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Social Media
How Facebook Changes Impact Ecommerce Merchants, Part 1: Page Redesign

February 16, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Facebook recently announced significant changes to its platform that impacts small-business marketing efforts. First, Facebook implemented a planned redesign of business-oriented "Pages" (also called "fan pages" or "business pages") to mirror the way personal Profiles — for individuals ...
Business
6 Common Ecommerce Mistakes

February 16, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce businesses can be founded by massive corporations or by families working out of a garage. It provides a relatively level field for everyone to compete. And, like so many businesses, ecommerce operations often find unique ways to succeed. This article's purpose is to help ecom...
SEO
J.C. Penney Incurs Google SEO ‘Action’; How to Protect Your Own Company

February 15, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search-engine-optimization agencies often play a vital role in ecommerce sites, where winning and converting organic searches to sales directly impacts the e-tailer’s bottom line. But how far should a company trust an SEO agency to act on its behalf? The SEO community erupted this weeke...
SEO > Merchant Voice
Stop obsessing over search engine rankings

February 15, 2011 • Jamie Salvatori

As the owner of an e-commerce store, my number one piece of advice to anyone with an online store is to stop obsessing over your search engine rankings. Instead, focus your attention on building your brand. In the real world, we buy stuff from people that we like. The “better” car sale...
Design & Dev Tools
32 Google Tools for Ecommerce Businesses

February 15, 2011 • PEC Staff

There is a steady stream of products and tools coming out of Google Labs. Many of these are free — and underutilized — by the community that would most benefit: ecommerce businesses. Need up-to-the-minute financial data? There’s a Google tool for that. Need to translate a product descr...
Email & Text Marketing
7 Tips to Grow Your Email Subscriber List

February 14, 2011 • Carolyn Nye

Email is a unique marketing channel because it is permission based. That's one reason email has a high return on investment: If consumers raise their hands and say, “Please market to me;” they are likely to purchase in the future. But building a large opt-in subscriber base takes dedi...
Platforms & Apps
10 Innovative Digital-Download Stores

February 14, 2011 • Armando Roggio

The Holy Grail of ecommerce is to create a product once and sell it over and over again. Many online stores are achieving this goal by focusing on downloadable products like source code, graphics, PDF files, or ebooks just, to name a few of the digital products available. In this arti...
Business
11 Tips for Merchants to Add Suppliers

February 11, 2011 • PEC Staff

Editor's Note: Chad Weinman is owner of Cat5 Commerce, a seasoned ecommerce firm in St. Louis, Mo. that operates HikingBoots.com, TacticalGear.com, and MilitaryBoots.com. He wrote us recently, stating, "I was writing a memo to my vendor relations manager that illustrated some techniqu...
Conversion
Ask an Expert: How to Increase Conversion Rates?

February 10, 2011 • PEC Staff

”Ask an Expert” is an occasional feature where we ask ecommerce experts questions from online merchants. For this installment, we address a question about converting online shoppers into paying customers. The question comes from Patricia Brown, owner of LordsArt, an Ozone Park, N.Y.-ba...
Code
9 CSS Codes that Ecommerce Merchants Need to Know

February 10, 2011 • PEC Staff

Although CSS code is more complicated than HTML, it ultimately gives merchants much more flexibility in formatting and style for websites. Just a rudimentary understanding of cascading style sheets can open up new possibilities for the way text and images function on your site. Embed ph...
Schools & Resources
Reading List: ChannelAdvisor CEO Scot Wingo

February 9, 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
5 Social-Shopping Sites to Help Retailers, Consumers

February 9, 2011 • Paul Chaney

I received an email recently from a friend asking me what type of vacuum cleaner he should purchase. I noticed the email did not come from him directly, however, but from ShopSocially, a social shopping website that is part of a new class of sites in which reliance on friends is at the ...
Design & Development
17 Solutions to Build Your Own Mobile App

February 8, 2011 • PEC Staff

You don’t have to be a web developer to build your own mobile app for your site. If your budget does not allow for a full custom app or you just want to try a mobile app on for size and test the app marketplace, these app building tools will help you get up and running. Non-developers,...
Business
4 Ways to Waste Money on Your Ecommerce Store

February 8, 2011 • Armando Roggio

The causes of ecommerce failures are diverse, but they frequently end with the proprietor shuttering the operation because it is losing too much money. In this article, I list four activities that I believe can destroy an ecommerce business's bottom line and waste your money. I think th...
Checkout Tactics
Ask An Expert: What Data to Mine from Abandoned Carts?

February 7, 2011 • PEC Staff

“Ask an Expert” is an occasional feature where we ask ecommerce experts questions from online merchants. For this installment, we address a question about collecting lost customer data from abandoned ...
Platforms & Apps
Google Chrome Links to New Web App Store

February 7, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Google recently announced several changes to version 9 of its popular Chrome browser, including closer ties to a web store featuring products that blur the line between websites and web applications further and give ecommerce marketers a new sales channel. Google has said in the past t...
Business
PCI-Council General Manager on Non-Compliance ‘Russian Roulette’

February 4, 2011 • PEC Staff

Most merchants prefer the idea of the credit card industry policing itself, versus lawmakers getting involved. PCI Security Standards Council is the industry's attempt to do just that. But how ecommerce merchants become compliant and meet PCI standards is confusing to many, and the pena...
Cross-border Selling
Geolocation Helpful to Merchants, Tricky for SEO

February 3, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Identifying where an online consumer lives can be helpful to ecommerce merchants. Among visitors to an ecommerce site, there's differences in language, currency, and climate. A clothing merchant, for example, would presumably offer different items to a visitor from Alaska than from, say...
Business
Day in the Life: Zoovy CEO Brian Horakh

February 3, 2011 • PEC Staff

Editor’s Note: “Day in the Life” is a series where we ask leaders in ecommerce about a single day in their professional lives. For this inaugural installment, we corresponded with Brian Horakh, founder and CEO of Zoovy, a Carlsbad, Calif.-based ecommerce platform provider. Brian Horakh...
Design & Development
Google Docs Adds Capabilities for Mobile Users

February 2, 2011 • Jeff Muendel

Google announced in Sept. 2010 that it would add editing capabilities to Google Docs for the iPad, iPhone, and Android. By allowing users to collaborate and co-edit documents and files from a wider range of devices, the users will no longer need to rely on third party apps like Quickoff...
Conversion
How To Set Up Shop on Niche Online Marketplaces

February 2, 2011 • PEC Staff

Ecommerce merchants know that sometimes just selling on your own shop’s website isn’t enough to keep the company growing. Selling your wares in a brick-and-mortar boutique or setting up a booth at designer shows, expos and other events can be a good way to increase profits and brand awa...
Schools & Resources
Reading List: Adyen CEO Peter Caparso

February 2, 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 spoke to ...
Google Ads
7 Pay-Per-Click Advertising Mistakes to Avoid in 2011

February 1, 2011 • Scott Smigler

2010 was a big year for pay-per-click marketing. Google made significant changes to AdWords, and Bing integrated PPC advertising from Yahoo! into its adCenter. Now, much to the chagrin of advertisers who prefer a “set and forget” approach to their advertising campaigns, the bar for eff...
Design & Development
21 Ecommerce Apps for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry

February 1, 2011 • PEC Staff

Ecommerce business owners can use mobile apps to help run a website. Whether you are interested in blogging, social networking, marketing, customer support or even design and development, there is a mobile app tool for just about anything an ecommerce website may need. I looked at the ...
Business
January 2011 Top Ten: Our Most Popular Posts

January 31, 2011 • Kate Monteith

Each month, we compile a list of the ten most popular articles we published at Practical eCommerce that month, based on the number of page views. Here are our ten most popular articles for January 2011. 4 Realities of Selling on Facebook Facebook is becoming a popular avenue for onlin...
Social Media
The Basics of Advertising on Facebook

January 31, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Facebook commerce has a long way to go before it's on par with traditional ecommerce. But many ecommerce merchants report that Facebook Ads, a self-service, pay-per-click advertising platform similar to Google AdWords, generates positive returns. In this article, I am going to outline t...
Platforms & Apps
Firefox 4.1 Will Shun Tracking

January 31, 2011 • Armando Roggio

A personal privacy organization praised new features in several leading browsers last week, singling out the forthcoming Firefox 4.1 as the leader in personal privacy. This latest chapter in the effort to inhibit online tracking may also affect some personalization and behavior driven t...
Conversion
Ten Great Ecommerce Ideas for February 2011

January 28, 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 February 2011 installment of "Ten Great Ecommerce Ideas." Use Customer Feedback to Further SEO “Not everyone has aut...
Design & Development
PCI Council General Manager Bob Russo

January 27, 2011 • Kerry Murdock

Most merchants like the idea of the credit card industry policing itself, versus lawmakers getting involved. PCI Security Standards Council is the industry’s attempt to do just that. But how ...
Business
OverstockArt CEO Critiques Holiday Sales Performance

January 27, 2011 • PEC Staff

The holiday selling season is important for many online merchants. This includes David Sasson. He is the founder and CEO of OverstockArt.com, a retailer of reproduced oil paintings. The company saw a 25 percent increase in 2010 holiday sales, versus 2009. We spoke with Sasson to see wha...