Page 254 – Practical Ecommerce

Category

Business
SBA Financing for Ecommerce Firms

July 28, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

Working into the evening, Sterling Savings banker Michael Williams wraps up another day of SBA lending in Portland, Ore.’s “Silicon Forrest.” As business development officer for Sterling Savings’ SBA division, Williams knows firsthand the issues faced by ecommerce sites looking for an S...
Email & Text Marketing
Growing Your Email Subscriber List With Contests

July 28, 2008 • Ben Chestnut

Cultivating a solid, permission-based email list can take a lot of time. So some businesses understandably get impatient waiting around for their lists to grow. For these businesses, online contests may be an attractive quick fix. As an example, let’s say a newly launched shoe e-retail...
Business
Research Domain Names Before You Bid

July 28, 2008 • Brendan Gibbons

Chris Stump of Onlyhammocks.com launched his site in October with a solid search engine-marketing plan. “Our original plan was pay-per-click from the start and search engine optimization as a long-term strategy,” Stump said. He got right to work, purchasing the domain Onlyhammocks.com...
Business
Enquisite’s Dan Robbins

July 28, 2008 • PEC Staff

Dan Robbins is Vice President of Marketing at Enquisite, a search analytics company that follows customers from search to conversion. He joins Practical eCommerce Publisher Kerry Murdock to discuss Enquisite ...
Social Media
Ratings And Reviews Engage Your Visitors

July 24, 2008 • Paul Chaney

Trust in word-of-mouth recommendations is at an all-time high. Public relations firm Edleman says in its 2008 Trust Barometer study that “a person like me” is still the most trusted source for information about a company and its services or products. While the most influential form of ...
Conversion
Tools To Detect Slow Load Times

July 24, 2008 • Greg Laptevsky

Don’t you hate when it takes, seemingly, forever for a website to load? Here’s why the load time of your site matters Slow load times constitute poor user experience. People are paying upwards of $50 a month for their high-speed Internet because they don’t like to wait. If you ma...
Business
Shaun Ryan, CEO Of SLI Systems

July 22, 2008 • Kerry Murdock

SLI Systems CEO Shaun Ryan discusses site search and SLI’s hosted site search solution with Practical eCommerce Publisher Kerry Murdock.
Conversion
Overcome The Disconnect With Persona Marketing

July 22, 2008 • Lisa Wehr

A major challenge for businesses today is a lack of understanding of their customers. You may know only what your online tracking reports or store receipts tell you about your customers, and not the customers themselves. You need a way to overcome this disconnect. Remember, you’re not m...
Google Ads
Pay-per-click Advertising: The Top 100 Keyword Phrases

July 22, 2008 • Bill Hartzer

Last time I checked, Spyfu.com is reporting that someone is bidding $51.66 per click for phrase “conference calling companies.” Are you bidding on words like this, which is one of the most expensive keyword phrases? Let’s take a look at the most expensive pay-per-click keywords and wha...
Social Media
Social Media Wheels Keep On Turning‚ And Fast!

July 16, 2008 • Paul Chaney

My social media journey started with blogs, then LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, a few other social networks, social sharing and bookmarking sites thrown in, then Twitter and now, Plurk. Sound familiar? How the wheels of social media evolution do turn. It's hard to keep up. Aft...
Social Media
Never Edit Your Own Stuff

July 15, 2008 • Paul Chaney

How many times has this happened? You compose a blog post, usually in a hurry, then hit the submit button, only to read it later and wonder how in the heck you missed what is a glaring error. I am the world’s worst. Years ago, a veteran magazine editor gave me this advice, “Never edit y...
User Experience
Customer Service For The Hearing Impaired

July 15, 2008 • Joseph C. Dolson

In an era of Internet commerce, it’s an unsurprising phenomenon that we expect the vast majority of our interactions with customers to happen in an online environment. The expectation is that people will send an email, contact us through support forms or simply place an order. But it’s ...
Conversion
Conversion Report Card: Weddingthings.com

July 15, 2008 • Alan Cox

WeddingThings is an established ecommerce company that sells the unique gifts wedding guests traditionally take home, as well as other wedding essentials for the perfect wedding such as invitations and bridal-party gifts. Eugene Mar, vice president of WeddingThings, wants some insigh...
Conversion
Improving Your Website’s Yahoo! Quality Index Score

July 15, 2008 • PEC Staff

Most pay-per-click advertisers are familiar by now with concept of the PPC Quality Score. Advertisers running on the major search engines may think that the variables that Google looks at are the same as those at Yahoo!. Both Google’s Quality Score and Yahoo!’s Quality Index aim to prov...
Conversion
Lessons Learned: Practicalsports.com Owner Byron Tabor

July 11, 2008 • Brendan Gibbons

“Lessons Learned” is an occasional series where we ask seasoned ecommerce professionals about their mistakes and successes. For this installment, we’ve asked Byron Tabor, owner of Rooms Delivered, a company that sells sporting goods and camping equipment on its sites Practicalsports.com...
Business
Field Test: Order Management Software

July 11, 2008 • Brendan Gibbons

In Field Test, Practical eCommerce has gathered twelve seasoned ecommerce merchants and asked each of them the same questions around a given topic. This month’s topic is order management software. The participating ecommerce merchants are: Dave Norris, House of Antique Hardware; Justin...
Conversion
Improving Your Yahoo! Quality Index Score

July 11, 2008 • Lee Goldberg

Most pay-per-click advertisers are familiar by now with concept of the PPC Quality Score. Advertisers running on the major search engines may think that the variables that Google looks at are the same as those at Yahoo!. Both Google’s Quality Score and Yahoo!’s Quality Index aim to prov...
Conversion
Facebook Widgets: Consider Sproutbuilder.com

July 11, 2008 • Jeff Muendel

Last year I wrote about the potential of applications – or widgets – on the Facebook platform. At the time Facebook was one of the only social media entities that had an open platform for anyone to build and share applications. Widgets are popular because users can customize their pages...
Business
Dr. J’s Pet Project

July 11, 2008 • Michael A. Cox

To be honest, it was a little embarrassing to be the daughter of an entrepreneur who was trying to start up a mail order livestock supply business back in 1975. Ruth Jeffers was a little girl when her dad, Dr. Keith Jeffers, decided to provide a higher level of service to his cattle cl...
Conversion
Pay-Per-Click Bid Management Strategies

July 11, 2008 • Pamela Nelson

My philosophy on pay-per-click bid management has always been to manage each keyword’s performance in each engine individually. Knowing a keyword’s impact makes it easier to determine the next steps to take in improving the account’s overall performance. I start by looking at a current ...
Business
Practical eCommerce Blogger Wins eBay Hall of Fame Award

July 11, 2008 • Brendan Gibbons

eBay expert and Practical eCommerce blogger Danna Crawford was out fishing with her daughters on her birthday, May 13. After a long day with no successful catches, the three went home tired and sunburned to find that Crawford was one of five eBay users to net two of eBay’s most prestigi...
Business
ICANN Exec On The new Top-level Domains

July 11, 2008 • PEC Staff

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Name and Numbers, or ICANN, coordinates the domain name system globally. These tasks involve ensuring the domain name system functions properly and that individuals and companies can easily obtain and use domain names for their lawful purposes. Rec...
Platforms & Apps
Shopping Cart Functionality Can Increase Sales

June 25, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

The tenet of customer service in the online shopping process is simple: the more you engage potential customers, and provide links relevant to their needs, the more they’ll buy and the longer they’ll remain a customer. As it turns out, the solution to that challenge may be as simple as ...
Conversion
Local Search Pays Off, Naturally

June 25, 2008 • Lisa Wehr

When your customers are right around the corner, you don’t need your pay-per-click ads seen half-way around the world. For example, when you’re a Boston-based florist offering online ordering, it’s not necessary to have a top position in search results every time someone searches for “o...
Business
Keirsun Scott, Social Media Director For OneUpWeb

June 25, 2008 • PEC Staff

Keirsun Scott is Social Media Director for OneUpWeb, an online marketing consulting company. He joins Practical eCommerce Publisher Kerry Murdock to discuss the benefits of social media for ecommerce merchants,
Conversion
Conversion Report Card: Musicforte.com

June 23, 2008 • Alan Cox

Musicforte.com offers songbooks, sheet music and music reference materials to artists and music fans. It relies heavily on search engine optimization for sheet music sales and hosts a social network of over 40,000 musicians. Unfortunately, the site is suffering from poor conversion rat...
Platforms & Apps
Third-Party Integrations Make Shopping Carts Easier To Use

June 23, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

By day Sean Dupuis is a courier for FedEx. By night, he sends out packages of his own: boxes of boots and moccasins and sheepskin bags for his bustling website business called Sheepskin and Things. Stretched thin, he’s able to get it all done because his shopping cart and its third-part...
Conversion
Niche Marketplace Sites Are Worth Considering

June 23, 2008 • Brendan Gibbons

Ecommerce merchants looking for additional sales channels might want to consider niche auction and marketplace sites. There are many niche auction sites owing to the fact that most anyone can create one, just like most anyone can open an eBay account or start an ecommerce store. In fac...
Business
Amit Das Discusses Virtual eCommerce Trade Show

June 19, 2008 • PEC Staff

Amit Das, Managing Director for the U.S. division of Worldwide Business Research, speaks with Practical eCommerce Publisher Kerry Murdock about the upcoming virtual ecommerce trade show, eTailXpo.
Platforms & Apps
Shopping Carts And Search Engines

June 18, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

When searching for “educational toys” on Google, at No. 5 on the list you’ll find BrainwavesToys.com—up from No. 78 a year ago. Michael Stebbins, co-founder of the business, employed a series of search engine optimization (SEO) strategies within his cart to achieve this result. “A lot ...