Page 225 – Practical Ecommerce

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Photography & Video
Full 360-Degree Product Image Rotation in JavaScript

August 21, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Product imagery and video are extremely important aspects of on-site merchandising that can have a significant impact on an online retailer’s success. And, to a great degree, web developers have a ...
Business
Live Chat: Magento’s Roy Rubin

August 20, 2010 • Kerry Murdock

Before launching Magento in 2007, Varien was a small, Los Angeles-based development firm. CEO Roy Rubin would occasionally contribute articles to Practical eCommerce, then a printed magazine.
Conversion
Holiday Tips for 2010, Part 4

August 20, 2010 • PEC Staff

The 2010 holiday season is nearly here. With that in mind, we are publishing a few good holiday-selling tips each week. Our fourth installment, provided by experienced ecommerce professionals, is below. Test for Usability Issues “Find usability issues by using new crowdsourcing servic...
Conversion
Top 10 Converting Websites: The Similarities and Differences

August 19, 2010 • Charles Nicholls

We continue our analysis of the top 10 converting websites by looking at the key similarities and differences between them. This follows from “Debunking Myths from the Top 10 Converting ...
Design & Development
Databases: What Online Merchants Need to Know

August 19, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Editor's Note: We continue our "Need to Know" series, where we explain complex web topics on an executive-level, "need to know" basis. For this installment, Contributing Editor Armando Roggio explains relational databases. The "Need to Know" Series Five Web Design Concepts Ecommerce ...
Conversion
Nuts and Bolts of Holiday Selling

August 18, 2010 • PEC Staff

The factors that determine a successful holiday season are oftentimes not the creative or extravagant ones, but rather the nuts and bolts of addressing critical areas of your business. We've identified 10 such "nuts and bolts" strategies to contemplate in “Ten Ecommerce Strategies for ...
Business
Legal: When Merchants Are Liable for Selling Counterfeit Brands

August 18, 2010 • Jeff Jacobson, Jd, Llm

This is the first installment of a two-part series regarding protection against counterfeit products being sold on the Internet. The first part of the series, below, discusses how online retailers and auction houses can protect themselves from unwittingly selling counterfeit products. T...
Social Media
Profile: Retailer Spends Little Money for Big Social Media Impact

August 18, 2010 • Paul Chaney

Editor's Note: For the past few weeks, Paul Chaney, our social media director, has addressed the integration of Facebook with ecommerce. He has reviewed a number of applications, including Wildfire and Fan Appz, both of which provide sweepstakes and coupons. He's also reviewed fully-emb...
Design & Development
Synchronized Applications Transformed Two Businesses

August 17, 2010 • PEC Staff

InkJetSuperstore.com and Wrigleyville Sports were once losing customers and sales. Now they are both successful and growing. In fact, just prior to a recent Practical eCommerce webinar, InkJetSuperstore.com CEO Ilan Douek spilled the beans about his prior day’s order volume. It was more...
Conversion
Conversion Tip: Pop-up Shopping Carts Drive Higher Order Amounts

August 17, 2010 • Charles Nicholls

Editor's Note: We continue our "Conversion Tip" series from Charles Nicholls, the founder and chief strategy officer of SeeWhy, a conversion and abandonment-recovery firm. For this week's installment, Nicholls focuses on a new trend, pop-up shopping carts. Many shopping carts take the ...
Design & Development
Google Docs: Word Processing, Collaboration, More

August 17, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons

Google offers a variety of useful free tools merchants can use in place of other more costly software. One of these is Google Docs, a free word processing tool with plenty of room for file storage and many unique tools unmatched by other word processors. The most important of these is t...
Email & Text Marketing
Email Marketing: The Three-Part Plan

August 16, 2010 • Carolyn Nye

Editor's Note: We welcome as our new email-marketing contributor. She's marketing manager with S&S Worldwide, a direct marketer of arts and crafts, sporting goods and educational supplies. She is responsible for the planning and implementation of S&S's email marketing programs,...
Link Building
Ask an Expert: Do No-Follow Links Help with SEO?

August 16, 2010 • 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 the search-engine-optimization value to no-follow links on social bookmarking sites, such as Digg and StumbleUpon. The question come...
Platforms & Apps
The PEC Review: Shopify

August 16, 2010 • Armando Roggio

There are nearly 600 different shopping cart solutions to choose from. While many of these carts are functional, a relative few rise to the top in terms of their ease of use, how much creative freedom they allow, and how well they help a merchant present their products. Shopify is on...
Conversion
Holiday Tips for 2010, Part 3

August 13, 2010 • PEC Staff

The 2010 holiday season is nearly here. With that in mind, Practical eCommerce is publishing a few good holiday-selling tips each week. Our third installment, provided by experienced ecommerce professionals, is below. Be Everywhere “Signup and post products in shopping comparison en...
Platforms & Apps
ProStores Upgrades Platform, Simplifies Store Design and Management

August 12, 2010 • PEC Staff

Editor's Note: Ecommerce service providers frequently launch new, interesting products, or issue upgrades to existing ones. We address these new products and upgrades periodically, and in this installment Contributing Editor Lisa Morgan explains eBay Prostores' new upgrade to its hosted...
Conversion
The Future of Your Conversion Funnel

August 12, 2010 • PEC Staff

As online merchants we all want to attract and retain as many profitable customers as possible at the lowest cost. However, the way we’re marketing ourselves may be getting in the way. In a recent webinar we discussed a few common pitfalls as they relate to branding, competition, part...
Platforms & Apps
Getting Started in Ecommerce: What’s a Shopping Cart?

August 11, 2010 • Armando Roggio

The ecommerce shopping cart is a software package that accepts customer payment and shipping information and facilitates the distribution of that information to merchants, payment processors, or others. At the surface, an ecommerce shopping cart is really something that every beginning...
Social Media
Social Bookmarking Helps with SEO, Product Sharing

August 11, 2010 • Paul Chaney

Social sharing and bookmarking have taken a back seat to Facebook and Twitter. For most of us, using sites like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, or Reddit rarely crosses our minds. Yet, these and other such services can provide a number of benefits to your ecommerce site, and here’s why....
Shipping & Fulfillment
Ten Ways To Reduce Your Shipping Costs

August 10, 2010 • John Lindberg

Online merchants are often caught between the increasing demand for free delivery and rising shipping and fulfillment costs. Thankfully, there are some simple ways to reduce the cost of shipping and order fulfillment. Here are ten of them. 1. Rate Shop Rate shop your parcels among al...
Google Ads
Transitioning from Pay-Per-Click to Organic Search

August 10, 2010 • Bill Hartzer

If you are spending too much money for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, then you likely have considered moving away from PPC and towards organic search results. After all, if you rank well in the organic, or natural, search results, you can spend a lot less money on PPC. But how do you ...
Conversion
Conversion Tip: Understand Why Visitors Abandon Purchases

August 9, 2010 • Charles Nicholls

We continue our series of conversion tips from Charles Nicholls, founder and CEO of SeeWhy, a conversion and cart-abandonment-recovery firm. For this tip, Nicholls addresses the two main causes of ...
Design & Dev Tools
The PEC Review: Mockingbird, for Wireframes

August 9, 2010 • Armando Roggio

In terms of website design, wireframes serve as a visual guide to page structure and interface. Web designers use wireframes in much the same way that builders use an architect's blueprints. It is certainly possible to build a website without a wireframe, just like it is possible to bu...
Conversion
Holiday Tips for 2010, Part 2

August 6, 2010 • PEC Staff

The 2010 holiday season is nearly here. With that in mind, Practical eCommerce is publishing a few good holiday-selling tips each week. Our second installment, provided by experienced ecommerce professionals, is below. Plan Ahead for Holiday Rush “Make sure all of your website improve...
Conversion
Survey Results: How Important Is Video in Ecommerce?

August 5, 2010 • PEC Staff

Practical eCommerce polled readers in July about the use of video in ecommerce. We wanted to know how many of our readers have posted product videos on their ecommerce sites, and if not, why. The July 2010 survey asked four questions about ecommerce video usage, with a comment section ...
Conversion
10 Holiday Ecommerce Pitfalls

August 5, 2010 • Michael Stearns

Holiday sales are vitally important for most ecommerce businesses. And yet, in my years of helping hundreds of merchants, I've seen them frequently make the same mistakes that negatively impact a successful holiday sales season. Here's my list, updated for 2010, of common pitfalls to a...
Customer Retention
Advanced Search Techniques Improve Ecommerce Sales

August 4, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Depending on which expert you ask, something like 40 to 70 percent of online shoppers will navigate an ecommerce store using a product search, making on-site search extremely important even if the most conservative estimates are assumed. Not all site search is the same, however. Rather...
Social Media
Facebook Encourages Ecommerce; App-Makers Respond

August 4, 2010 • Paul Chaney

Facebook designates Fan pages for businesses to engage users. And to help these businesses, Facebook now provides a series of resource guides for Fan page development and Facebook Ads development. It has also greatly improved the Fan page analytics component (called Insights), and it ha...
Business
Lessons Learned: 877MyJuicer.com Changes Platforms, and Evolves

August 3, 2010 • PEC Staff

“Lessons Learned” is an occasional series in which we ask ecommerce business owners to share their experiences, good and bad. For this installment, we visited with Andrew Casey, founder and CEO of 877MyJuicer.com, a Del Mar, Calif.-based seller of juicers and other health-related and ki...
Checkout Tactics
Usability Report Card: LiveOutThere.com

August 3, 2010 • Pamela Hazelton

Live Out There is an online community and store for active people. Featuring top brands in apparel and gear, the site is designed to attract folks serious about outdoor activities. The products Live Out There sells aren’t for the budget-shopper, but rather those looking for tried and ...