October 1, 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 October 2010 installment of "Ten Great Ecommerce Ideas." How to Leverage Promotion Codes “Make sure your promotion...

September 30, 2010 • Scott Smigler

Many online retailers take the "ready, fire, aim" approach when structuring their PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns. However, as competition intensifies and search engines evolve, online retailers who fail to organize their campaigns in more thoughtful ways will be penalized. Those who “aim...

September 30, 2010 • Jill Kocher Brown

Let’s face it, the engines control search. They may keep tight-lipped control of their algorithmic secrets, but they also provide their users with tools that SEO practitioners can use to understand how the engines see their sites. These advanced operators offer a peek behind the curtain...

September 29, 2010 • Charles Nicholls

September 29, 2010 • Paul Chaney

September 28, 2010 • Armando Roggio

The Opera web browser allows web surfers to use quick, predetermined mouse movements to complete many common browsing tasks, such as going back to a previous page, opening new tabs, or reloading a page. Once users become familiar with these mouse gestures, they can surf the web potenti...

September 28, 2010 • Kerry Murdock

“Lessons Learned” is a series where we ask ecommerce business owners to share their experiences. For this installment we visited with Avrum Elmakis, owner and president of Best Bully Sticks,

September 27, 2010 • Armando Roggio

From product or how-to videos to expert audio podcasts, many online merchants use multimedia to help sell products and engage customers. Examples of ecommerce companies using video and audio abound, but they include REI and Maker SHED. Yet, both of these examples are from relatively ...

September 24, 2010 • Bill Hartzer

To obtain good organic rankings in the search engines, web pages need inbound links. This is because search engines look for some way to determine how to rank one page over another. They look for some sort of indication of quality, some sort of "approval" that one ecommerce product page...

September 23, 2010 • PEC Staff

As we head into the holiday season amid mixed economic signals, merchants are looking to maximize visibility while keeping expenses in check. In a recent Practical eCommerce webinar we reviewed some easy-to-implement SEO tips with Andreas Ryuta Stenzel, online marketing manager with TRU...

September 23, 2010 • PEC Staff

Google Instant, the new auto-fill search query process, could impact traffic to ecommerce sites. We asked four ecommerce merchants how Instant, which Google launched on Sept. 8, is affecting their traffic and how they plan to react to it. Their responses are below. Traffic Up by 20 Pe...

September 22, 2010 • Charles Nicholls

Editor’s Note: We continue our “Conversion Tip” series from Charles Nicholls, founder and chief strategy officer of SeeWhy, a conversion and abandonment-recovery firm. For this week’s installment, Nicholls addresses tools ...

September 22, 2010 • Paul Chaney

Social media has breathed new life into email marketing. And email provides a "push" element to update social network friends, Fans and followers. Email service providers (ESPs) are leading this renewed vitality and interest with the integration of email with social media. In this art...

September 21, 2010 • PEC Staff

Roughly half of the visitors to an ecommerce site come from search engines, typically. And when those search engines change the method in which consumers search for online products, the effect on ecommerce merchants can be dramatic. Enter Google Instant, the new auto-fill search proces...

September 21, 2010 • PEC Staff

“Lessons Learned” is a series where we ask ecommerce business owners to share their experiences. For this installment, we visited with Todd Henley, president of Makai’s, an online retailer of ...

September 20, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Social marketing has emerged as one of the best ways to connect with consumers online. And tracking how well your business's social media marketing is performing has become a vital measurement of ecommerce marketing measurement. Yet with so many metrics and statistics to follow, it can...

September 20, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Microsoft released a preview of its Internet Explorer (IE) 9 web browser on September 15, promising users "a more beautiful web." Historically, Microsoft's IE browsers are widely used by Internet novices and widely hated by Internet regulars. Web developers, ecommerce merchants, and ...

September 17, 2010 • Jill Kocher Brown

Last week, Google introduced "Instant," a feature that predicts searchers’ queries as they type them and streams the results for that predicted query onto the results page in real time. Google announced Instant on its blog, at "Search: now faster than the speed of type." Google Instan...

September 16, 2010 • Jeff Jacobson, Jd, Llm

This is the second installment in a two-part series regarding protection against counterfeit products being sold on the Internet. In the first installment, "Legal: When Merchants Are Liable for Selling Counterfeit Brands," I wrote how online retailers and auction houses can protect them...

September 16, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons

Internet users interact with SSL certificates when they access a web page or transmit data over the web. These certificates help confirm the rightful owner of the site, and that payment and other information is encrypted and safely transmitted. However, one size of SSL certificates do...

September 15, 2010 • Paul Chaney

There is a growing integration between social media and ecommerce. And there's a new term for this integration: social commerce. Facebook is the leading social commerce platform. Recently I moderated "500 Million People and Growing: The Facebook Conversation Turns to Commerce," a Prac...

September 15, 2010 • Pamela Hazelton

Most conversion articles focus on a store’s product pages. After all, those pages are most visited by search engine spiders and internal search results. Customers who browse, however, use category pages, and those customers need buying nudges, too. Every store needs conversion-ready c...

September 14, 2010 • Paul Chaney

Many small businesses are experimenting with social media to market their products. Based on my observations, however, most are doing it in piecemeal fashion, without a coordinated, overall strategy. In this article, I present a practical, four-part social commerce strategy that minim...

September 14, 2010 • Kerry Murdock

Candy Blakeslee once ordered a toy for her dog. She ordered the toy on eBay because she and her husband, Dean, had sold antiques there and she figured it would be a good place to buy dog toys, too. The year was 2000. "I decided I should buy my dog a toy from eBay." said Blakeslee....

September 13, 2010 • PEC Staff

Ecommerce merchants are innovators. And many in that industry are finding new and better ways to sell products online. One of those companies is Spotlight Retail, an ecommerce firm with 30 niche websites. Its new "Spotlight Visualizer" enables consumers to see how an item will look in t...

September 13, 2010 • Armando Roggio

On average, Americans spent about 56 hours on the Internet in June 2010, according to a recent Nielsen Wire report. Ecommerce merchants, whose workplace is on the web, likely spend many more hours online than the average user. With so much time spent online, a web browser's features an...

September 10, 2010 • Charles Nicholls

Editor's Note: Charles Nicholls is founder and chief technical officer of SeeWhy, a conversion and abandonment-recovery firm. His "Conversion Tip" series continues, below, with a suggestion for using Facebook's "Recommendations" plug-in on an ecommerce site. Facebook’s new "Recommendat...

September 10, 2010 • Armando Roggio

September 9, 2010 • PEC Staff

Holiday sales are vital for most ecommerce merchants. But the selling process can be a management headache when a merchant is juggling many different suppliers, sales channels, and stocking requirements. Couple those challenges with trying to decide which products to promote, and what t...

September 9, 2010 • Michael Stearns

This week Google rolled out Instant Search, a revolutionary AJAX-based technology that dynamically updates the search results page as users type in each character of their queries. Instant Search changes the fundamentals of how a user will search on Google. The introduction of Instant S...