Page 235 – Practical Ecommerce

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Business
Ecommerce Know-How: Taking Advantage of Online Education Opportunities

December 24, 2009 • Kevin Patrick Allen

An online education can come in a variety of forms and it can mean a lot of different things. It might mean a traditional college degree offered via the Internet. It could come in the form of a single unaccredited course taken simply because it offers an opportunity to grow one’s skil...
Business
Managing the Technological Side of Your Business When You Don’t Understand Technology

December 23, 2009 • Kevin Patrick Allen

A businessperson doesn’t necessarily understand technology. Nor does a technology expert necessarily understand business. But the two fields certainly do intersect in the world of ecommerce. So how does an ecommerce merchant who is lacking in technological understanding, manage a suc...
Link Building
SEO: Remember LinkedIn for Inbound Links

December 23, 2009 • Bill Hartzer

Editor’s Note: Bill Hartzer is a contributor to Practical eCommerce and manager of search engine optimization and social media marketing with VizionInteractive, a Dallas-based online marketing firm. Hartzer wrote the article, below, which first appeared in that company’s blog. Inbound...
Design & Development
Quick Query: Quickoffice’s David Brennan on Mobile Office Applications

December 22, 2009 • Kevin Patrick Allen

The days of being tied to a desktop computer are long gone. Ecommerce merchants can work wirelessly with laptop computers, personal digital assistants, and increasingly, smart mobile phones. Quickoffice is a Texas-based software company that focuses on providing mobile office software...
Business
Ask an Expert: Managing Outside Developers

December 21, 2009 • PEC Staff

Editor’s Note: This is the inaugural edition of "Ask an Expert," a new Practical eCommerce feature in which ecommerce merchants submit a question to be answered by a fellow merchant or an industry colleague. Our goal with “Ask an Expert” is to allow you to tap into the collective know...
Amazon & Marketplaces
Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne on Holiday Sales, Free Shipping

December 21, 2009 • Kerry Murdock

It's not every day that we speak with a Stanford PhD who has funded the construction of schools around the world. That same person started dabbling in ecommerce a decade or so ago and his company is now a publicly traded retailing powerhouse. He is Patrick Byrne, and the company is Ov...
Payments
The PeC Review: PayPal’s Website Payment Pro is a Good Value for Small Merchants

December 18, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce is not possible without online payment processing. You might have the best products. You might have the best website. But, if customers cannot order and pay for products online, you’re not in the ecommerce business. PayPal’s Website Payments Pro is an all-in-one payment proc...
Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: CommerceV3

December 18, 2009 • Kate Monteith

There are more than 350 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. Thi...
SEO
SEO Report Card: BabyGiftIdea.com

December 17, 2009 • Stephan Spencer

For this month, I am reviewing BabyGiftIdea.com, at co-owner Pat Laws' request. Pat and her husband bought the business from the original owner in May 2008. The site has been online for about nine years, so it definitely has some history and credibility in the eyes of Google. Pat shar...
Conversion
URL Shorteners: Saving Space and Tracking Clicks

December 17, 2009 • Kevin Patrick Allen

For today’s ecommerce merchant who wants to convey an important point via instant messaging or mobile texting, brevity is helpful. But when the merchant is using Twitter, brevity is a must since a Twitter post is limited to 140 characters. It’s easy to run out of space to enter the most...
Technical SEO
SEO: Capture More Search Traffic with Rich Snippets

December 16, 2009 • Jill Kocher Brown

The difference between a snippet and a rich snippet is the difference between just showing up at a party and showing up in style. Showing up in style can ensure you get the attention you want. For an ecommerce merchant, "the party" is a search engine's results page. A snippet is your U...
Business
MonsterCommerce Co-founder Stephanie Leffler ‘Juggles’ New Venture

December 15, 2009 • PEC Staff

Stephanie Leffler started selling sun protection products online while in college. That was around the year 2000. She became frustrated with her web developer and she decided to produce, with her partner, a shopping cart herself. That cart became MonsterCommerce, an early day hosted ...
Conversion
Quick Query: Dr. BJ Fogg on Fogg Behavior Model

December 15, 2009 • Kevin Patrick Allen

Ecommerce merchants want consumers to take action. That’s what marketing is all about: reaching potential customers and convincing them to take action, more specifically, to make a purchase. Dr. BJ ...
Marketing & Advertising
Search Engines, Indexing and Copyright Law

December 14, 2009 • Brendan Gibbons

In 1998, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, intended to extend intellectual property rights to the web and to limit liability for online service providers. Since then, search engines have used their web crawlers to identify and copy millions o...
Marketing & Advertising
Fans and Followers: The Social Media Numbers Game

December 14, 2009 • Kevin Patrick Allen

Momentum is a valuable force. A business owner that has customer-generated momentum is in a desirable position. Author Malcolm Gladwell famously described the point at which growth becomes exponential--and momentum becomes unstoppable--as The Tipping Point. Recently I listened as a s...
Fraud Prevention
The PeC Review: Filtrbox for Reputation Management

December 11, 2009 • Armando Roggio

An increasingly social Internet has transformed Facebooking moms, tweeting trend-followers, and Digging teens into powerful brand and product influencers. And as your ecommerce business grows, you should be concerned about what these social Internet influencers are saying regarding yo...
Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: Open Mind Commerce

December 11, 2009 • Kate Monteith

There are more than 350 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. Thi...
Design & Development
Where the PCI Security Council Goes Wrong

December 10, 2009 • Kevin Patrick Allen

While conducting interviews with numerous PCI compliance experts for a series of articles on Practical eCommerce, one thing about PCI compliance has become clear. No one seems to be able to address the issue of enforcement. For example, if I’m a merchant who is found to be PCI non-com...
Conversion
Ecommerce Know-How: Product Videos Easy to Produce, Inexpensive

December 10, 2009 • Kevin Patrick Allen

Ecommerce videos drive sales. Lars Hundley, president of Clean Air Gardening, is confident of that. “We typically get up to a 20 percent increase in conversion rate on products that have a video, and also a lower return rate at the same time. It's hard to put an exact dollar amount...
Business
Lessons Learned: Fairytale Brownies Relies on Catalogs, Empowers Employees

December 9, 2009 • Kate Monteith

"Lessons Learned" is a series where we ask ecommerce business executives to share their experiences and advice. For this installment, we interviewed David Kravetz, the catalog and web team leader of Fairytale Brownies, an online brownie gift store based in Phoenix, Ariz. Fairytale Brow...
Schools & Resources
Booklist: McAfee VP Stuart McClure

December 9, 2009 • PEC Staff

In “Booklist” we ask Internet professionals about the books and blogs they read, and why. For this list, we asked Stuart McClure, vice president and general manager risk and compliance unit ...
Design & Development
PCI Exec Suggests Payment Outsourcing for Smaller Merchants

December 8, 2009 • Kevin Patrick Allen

Editor’s note: Payment Card Industry compliance is a requirement for virtually all ecommerce merchants. But it’s also a complicated and confusing topic. With that in mind, Practical eCommerce is publishing a series of articles aimed at answering merchants' questions on the issue. In...
Platforms & Apps
Miva Merchant Launches In-house Hosted Platform

December 7, 2009 • Kerry Murdock

The evolution of Miva Merchant continues. The shopping cart launched in 1995 as "HTML Script." It then renamed itself Miva and quickly gained market share.
Marketing & Advertising
Quick Query: SocialGrub Founder on Social Media Tools

December 7, 2009 • PEC Staff

Social media has become mainstream and businesses are increasingly turning to it to interact with their customers and boost the company bottom line. SocialGrub is a new service that brings social marketing tools to the restaurant and retail industry. For this "Quick Query" we spoke wi...
Platforms & Apps
The PeC Review: Crucial Webhosting Offers Value and Service

December 4, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Most small-to-midsized online retailers don’t own their own web servers. Instead,these companies rent space on servers at data centers around the globe—a practice we commonly call “web hosting.” An online merchant’s web host can have a significant effect on business success. For examp...
Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: Shop a la Cart

December 4, 2009 • Kate Monteith

There are more than 350 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. Thi...
Link Building
SEO: Link-building Opportunities

December 3, 2009 • Jeff Muendel

Link building is an ever-changing landscape. This is because the search engines make changes to their algorithms to thwart artificial link building, and because link building as a practice continues to morph. As time goes on, more webmasters will become aware of the importance that inbo...
Business
Lessons Learned: Boyd Badten of PrintingForLess.com

December 3, 2009 • Ankush Agarwal

"Lessons Learned" is a series where we ask ecommerce business executives to share their experiences and advice. For this installment, we interviewed Boyd Badten, director of technical service for PrintingForLess.com, a pioneering, online printing company located in Livingston, Mont. ...
User Experience
Accessibility: How Many Disabled Web Users Are There?

December 2, 2009 • Joseph C. Dolson

Ecommerce merchants spend a lot of time thinking about statistics. They try to gauge who is visiting their website, what products consumers are most interested in, and how consumers are finding those products. Without knowing about their audience, merchants have a difficult time marketi...
Conversion
Ecommerce Know-How: Think Negative to Realize Positive Holiday Sales Growth

December 2, 2009 • Kevin Patrick Allen

Two recent studies on holiday ecommerce spending provide important insights for small, online merchants wanting to achieve positive growth over the same period in 2008. The studies from comScore, an online tracking firm, and Forrester Research, indicate the economic climate is improvin...