April 1, 2011 • PEC Staff

Social media can help ecommerce businesses. And although social media sites — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube — are cost-free, they are not time-free. In fact, managing just a single social network business page can be a full-time job, not to mention managing three or four on multi...

March 31, 2011 • Kate Monteith

March 31, 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 April 2011 installment of "Ten Great Ecommerce Ideas." Personalize Customer Service “Have automated email correspond...

March 30, 2011 • PEC Staff

Cindy Ratzlaff is an expert on branding. She worked in the marketing industry for over twenty years, having developed the marketing and publicity campaigns for more than 150 New York Times bestselling books. She spearheaded the successful campaign for The South Beach Diet international ...

March 29, 2011 • Scott Smigler

Online retailers often overlook the potential of pay-per-click advertising to drive sales of expensive products. Campaigns that target these items often bring the double whammy of low conversion rates and a high cost-per-click. There are several ways you can adjust your PPC advertising ...

March 29, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Google’s so-called “Farmer” algorithm update emphasizes original, unique content for favorable organic search results. Frequently-updated, keyword-optimized, topically-relevant blog posts can provide your ecommerce site with original content, and improve its search engine rankings. I have seen it happen

March 28, 2011 • PEC Staff

Credit card processing can be one of the most confusing parts of ecommerce for many merchants. The rates fluctuate widely and the monthly statements are hard to follow. And yet, credit card processing is key to virtually every ecommerce business. To help us understand how merchants can ...

March 28, 2011 • Armando Roggio

In web development, a "cookie" stores basic user information on the user's own computer, potentially improving the browsing experience and even making visitors to an ecommerce site feel more welcome. Cookies are often used to save a visitor's username and password so that the visitor d...

March 25, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Editor's Note: This is the second installment of a search-engine-optimization case study from contributor Jill Kocher on the SEO travails of The Motor Bookstore, a retailer of automotive manuals. Like most ecommerce businesses, The Motorbook Store relies heavily on traffic from search ...

March 25, 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. In this installment, we corresponded with ...

March 24, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Unique and entertaining content can help engage customers, encourage site traffic and earn your brand top-of-mind recognition. But sometimes, ecommerce entrepreneurs and marketers struggle to find new content ideas. This demand for fresh and one-of-a-kind content may be even more imper...

March 24, 2011 • Pamela Hazelton

When describing products and services, remember that consumers want to know why they need those items. Use bullet points and lists to present need-to-know information in an easy-to-read format. Furniture stores, for example, would use bullet points to display measurements, color and mat...

March 23, 2011 • PEC Staff

Hiring models and production crews to shoot products can be costly. And with the onset of affordable, high-quality digital camera equipment, as well as just a little ingenuity you can set up your own photo studio. Here are some tips and guidelines on how to achieve that professional pr...

March 23, 2011 • PEC Staff

Facebook is not just a social forum to share pictures with friends anymore. Businesses are pushing traffic to their ecommerce sites, increasing brand awareness and now making sales on Facebook stores. I looked at the top ten brands on Facebook with the most Fans as analyzed by All Face...

March 22, 2011 • Jeff Jacobson, Jd, Llm

Illinois is the latest state to try to capture taxes from Internet sales. That state recently passed a so-called “Amazon Tax,” which uses affiliate programs to create a "nexus." Many states require a nexus — or physical presence — in the state to compel a retailer to collect sales tax...

March 22, 2011 • Jamie Salvatori

Every online retailer will, at some point, be faced with fraud. It is as inevitable as taxes, but far more sinister! Your credit card processor is going to give you two pieces of information to help combat fraud: the 3 or 4-digit “security code” and an AVS response. The CSC code shoul...

March 22, 2011 • PEC Staff

Miva Merchant launched its shopping cart in the late 1990s and the company's evolution continues. An independent investor group acquired Miva Merchant in 2007, and executives there have since been evolving that product to a hosted platform, enhancing the company's revenue, and generally...

March 21, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Zappos, the online retailer, has used incredible customer service to create an extremely loyal customer base. Small ecommerce businesses that want to grow would be wise to take a lesson from Zappos. As an example of Zappos' almost insane customer care, the company has even been known t...

March 21, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Online video has gone mainstream. Thanks to sites like Hulu, Netflix, iTunes and Amazon, more people are watching full-length movies and TV shows online than ever before. But no site has the video audience of YouTube. Consider these facts, which are from YouTube's Statistics page: M...

March 18, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Compelling, informative, and unique product descriptions can help your ecommerce business increase sales. Moreover, original product descriptions can help avoid Google's so-called "Farmer algorithm" penalty, which can affect retailers that copy product descriptions from competitors, or ...

March 18, 2011 • PEC Staff

There are two sides to the growing discussion of how ecommerce merchants can best use Facebook. One side recommends the setting up a self-contained shopping cart on Facebook, where consumers ...

March 17, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

In an effort to increase the quality of its search results, Google launched an update in late February dubbed the “Farmer/Panda Update” by the search-engine-optimization industry. The update affected 12 percent of Google’s results, decreasing organic traffic for sites like the one owned...

March 16, 2011 • PEC Staff

The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) proposed "Do Not Track" legislation has generated a lot of interest in how websites track visitor behavior. In this article, I am going to introduce Flash cookies and explain how they may be used to violate consumer's privacy. What Is a Flash Cookie...

March 16, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Internet-enabled mobile devices are going to have a huge impact on retail sales in just the next few years, especially affecting small ecommerce businesses. Anytime one discusses the future of a particular industry or where a trending technology or behavior may be taking some segment, ...

March 15, 2011 • PEC Staff

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

March 15, 2011 • PEC Staff

Google may have the biggest impact on the web overall with tools and products that have become indispensable. But Google’s competitors, Yahoo! and Bing, offer a wide array of free tools that ecommerce merchants often underutilize. Take advantage of all the tools that every major search ...

March 14, 2011 • Armando Roggio

The growth of mobile devices, changes in search engines, social media sites, and new consumer behaviors are affecting the way that online retailers market. And often the creative and dynamic marketing plans win the customers. In this post, I'll describe five dynamic ecommerce marketing...

March 14, 2011 • Paul Chaney

March 10 was a big day for Facebook Page owners. On that day, Facebook upgraded Pages to a new layout and removed FBML — Facebook Markup Language — as the custom-tab-creation code, replacing it with iframes. The latter action spelled trouble for do-it-yourselfers because it required the...

March 11, 2011 • PEC Staff

”Lessons Learned” is a series where we ask ecommerce business owners to share their experiences and advice. For this installment, we interviewed Kathy Seigler, CEO and president of Ecommerce Superstores, a Bowling Green, Ky.-based online retail brand with six niche online shops: CoolCo...

March 11, 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 ...