Page 213 – Practical Ecommerce

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Schools & Resources
Reading List: HiConversion Founder Zee Aganovic

May 17, 2011 • 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 ...
Amazon & Marketplaces
10 Deal Sites to Drive Ecommerce Traffic

May 17, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Although deal and coupon sites appear to have focused on services or brick-and-mortar retailers, online sellers can still use these services to drive additional traffic and find new customers. The rise in popularity of Groupon, Living Social, and other deal sites has created a new adve...
Social Media
Managing Negative Facebook Page Comments

May 16, 2011 • Paul Chaney

A small business owner contacted me recently. She had received a comment on her Facebook page criticizing the price of her products. In her way of thinking, it would be better to have no comments at all than to give disgruntled customers the opportunity to use her Fan page as a platform...
User Experience
SEO: Is a Mobile Site Necessary to Win Mobile Searchers?

May 16, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Today’s superphones finally make mobile search a reality. After all, they sport 1GHz processors, 4 inch screens, 4G data connections and browsers that can execute Flash and JavaScript with relative ...
Design & Development
10 Geolocation Apps for Business

May 13, 2011 • Sig Ueland

You need to be places. With geolocation mobile apps — which attach real-world locations to mobile phones — you now have the tools manage the location of your business wherever ...
SEO
Search Engines Love Blogs; 3 Benefits

May 12, 2011 • Stephan Spencer

Search engines love blogs. They provide original, updated content that contribute to highly ranked sites. But how do merchants optimize blogs for search engines and how do they incorporate the blogs into their ecommerce sites? I'll discuss optimizing blogs for search engine performance ...
Social Media
Top 51 Facebook Pages with Stores

May 12, 2011 • Sig Ueland

Facebook commerce is here. But what is sold on Facebook, and how it is sold, is still up in the air. Here is a list of the 51 most popular — based on the number of "Likes" — Facebook pages with stores. For the purposes of this article, a page is considered to have a “store” if there ar...
Marketing & Advertising
3 Crazy Ecommerce Marketing Ideas

May 11, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Marketing may be the single most important task an ecommerce business must tackle. To paraphrase Sam Hill and Glenn Rifkin, the authors of Radical Marketing: From Harvard to Harley, Lessons From Ten That Broke the Rules and Made It Big, an ecommerce business can survive using an Excel ...
Technical SEO
How to Increase Page Speed and Help Search-Engine Rankings

May 11, 2011 • Michael Stearns

In the spring of 2010, Google announced it would factor page speed more heavily into its search ranking algorithm. "Faster sites create happy users," Google stated in the blog post describing the algorithm change. Your ability — as an ecommerce merchant — to improve your site's speed d...
Conversion
Domain Name ‘RunningShoes.com’ Sells for $700,000

May 10, 2011 • PEC Staff

Most ecommerce merchants own several domain names. One merchant recently purchased the domain name RunningShoes.com for a whopping $700,000.
Payments
Understanding Credit-Card Fees, Part 1: The Basics

May 10, 2011 • Phil Hinke

I had a few merchants contact me after my last article. They wanted my advice because they could not understand their merchant statements, much less know the best way to ...
Social Media
5 Ways to Increase Ratings and Reviews

May 9, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Today's Internet is largely driven by peer-to-peer interaction. When making a purchase, consumers seek out the experiences of others. This includes reading online ratings and reviews posted by other consumers, which can increase overall engagement and drive sales. With that in mind, he...
Email & Text Marketing
Creating Content for Email Newsletters

May 9, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Content intensive email newsletters can provide potential customers with real value, present an opportunity to build trust, encourage sharing, and drive direct site traffic. In the old days of advertising and marketing, retailers would place ads in newspapers or magazines. The idea was...
Social Media
5 Ways Merchants Can Locate Social Communities

May 6, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Editor's Note: One of the marketing challenges faced by ecommerce merchants is finding online communities that have an interest in the merchants' products. Few observers dispute the potential of social media, provided merchants can find interested parties to be social with. We posed th...
Schools & Resources
Reading List: ZippyCart Co-Founders Nick Grant and Amy Balliett

May 6, 2011 • 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 Nick Grant and Amy Balliett, co-founders of ZippyCart, an ecommerce solution provider offering shopping cart...
Platforms & Apps
Cloud Computing Future of Web, Says Shopify Exec

May 5, 2011 • Kerry Murdock

Chief Platform Officer Harley Finkelstein explains hosted ecommerce platforms, those that are not installed locally.
Platforms & Apps
Ubuntu Linux: A User-Friendly, Desktop Operating System

May 4, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Last week, Canonical — the open-source development firm — released a new version of its Ubuntu Linux operating system, seemingly aimed at offering casual Windows and Mac users a feature-rich alternative. Although it is certainly a bit of hyperbole to say that Ubuntu 11.04 will send Ap...
Amazon & Marketplaces
Amazon Versus States: A Sales Tax Roundup

May 4, 2011 • Sig Ueland

For years states have fought Amazon.com to force the ecommerce giant to collect sales tax — the states, desperately looking for cash, versus Amazon, vehemently defending its practices as well ...
Schools & Resources
Reading List: Optify CEO Brian Goffman

May 3, 2011 • 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 ...
Social Media
16 Facebook Marketing Strategies

May 3, 2011 • Paul Chaney

There are thousands of Facebook apps, including a growing class designed for marketing use on company Facebook Pages. Here is a list of 16 different marketing strategies — using apps — that can help your ecommerce business. 1. Facebook Send button Facebook recently launched the “Send”...
Social Media
Have You Reddit? Surging Social-News Site Can Help Merchants

May 2, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Reddit is a social media site that allows anyone to submit links to news articles, blog posts, pictures, or other web content. Once submitted, Reddit users vote content up or down, potentially driving hundreds or even thousands of clicks and visitors. Reddit has been around since 2005,...
Conversion
20 Popular Twitter Feeds from Retail Companies

May 2, 2011 • PEC Staff

Twitter is filled with potential for businesses, but a Twitter account is only as good as its content. Sometimes just observing how top businesses take advantage of this communication platform is a good way to learn. Here are 20 popular retail brands’ Twitter feeds. Follow them on Twit...
Conversion
Ten Great Ecommerce Ideas for May 2011

April 29, 2011 • Kate Monteith

Practical eCommerce asks industry insiders each month to share a great, innovative idea that could help an ecommerce company. Here’s what ten of them had to say for the May 2011 installment of "Ten Great Ecommerce Ideas." Promote Overstocked Products with Flash Sales "My idea to share...
Email & Text Marketing
Email Versus Social Media: 3 Key Points

April 29, 2011 • Carolyn Nye

With increased use of social media, many marketing professionals wonder if email will remain relevant. The question for ecommerce retailers then becomes where should they focus their efforts, and should they abandon email for social media? comScore, the tracking and analysis firm, publ...
Google Ads
Mobile Pay-per-click Advertising: 5 Ways to Improve Performance

April 28, 2011 • Scott Smigler

“Mobile” and “social” have received a lot of hype over the past few years. To a large extent that hype has been warranted. Sales of smart phones are setting records, and according to Alexa — the web-traffic-ranking firm — socially driven websites account for five of the ten most popular...
Staffing
Crucial Skills for Ecommerce Entrepreneurs

April 28, 2011 • Armando Roggio

What does it take to be a successful ecommerce entrepreneur? The answer might surprise you. If you did a quick search for "crucial small business skills" or "must have entrepreneurial skills" in your favorite search engine, you would find dozens of articles each offering their own spin...
Conversion
10 Large-company Features That Help Smaller Merchants

April 27, 2011 • Gagan Mehra

Editor's Note: We welcome Gagan Mehra as our newest contributor. He's a seasoned ecommerce consultant to large retailers, having worked for a "Big 4" accounting and consulting firm for over ten years. For us, he brings his large-company insights to smaller merchants. Large ecommerce ...
Design & Development
11 Google Business-Class Apps and Services

April 27, 2011 • PEC Staff

Google releases a steady stream of tools and apps for businesses. And although free versions exist, they are limited in their scope and function. Many of those same tools are offered at a business-class level for a price. Here is a list of many of the business-class apps available from...
Inventory
10 Ways to Save Money on Inventory

April 26, 2011 • PEC Staff

Online retailers purchase and manage inventory. The prices they pay for the inventory, the quantities they carry, and the inventory commitments they make can drastically affect their profits. We recently asked three seasoned ecommerce merchants for money saving inventory tips. The merc...
Social Media
Sprout Social: Social Media Management Time-Saving Tool

April 26, 2011 • Paul Chaney

There are a number of tools that help reduce the time required to manage social media engagement. We have reviewed many of them here, in "15 Services to Manage Your Social Media Activity" and "5 Time-Saving Social Network Tools." In this article, I want to review a resource that I have ...