Page 206 – Practical Ecommerce

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Email & Text Marketing
Writing Excellent Email Subject Lines

October 20, 2011 • Armando Roggio

A well written email subject line can increase open rates and, potentially, increase conversions. An email with a poorly written subject will probably get deleted. Subject line composition is as important to an email-marketing program as earning subscribers and providing great content ...
Business
Interview: Yahoo! Small Business General Manager

October 19, 2011 • PEC Staff

There's no more pioneering platform in the ecommerce business than Yahoo!. Its shopping cart powers thousands of ecommerce stores, and its hosting and other small business services help over a million companies. But Yahoo! is changing — the recent departure of its CEO being one indicat...
Business
10 Online Legal Form Providers

October 19, 2011 • Marcia Kaplan

Hiring attorneys for issues such as incorporation, contracts, or business sales can be extremely expensive for small businesses. The Internet provides less expensive alternatives, with templates offered by a number of firms. The most commonly available forms are for incorporation or LLC...
Design & Development
Designing ‘Above the Fold’ Necessary?

October 18, 2011 • Drew Coffin

Ensuring that customers can easily find important information on a site should be a priority for online merchants. In the past, you may have heard of “designing above the fold” as a way to present important information. While this strategy might have worked in the past, the traditional ...
Social Media
Understanding Facebook’s New ‘Insights’ Analytics

October 18, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Facebook recently launched a new, enhanced version of Insights, its analytics package for Fan pages. The old version contained lots of information — demographics, the total number of Likes/Unlikes, number of average daily users, and total page and post impressions — but nothing that hel...
Email & Text Marketing
Email Case Study: Allrecipes.com Makes Daily Frequency Work

October 17, 2011 • Carolyn Nye

For many ecommerce sites, sending marketing emails every day may be scary, fearing that recipients will unsubscribe based on the number of emails they are receiving. However, sending daily emails ...
User Experience
Lessons from the Amazon Redesign

October 17, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Changes in Amazon's graphic design and how it displays navigation menus offer a few basic lessons about site-presentation trends that may help small and mid-sized online merchants with their own site designs. Arguably, the Amazon website was long overdue for a redesign.
Conversion
Selling Luxury Goods Online

October 14, 2011 • Marcia Kaplan

The wisdom of selling expensive, high-end goods online has been debated since ecommerce became a reality. Many brands fear that products will lose their prestige if sold online. Purveyors of French luxury brands such as Chanel have been especially disdainful of ecommerce. In his book, T...
Influencers & Affiliates
SEO: Using Affiliates for Search Marketing

October 13, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Working in the organic search industry, I’ve often had large search marketing clients who envied the success of their affiliates, which sometimes outperformed their own in-house search marketing efforts. But Carolyn Tang Kmet opened my eyes to the ways that search affiliates can actuall...
Conversion
5 Holiday Marketing Ideas to Boost Sales

October 13, 2011 • Armando Roggio

The holiday shopping season runs from the end of October to the end of the year, and it can represent as much as 20-to-40 percent of a retailer’s total annual ...
Business
Back Office Complexities of Selling on Multiple Channels

October 12, 2011 • PEC Staff

Proponents of selling retail products across multiple online channels don't often discuss the back office reality of managing it all. Merchants who sell on, say, (a) their own ecommerce sites, (b) Amazon, (c) eBay and (d) Facebook must update — on four separate websites — stock quantit...
Google Ads
Paid Search: Can Anyone Challenge Google?

October 12, 2011 • Marcia Kaplan

We can end the suspense right now. It's not likely that any other company is going to be a real contender in paid search anytime soon. The Search Alliance formed by Microsoft's adCenter and Yahoo! makes Bing the default search engine on Yahoo! pages. Although Microsoft has spent a good ...
User Experience
How to Make Category Navigation Dynamic

October 11, 2011 • PEC Staff

Sophisticated site search helps consumers find products on ecommerce sites, and therefore increases sales. But site search can also work with faceted category navigation to help consumers too. To explain it, we are joined by Scott Zielinski, co-founder of SearchSpring, a leading search...
Payments
Credit Card Processing: ‘Interchange-Plus’ Pricing Not Necessarily Fair

October 11, 2011 • Phil Hinke

I am not only upset with what I am seeing in the in the card processing industry right now, I am disgusted with how merchants are being taken advantage of.
Social Media
Social Media: Become a ‘One Percenter’

October 10, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Years ago, usability expert Jakob Nielsen developed the "Community Participation Pyramid," which some observers now call the "90-9-1 Principle." It states: 90 percent of web users are lurkers — read or observe, but don't contribute; 9 percent of users contribute from time to time, bu...
Conversion
Holiday Sales to Grow 2.8 Percent?

October 10, 2011 • Armando Roggio

The National Retail Federation has estimated that overall 2011 holiday sales — brick-and-mortar and online — will grow 2.8 percent reaching some $465.6 billion compared to $453 billion in 2010. The NRF uses a complex economic model that includes data from across the U.S. and world econ...
SEO
SEO Report Card: SolsticeSupply.com, Part 2

October 7, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Over two years ago, we published an "SEO Report Card" for SolsticeSupply.com, an ecommerce site dedicated to closeout winter goods ranging from skis and snowboards to winter apparel. With a final grade of D+, the review didn't go well for founder Justin Clapick, who requested it. Clapic...
Schools & Resources
13 New Ecommerce Books in September 2011

October 7, 2011 • Sig Ueland

September’s new ecommerce books are about social media and location-based marketing tools. Several of the books focus on online strategies for small businesses. Here is a list of new ecommerce books in September. Included are both new releases and new editions. Release information and...
Conversion
Understanding the Shift to Online Shopping

October 6, 2011 • Marcia Kaplan

Defying the general economic gloom, ecommerce sales have registered seven consecutive quarters of year-over-year revenue gains since Q4 2009, with some in double digits. The last three quarters (Q4 2010 through Q2 2011) showed gains of 11, 12, and 14 percent respectively, the best perfo...
Design & Development
Sales of Smartphones and Tablets to Exceed PCs

October 6, 2011 • David Maier

The rise of smartphones and computer tablets have forced many ecommerce merchants to ask how consumers will access the Internet, and shop. We're curious, too. We've researched the overall unit sales of personal computers — desktops and laptops — and compared those to unit sales of s...
Platforms & Apps
The 10 Best Blogging Platforms in 2011

October 5, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Online merchants are competing for customer attention and loyalty in an Internet landscape where people create their autobiographies across social networks and businesses have to discover a reason to be relevant in that narrative. Blogging, which some suggest is a waning art for indivi...
Business
X.commerce: An eBay, PayPal, Magento ‘Ecosystem’?

October 4, 2011 • PEC Staff

The notion of combining an online marketplace with a payment platform, a shopping cart and a robust backend is not new. But when the marketplace is eBay, the payment platform is PayPal, the cart is Magento and the backend is GSI Commerce, that is news. eBay calls this new collaboration ...
Social Media
Facebook Platform Changes, Part 2: Pages

October 4, 2011 • Paul Chaney

At its recent f8 developers' conference, Facebook announced extensive changes to its platform, including changes to personal "Profiles" and business-oriented "Pages." I described the changes to Profiles in last week's article. This article, below, addresses changes to Pages. 1. Intera...
Typography & Fonts
How Browsers Manage Fonts

October 3, 2011 • Drew Coffin

Last month I wrote “Typography 101: The Basics,” which explained rudimentary aspects of general typography. In this article, I will explore typography on web browsers. In other words, how exactly does a browser handle fonts? Web Safe Fonts First, I want to address web safe fonts. In m...
Design & Dev Tools
10 Tools to Boost Your Ecommerce Business

October 3, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Crowd sourcing, infrastructure-as-a-service, and even marketing intelligence solutions can help small and mid-sized businesses to grow and become more profitable. It is a cliché, perhaps, to say that business is always changing, but nonetheless the way business is conducted does change...
Business
Good Internet businesses are sold quickly – If you don’t grab it – someone else will

October 3, 2011 • Manish Shah

I recently finished my assignment with a buyer; let’s call him Mike, who contacted me after losing a good internet business that he liked to another buyer. He said this internet business was selling product line that he and his wife liked and it had all characteristics of good business...
Platforms & Apps
18 Useful Extensions for OpenCart

September 30, 2011 • Sig Ueland

OpenCart is a leading open-source ecommerce platform. With nearly 3,000 free and premium extensions available, OpenCart is also feature-rich and highly customizable. Here is a list of extensions to tailor your OpenCart site. There are extensions to enhance your cart’s functionality, pr...
SEO
SEO Sidecars More Trouble than They’re Worth

September 30, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

I'll get right to the point. You can't bolt a couple of pages onto the edge of your ecommece site like a sidecar to a motorcycle and call it search engine optimization. Or, rather, you can launch your SEO sidecar but it won't achieve the organic search performance you desire without app...
Finance
Amazon Becomes a Proponent of Uniform Internet Sales Tax

September 29, 2011 • Marcia Kaplan

Two months ago I wrote "California Joins the Internet Sales Tax Fray; Federal Legislation Coming?," a description of the latest efforts by states to get online sellers to pay sales tax. Several new developments warrant another look. California and Amazon Come to Terms After we publish...
Google Ads
Ramping Up Holiday Pay-per-click Advertising

September 29, 2011 • Scott Smigler

The holidays are coming. For many online merchants, this means dramatically increased revenue and conversion rates. Start ramping up for holiday pay-per-click advertising now to ensure that you maximize your profits — and build momentum for 2012. Below I’ve provided six tips that shou...