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Fraud Prevention
The PeC Review: Yahoo! Alerts Can Send You Text Messages

April 10, 2009 • Armando Roggio

While there are many online tools that can help ecommerce proprietors keep track of their businesses' reputations and reviews, Yahoo! Alerts, a free notification service, is one of the few that can send those alerts as text messages to a mobile phone, or via Yahoo! Messenger, as a stand...
Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: GoECart

April 10, 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 GoECart, a hosted solution with two tiers of pricing, one ...
Business
Lessons Learned: Harvey Jelks of Jelks Gourmet Coffee

April 9, 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 Harvey Jelks, president of Jelks Gourmet Coffee, an online retailer of roughly 1,500 freshly roasted coffees and Cajun food products....
Conversion
Is Twitter an Ecommerce Tool?

April 9, 2009 • Jeff Muendel

I hear it a lot. People say they know they should use Twitter for marketing purposes, but the idea of “Twittering” doesn’t sit well with them. On a personal level, I have no interest in letting the world know what I’m doing hour-to-hour, much less moment-to-moment. But Twittering on beh...
Analytics & Data
Ecommerce Know-how: Setting SMART Goals and Measuring Success

April 8, 2009 • Armando Roggio

To really get the most from web measurements, online business owners need a clear understanding of exactly what they want to accomplish and how they will measure those accomplishments. No matter how objective the reporting of analytics software, the meaning divined from its numbers and...
Conversion
Using Google Analytics for Keyword Segmentation and In-Depth Analysis

April 7, 2009 • Michael Stearns

Google Analytics provides a wealth of information. But many GA account holders do little beyond viewing their site's daily traffic and trying to understand terms like "bounce rate." In this article, we will learn to segment data in GA to determine the number of paying customers enterin...
Conversion
Building Your Brand. Part 1: Defining Your Business Purpose

April 7, 2009 • Dan Wilson

You want your customers to remember the essence of your company, not just its public face. Your brand is not your website look and feel, your logo, or even your snappy slogan. These help clarify your brand and make it more memorable for your customers.
User Experience
The Shopping Experience: Source 1 Medical Offers Easy Navigation, Good Service

April 7, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Each month, Practical eCommerce sends me shopping. I make a purchase from a real online merchant and create both an article and a video of the shopping experience. My goal is to report back to you about the overall checkout process, customer service experience, website aesthetics, and d...
Business
Quick Query: Listrak CEO on Email Geo Tracking

April 6, 2009 • PEC Staff

Many ecommerce merchants rely on email marketing and many of them, we suspect, wish they could monitor and track emails based on where a recipient lives. Geo tracking would allow for this. To find out more about geo tracking, we interviewed Ross Kramer, CEO of Listrak, an email marketin...
Payments
Credit Card Processing: Eleven Pointers to Save Money, Part 2

April 6, 2009 • Michael E. Shatz

Editor's Note: This is Part 2 in a two-part series on ideas for ecommerce merchants to save money on credit card processing. The author is Michael Shatz, a veteran of the credit card processing industry. He now owns The Merchant’s Guide, a Massachusetts-based consulting and publishing f...
Conversion
Ten Great New Ecommerce Ideas for April 2009

April 3, 2009 • Ankush Agarwal

Practical eCommerce recently asked industry insiders to share a great, innovative idea that could help an ecommerce firm. Here’s what ten of them had to say. Rich Consumer Experiences Dominate "Focus on immersive branding and marketing techniques that create unexpectedly fast, fun, an...
Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: AspDotNetStorefront

April 3, 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 AspDotNetStorefront’s ML shopping cart. We asked COO and E...
SEO
Search Engine Friendly Shopping Carts?

April 2, 2009 • PEC Staff

Practical eCommerce will soon publish our "Shopping Cart Roundup" PDF guide. This guide will offer suggestions for choosing the shopping cart that best fits a merchant's needs. It will also list every shopping cart company that we know of. One question that most all merchants have in e...
Design & Development
Credit Card Processing: Eleven Pointers to Save Money, Part 1

April 2, 2009 • Michael E. Shatz

Editor's Note: This is Part 1 in a two-part series on ideas for ecommerce merchants to save money on credit card processing. The author is Michael Shatz, a veteran of the credit card processing industry. He now owns The Merchant’s Guide, a Massachusetts-based consulting and publishing ...
SEO
SEO Report Card: Poor SEO Choices Cost Worthy Charity

April 1, 2009 • Stephan Spencer

Although you might not think of nonprofits as having ecommerce sites, they do. They accept donations via secure transactions. Rarely will they have a shopping cart, but nonetheless, nonprofits suffer from a number of the same search engine optimization ills that plague traditional ecomm...
Design & Dev Tools
Web Design Tips: Configuring Templates, Adding a Product Grid in Magento

April 1, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Adding a dynamic product grid or list to any static page in Magento is as easy as adding a few lines of code. The challenge is knowing which lines to add and where to put them. Magento is a popular open-source ecommerce platform that has been downloaded more than 750,000 times, accordi...
Staffing
Ecommerce Know-How: Selecting a Web Designer or Developer

March 31, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Often with ecommerce sites success is not a matter of how good you are but rather how good you look. Consumers often judge how professional and how trustworthy an online store is by nothing more than its aesthetics. While many online retailers are experts in their field (i.e., apparel,...
Conversion
Using Banner Ads to Promote Your Website

March 31, 2009 • Dr. Ralph F. Wilson

We are in a period when banner advertising seems to be on the wane. You know, those rectangular boxes on commercial sites.
Business
Quick Query: Joe Dolson of Accessible Web Design

March 30, 2009 • PEC Staff

There are millions of disabled Internet users who are unable to use a website in a traditional manner, and making sure a site functions for sight impaired, deaf or disabled users is called "accessibility." To learn more about the topic, we spoke with Joseph C. Dolson, president and foun...
Fraud Prevention
The PeC Review: Google Alerts Helps With Reputation Management

March 30, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Google Alerts is a free service that sends users an email or RSS alert when the search engine indexes new material related to a specific keyword phrase. Although the service is still described as a beta, it has been available for years and many a savvy businessperson has used the servi...
Conversion
Conversion Review: The Russian Store is Well Designed with Clear Navigation

March 27, 2009 • Alan Cox

In Conversion Review we visit a website as if we were a potential customer and assess how well the site does at converting visitors into buyers. For this review, we visited The Russian Store, acting as a customer who wished to purchase some Russian collectibles. Staff of The Russian Sto...
Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: 3dCart

March 27, 2009 • Brendan Gibbons

In this ongoing “Cart of the Week” feature, we profile 3dCart, a Margate, Fla.-based hosted platform. We asked 3dCart founder Gil Gonzalo to explain the benefits...
Business
Lessons Learned: Dave Anderson of Wildlife Wonders

March 26, 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 Dave Anderson, co-owner of Wildlife Wonders. Anderson and his business partner Brenda Martin run the online business from their brick...
Design & Development
PCI Compliance: Frequently Asked Questions

March 26, 2009 • PEC Staff

Payment card industry compliance is confusing for many ecommerce merchants. But it potentially affects every merchant that accepts credit card payments. Failure to understand the PCI compliance standards could result in higher merchant account fees and fines from the credit card issuers...
Platforms & Apps
Calling All Carts for the Shopping Cart Roundup

March 25, 2009 • PEC Staff

Choosing the right online shopping cart is one of the most important decisions an ecommerce merchant will make. And carts are possibly the hottest topic we regularly explore here at Practical eCommerce. This has prompted us to develop a comprehensive guide of every known shopping cart o...
User Experience
New Accessibility Guidelines Part II: Operability

March 24, 2009 • Joseph C. Dolson

This is the second article in my series on WCAG 2.0. The first installment, "New Accessibility Guidelines A Welcomed Update," we published last month. The concept behind website operability is simple: Can everybody use the tools and mechanisms required to operate your website?
Marketing & Advertising
The PeC Review: The SOC Exchange Offers A New, Inexpensive Selling Channel

March 24, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Selling online can take many forms and merchants can use several channels to market and sell their wares. The SOC Exchange is a new online storefront that lets merchants post and sell products for as little as $10 per year with no hidden fees. The site allows ecommerce businesses to ...
Email & Text Marketing
Quick Query: MailChimp CEO on Email Strategy

March 23, 2009 • PEC Staff

Many ecommerce merchants rely on email newsletters and email marketing to drive sales, but the success of those email campaigns varies. There are frequently issues related to open rates, click-through rates and even deliverability of the email itself. To offer insight and suggestions on...
Checkout Tactics
Ecommerce Know-How: Using a Variable Pricing Model

March 20, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Selling downloadable products online presents a number of special problems for ecommerce businesses, not the least of which is demonstrating the value of an intangible product that has no physical form and no glossy packaging. Certainly, software vendors and popular sites like iTunes ha...
Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: EC Express by Mercantec

March 20, 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 EC Express by Mercantec, a Naperville, IL company that fir...