December 9, 2010 • Paul Chaney

Blogging is popular among social media users. But many small businesses still do not use it for marketing. Most lack either the time or commitment required to make blogging a successful marketing strategy. But there is a now a way to incorporate blogging that doesn't require the same d...

December 8, 2010 • Matt Ferner

Ecommerce merchants have several options to hide or obscure that email address from spam bot programs and still make it accessible and user-friendly for customers. Below is a listing of some of the more popular methods and simple step-by-step instructions on how to employ them, each one progressively more hidden, or "obfuscated.

December 8, 2010 • PEC Staff

The adoption continues of product videos on ecommerce sites, and most every merchant, seemingly, can benefit from them. We recently discussed product videos with Craig Wax, CEO of Invodo, a company that provides video solutions for ecommerce merchants. PEC: What factors can determin...

December 7, 2010 • Carolyn Nye

In the natural progression of most email programs, there comes a time when an ecommerce site is ready to tackle the power of triggered emails. Although a challenge to set up, they can be a crucial element in your overall marketing communications strategy, and for good reason. Triggered ...

December 7, 2010 • Armando Roggio

The free Opera web browser includes a built-in and feature-rich email client that lets you surf the web, subscribe to feeds, and manage your email from a single platform. There are a number of excellent email clients available, including Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, Mac OS X Mail, and...

December 6, 2010 • PEC Staff

Editor’s Note: In September 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 ...

December 6, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Internet users conduct billions of web searches every month. In fact, comScore reported that Americans alone queried Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and other search engines some 18.6 billion times in October 2010. What's more, the number of searches is growing. comScore reports that Americans ...

December 3, 2010 • PEC Staff

Editor’s Note: “Cart Talk” is our new, weekly discussion about shopping carts with the merchants that use them. For this inaugural installment, we visit with a merchant that sells both ...

December 2, 2010 • PEC Staff

The “Find Us On Facebook” button has become ubiquitous on the web. Any merchant can embed this button (and many others) into a website in minutes with very little understanding of programming code and a few free online tools, giving consumers quick access to the company's existing soci...

December 2, 2010 • Paul Chaney

Ecommerce is playing an increasingly important role in holiday sales. But how much of that growth can be attributed to social media? I asked Hitwise, the competitive intelligence service, how much traffic ecommerce sites received from social media. A spokesman for Hitwise responded vi...

December 1, 2010 • John Lindberg

UPS, FedEx and the U.S. Postal Service all do a good job of getting orders to your customers, but there are some simple things you can do to lower the costs involved. Understand How Delivery Costs Are Calculated When you start shipping in volume it is vital to understand how each carr...

December 1, 2010 • Scott Smigler

In late October, Microsoft’s Bing began powering all of the natural and paid search results in Yahoo!. Now, advertisers who wish to purchase sponsored search ads in either Yahoo! or Bing must do so through Microsoft adCenter. Given that the alliance has a combined market share of almost...

November 30, 2010 • 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 November 2010. 8 Steps to Social Media Success The subject of social media typically garners a g...

November 30, 2010 • Jill Kocher Brown

An alarming new flavor of search engine optimization surfaced on Friday when The New York Times reported on DecorMyEyes, an unscrupulous eyewear etailer who goads customers into writing negative reviews for SEO benefit. Nothing boosts a well-crawled site’s rankings higher than an infusi...

November 29, 2010 • Armando Roggio

November 29, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Yahoo! has released a new trend-tracking tool that identifies what users looked for before and after a particular search term and estimates those users' annual incomes, potentially providing online retailers with good customer intelligence. Search marketing, whether via pay-per-click (...

November 25, 2010 • 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 December 2010 installment of "Ten Great Ecommerce Ideas." Understand How Consumers Research Brands Online 
“Buying...

November 24, 2010 • Paul Chaney

When people log onto the Internet, they tend to go one of three places: Google, their email inboxes or, increasingly, Facebook. Now, Facebook is reportedly positioning itself to become the home page for its users. According to articles in TechCrunch and The Wall Street Journal, Facebook...

November 23, 2010 • Paul Chaney

LinkedIn has released a new version of its company profiles called "Company Pages," which provides a place for businesses to "showcase their products, services and associated recommendations," according to LinkedIn. Heretofore, LinkedIn company profiles served only a research purpose ...

November 23, 2010 • PEC Staff

Remarketing is an advertising concept to solicit consumers who have visited ecommerce sites and left without purchasing. There are different forms of remarketing. One method places a "cookie" in a consumer's web browser when that consumer visits a site, and subsequently shows relevant d...

November 22, 2010 • PEC Staff

Ecommerce merchants may feel more compelled than ever to jump on the nearest mobile platform, but they need to decide if consumers are actually buying products – both digital and tangible – on mobile devices. To be sure, there is a frenzy of excitement around m-commerce, but let’s take ...

November 22, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Social media marketing is proving to be an effective way to engage customers and improve sales for online stores. The social media landscape is, at least for the moment, dominated by two major services, Facebook and Twitter. But there are many other services that offer the possibility ...

November 19, 2010 • Armando Roggio

RockMelt is a new web browser that integrates with Facebook so that every page can be quickly shared and every post from a friend discovered. RockMelt is built using Chromium, which is the open-source web browser project that underlies Chrome; so it performs almost as well as the speed...

November 18, 2010 • PEC Staff

Remarketing is an advertising concept to bring back consumers who have visited ecommerce sites and left without purchasing. In general, the remarketing services fall into two camps. We discussed the first remarketing camp, targeted banner ads, in “Remarketing 101, Part 1: Targeted Banne...

November 18, 2010 • Pamela Hazelton

I'll be honest. The key elements for increasing traffic and sales this holiday season should have been put in place by October 15th. That doesn't mean, however, that all hope is lost for those who've procrastinated or otherwise failed to implement seasonal changes. Whether you didn’t g...

November 17, 2010 • Stephan Spencer

Andrew Casey, founder and CEO of 877MyJuicer.com, asked for an "SEO Report Card" for his site. As always, I’m happy to oblige. Andrew started this business in 2004 by selling juicers on eBay. Over the past 6 years, he has grown his startup into a million dollar company with its own e...

November 17, 2010 • Jeff Jacobson, Jd, Llm

Comparative advertising can be beneficial to the marketplace. It tells consumers the differences in products and allows competitors to highlight why the consumer should select its product over another product. The Federal Trade Commission’s policy in the area of comparative advertising ...

November 16, 2010 • Christian Arno

With social networking, blogging, microblogging, social bookmarking and video sharing, people from all corners of the digital world are brought together under one virtual roof. Social media has landed; and it’s here to stay. And the beauty of social media is it is largely free. So it’s...

November 16, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Mozilla Labs Messaging Group has released a new Firefox extension that makes it simpler to share content from around the web on Facebook and Twitter. Social media marketing seeks to make new or more loyal customers by engaging with them, not just pushing products. Usually, social marke...

November 15, 2010 • Paul Chaney

A lot of activity is occurring around the group-coupon-deals space in recent days. Facebook launched "Deals," which, according to Facebook, "local businesses will be able to offer you deals when you check in to their place on Facebook." And there's Groupon Stores, which allow merchants ...