Page 251 – Practical Ecommerce

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Conversion
Great Ideas for The Holidays: Part 1

November 26, 2008 • PEC Staff

For many merchants, the holiday season is the largest sales period of the year. In this “Great Ideas for the Holidays” series, we’ll be asking ecommerce experts for ideas to help online retailers. For this first installment, we’ve asked Massimo Arrigoni, CEO of Early Impact, which publ...
SEO Tools
Review: Google Insights Can Help Merchants Optimize PPC/SEO Campaigns

November 25, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Google Insights, a free and relatively new research tool, provides detailed search data that can help online retailers improve their pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization. Like it or not, many online retailers depend on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and search engi...
Checkout Tactics
Sharable Coupons Can Boost Sales

November 24, 2008 • Armando Roggio

What our friends and relations think matters to us. I care about what my wife thinks of my new shirt, and when I got a 12-inch table saw this summer, I was sure to discuss the tool’s finer points my friend Steve. I am not alone. Shoppers like and trust recommendations and opinions from...
Business
Video for eCommerce: "Increases Conversion, Drives Traffic"

November 21, 2008 • Kerry Murdock

The use of video in ecommerce sites is becoming increasingly popular. Merchants are using video to both increase conversion rates and to drive traffic to their sites. And video is ...
Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: Sure Solutions’ Actinic Shopping Cart

November 21, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Practical eCommerce counts over 300 different shopping cart platforms. In this, our "Cart of the Week" feature, we’ll profile—but not evaluate—a specific shopping cart and ask its management about its strengths and weaknesses. We’ll then ask a customer about the cart, too. In this in...
Design & Development
Credit Card Theft: Steps to Protect You and Your Customers

November 20, 2008 • Sarah Worsham

Having even one credit card number stolen from your site can tarnish your reputation and impact sales for years. It is important to be aware of potential security flaws and how to mitigate them to protect yourself. “A breach of cardholder data can be big money in fines and remediation ...
Conversion
Video Boosts Online Sales, Merchants Confirm

November 19, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

With the holidays ahead, and a new inflatable fruit cake product selling only sparsely, Seattle toy store Archie McPhee this week is setting out to drive online sales with an explanatory video. It’s apparently working. Within 12 hours of launching the video ad campaign, sales for th...
Conversion
Survey: Female Shoppers are Influenced by Their Friends

November 19, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Personal recommendations and coupons or flyers passed on by friends are key factors in how female shoppers select products, according to a survey of 2,000 women from SheSpeaks, a marketing agency and social network for women. “SheSpeaks members are representative of influential and eng...
Checkout Tactics
Secure Checkout Most Important in Attracting New Customers

November 19, 2008 • Armando Roggio

A newly released consumer survey from Harris Interactive, a research firm, and Volusion, a hosted shopping cart company, suggests that payment security is—not surprisingly—a top issue for online shoppers. The survey asked more than 2,400 online shoppers aged 18 or older what factors in...
Design & Development
Camino Web Browser is Best in Mac Universe

November 18, 2008 • Brendan Gibbons

The Camino Project released its newest version for Mac OS-X in September 2008. Version 1.6.4 of this union of Mozilla and Macintosh offers a solid, Mac-compatible browsing experience with quick load times and crystal-clear renderings using the Gecko engine. For the past several weeks,...
Conversion
Conversion Review: Coffee Purveyor Needs Clear Purchase Path

November 17, 2008 • Alan Cox

JL Hufford is a gourmet coffee company that started life with a small café in Lafayette, IN. The company went online six years ago and now boasts over 400 different specialty beverage blends as well as a wide range of “coffee lifestyle” products. In this conversion review, I will evalu...
Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: MightyMerchant Offers Full-Service Ecommerce Platform

November 14, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Practical eCommerce counts over 300 different shopping cart platforms. In this, our “Cart Of The Week” feature, we’ll profile—but not evaluate—a specific shopping cart and ask its management about its strengths and weaknesses. We’ll then ask a competitor or a customer about the cart, to...
Conversion
Direct Traffic is Better Than Google Traffic

November 14, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Not all web traffic is equal and understanding the value of direct traffic can help online retailers hone their marketing. “Direct traffic” is web traffic you get from people who already know about your website or store. They either click a bookmark to come to your site or type your si...
Business
Christian Science Monitor Editor on Future of News Delivery

November 14, 2008 • Kerry Murdock

The Christian Science Monitor, a 100 year-old Pulitzer-prize-winning newspaper, recently announced plans to drop its daily printed paper in favor of a mainly web-based publishing model. Other newspapers will almost ...
Fraud Prevention
New PCI Compliance Standards Take Effect

November 13, 2008 • Armando Roggio

The Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council recently released a new version of its Data Security Standard (DSS), making minor but important changes and clarifications to the PCI compliance standard that responsible online merchants follow to protect their customers and av...
Marketing & Advertising
SEO Report Card: Socialcouture.com Stresses Social Media

November 13, 2008 • Jeff Muendel

I like parties, and Social Couture is a high-end party supply website. On its corresponding MySpace site (always a good thing to have, but especially important if your gig is party supplies) Social Couture says, “whether your style is traditional or modern or whether your guests are you...
Conversion
Online Retailers Want More Web Traffic

November 12, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Preliminary results from a new Practical eCommerce survey showed that at least 63 percent of respondents thought traffic generation was a big challenge, and more than 31 percent saw it as their biggest challenge. Practical eCommerce launched the first of a series of reader surveys on N...
Business
Yugster.com Shares its Fulfillment Strategy

November 12, 2008 • Mark Ayotte

The old-school approach to order fulfillment doesn’t fly for many Internet retailers. Warehousing, packing, shipping, and return-order processing are labor-intensive and time-consuming. This has led to a trend among online sellers to outsource its fulfillment operations. This isn’t dro...
Platforms & Apps
Maxthon: China’s Ad Smashing, Proxy Switching, Web Browser

November 11, 2008 • Armando Roggio

The Maxthon web browser brings several great features to the same platform as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) and lets users pretend to be from other counties so they can access otherwise restricted sites. For the past several weeks, Practical eCommerce has been reviewing the leadin...
Business
Effective Return Policies Save Money and Earn Business

November 10, 2008 • Stanley Arul

If there is one thing that every online retailer hates and fears, it’s returns. Many great stores fight to keep return rates below 2 percent of total shipments. Those merchants work with the carriers and shippers, modify their websites, and send customer satisfaction surveys—all of whic...
Link Building
Find and Measure Links Better with Linkscape

November 7, 2008 • Jeff Muendel

One of the most important attributes of search engine optimization (SEO) is link building, which is garnering quality inbound links to a website. A single link from a high-quality, trusted source can raise the rankings of multiple pages on a website because search engines aren’t just co...
User Experience
Accessibility: Making Video and Audio Usable For The Deaf

November 6, 2008 • Joseph C. Dolson

Using video and audio in a website increases the probability of an accessibility problem. Where text can be readily translated into a wide variety of alternative mediums for the disabled, the complex nature of video and audio make this kind of machine-generated comprehension nearly impo...
Platforms & Apps
Opera 9.6 Browser: Links Email, Desktop, and Mobile

November 4, 2008 • Armando Roggio

If you want evidence that there is a hot browser war underway, you need look no further than the new Opera 9.6 web browser that some believe is a response to Google’s game-changing Chrome browser. When Google launched the beta version of its Chrome browser on September 2, 2008,...
Conversion
Automated Chat Captures Prospects After They Leave A Site

November 3, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

UpSellit’s SMARTagent promises to automatically bring shoppers back to your site and close potential sales. It’s part user-engaged action, part automated chat, and part sales-floor closer. UpSellit CTO and president Chris Wampler said that e-retailers who add it to their sites could exp...
Business
Bloglist: Market Motive CEO Michael Stebbins

November 3, 2008 • Brendan Gibbons

In Bloglist, we ask ecommerce professionals to share some of their favorite blogs and tell us why they read them. For this bloglist, we talked to Michael Stebbins, CEO of Market Motive, a year-old Internet marketing instruction and services agency that provides online courses and confer...
Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: Interspire ‘Obsesses over Quality’

October 31, 2008 • Armando Roggio

In this installment of "Cart of the Week," we’ve featured Interspire, an Ajax-intensive, licensed shopping cart that boasts easy design and update tools without needing extensive XHTML, CSS, or other coding skills.
Conversion
Interactive Chat Improves Sales, Customer Service

October 30, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

Memorysuppliers.com offers more than just electronic-device memory cards. It also offers one-to-one, 24-hour-a-day chat. With four people dedicated to chat and email responses, Memorysuppliers.com is one of thousands of ecommerce companies adding chat to its marketing and customer se...
Business
Lessons Learned: 3tailer Co-Founder Jon West

October 29, 2008 • Brendan Gibbons

"Lessons Learned" is an occasional series where we ask experienced ecommerce merchants about their mistakes and successes. For this installment, we asked Jon West, co-founder of 3tailer, a niche firm based in Charlotte, N.C. with over 50,000 individual products sold on 17 websites. West...
Platforms & Apps
Google’s Chrome: The Prototype for Tomorrow’s Browsers

October 28, 2008 • Armando Roggio

When Google introduced its Chrome browser on September 2, 2008, it began the foundation for an improved Internet experience—full of rich web applications—and launched the next round of commercial combat with chief rival Microsoft. If Google is going to compete against Microsoft for a sh...
Business
Quick Query: Guidance CTO on Importance of Social Media

October 27, 2008 • Brendan Gibbons

As the landscape of social media changes (with Facebook as its barometer), ecommerce professionals have to face the decision of extending their social marketing and multiplying their influence into different channels. Jon Provisor is co-owner and CTO of Guidance, which specializes in h...