Page 194 – Practical Ecommerce

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Marketing & Advertising
13 Sites with Personalized Social Media Icons

June 29, 2012 • Drew Coffin

Many online merchants use social media icons to link their storefronts to social networks like Facebook and Twitter. While basic social media icons will get the job done, some merchants choose to customize their social media icons for a more personalized user experience. Here are thirte...
Business > Merchant Voice
Not the Top Ten Extensions for Magento

June 29, 2012 • Richard Stubbings

When you first install Magento the temptation is to go to Magento Connect and look at all the possible extensions. There are literally thousands of them. The next step is to Google things like “best Magento extensions”, or “top 10 ..” or “recommended ….” just to try to whittle down the ...
Technical SEO
SEO: Understanding XML Sitemaps

June 29, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

XML sitemaps serve a very niche purpose in search engine optimization: facilitating indexation. Posting an XML sitemap is kind of like rolling out the red carpet for search engines and giving them a roadmap of the preferred routes through the site. It’s the site owner’s chance to tell c...
Staffing
How to Hire an Affiliate Manager

June 28, 2012 • Carolyn Kmet

Online retailers frequently ask me, “How much time am I going to need to run an affiliate marketing program?” Larger companies often employ an internal, full-time, dedicated marketing manager who focuses her attention on growing the affiliate program. However, for smaller companies, t...
Business
Simplified Accounting for Ecommerce Merchants

June 27, 2012 • PEC Staff

Ecommerce businesses, like all businesses, should maintain accurate accounting records. But many entrepreneurs dislike accounting. Many are confused by it, and prefer to avoid it. Steven Aldrich wants to help those entrepreneurs. He's CEO of Outright.com, a hosted, simplified bookkeep...
Social Media
Putting a Dollar Value on Fans, Friends, and Followers

June 27, 2012 • Armando Roggio

According to studies from diverse research and analysis firms around the globe, a Facebook Fan is worth $136.38, a Twitter follower is worth $2.00, and a would-be friend on Pinterest is worth, perhaps, $5.00. Unfortunately, as concise and direct as these figures might seem when used a...
Marketing & Advertising
For Quick Sales, Target Top PPC Ad Placements

June 26, 2012 • Dale Traxler

For many retail businesses, summers can be a challenging time to maintain steady revenue. This week, I’m going to focus on a strategy that could bring quick revenue into your business. A lot of the marketing buzz for ecommerce businesses has been around using social media to build you...
Social Media
Writing Social Media Press Releases: 3 Tools to Help

June 25, 2012 • Paul Chaney

More than 3,000 press releases are issued each day. However, unless you have a public relations firm following up — making phone calls or sending emails to journalists and bloggers — it's almost impossible to get your release read by the media. But there are three ways press releases ...
Social Media
Moving Beyond Likes on Facebook

June 25, 2012 • Armando Roggio

A new study seeks to better understand how businesses may use Facebook to go beyond just acquiring Likes, to engaging and communicating with customers in effective and measurable ways. The study comes from Internet analysis firm comScore and includes data from comScore's "Social Essent...
Keyword Research
SEO Keywords: ‘Red Roses’ vs. ‘Roses Red’

June 22, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engines are code-driven, logic-based pieces of software and hardware that know and do what they’re programmed to do: rank data gathered from crawling websites according to specific algorithms against searchers’ queries. Those algorithms based on keyword relevance prefer exact mat...
Business
Overcoming Challenges for Qualifying Potential Buyers of eCommerce business

June 22, 2012 • Manish Shah

In my last post, I discussed the importance of qualifying buyers when selling a business. The two-tired, gated approach I outlined is a great way to provide maximum exposure for your business while protecting your confidentiality and sensitive information. It keeps all parties on equal ...
Marketing & Advertising
Collaborative Consumption Can Help Your Ecommerce Business

June 21, 2012 • Gagan Mehra

"Collaborative consumption" refers to the matching of suppliers with consumers in a large-scale manner. It could involve bartering services, renting resources, selling products, and more. The Internet has greatly facilitated collaborative consumption, by offering online platforms for ...
Business
Social Media: 5 Legal Risks to Your Company

June 21, 2012 • Jeff Jacobson, Jd, Llm

Social media has become not just a place to share our personal lives. Many people use social media to promote their business, communicate with customers, and recruit or check-up on employees. However, most businesses don't think about the legal risks and issues that may result from su...
Business > Merchant Voice
7 ways to maximise distribution opportunities through other retailers

June 20, 2012 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

As an online retailer, you obviously have your own store. But what are some of the issues you need to consider when distributing your products and services through other online retailers? 1. Who are their customers? Presumably some of them are the same types of people who do business ...
Business
Adapting To Business Lifecycles

June 20, 2012 • Dale Traxler

Businesses have a lifecycles. They can be summarized as follows. Humble beginnings to survival. This is the period from the conceptualization of the business to actually receiving sales. You can pay your employees and your vendors. You have revenue coming in, and the makings of a sust...
Social Media
Installing Facebook’s New WordPress Plugin

June 19, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Facebook has created a WordPress plugin that integrates the social network's functionality to a much deeper degree. It makes your WordPress site nearly an extension of Facebook itself. Once installed, each time you create a WordPress post, it automatically cross-posts to your Facebook T...
Business
Lessons Learned: Working Mom Applies Science to Online Toy Business

June 18, 2012 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

Kelly Brough is no stranger to the online world. She worked for 10 years at AOL and Lonely Planet, the travel-guide company. Nonetheless, this high-powered working mother, with degrees ...
Email & Text Marketing
5 Ways to Freshen Your Email List

June 18, 2012 • Carolyn Nye

Your email-marketing program depends on a quality list. It's easy for a list to stagnate over time. An email database that is left alone, without refreshing, combined with an email marketing program that is not stimulating, will lead to lower open and click rates. In this article, I'l...
Social Media
Measuring Social Media’s Impact on Revenue

June 15, 2012 • Tim Wilson

You can explore the impact of social media on your site’s revenue using data that is already available to you. None of this data is perfect, and none of it is comprehensive. But when used together, the data can inform how and where you invest. Organic vs. Campaign-Driven Social Media ...
Schools & Resources
Reading List: Trevor Ginn of Hello Baby

June 15, 2012 • PEC Staff

In “Reading List,” we ask ecommerce professionals to name some of their favorite recent books and blogs and tell us why they read them. For this installment, we corresponded with ...
Business
How to Evaluate Ecommerce Risks

June 14, 2012 • Dale Traxler

Ecommerce business owners face risks. Some may keep you awake at night. Others are routine and you really don’t think about them. The ones that keep you awake at night are most likely the least understood — or outside of your control. A key to business success is to mitigate your risk...
Finance
Investment in Ecommerce Firms Robust

June 14, 2012 • Marcia Kaplan

While the poor showing of Facebook in its initial public offering last month has immobilized the market for Internet companies wanting to sell stock to the public, the overall investment climate remains strong. Merger and acquisitions activity in the ecommerce arena has remained robust ...
SEO Tools
12 Free Google SEO Tools

June 13, 2012 • Sig Ueland

Before you spend any money on a search-engine-optimization campaign for your website, take advantage of Google’s free tools to optimize your site and increase its PageRank. And if you are just starting out with SEO, check out Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide PDF. Here ...
Social Media
Facebook Adds Post Scheduler and Admin Roles

June 13, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Facebook recently added two new administrative functions to Fan pages: the ability to (a) schedule posts, and (b) set management roles for page administrators. Scheduling Posts Facebook page administrators can now schedule posts for publication at a future date. This long anticipated...
Payments
Avoid Credit Card Processing Proposals with AVS Fees

June 12, 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 them lower their processing costs, believing the credit card industry is often unfair to them. His latest installment is below. There have been a few cases ...
Design & Development
5 Mistakes to Avoid on Ecommerce Sites

June 12, 2012 • Armando Roggio

What makes great ecommerce-site aesthetics, layout, and even features are a matter of opinion. But there are some things that simply are not smart for online retailers. Online retail sites have a distinct job: selling something. While site design can be a matter of taste, I believe th...
Schools & Resources
Reading List: Hassan Bawab of Magic Logix

June 11, 2012 • PEC Staff

In “Reading List,” we ask ecommerce professionals to name some of their favorite recent books and blogs and tell us why they read them. For this installment, we corresponded with ...
Conversion
Tablets and Phablets Could Boost Value of Ecommerce Video

June 11, 2012 • Armando Roggio

New research shows that tablet users are more likely to watch video. Separately, a new and potentially popular smartphone category may be similar to tablets in video consumption. A report released June 8, 2012 from trend-tracking firm comScore found that tablet users in the U.S. are th...
Business
Achieving Your Ecommerce Business Goals

June 8, 2012 • Dale Traxler

In my recent series of articles, I examined six different elements of a business model: customers, products and services, channels, profit, people, and infrastructure. A well-planned business model and a well-executed strategy to support it should allow you to achieve your business goal...
Schools & Resources
Reading List: Andrew Youderian of eCommerceFuel.com

June 8, 2012 • PEC Staff

In “Reading List,” we ask ecommerce professionals to name some of their favorite recent books and blogs and tell us why they read them. For this installment, we corresponded with ...