Page 261 – Practical Ecommerce

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Business
Interview: Ecommerce Implications From Social Media

October 31, 2007 • PEC Staff

Without question, the popularity of social media sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter show no signs of declining. Practical eCommerce asked Web Strategist and Forrester Research Senior Analyst Jeremiah Owyang his views on social media and its potential impact on ecommerce. P...
Business
Bloglist: Andrew Goodman

October 31, 2007 • PEC Staff

Name: Andrew Goodman, Founder And Principal Company: Page Zero Media Blog: Traffick.com In Bloglist, we ask ecommerce professionals to identify their favorite blogs. For this installment, we asked Andrew Goodman, founder and principal of Page Zero Media, a Toronto-based paid search...
SEO
Video: SEO Website Update

October 29, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

In January 2006, Contributor Stephan Spencer, founder and CEO of search-firm Netconcepts, critiqued the search engine optimization efforts of Balancedlifeproducts.com, following a request from that company. In this SEO Report Card critique, Spencer issued a D+ for an overall SEO grade....
Conversion
Holiday Sales: Make Your List, Check It Twice

October 29, 2007 • PEC Staff

1. Target The Right Buyers Selling more effectively throughout the holidays means targeting the right person, with the right offer, at the right time. Pretty easy in theory, right? In practice it’s a lot more difficult. Most e-tailers, through trial and error, get in a rut of going wit...
Fraud Prevention
Interview: The Future Of Credit Card Fraud

October 29, 2007 • PEC Staff

The risk of credit card fraud and identity theft remain important issues for many potential ecommerce consumers. Practical eCommerce asked John Munsell, founder and CEO of Bizzuka, a web design and development firm, his views on the evolution of online fraud. PeC: The risk of a stole...
Business
SEOmoz CEO and Co-Founder Rand Fishkin

October 26, 2007 • PEC Staff

Contributing Editor Pat Callahan is joined by Rand Fishkin, the CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz.org. The two discuss search engine optimization and writing successful blogs.
Design & Development
Personalized Search: Coming For Search Engines?

October 24, 2007 • Greg Laptevsky

Personalized search could be the next big thing in search engine marketing. In fact, we are beginning to see the shift from homogeneous search results to personalized results already, and all major search engines have tools in place that are collecting such data. A good example is Googl...
Code
Software Frameworks

October 24, 2007 • Brian Getting

In broad terms, a software framework is a code library that is designed to facilitate software development. The idea is that all of the tedious, low-level details of creating a web application are already addressed in a reusable package. For a web developer, this means you can spend y...
Business
Interview: The Future Of Online Advertising

October 24, 2007 • PEC Staff

Smaller ecommerce firms frequently spend heavily on various methods of online advertising. We asked an executive with Network Solutions, Jeff Zimmerman, his views on the development of online ads. Zimmerman is vice president of product management and marketing for Network Solutions, the...
Design & Dev Tools
Site Monitoring Tools Help Prevent Downtime

October 22, 2007 • Dave Young

In order for an ecommerce site to sell products and services, it must be continuously available to online customers. Any downtime could potentially cause a retailer to lose thousands of dollars. Consequently, an important element in any online endeavor is having a structure in place to ...
Business
Interview: The Future Of Computer Hardware

October 22, 2007 • PEC Staff

What sort of computers will consumers use to purchase products from ecommerce firms? We asked this to Rob Witman, the CEO and founder of Riffware, a provider of mobile software applications and other professional applications. Prior to founding Riffware, Witman was a Sr. Robotics Engin...
Design & Development
What Are “Tags” And What Is “Tagging?”

October 22, 2007 • Brian Getting

Since around 2004, content tagging has become more and more common due to social networking, photography sharing and bookmarking sites. Tagging is known by a few different names, such as content tagging, collaborative tagging, social tagging and even the scientific-sounding "folks...
Design & Development
Video Tutorial: Script.aculo.us Effects

October 18, 2007 • Brian Getting

Script.aculo.us is a JavaScript framework that is built upon the wildly successful Prototype JavaScript libraries. Script.aculo.us allows web designers to create engaging user interfaces quickly and easily, due in ...
Conversion
Product Spotlight

October 17, 2007 • PEC Staff

Create Your Own Business Cards BusinessCards MX allows you to quickly and easily create your own custom business cards. Version 3.30 includes 400 examples of business card templates, and designing a card is simple through the program’s ready to use elements, which include a variety of ...
Business
Quick Query: Filmmaker Joseph Monks and Web Accessibility

October 17, 2007 • PEC Staff

Joseph Monks is a Miami, Fla.-based filmmaker and freelance writer. His new horror film, "The Bunker," is soon to be released and details of it and his other films projects can be found at Sightunseenpictures.com. Monks is also blind, and we asked him about blindness, the Internet, ecommerce...
Business
Legal: The Future Of The Law Of The Web

October 15, 2007 • John W. Dozier, Jr.

One of the compelling aspects of Web 2.0 is the leveraging of user generated content (UGC) on a much more integrated and wide-scale basis. The laws dealing with UGC are nothing particularly new. A site that allows informational postings by third parties today already has to deal with ri...
Business
Bloglist: Rand Fishkin

October 15, 2007 • PEC Staff

Name: Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder Company: Seomoz.org Blog: Seomoz.org/blog In Bloglist, we ask ecommerce professionals to identify their favorite blogs. For this installment, we asked Rand Fishkin, founder and CEO of Seomoz.org, a consulting firm specializing in, among othe...
Business
A Lender Or Borrower Be Is Prosper.com

October 15, 2007 • Michael A. Cox

The increased difficulty for people and small businesses to acquire decently priced loans, or loans at all, created a vacuum in the money business in recent years. Chris Larsen, the man who gave us E-Loan.com beat Mother Nature to the punch in filling the void. It occurred to him that...
Business
Mercado Software’s Sue Chapman, Part 3

October 12, 2007 • PEC Staff

Callahan and Sue Chapman, director of merchandising solutions at Mercado Software, discuss how online retailers should prepare for the upcoming holiday shopping season, includng how to fine tune a website ...
Design & Development
Video Tutorial: Tabbed Content – Part 2

October 11, 2007 • Brian Getting

Tabbed content appears more and more frequently in web pages, and is an interesting way to simultaneously save page space and effectively present information. In part two of this two-part tutorial on creating tabbed content, Practical eCommerce's online director Brian Getting illustrat...
Conversion
PPC Report Card: POSSupply.com

October 10, 2007 • Greg Laptevsky

POS Supply Solutions sells office and paper products at its website, Possupply.com. It spends $1,000 per month on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising with, exclusively, Google. POS says its PPC goal is to generate product sales, and POS Supply asked us to review its overall pay-per-click ad...
Payments
Credit Card Chargebacks

October 7, 2007 • Pamela Hazelton

It seems like only yesterday we were gearing up for a new holiday shopping season. Alas, a plethora of shoppers seeking competitive pricing, free shipping and prime customer service is here. We’ve struggled to work out all the kinks in our shopping cart solution and backend system, so w...
Business
Holiday Book Ideas For Etailers

October 7, 2007 • PEC Staff

As the holiday season draws near, it seems a fitting time to share some book ideas — ones for your own reading pleasure or as gifts for your favorite etailer. While there wasn’t any scientific method for choosing these books, they all share some important qualities. I’ve enjoyed readin...
Business
Mercado Software’s Sue Chapman, Part 2

October 5, 2007 • PEC Staff

Callahan and Sue Chapman, director of merchandising solutions at Mercado Software, discuss how online retailers should prepare for the upcoming holiday shopping season, includng how to fine tune a website ...
Design & Development
Video Tutorial: Tabbed Content

October 4, 2007 • Brian Getting

Tabbed content appears more and more frequently in web pages, and is an interesting way to simultaneously save page space and effectively present information. In part one of this ...
Business
Caveat Vendor: PCI Is Here

October 3, 2007 • Michael A. Cox

Here’s one of those cold chill up your spine thoughts: Every day, there are at least two new threats to data security developed by identity thieves and Internet system hackers. And it never stops. Security pros slam and lock one gate and the hordes find another chink and slither through...
Conversion
Local Pay-Per-Click Opportunities For Small Businesses

October 3, 2007 • PEC Staff

It’s been over a year and a half since I last covered the local pay-per-click market for Practical eCommerce. If there is one thing you can depend on, it is that this industry does not stand still. It’s definitely time to go over the latest opportunities and trends in the local pay-per-...
Link Building
SEO Report Card: Link Building Could Improve Strong Site

October 1, 2007 • Jeff Muendel

Candlesandsuch.com is a website run quite frugally by its two main proprietors. For a site that hasn’t had a lot of professional help with regard to search engine optimization, it possesses some positive SEO attributes. That’s not to say there aren’t issues, but some of the main facets ...
Business
Mercado Software’s Sue Chapman

September 28, 2007 • PEC Staff

Sue Chapman, director of merchandising solutions at Mercado Software, discusses how online retailers should prepare for the upcoming holiday shopping season, includng how to fine tune your website for the ...
Marketing & Advertising
Baiting The Social Media Crowd

September 27, 2007 • Jeff Muendel

You may recall that Stephan Spencer (I am now taking over his two columns here at Practical Ecommerce) wrote about link baiting some months ago. To sum up his thoughts, inbound links are good. Search engines improve rankings of a given page or website based upon the number and quality o...