Page 201 – Practical Ecommerce

Category

SEO
SEO Impact of Google’s Search Plus Your World

February 3, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

As search and social become ever more entwined in Google’s and Bing’s algorithms and search results, search engine optimizers cannot afford to turn a blind eye to social media. Bing incorporates Facebook data into its search results. Google has taken another big step with the introducti...
Amazon & Marketplaces > Merchant Voice
Playing The Amazon Game

February 3, 2012 • Richard Stubbings

Sooner or latter every online retailer will consider selling on Amazon, or are already doing so. Amazon is a huge market, and it would be unwise not to consider it. There are other blogs covering the pros and cons, but none really cover what to do if you decide to take the gamble, and e...
Social Media
How to Use Google+ Scrapbook Photo Album to Showcase Your Products

February 3, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Google's new social network, Google+, is experiencing phenomenal growth. In just seven months since its inception, the network has more than 60 million users, according to published reports. It took Facebook four years to reach that amount. At first, Google+ was available only for indiv...
Social Media
Facebook’s Open Graph and Timeline Could Help Ecommerce Merchants

February 2, 2012 • Paul Chaney

People don't go to Facebook to shop. Many large companies have accrued millions of Fans, but — with a few exceptions — retailers don't generate many sales there. Two recent Facebook developments, however, could change this. The launch of "Open Graph" may allow retailers to better inte...
Business
Reducing Shipping Costs for Low-Volume Merchants

February 1, 2012 • PEC Staff

The free-shipping era squeezes smaller merchants. They must match the shipping policies of larger competitors, but they don't receive the high-volume shipping discounts that the larger companies do. Smaller merchants must pay more, in other words, for offering free shipping. There's ...
Google Ads
Cheaper Clicks from AdWords Coming?

February 1, 2012 • Scott Smigler

Google's average revenue per click from AdWords' advertisers dropped for the first time in two years for the quarter ended Dec. 31, 2011, according to Reuters. Analysts projected a 3 percent increase in cost-per-click revenue, but Google reported an 8 percent decrease. As a result, man...
Influencers & Affiliates
Affiliate Marketing: Segmenting Your Affiliates

January 31, 2012 • Carolyn Kmet

As a retailer, you likely segment your consumers. The segmentation can be a formal exercise, where preferred customers get preferential treatment; or it can even be informal, such as when you greet your regulars with a friendly wave or a cup of coffee. Segmentation is the practice of ...
Customer Retention
Fake Reviews, a Despicable Practice?

January 31, 2012 • Armando Roggio

Online retailers have an ethical and legal responsibility to customers to advertise and market in an honest and legitimate fashion. But sometimes the line separating an excellent marketing idea from a despicable or even illegal business practice is not perfectly clear. Ecommerce market...
Schools & Resources
SVG Images: Sources to Download, Create

January 30, 2012 • Drew Coffin

In "SVG Images: What Merchants Need to Know," I explained the difference between raster and vector images and explained how SVG images use XML to generate perfectly scalable graphics. From that article, recall that raster images can accommodate many more color variations than vector, b...
Conversion
PetFlow.com: Customer Focus, Business Savvy Drives Success

January 30, 2012 • Armando Roggio

PetFlow is a subscription-based ecommerce business that sells pet food, including heavy bags of it, overcoming logistic and service challenges. The company is expected to have more than $20 million in sales in 2012, succeeding in an industry where others have failed, and demonstrating ...
Social Media
Google Integrates Google+ in Search Results

January 27, 2012 • Paul Chaney

We all expected Google+ would factor into Google's search results. Now we know how. Google recently announced in its blog the integration of its new social network into search by including results from the searcher's Google+ friends and interests. This only works for searchers who ar...
Keyword Research
Optimizing a Page for Search Engines, Part 3: Keywords to Content

January 27, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Editor's Note: This is the final installment of a three-part series on optimizing ecommerce pages for search engines. The first two installments, "Part 1: Keyword Research" and “Part 2: Keyword Mapping,” we published previously. I discussed keyword research and content mapping in detai...
Customer Service
Increasing Conversions by Referring Consumers Elsewhere

January 26, 2012 • Pamela Hazelton

Zappos.com's customer service is legendary. It's been known to order pizzas for customers, to take special product photos for customers, and to help customers match items and colors. It also refers consumers to competitors when they request products Zappos doesn't carry. Referring cons...
SEO
Too Much SEO Can Harm an Ecommerce Business

January 26, 2012 • Kerry Murdock

Balancing SEO with usability was the topic when we recently spoke with Hamlet Batista. He is a pioneering SEO innovator and the founder of Hamlet Batista Group, an SEO consultancy.
Business > Merchant Voice
My favorite tools and services

January 25, 2012 • Jamie Salvatori

I use a variety of software in my day-to-day activities running an e-commerce company. Here is a list of my favorites. Hopefully, it’s useful to you as well! Photoshop - If you don’t know how to use any flavor of image editing software, you shouldn’t be in the e-commerce game. As I’ve ...
Shipping & Fulfillment
How to Expand to the U.K. Market

January 25, 2012 • James Hyde

Editor's Note: We welcome James Hyde as our newest contributor. He's a U.K.-based shipping and fulfillment expert with Six Works, a fulfillment firm. Hyde's first article, below, explains money-saving strategies for U.S.-based merchants to sell to U.K. consumers. While the U.S. online ...
Conversion
3 Things to Love About Quarterly.co

January 25, 2012 • Armando Roggio

A new ecommerce business delivers curated gifts to its customers on a subscription basis and exemplifies some of the most exciting new trends in ecommerce. Quarterly.co — which Zach Frechette, co-founder of Good Magazine, created — does at least three things very well. So well, in fact...
Business
Legal: Ecommerce Owners Liable to Patent Trolls?

January 24, 2012 • Jeff Jacobson, Jd, Llm

There has recently been an increase in the number of patent claims against website developers and operators. The claims are based on "business method" and software patents for various functions of a website, such as drop-down menus, site search, and other common functions. Many of the...
Social Media
Top 20 Brands on Google+ for Jan. 2012

January 24, 2012 • Sig Ueland

Google+ launched brand pages in November. Already many companies, groups and organizations have established large numbers of followers on the social network. To check Google+ brand page rankings, you can now use Zoomsphere, a statistics site for major social networks. Track followers, ...
Business > Merchant Voice
January Blues

January 24, 2012 • Richard Stubbings

It's January and Christmas is over. The huge rush of orders has been picked, packed and dispatched. The first week or two of January is also busy with the customers spending their Christmas money. Then the credit card bills come in, the orders dry up, and the problems start. What separ...
Conversion
Using ‘Quick Views’ to Increase Conversions

January 23, 2012 • Louis Camassa

Editor's Note: Each month contributor Louis Camassa, a seasoned ecommerce developer, identifies a feature from existing ecommerce sites that is well executed, and applicable to other merchants. Camassa's previous installments are "Admiring Apple's ‘Questions & Answers’ Feature" and ...
Content Marketing
3 Content Lessons from Top Performing Blogs

January 23, 2012 • Armando Roggio

Blogs are a good way to engage customers, offer more than products, and attract visitors to a site. Great blogs are often the result of great content in the form of a well-written post, an illuminating infographic, or an excellent video. People are attracted to the substance of the co...
Conversion
10 Ideas to Grow Ecommerce Profits in 2012

January 20, 2012 • Gagan Mehra

The 2011 holiday season was record breaking for online commerce. Sales hit a new high of $37 billion, according to comScore, the research firm. With the New Year, it is time to examine the key factors that have made your online store successful, and how to further grow your profits. Bel...
Keyword Research
Optimizing a Page for Search Engines, Part 2: Keyword Mapping

January 20, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Editor's Note: This is the second installment of a three-part series on optimizing ecommerce pages for search engines. The first installment, "Part 1: Keyword Research," we published last week. "Part 3: Keywords to Content" we published after the article, below. Keyword research is ess...
Social Media
5 Ways Blogging Is Better than Social Networking

January 19, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Blogging has long been an online marketing staple among businesses. In recent years, however, many businesses have focused on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. But blogging can benefit businesses in ways those cannot. This article outlines five such methods. 1. Blog...
Email & Text Marketing
Email Marketing: 3 Ways to Increase Relevancy

January 19, 2012 • Carolyn Nye

An email marketing message needs to be relevant to its recipients to achieve maximum results. Relevancy can be a simple as inserting the recipient's name in the subject line or salutation. But it can be much more dynamic than that, too. It can include recommendations based on past pur...
Business
Vat19.com Thrives in 2011, Recap

January 18, 2012 • PEC Staff

We recently spoke with Jamie Salvatori about how his company fared in 2011. He is the founder and owner of Vat19, an established ecommerce business that sells unique gift items. He's also a Practical eCommerce blogger, at "The (eCommerce) Corner Office." Practical eCommerce: How w...
Social Media
6 Innovative Ecommerce Uses of YouTube

January 18, 2012 • Sig Ueland

With over 3 billion videos viewed every day, YouTube is a great place for online merchants to find customers. However, there are many different ways to engage those customers. Here is a list of innovative uses of YouTube by ecommerce merchants. Some provide product information; others...
Conversion
How to Analyze Your Ecommerce Competitors

January 17, 2012 • Armando Roggio

In online retailing, an accurate and current competitive analysis accesses rival merchants' strengths and weaknesses relative to a seller's own operations, providing a significant advantage or identifying opportunities. For small and mid-sized online retailers, a basic competitive anal...
Design & Development
SVG Images: What Merchants Need to Know

January 17, 2012 • Drew Coffin

Many online merchants are unaware of the benefits of scalable vector graphics, or SVGs. This article will provide a basic overview. Vector vs. Raster Before looking at SVGs, we first need to understand what a “vector” graphic is. There are two types of web graphics: raster and vector....