January 27, 2011 • Pamela Hazelton

Websites like Groupon, which allow people to “crowd purchase” products and services from local retailers, are becoming popular, mostly due to current economies. It makes sense for online stores selling items normally used in bulk to offer volume discounts, but what about specialty or hi...

January 26, 2011 • PEC Staff

Once you have your blog set up, start the process by brainstorming compelling topics that are related to your industry, business, products or services. First, identify your audience. Look at the demographics of your store — what are the personal details of your customer base?

January 26, 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 ...

January 25, 2011 • PEC Staff

Running an ecommerce store can mean wearing many hats. Occasionally, that means dropping in some HTML code into your site. Just a rudimentary understanding of HTML can open new worlds for your website.

January 25, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Selling to a customer once is great. Selling to a customer every year, month, or week is even better. This mantra of sorts — along with apparent growth in consumer demand and several new subscription-specific billing solutions — is creating opportunity for ecommerce entrepreneurs large...

January 24, 2011 • Armando Roggio

How you market your ecommerce business in 2011 may be different than how you marketed in 2010, or before. Unique sites like Fiverr are enabling edgy, entertaining, and engaging ways to reach new customers. On Fiverr, individuals post listings describing what they would do for $5. It's ...

January 24, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Twitter is helpful for many small businesses. One key to maximizing its value is to find relevant people to follow in the hopes they will return the courtesy. Relevance is essential to growing a follower base that would most likely read your content, and eventually become customers. I w...

January 20, 2011 • PEC Staff

Many ecommerce merchants are attracted to selling products to consumers in other countries. But the complexities of international sales can include tariffs, customs and export laws. For United States-based merchants, the U.S. Department of Commerce can help. It has just published a free...

January 20, 2011 • PEC Staff

January 19, 2011 • PEC Staff

Shipping, tracking, and calculating time and cost of shipments are at the heart of ecommerce businesses. Merchants are usually tied to a desktop to make all these choices for shipping ...

January 18, 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 inaugural installment, we corresponded with Henry Wong, founder and CEO of Adgregate Markets, a provider of Facebook-enabled ecommerce platforms. Social c...

January 18, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Google announced last week that forthcoming versions of its increasingly popular Chrome browser would drop support for the patent-entangled H.264 video codec, potentially making HTML5 more open and available, but also challenging competitors like Apple, which is closely tied to H.264. ...

January 17, 2011 • Paul Chaney

It won't be long before everyone is subject to the new, wider Twitter layout. Up to now, the new layout has been optional and Twitter users could switch back to the old settings. Though no firm date has been announced for the transition, Twitter indicates it will take place soon. Here's...

January 17, 2011 • Armando Roggio

The monitor, keyboard, and mouse are the three most ubiquitous computer peripherals. In fact, it would be hard to image using a computer without them. But consider that prior to the invention of the mouse, most folks thought only of using keyboards or punch cards. So just as the mouse ...

January 13, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Selling products online is a challenge. Ecommerce merchants rarely benefit from spontaneous buys, cannot easily generate emotional buying responses, and face tremendous price competition, since thousands of competitors are only a click away. Nonetheless, many companies — from tiny purv...

January 13, 2011 • PEC Staff

Photographs enhance an ecommerce site. Photos can feature products, customers or even a company's staff. Photos can personalize a site and increase ecommerce sales. But, depending on a merchant's ecommerce platform, photos can be tricky to upload and limited in their location, quantity...

January 12, 2011 • Jamie Salvatori

Every website owner should be backing up their website and database on a daily basis. If you’re not, set that up immediately. However, this is not what I’m referring to when it comes to backups. I’m referring to all of the critical aspects of your business. Here are some questions to as...

January 12, 2011 • PEC Staff

Many ecommerce merchants sell products from large manufacturers and suppliers. Increasingly, those manufacturers and suppliers also sell — on a retail basis — the same products. Shopatron is a company ...

January 12, 2011 • PEC Staff

January 11, 2011 • Paul Chaney

There are few who question Facebook's potential for ecommerce merchants. Access to a user base of nearly 600 million consumers — coupled with the targeting of specific audience segments based on users' Likes — are compelling reasons to experiment with it as a sales channel. However, li...

January 11, 2011 • Carolyn Nye

Email marketing is vital for many ecommerce merchants. What does 2011 hold for email marketing? Below are seven key email marketing tactics businesses should be planning for the upcoming year. Relevancy Craft email messages with increased personalization, through segmentation and tar...

January 10, 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 Virgil Dickerson, CEO and owner of Suburban Home ...

January 10, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Social media marketing can be an effective way to engage customers and, ultimately, sell more products. There have certainly been lots of articles, publications, and webinars that describe tactics you can use in social media campaigns. But there may be comparatively few resources that h...

January 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 advertising with Google versus Facebook. The question comes from Matthew Johnson, owner and artist behind Seventh.Ink, a Palm Harb...

January 6, 2011 • Kate Monteith

Free shipping is often touted as a surefire way to get more sales, but rolling shipping costs into the product price can also take a big bite out of a profit margin. During the rush of holiday sales, we wondered how many of our readers offer free shipping and if you think it is a worthw...

January 5, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Many people consider Twitter an enormous waste of time. "Why would I care what someone had for dinner?" is a question often asked by those who do not use Twitter for personal communications. Granted, if improperly managed, Twitter can be a huge black hole sucking up lots of time. What...

January 5, 2011 • PEC Staff

Mobile commerce is here and with it comes a steady stream of new mobile browsers. There are device-specific browsers like the BlackBerry browser, Android’s browser and Palm’s WebOS browser. There ...

January 4, 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. In this installment, we spoke to Josh ...

January 4, 2011 • Armando Roggio

In October 2010, Facebook introduced automatic content filtering to business pages (sometimes called Fan pages) in an effort to help stop Wall spammers from successfully posting unwanted or dangerous messages to dozens or even hundreds of pages daily. For social media marketers, the fi...

January 3, 2011 • Jeff Muendel

Editor's Note: Google is much more than a search engine. Its many products and services are innovative and, oftentimes, useful to ecommerce merchants. But keeping track of Google takes time. For 2011, we've asked contributor Jeff Muendel to file a monthly post on a non-search Google act...