Page 245 – Practical Ecommerce

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Marketing & Advertising
Negative Keywords Improve Pay-per-click Performance, Save Money

May 5, 2009 • Greg Laptevsky

Implementation of negative keywords to your paid search account is one of the most effective methods to improve its performance. Negative keywords allow you to filter out unwanted traffic and only pay for clicks that have a higher probability of converting. Here’s how it works. Negativ...
Customer Retention
Ecommerce Know-How: Six Ways To Improve Your Online Store

May 4, 2009 • Armando Roggio

An online merchant's most important marketing and sales tool is a content-rich, visually interesting, and factually accurate website. In this edition of "eCommerce Know-How," I am going to propose six ways to improve your site, and I am offering these methods exactly five months before...
Conversion
Online Marketing Overview: Where to Best Invest

May 4, 2009 • Jeff Muendel

I was contacted by a gentleman in the music industry who wanted advice regarding online marketing for his website. He seemed to have strong old-school marketing ties, but also knew that efforts surrounding social media and search engine optimization were important things to consider. ...
Conversion
Conversion Review: “It’s In The Stars” Needs Help

May 1, 2009 • Alan Cox

"Conversion Review" is a high level evaluation of a website that a company has submitted for assessment. When doing a review, we analyze the website as if we were a potential customer with a typical usage scenario. We then assess how well the site does at converting visitors into buyers...
Platforms & Apps
Interview: Miva Merchant CEO, EVP on Moving to a SAAS Business Model

May 1, 2009 • PEC Staff

Miva Merchant is among the most prominent ecommerce brands. The company was launched in 1995 as HTMLScript Corporation, and it’s one of the early day shopping cart providers. It rose, and then fell, with the first dotcom boom and bust. In 2005, the company sold to Findwhat.com, a publi...
Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: RomanCart

April 30, 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 RomanCart, a U.K.-based hosted cart solution, offering cart...
Conversion
Ten Great New Ecommerce Ideas for May 2009

April 29, 2009 • Ankush Agarwal

Each month, Practical eCommerce asks industry insiders to share a great, innovative idea that could help an ecommerce company. Here’s what ten of them had to say for the May 2009 installment. Optimize Comparison Shopping Engine Feeds "Start inexpensively with Google Base. When the fee...
Conversion
Amazon Reports Q1 2009 Sales, Asks “What Recession?”

April 29, 2009 • PEC Staff

Last week, Amazon.com announced quarterly sales of $4.89 billion, up 18 percent from the first quarter of 2009. While many factors contributed to the company's strong quarter and more than $1.14 billion gross profit, Amazon executives pointed to strict inventory management and better th...
Conversion
Link Article Marketing to Purchase-Related Keywords

April 28, 2009 • Jan Riley

Article marketing has been around since the beginning of the Internet, seemingly. It is practically free (if you write the articles yourself); it builds trust; and it attracts customers and influences people while they are in the process of making a buying decision. The Proof is in th...
Analytics & Data
Ecommerce Know-How: Four Ways to Measure Print Advertising Effectiveness

April 28, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Print advertising is a waning media vehicle. It has become less effective in the post-interruption era. However, in spite of this decline, printed display advertising and classifieds can still provide a solid return on investment (ROI) for some ecommerce merchants willing and able to me...
Conversion
eBay Earnings Release Not Entirely Good News

April 27, 2009 • PEC Staff

Last week, eBay announced first quarter 2009 revenue of $2.02 billion, a $171.6 million year-over-year decrease. While PayPal, Classifieds and Skype performed well, according to eBay, delivering year-over-year revenue growth, text and graphical advertising revenues were flat compared to...
Google Ads
The PeC Review: Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool Lets You See What Spiders See

April 24, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool can help ecommerce merchants find pertinent keywords specific to a given URL, potentially improving search-engine-optimization and pay-per-click-advertising campaigns. Using URLs from your AdWords account, the Search Based Keyword Tool (SKTool) "dis...
Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: ProductCart

April 24, 2009 • Brendan Gibbons

Practical eCommerce counts over 300 different shopping cart systems. In this ongoing "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 ProductCart, by Early Impact, Inc. Based in Mission Viejo,...
Business
Lessons Learned: Solarbatshades.com Owner Matt Mauldin

April 23, 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 Matt Mauldin, owner of Solarbatshades.com, an Allen, Texas-based online retailer of roughly 50 types of sunglasses and accessories. M...
Code
Web Design Tips: Converting an Older Table-Based Email Template To CSS

April 23, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Many email templates were developed using older table-based layouts that "break" easily and are very complicated to maintain. Tables in HTML are fantastic for displaying tabular data. But as a layout tool they interfere with some dynamic and rich media elements, cause accessibility cha...
Business
Ecommerce Know-How: Self-Employment Tax Requirements

April 22, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce businesses that operate as sole proprietorships, partnerships, and even limited liability companies frequently pass tax liability from the company to the owners and contractors of the business. These owners and contractors must then pay self-employment tax, which is typically ...
User Experience
New Accessibility Guidelines Part III: Understandability

April 22, 2009 • Joseph C. Dolson

This is the third article in my series on the new WCAG 2.0. The previous installments are "A Welcomed Update" and "Part II: Operability." In this article, I'll addresses “understandability."
Marketing & Advertising
8 Tips for Choosing an SEO Professional

April 21, 2009 • Greg Laptevsky

Editor's Note: Greg Laptevsky is a longtime Practical eCommerce contributor and a professional search-engine-marketing consultant. We asked him for tips to help ecommerce companies hire SEO firms. What follows, below, is his response. The checklist below will help you choose the right ...
Design & Development
Video Ideas: 4 Ways to Engage Visitors and Increase Sales

April 21, 2009 • Jan Riley

Nearly 80 percent of U.S. Internet users spent roughly 5 hours watching videos in December 2008, with an average view time of 3.2 minutes per video, according to a study by comScore. Here are four ways your ecommerce business can use video to engage your visitors and increase sales, n...
Platforms & Apps
The PeC Review: “Remember the Milk” A Helpful Organizing Tool

April 20, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce entrepreneurs are busy people who manage suppliers, web marketing, merchandising, accounting, and more. Many of these entrepreneurs keep lists on legal pads or stick dozens of yellow Post-it notes to the sides of their monitors like a mane on a lion. Australia-based Remem...
Conversion
Pay-per-click Advertising: Yahoo! Targeting Gets More Focused

April 17, 2009 • Lisa Wehr

Companies are frequently looking for ways to position their products in front of consumers that will most likely result in a conversion or a purchase. While there are several different options for targeting pay-per-click campaigns, the recent advances in Yahoo!’s audience targeting capa...
Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: Shop2Cart

April 17, 2009 • Brendan Gibbons

Practical eCommerce counts over 300 different shopping cart systems. In this ongoing "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 Shop2Cart, a Boca Raton, Florida-based hosted cart. We ask...
Social Media
Quick Query: Comodo CEO on Hiring a Social Media Officer

April 16, 2009 • PEC Staff

There's much talk about social media sites and there's also talk of how companies can use social media for marketing purposes. One company doing just that is Comodo, a firm that provides online security solutions. Comodo has recently created a “social media officer” job position and Com...
Email & Text Marketing
PeC Traffic Report: Six Measurements to Improve Email Performance

April 16, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Good ecommerce merchants know that email campaigns built around opt-in lists are an effective way to reach potential customers. But more than 18 percent of email marketers in the U.S. either don't or cannot measure the return on investment for their email campaigns, according to a new s...
SEO Tools
SEO: Try Surfing Like a Search Engine Spider

April 15, 2009 • Jill Kocher Brown

I’m a visual learner. I need to see and interact with things to understand them. It therefore helps me to mimic the behavior of search engine spiders when I’m digging into a site for the first time to review its search engine optimization issues. I like to think of it as “being the bot....
Customer Retention
Ecommerce Know-How: Developing a Postcard Campaign

April 15, 2009 • Armando Roggio

A postcard marketing campaign can be inexpensive, and it could increase your store's sales next month. Almost every weekday at about 2 p.m., I trot out to my mailbox, wave at the retired Marine smoking cigarettes on his porch across the street, and collect my U.S. mail. I sort out the...
Design & Development
Mobile Broadband Growth Slowed in Fourth Quarter 2008

April 14, 2009 • PEC Staff

The growth in new mobile broadband subscriptions fell significantly in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to a new report. The total mobile PC data card subscriber base grew 5 percent in the final three months of 2008, compared to 22 percent growth in the prior quarter, according to...
Conversion
Selling (And Socializing) On Facebook

April 14, 2009 • Sarah Worsham

Facebook offers ecommerce companies an opportunity to both market their products and connect with their customers. Traffic to Facebook has increased by 149% from February 2008 to February 2009, according to Hitwise, and it’s not just from the young crowd. Visitors over age 35 have incre...
Amazon & Marketplaces
Quick Query: Amazon Exec Explains ‘Selling on Amazon’

April 13, 2009 • PEC Staff

Online retailers are frequently interested in new channels to sell their products. Merchants can consider auction sites and comparison-shopping sites, for example. And there's also Amazon.com. Amazon competes with many smaller ecommerce merchants, but also allows those merchants to list...
Conversion
Survey: Ecommerce Merchants Report Extremes in Sales Growth

April 13, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Online shopkeepers willing to indicate how their sales were doing in 2009 generally reported extremes, with sales either rising or falling by more than 10 percent, according to a new Practical eCommerce survey. Practical eCommerce asked a group of its readers how their 2009 sales had f...