Page 226 – Practical Ecommerce

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Platforms & Apps
The PEC Review: Comodo Dragon, A Web Browser

August 2, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce merchants are digital natives. They live, in a sense, online, operating their businesses, marketing, and even servicing customers on the World Wide Web. But the Internet can be a wild place, and sometimes digital natives become a little too comfortable with their surroundings...
Conversion
Ten Great Ecommerce Ideas for August 2010

August 2, 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 August 2010 installment of "Ten Great Ecommerce Ideas." Create Unique Descriptions for Best Results “Search engines ...
Conversion
Conversion Tip: Show Shipping Costs Early

July 30, 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 shipping charges, and surprises, in ...
Social Media
Ecommerce News Around the Web for July 30, 2010

July 30, 2010 • Paul Chaney

"Ecommerce News Around the Web" is our weekly review of articles, blog posts and other news items that could interest ecommerce merchants. Ecommerce SSL is Broken, Says Conference Founder - The Inquirer Black Hat 2010 conference founder Jeff Moss is adamant that commerce's secure soc...
Business
July 2010 Top Ten: Our Most Popular Posts

July 30, 2010 • Kate Monteith

Each month, we compile a list of the ten most popular Practical eCommerce articles published that month, based on the number of page views. Here are the ten most popular articles for July 2010. Six Facebook Applications to Sell Your Products In this, the third installment of our serie...
Design & Development
Great User Experience Is More than a Pretty Ecommerce Site

July 29, 2010 • PEC Staff

Many ecommerce merchants think of user experience in terms of the user interface. They take great pains to optimize the aesthetic appearance of their sites with the goal of increasing conversions. Yet, it’s often the less sexy backend issues that are driving customers away, and increa...
Conversion
Holiday Tips for 2010, Part 1

July 29, 2010 • PEC Staff

The 2010 holiday season is nearly here. With that in mind, Practical eCommerce will publish a few good holiday-selling tips each week. Our first installment, provided by experienced ecommerce professionals, is below. Create Holiday Landing Pages Create custom landing pages for your em...
SEO
SEO for Anti-SEO Business Models

July 29, 2010 • Jill Kocher Brown

I recently changed SEO jobs. I went from an agency that manages clients' search-engine-optimization efforts, to an in-house SEO manager for a single company. I knew previously, from working with many ecommerce clients, that business models and product offerings have an impact on SEO suc...
Business
Bloglist: TechXpress’s Louis Camassa

July 28, 2010 • Nic Murdock

In “Bloglist,” we ask ecommerce professionals to share some of their favorite blogs, websites and forums, and tell us why they read them. For this installment, we asked Louis Camassa,
Marketing & Advertising
SEO: Managing Inbound Link Equity

July 28, 2010 • Amanda Barnes

Links point to your website from all corners of the online world. Some links, like friends, come and go. However, some are very rare, and making sure you keep them current and connected is critical to your website success. I’m not talking about new links. I’m talking about links that ...
Business
Merchant Profile: David Sasson of OverstockArt

July 27, 2010 • PEC Staff

You could argue that a center of the online retail art world is in Kansas. That's where OverstockArt.com is located, and in nine years it has grown to be a leading online retailer of original art reproductions. Its founder and CEO, David Sasson, has guided the business from its inceptio...
User Experience
Screen Readers: Eight Frequently Asked Questions

July 27, 2010 • PEC Staff

Editor's Note: The article below discusses screen readers, the software that reads aloud text on a computer screen. Screen reader software allows visually handicapped consumers to use Internet sites. To help text-reading consumers understand what a visually-handicapped user experiences,...
Conversion
Conversion Tip: Which Conversion Rate to Measure?

July 26, 2010 • Charles Nicholls

"Conversion Tip" is an occasional feature where we publish a single conversion-related suggestion that could help ecommerce merchants improve the percentage of visitors who ultimately become customers. For this installment, Charles Nicholls, the founder and CEO of SeeWhy, a conversion a...
Technical SEO
The PEC Review: Online Image Optimizer Speeds Load Times

July 26, 2010 • Armando Roggio

A slow-loading retail site is akin to the store clerk who ignores you in a brick-and-mortar shop. On a recent trip, I stopped at a small antique store. My wife and I entered the store, walked around for about 20 minutes, examined dozens of items, and never once during the entire experi...
SEO
SEO Report Card: Woot.com

July 23, 2010 • Stephan Spencer

For this month’s “SEO Report Card,” I thought I would do something different and review a site that didn’t request it. The site I chose, Woot.com, is near and dear ...
Marketing & Advertising
Ask an Expert: Will My Facebook Store Help with Search Engine Optimization?

July 22, 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 implications from selling on Facebook. The question comes from Brian M. Almashie, vice president of ecommerce for ...
Product Pages
Eight Copywriting Rules for Increasing Conversion

July 22, 2010 • Pamela Hazelton

When merchants talk about ecommerce conversion, it usually centers on design, button placement and ease of checkout. The process, though, actually starts the second someone lands on any web page. This is why textual content is so important. Here are eight rules for using text on your e...
Conversion
Gearing Up for the 2010 Holiday Season

July 21, 2010 • PEC Staff

If you haven’t started thinking about the 2010 holiday season, now is the time. The economy is still shaky, customers remain fickle, and if you’re not prepared you could miss out on the most important shopping season of the year. Thanks to technological advances, we now have more info...
Conversion
TheFind.com CEO: ‘We Index Every Product from Every Store’

July 21, 2010 • PEC Staff

Specialized shopping search engines are becoming increasingly important for consumers. Among the largest of these shopping engines is TheFind, which receives more than 25 million visits per month. The products of most ecommerce merchants are likely already featured on that site, as the ...
Conversion
Debunking Myths from the Top 10 Converting Websites

July 20, 2010 • Charles Nicholls

Editor's Note: We welcome Charles Nicholls as our newest contributor. He's a conversion and analytics expert, and the founder and chief strategy officer of SeeWhy, a conversion and cart-abandonment-recovery firm. He's also the author of “Lessons Learned from the Top Ten Converting Websi...
Social Media
Six Facebook Applications to Sell Your Products

July 20, 2010 • Paul Chaney

Editor's Note: This is the third installment in our series on social commerce, the process of linking ecommerce with social media sites, such as Facebook. In the second installment, we reviewed the Facebook apps of a number of shopping cart providers. These apps extend the Facebook reac...
Email & Text Marketing
Tools to Combine Email Marketing with Social Media

July 19, 2010 • PEC Staff

If you’ve been selling online for any amount of time, you know how valuable email marketing can be, especially among existing customers. And you may also have pages set up on at least a couple of popular social networks, and you might have a blog. Once separate, these forms of marketi...
Design & Development
The PEC Review: IETester for Browser Testing

July 19, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce entrepreneurs and marketers must pay careful attention to website analytics. Like conscientious doctors watching a patient for any sign of improvement, site owners and marketers study many details of visitor data, including which web browsers those visitors are using. Thanks...
Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: nsCommerceSpace by Network Solutions

July 16, 2010 • Kate Monteith

There are nearly 600 online shopping carts. And each week we feature one, interviewing both the cart's developer and a customer. "Cart of the Week" is not a review or an evaluation, but rather an opportunity to learn about a shopping cart from the people who build it and use it. This w...
Business
Five Legal Practices to Protect Your Online Business

July 15, 2010 • Jeff Jacobson, Jd, Llm

The following is a list of five business practices that online business owners should follow to help protect their business from liability and minimize legal claims. 1. Maintain Clear and Accurate Communication with Customers Clear communications will solve many customer complaint pro...
Marketing & Advertising
Ask an Expert: Why Isn’t Google Indexing All of My Site’s Pages?

July 15, 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 getting pages from an ecommerce site fully indexed by Google. It comes from Robert Mobberley, CEO of Performance Motorcare Products,...
Design & Development
Not PCI Compliant? No Problem

July 14, 2010 • Kerry Murdock

By Practical eCommerce's count, there are nearly 600 English-language shopping carts. These include hosted carts, licensed software carts and open-source carts. There are small ones with just a few clients, and large ones with tens of thousands of clients. But, as of July 14, only 40 o...
Conversion
Three Free Language Translation Programs

July 14, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons

While there is no substitute for human linguistic knowledge, there are cheaper ways to translate large amounts of text than by hiring a professional translator. A good way for merchants to circumvent hiring a professional translator is to use a machine translator, sentence by sentence, ...
Design & Development
8 Questions on Cloud Computing

July 13, 2010 • PEC Staff

Traditional web hosting assumes that customers pay for a fixed amount of storage space and a fixed amount of bandwidth. But the traffic to many websites varies, and storage and bandwidth needs fluctuate over time. For those websites, cloud computing, or cloud hosting, could save them ...
Business
Lessons Learned: Rob Holzer with S&S Worldwide

July 13, 2010 • PEC Staff

"Lessons Learned" is an occasional feature where we ask seasoned ecommerce professionals about their experiences in online retailing. For this installment, we've asked Rob Holzer, emarketing manager with S&S Worldwide, a 100-year-old company that sells craft kits, games, educational...