Page 244 – Practical Ecommerce

Category

Conversion
Constant Contact Continues to Add Customers, Increase Cash Flow But Loses $1 Million

May 28, 2009 • PEC Staff

Constant Contact, the email-marketing firm, reported revenues of $28.1 million for the three months ended March 31, 2009, up roughly $10 million, or 55 percent, from the same period in ...
Finance
Ecommerce Know-How: Alternative Financing

May 28, 2009 • Armando Roggio

The United States and much of the western world is in the midst of a recession that has made business credit difficult to find. More than 1 million Americans lost their jobs in the third quarter of 2008, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data released May 19, 2009. And perhap...
Social Media
The PeC Review: Tinker Sorts Your Twitter Tweets for Brand-Safe Marketing

May 27, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Tinker sorts and organizes Twitter.com tweets around brands, products, and other topics or events. This potentially gives ecommerce businesses a new, brand-safe way to market via social media and a means of monitoring popular trends. Tinker allows users to create so-called events based...
Email & Text Marketing
Email Marketing: Split Testing Improves Results “Up to 191 Percent”

May 26, 2009 • Matt Carroll

Split testing of email marketing campaigns can improve open rates, click through rates and even purchase conversion rates. More email service providers are offering split test functionality, making it possible to upload two or more versions of a single broadcast and send them to random ...
Photography & Video
The Shopping Experience: Envato’s FlashDen Has Broad Selection of Flash Files for Developers

May 22, 2009 • Armando Roggio

FlashDen.net sells Adobe Flash-based plugins, content sliders, animations, preloaders, and menus that web developers can integrate into their designs saving a lot of time. While the site had a great selection of downloadable products, easy navigation, a strong community, and great aes...
User Experience
New Accessibility Guidelines Part IV: Robustness

May 22, 2009 • Joseph C. Dolson

This is the fourth article in my series on the new WCAG 2.0. The previous installments are "A Welcomed Update," "Part II: Operability," and "Part III: Understandability." In this article, I'll addresses “robustness."
Business
Practical eCommerce to Launch Webinar Series

May 21, 2009 • PEC Staff

Practical eCommerce will soon launch a free webinar series. The webinars will address topics most helpful to small and midsize ecommerce merchants. Armando Roggio, Practical eCommerce’s Contributing Editor and a seasoned ecommerce merchant and developer, will moderate them. “Our miss...
Conversion
Attract Qualified Traffic with Content Syndication

May 21, 2009 • Jan Riley

Stop focusing on getting tons of traffic to your ecommerce store. Instead, shift to getting the right kind of traffic that will produce visitors who can turn into buyers. Syndication is perhaps the most powerful tool to help produce qualified traffic. Syndication means taking one piece ...
Inventory
Ecommerce Know-How: Improve Cash Flow by Delaying Suppliers

May 21, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Cash flow can be the strongest indicator of an ecommerce business's success or failure, and properly managing your accounts payable and receivable can be the difference between success or insolvency. Years ago, I read an article that described cash flow as the difference in time betwee...
Conversion
Pay-per-click Advertising: Top 6 Rookie Mistakes

May 20, 2009 • Greg Laptevsky

Here is a quick list of the top 6 pay-per-click advertising mistakes that I’ve seen. I suggest that you print this list and go through it before you start your next pay-per-click campaign. Check for Strange Keywords. You may have accidentally typed-in or pasted an incorrect keyword in...
Photography & Video
Web Design Tips: Use this PNG Fix for Attractive Images in Older Browsers

May 20, 2009 • Armando Roggio

For most website designs, the portable network graphic, or PNG, is simply the best available image format. But older, noncompliant versions of the Internet Explorer browser (IE) poorly managed this extensible file format's powerful transparency capabilities, making it hard to design for...
Business
Quick Query: Zappos Exec on Benefits of Printed Catalogs

May 19, 2009 • PEC Staff

The name Zappos, for many retail observers, is synonymous with great customer service and ecommerce well executed. The company was launched in 1999 as an online footwear merchant. It has since grown into a retailing powerhouse with 2008 sales reaching just over $1 billion. In 2007, Za...
SEO Tools
SEO: “Speak” to the Search Engine Spiders

May 19, 2009 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engines are like translators. With no more than a couple of words entered into the search box, they attempt to translate a word or phrase into the searcher’s meaning or intent and compare it to the millions of potential matches in their indices. But the less understood and even...
Design & Dev Tools
The PeC Review: Microsoft Tool Helps Designers with Internet Explorer Compatibility Problems

May 18, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Designing for Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser has always been a problem as designers were forced to choose between widely accepted Internet standards and what would work in IE. This problem has been exacerbated by the complexity of designers having to maintain various generat...
SEO
Blended Search: Four Ways to Optimize Content for Better Search Rankings

May 15, 2009 • Lisa Wehr

Gone are the days when a search is performed and only a list of pertinent websites appears in the search engine results page. Instead, what can be found now is a blend of websites, videos, images, social media profiles, blogs, news stories, press releases, podcasts and maps. With blende...
Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: Shop-Script, by WebAsyst

May 15, 2009 • Brendan Gibbons

Practical eCommerce counts over 300 different shopping cart systems. In this weekly “Cart of the Week” feature, we profile a specific cart, asking the cart's owners and users about its strengths and weaknesses. Here we profile Shop-Script by WebAsyst, based in Delaware. WebAsyst offers...
Conversion
Take the Survey and Predict the Future of eCommerce

May 14, 2009 • PEC Staff

What do you think will happen in ecommerce over the next five years? A Practical eCommerce survey asks if big box stores such as Walmart will overtake small-to-mid-sized online retailers. Do you believe leading brands will eventually dominate the web? And, which technologies do you thin...
Social Media
The PeC Review: Share This Makes Adding Social Media a Breeze

May 14, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Share This is a JavaScript-based widget that merchants can easily be embedded on their websites, allowing visitors to email web content to friends, send links as text messages, or post the content to a couple dozen social sharing sites like Facebook, MySpace, or Digg. Each week, "The P...
Business
Quick Query: Ecommerce in the Virgin Islands Can Save Taxes

May 14, 2009 • PEC Staff

The U.S. Virgin Islands are located roughly 90 miles east of Puerto Rico in the Caribbean Sea. The islands are known for their white sand beaches and clear, blue water. A new Virgin Islands-based economic initiative wants e-businesses to know there are significant tax advantages to doin...
Product Pages
Ecommerce Know-How: Writing Product Descriptions that Sell

May 13, 2009 • Armando Roggio

An ecommerce website, boiled down to its dry essence, is a virtual salesman at best and a slow-to-deliver electronic vending machine at worst. Consciously or not, online stores are conceived, designed, and created to sell products while making as little personal contact with a customer ...
Conversion
Social Media: Create a Strategy for Your Online Store

May 13, 2009 • Sarah Worsham

Most of us are familiar with Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and other social networking sites. There has been quite a bit of coverage on how to use them, but how should an online merchant create an overall social media strategy? First, Determine Your Goals The first step to any social medi...
Technical SEO
PeC Traffic Report: Does Google’s “Vince Update” Favor Big Brands?

May 12, 2009 • Armando Roggio

A recent change to the Google algorithm apparently favors established, well-known brands in some categories, potentially making it harder for small online sellers to compete with large retailers for search engine rankings. The so-called "Vince Update" seems to have taken effect on Janu...
Conversion
Survey Results: Advertising is Important, Pay-per-click Most Effective

May 11, 2009 • PEC Staff

Respondents to an April 2009 Practical eCommerce survey overwhelmingly said that pay-per-click advertising was an effective way to promote an ecommerce store and improve sales. Those same respondents also declared advertising an important part of their ecommerce business. The survey fo...
SEO
SEO Report Card: eHobbies.com “Uncommonly Sophisticated”

May 11, 2009 • Stephan Spencer

This month eHobbies.com is up for review. Ken Kikkawa, CEO of eHobbies, submitted the site for grading. I have to say I was impressed. Chief executive officers of companies that large - #364 on the Internet Retailer 500 list for eHobbies - are usually too high level to concern themselve...
Business
Quick Query: Miva Merchant CEO Russ Carroll

May 8, 2009 • PEC Staff

Miva Merchant is an early day shopping cart. First launched in 1995, it rose and then fell with the dotcom boom and bust. Findwhat.com, a publicly traded company, purchased Miva Merchant in 2005. Findwhat subsequently renamed itself Miva, only to sell the Miva Merchant shopping cart div...
Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: eCommerce Framework, by Mediachase

May 8, 2009 • Brendan Gibbons

Practical eCommerce counts over 300 different shopping cart systems. In this weekly “Cart of the Week” feature, we profile a specific cart, asking the cart's owners and users about its strengths and weaknesses. Here we profile the ASP.NET eCommerce Framework (ECF) by Mediachase. The Lo...
Analytics & Data
The PeC Review: Woopra Promises Real-Time Web Analytics and Behavior Tracking

May 7, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Woopra is an innovative web analytics suite that promises to vastly improve the information that website owners can collect and monitor. As customers return to your store, Woopra begins to track behavioral profiles, allowing online merchants to monitor individual customer behavior o...
Business
Lessons Learned: Bicyclinghub.com Owner Doug Duguay

May 7, 2009 • Brendan Gibbons

"Lessons Learned" is a biweekly series where we ask ecommerce business owners to share their experiences and advice. For this installment, we interviewed Bicyclinghub.com owner Doug Duguay about his experiences selling cycling apparel online. Duguay's business has three employees and is...
Schools & Resources
12 Good Ecommerce Resources

May 6, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce entrepreneurs frequently earn their profits in small margins, where slight competitive advantages can be the difference between flourishing and floundering. Gaining a competitive advantage can be as simple as trying a new marketing tactic, making a subtle adjustment to your w...
Code
Web Design Tips: Adding A Featured Section to Your Site Using jQuery and jFlow

May 6, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Smooth content sliders are widgets that can show clickable product images, Adobe Flash, HTML, or other content, effectively creating a "featured section" in a small amount of space. After researching several "easy" solutions (most of which did not work), I tried the jFlow plugin that ...