Page 214 – Practical Ecommerce

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Business
CartSpan Founder on Peachtree Accounting Integration

April 25, 2011 • PEC Staff

Virtually all merchants utilize accounting software. They typically transfer sales and customer data from their shopping carts to that software. For many merchants, this transfer requires the manual exporting of data from the cart, and the manual importing of it to the accounting softwa...
Business
Why Exit Strategy Planning is important?

April 23, 2011 • Manish Shah

In this blog, I will share specific information about ecommerce business valuation, factors that drive higher business value, profiles of buyers who are looking for web based businesses ( and who is likely to pay the highest price for your website ), deal structures, how to prepare you...
Conversion
Do-It-Yourself Awareness-Building for Your Products

April 22, 2011 • PEC Staff

For a merchant just starting out, building an awareness with potential customers that your products even exist can be a daunting task. But there are many tools — and some strategies — that can help give a smaller merchant a louder voice to compete with already established brands. Trade...
Business
Google’s First Quarter Financial Results a ‘Juggernaut’

April 22, 2011 • PEC Staff

Not since Microsoft’s heyday in the 1990s has a tech company so thoroughly dominated an industry as Google dominates the search business. Google released its first quarter 2011 financial results last week and the numbers show a company with near historic — no joke — profit margins, buc...
Design & Development
Notable Views: Mobify CEO on Mobile Commerce

April 20, 2011 • PEC Staff

Editor's Note: "Notable Views” is a series where we ask leading experts to address critical, ecommerce-related topics. For this installment, we corresponded with Igor Faletski, a mobile-commerce authority and CEO of Mobify, a mobile development firm. "Retailers Retool Sites to Ease Mo...
Conversion
25 Advertising Networks for Online Businesses

April 20, 2011 • PEC Staff

Google’s AdSense and AdWords are two of the most widely used advertising platforms for online business. And although Google facilitates a massive amount of traffic online, there are dozens of other ad networks that ecommerce businesses can take advantage of. Here are twenty-five popul...
Schools & Resources
Reading List: SteelHouse CEO Mark Douglas

April 19, 2011 • PEC Staff

In “Reading List,” we ask ecommerce professionals to name some of their favorite books and blogs and tell us why they read them. For this installment, we corresponded with Mark ...
Checkout Tactics > Merchant Voice
Pros and Cons of Checkout by Amazon’s Inline Checkout

April 19, 2011 • Jamie Salvatori

Checkout by Amazon allows your customers to use their Amazon login credentials to make purchases on your site. There are several different ways to integrate this into your store. The best “experience”, in my opinion, is their inline offering. In this method, your customers never leave...
Social Media
8 Benefits to Facebook ‘Likes’

April 18, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Last week, I addressed strategies for increasing numbers of Facebook Likes, in "15 Ways to Get Liked on Facebook." This week, I discuss 8 reasons why getting Likes can benefit your business, and I cite research that attempts to assign a value to each "Like." 8 Reasons to Encourage Like...
Platforms & Apps
Internet Explorer 10 Is Coming

April 18, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Microsoft released a preview version of its forthcoming Internet Explorer 10 web browser at the MIX11 developer conference in Las Vegas last week. The browser preview provides important insights into what might be a new salvo in the browser wars and could affect how online businesses develop websites and applications.
Business
6 Key ‘Terms and Conditions’ for Ecommerce Merchants

April 15, 2011 • Jeff Jacobson, Jd, Llm

If you are selling goods or services over the Internet, it is important to have terms and conditions on your website. A terms and conditions page or language throughout the website about how you will treat certain transactions creates a contract between you and your customers. Having ...
SEO
SEO Case Study: When Past SEO Efforts Hurt Today’s Traffic

April 15, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Editor’s Note: This is the third installment of a search-engine-optimization case study from contributor Jill Kocher on the SEO struggles of The Motor Bookstore, a retailer of automotive manuals. The Motorbook ...
Business
Deceptive Credit Card Practices, Part 2

April 14, 2011 • PEC Staff

Credit card veteran Phil Hinke knows a thing or two about payment-processing rates. He has been in the credit card industry since 1994, with NaBanco, First Data Corporation, and Heartland ...
Conversion
11 Shopping-Search Engines to Sell Your Products

April 14, 2011 • PEC Staff

Listing your products with shopping-oriented search engines can be a great way to attract new customers. Many shopping search engines are free, but some require a fee and come with varying levels of control and interaction with your products and with customers that buy through the shopp...
Schools & Resources
Reading List: DYMO Endicia Founder Amine Khechfe

April 13, 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 ...
Conversion
22 Analytics Tools for Online Businesses

April 13, 2011 • PEC Staff

Measuring the behavior of a site’s visitors is crucial to understanding what works and what doesn’t. With these 22 analytics tools, you can analyze your site’s traffic – see which products are popular, which blog posts are most clicked, where your visitors are coming from and how long t...
Social Media
15 Ways to Get ‘Liked’ on Facebook

April 12, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Once a business has established a Facebook Page, a key challenge is to grow its fan base. This is accomplished, in part, through the use of the "Like" button. By clicking the Like button, a person expresses affinity for the brand or its products. It is the Facebook equivalent of an emai...
Content Marketing
5 Blogging Ideas to Engage Customers

April 12, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Engaging customers with both informative and entertaining content can be a key to keeping them long term and making additional sales. After all, what's better, a customer that buys once, or a customer that keeps on making purchases because your blog content draws them back to your site?...
Design & Development
Optimizing an Ecommerce Site for Mobile Devices, Part 4: Implementation and Launch

April 11, 2011 • PEC Staff

Editor's Note: In September 2010 we published "Volunteer for a Free Mobile-Optimized Ecommerce Site," soliciting merchants to volunteer for a mobile optimization case study in which we follow the process of creating a mobile site step-by-step. Dozens of merchants submitted their sites, ...
Customer Retention
6 Things Consumers Hate About Ecommerce Sites

April 11, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce websites should inspire trust, engage customers, and make it easy to shop — ultimately leading to more sales. Unfortunately, too many online stores fall short in one or more areas. In this article, I am going to describe six things consumers — including me — hate to find on e...
Email & Text Marketing
Segment Your Emails to Increase Effectiveness; 4 Potential Segments

April 8, 2011 • Carolyn Nye

For email marketing, the practice of "batch and blast" is dated. Companies should move beyond this strategy, into a segmented email approach that is more relevant to each individual subscriber and increases the overall effectiveness of an email-marketing program. But where do you start ...
Email & Text Marketing
Irritating Your Customers with Facebook, Twitter and Email

April 8, 2011 • PEC Staff

Businesses have more tools to communicate with their customers than ever before. There's email, text messaging, Twitter, Facebook, blogs and websites — and those are just the most widely used tools. But with all those tools comes additional responsibility. Your customers should feel en...
Business
Google’s ‘Orphaned Books’ Litigation; Effect on Digital Sales

April 7, 2011 • PEC Staff

The balancing of copyright law with the dissemination of information on the Internet can sometimes become tangled. And nowhere is that more evident than in the recent so-called "orphaned books" settlement, which involves Google's attempt to scan and distribute the content of out-of-prin...
Business
Notable Views: Credit Card Veteran on ‘Onerous’ Processing Rates

April 6, 2011 • PEC Staff

Editor’s Note: “Notable Views” is a new series where we ask leading experts to address critical, ecommerce-related topics. For this installment, we corresponded with Phil Hinke, a credit-card processing veteran ...
Design & Development
Denial-of-Service Attack: Steps to Prevent, Defend

April 6, 2011 • Michael Stearns

If you own an ecommerce website, about the last place you want to find yourself is on the receiving end of a distributed denial of service — DDoS — attack. A DDoS attack involves a malicious person(s) flooding a computer network or web server with so much traffic that it no longer func...
Social Media
Social Q&A: New Take On An Old Genre

April 5, 2011 • Paul Chaney

The question-and-answer genre has been around for a long time in the form of bulletin boards, discussion forums and sites such as Answers.com and AskJeeves.com (now Ask.com). A new variation ...
Social Media
10 Marketers You Must Follow on Twitter

April 5, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Changing consumer behaviors are having a significant effect on marketing tactics and strategies. New social sites, mobile devices, or other advancements are fueling these changes. Just a few years ago no mainstream marketers had budgets for Facebook ads. But now Facebook is a leading o...
Business
Streamlined Sales-Tax Director on Efforts to Simplify

April 4, 2011 • PEC Staff

Attempts to simplify the administration and collection of Internet sales taxes in the United States may be the most daunting task in the ecommerce industry. There are thousands of state, county and municipal taxation districts and each has its own tax rates and rules. One organization t...
Code
What Makes HTML5 Special?

April 4, 2011 • Armando Roggio

HTML5 promises to make the Internet more functional and interactive. It seeks to transform a World Wide Web of relatively flat, static pages into one filled with web applications —
Product Pages
10 Compelling Product Descriptions

April 1, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Product descriptions help to sell products. That's an obvious but sometimes overlooked reality. Too often, online merchants are happy to simply copy a manufacturer's product description and call it good. But since that merchant is probably not the only one just copying and pasting, t...