2012 • Paul Chaney

How do you manage social media when you have little time or money? All too often that is the situation in which merchants find themselves. Faced with many demands, merchants oftentimes have little time or money to engage on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or LinkedIn. ...
Social Media
34 People to Follow on Google+

August 14, 2012 • Sig Ueland

Google+ is one year old. While the social network has not achieved the critical mass of Facebook or Twitter, Google+ hosts a large and engaged community that includes entrepreneurial giants, tech visionaries and social media super-stars. Here is a list of people to follow on Google+. E...
Platforms & Apps
Microsoft Office Alternatives for Ubuntu Linux

August 13, 2012 • Armando Roggio

Maintaining spreadsheets, composing business documents, or even building slide-style presentations are a mainstay of modern business, including small and mid-sized online retail operations that often depend on the Microsoft Office suite to compete these tasks. The dependency on Office ...
Payments
How to Lower Credit Card Processing Costs and Obtain Better Terms, Part 1: The Basics

August 13, 2012 • Phil Hinke

Editor’s Note: Contributor Phil Hinke is a veteran of the credit card processing industry. He now consults with merchants to help lower their processing costs, believing the credit card industry ...
Conversion
How to Use Google’s Remarketing Platform

August 10, 2012 • Jaime Brugueras

It's frustrating to online retailers when potential customers visit their websites, browse product pages, and then leave. There’s no sale made, and money is spent serving ads and hosting content to those visitors. This is how a lot of visits end up for online businesses. That doesn’t me...
SEO
4 Simple Visuals to Explain SEO

August 10, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

When talking to marketers, it can be nearly impossible to get them to look beyond the brand imagery and user experience they’ve crafted for their customers online. And while they’re locked into that perception of their sites, it’s very difficult to explain why search engines don’t perce...
Conversion
Tips for a Successful Seasonal Marketing Campaign

August 9, 2012 • Dale Traxler

One strategy for increasing your website traffic and sales is to run integrated campaigns on seasonal merchandise. Almost any type of business-to-consumer — and even many business-to-business — stores sell items that are more appropriate for various seasons or holidays. This article e...
Finance
Ecommerce Acquisitions, Mergers, and Partnerships — What You Need to Know

August 8, 2012 • Marcia Kaplan

In the late 1990s, ecommerce vendors looked to brick and mortar retailers for marketing tips and best practices. Now, as more people shop online and abandon brick and mortar stores, retail chains are turning to online merchants for advice. That's because web-only sellers have shown th...
Social Media
3 Pinterest Apps for Facebook Pages

August 7, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Facebook and Pinterest continue to grow in popularity for social commerce marketing channels among retailers. Until recently, however, there was no convenient way to tie the two together. Two companies — Woobox and Tabfusion — have now developed easy to use apps that allow merchants to ...
Conversion
Observations on Marketing to Men

August 7, 2012 • Armando Roggio

Male shoppers may be more difficult to reach with Internet marketing than their female counterparts in an era focused on social sites and so-called gender-neutral media. Sites like Facebook and Pinterest have rightly become a major focus for Internet marketers. In the case of Facebook,...
Platforms & Apps
16 Responsive Ecommerce Themes on WordPress

August 6, 2012 • Sig Ueland

Responsive design allows a business to reach computers, tablets and smartphones from a single website. Here is a list of responsive themes on WordPress for ecommerce sites. Many of these themes are designed to be used with specific ecommerce plugins. All are premium themes, though r...
Social Media
5 Tips for Pinterest Pin-to-Win Contests

August 6, 2012 • Armando Roggio

Pinterest is the most important new social sharing site in 2012, giving online marketers both a new way to engage potential customers and a means of boosting sales. Although there have been conflicting reports of just how Pinterest is impacting business fundamentals like sales, the gen...
Local Business
SEO: Can Local Searchers Find Your Stores?

August 3, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Online location pages of physical stores should provide much more information than just the physical address of a store close to the individual user. Many consumers already know where a store is, based on their everyday routines. What they don’t know and are seeking are the hours, holid...
Business > Merchant Voice
If You Build It They Will Come – Not Unless You Work On It

August 3, 2012 • Richard Stubbings

I often see posts on forums from optimists who want to set up a web site and make money. They seem to have that great optimism that any Ecommerce web site will be a success and save their business, or make them lots and lots of money. The sad fact is that the vast majority of new web ...
User Experience
10 Tips to Freshen Your Ecommerce Site

August 2, 2012 • Dale Traxler

One important strategy to grow your ecommerce revenue is to keep your store fresh and vibrant. That includes your content, products, and promotions. It may also mean regularly refreshing your navigation, themes, and other design elements. When was the last time you really looked at you...
Email & Text Marketing
Email Case Study: Moosejaw Adds Personality to Email Messages

August 2, 2012 • Carolyn Nye

The challenge with an ongoing email program is that people are busy. Unless they have a need for your product or service, they aren’t necessarily going to open your email and purchase from you immediately. To stay relevant and keep email recipients engaged, some retailers are turning to...
Social Media
Understanding the 6 Facebook Post Types

August 1, 2012 • Paul Chaney

There are six types of posts you can make to your Facebook page: Video, Photo, Link, Question, Event, and Text. This article outlines reasons why you would use them and best practices for each post type. 1. Video Videos are among the most compelling and popular formats for Facebook p...
Content Marketing
How to Write an Online Press Release

August 1, 2012 • Lorrie Thomas Ross

Today’s web-driven world makes it possible for companies large and small to create news simply by writing and publishing their own newsworthy content. The way to get started is by writing and sharing powerful press releases online.
Business
Will U.S. Online Sales Tax Mandate Hurt Small Business?

August 1, 2012 • Armando Roggio

Struggling states and some brick-and-mortar retailers have reinvigorated an effort to mandate that online merchants collect sales taxes for all U.S. jurisdictions, whether or not those retailers actually have operations there. The most recent legislation is the so-called Marketplace Fa...
Google Ads
5 Steps to Prepare for Google Shopping

July 31, 2012 • Scott Smigler

In "Cheaper Clicks from AdWords Coming?," I encouraged merchants to try Google's Product Listing Ads because they produce exceptional results. They are the paid version of Google’s free product listings, which for many merchants are a major source of sales. Google recently announced, in...
Influencers & Affiliates
Affiliate Marketing: 3 Incentives to Drive Sales

July 31, 2012 • Carolyn Kmet

Ecommerce executives often gauge the success of an affiliate program by how many affiliates have signed up. This is misleading. I’d much rather oversee a program with 25 active and engaged affiliates driving traffic and sales, than thousands of affiliates who aren’t generating any ac...
Social Media
7 Tips for Pinterest Pinning

July 30, 2012 • Armando Roggio

Social sharing site Pinterest has grown to 12 million users and sparked a new surge in social marketing. Some online businesses are hoping to use Pinterest as a way to engage customers and make sales. As with any form of marketing there are some best practices that may make a business'...
Marketing & Advertising
Plastic Surgeon Drives Business With Social Media

July 30, 2012 • Web Marketing Today

Michael Salzhauer is a plastic surgeon with a passion for Internet marketing. He attributes virtually all of his new-patient business to it. His company, Bal Harbour Plastic Surgery, has posted videos on YouTube that have
Business > Merchant Voice
5 ways to expand your product range for free or little cost

July 30, 2012 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

If you're a small online retailer, you may not want to tie up much – or if things are starting to bite financially, any more - money in purchasing products for your online store. But how can you expand your product selection easily without affecting your bottom line? Here's five possib...
Business
Lessons Learned: Personalized Gift Site a Family Affair

July 26, 2012 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

It wasn’t until her youngest daughter attended pre-school that Melissa Perlman Chelist could help manage the small gift website her husband Barry and his business partner David had created ...
Business
Analyzing a Startup, and Pivoting

July 26, 2012 • Dale Traxler

Editor's Note: Contributing Editor Dale Traxler is a former ecommerce owner who now consults with other businesses on financial and strategy matters. His piece below describes his work for a startup manufacturer and retailer. I mentioned in previous articles that I’m involved in two s...
Local Business
Showrooming Challenges Brick-and-Mortar Retailers

July 25, 2012 • Marcia Kaplan

Last December, at the height of the Christmas shopping season, Amazon aggressively promoted its price-checking mobile phone application by giving shoppers five percent off items on Amazon that they scanned while in brick-and-mortar stores. The application, which compares store prices wi...
Business
To Maintain Productivity, Keep Some Margin

July 25, 2012 • Armando Roggio

Online retailers are accustomed to thinking about margin in a purely financial sense — as the difference between what an item costs and the amount at which it is sold. There are, however, other areas of an online retail business that need margin too. Margin may be thought of as a borde...
Email & Text Marketing
Sending HTML and Plain Text Email Simultaneously

July 25, 2012 • Web Marketing Today

With so many different smartphones and tablets, it’s important to be able to display your company's emails in the way that the mobile browser is best suited. Some mobile browsers will show your email in its full HTML form. Others will default to just plain text. How do you know which version to send to each recipient? The solution to this problem is to craft an email which has two parts: one that displays your complete graphics and the other made up of nothing more than conventional text, with no images and colors.