Page 264 – Practical Ecommerce

Category

Conversion
Six Surefire Ways To Boost Sales

July 2, 2007 • PEC Staff

I would venture to say that not a single website in the world has reached its peak of effectiveness or earnings potential. No matter the circumstances, every site can "better its best." If a "magic" formula for website success existed, you'd see the big boys like Google and Yahoo using ...
Conversion
Google AdWords: It Just Keeps Getting Better

July 1, 2007 • PEC Staff

Over the past few months, Google has announced a number of new features in the AdWords interface. Some are relatively minor and simply affect the interface; some offer new functionality and a lot of value to the advertiser. Either way, they can help you run your AdWords campaigns more ...
Design & Development
Quick Query: Alternative Payment Option eBillme

June 27, 2007 • PEC Staff

Marwan Forzley is president and CEO of online payment alternative eBillme (Modasolutions.com), formerly known as SECURE-eBill. How does a consumer use eBillme? Forzley: When you are at the checkout, there are all kinds of payment options. You've got Visa, MasterCard and American Exp...
Fraud Prevention
Click Fraud Not Top PPC Concern

June 27, 2007 • PEC Staff

Click fraud has been a popular topic of discussion for a number of years, and it doesn’t appear the issue will fade away anytime soon. The industry is full of various numbers thrown around putting the click fraud rate anywhere from .02 percent (claimed by Google) to 30 percent or more. ...
Design & Development
Protect Data From Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Attacks

June 25, 2007 • Brian Getting

Security is always going to be a concern for both developers and ecommerce business owners alike, since providing a secure environment for making transactions is not only a matter of gaining customer trust, it is also a legal requirement. As websites become more interactive they are uti...
Code
Video Tutorial: CSS Design, Part Two

June 20, 2007 • Brian Getting

In the conclusion of our two-part video tutorial on CSS layout and design, we will take the layout we created in the beginning of this tutorial and begin to apply graphics and other visual stylings to it, in order to achieve the look we are going for. In Part Two, we will be looking a...
Conversion
Merchants Should Be Preparing For The Holidays Now

June 20, 2007 • PEC Staff

Just as most consumers begin to enjoy summer, it's time for savvy merchants to put the finishing touches on holiday sales plans. While it is difficult to estimate the volume of "gifting" purchases made online, there is no doubt about the customers' penchant for buying gifts via this cha...
Conversion
eBay Isn’t The Only Auction Site

June 20, 2007 • PEC Staff

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Curabitur et quam. Aliquam erat volutpat. Vivamus et elit. Fusce tincidunt nisl at arcu. Praesent dolor turpis, pharetra non, commodo eget, pharetra sit amet, nulla. Phasellus sit amet ante sit amet ipsum tristique tristique. Ves...
Code
Video Tutorial: CSS Design, Part One

June 19, 2007 • Brian Getting

Designing search engine friendly websites can be intimidating, particularly for designers who are just learning how to use CSS formatting. One of the most intimidating aspects to learning CSS design is creating page layouts that do not rely on tables. In the first of a two-part video...
SEO
SEO: Metrics That Matter

June 17, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

Out with the old, in with the new. In terms of SEO, what’s falling by the wayside? Obsessively watching indexation numbers and rankings on “trophy” keywords (like the one you know the CEO always checks first thing in the morning). Worrying yourself sick over “duplicate content penalt...
Conversion
Product Spotlight: Mercado 4, Surveys, And More

June 13, 2007 • PEC Staff

One Stop Site for Wholesale Products WorldwideBrands’ new OneSource is an online database of thousands of wholesalers representing millions of wholesale products. Users can search by product category for specific items and can export results to Word and Excel. The site contains market ...
Conversion
“Mobiwebolized” Search Marketing

June 13, 2007 • Greg Laptevsky

If you're one of the big guys at the top of the search engine organic results, your business is probably doing pretty well. For the rest of us, there’s an “early bird” special. It’s called mobile search, and it just might be the search marketing redemption you were looking for. Why? Ev...
SEO
SEO Report Card: Change Home Page Links

June 12, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

This month's selectee, Millcraftfurniture.com, is an outdoor furniture manufacturer operating a small (less than 100 pages) MIVA Merchant-powered ecommerce site. Its rankings are in the doldrums. The store does not appear in the first 100 listings in Google for critical terms "Adirondac...
Fraud Prevention
Click Fraud: What To Do When You’ve Been Cheated

June 11, 2007 • Greg Laptevsky

So you think you’re a victim of click fraud, and the question is now what? Well, it’s time to play “cyber detective” and get refunds from pay-per-click (PPC) engines for the wasted dollars. But keep in mind, because click fraud eats away search engine revenue in the form of reimbursed c...
Design & Development
Product Spotlight: eBay Items, Mouse & Tablet, And More

June 8, 2007 • PEC Staff

Blog Your eBay Items Have you ever found something on eBay that you really wanted to let your friends know about? Or is your business selling items on eBay and you want to cross-promote those items in your businesses' blog? If so, eBay To Go is for you. It's a way for you to share inte...
Design & Development
Web Conversion Strategy: When Design Dominates

June 8, 2007 • Mat Greenfield

A local business magazine had written an article reviewing the website designs of various local companies. As you may imagine, I read with dismay as the three-page article focused solely on graphic design. There was no mention of usability, conversion rate or site effectiveness (using a...
Business
Bloglist: Ecommerce Potpourri

June 7, 2007 • PEC Staff

In Bloglist, we ask ecommerce professionals to identify their favorite blogs. For this installment, we've asked Thomas Holmes with logic+intuition. Name: Thomas Holmes Founder, logic+intuition Company: logic+intuition *Blogs: *Yclick.it, Thomasholmes.info [Grokdotcom.com] This blo...
Conversion
Is Your Website Ready For The Holiday Shopping Season?

June 6, 2007 • Pamela Hazelton

Anyone’s who has talked with me for any given amount of time will tell you I’m adamant about testing sites for security and navigation. Summer is the perfect time to plot out upcoming holiday season sales campaigns, and it’s also the time to make sure things are running smoothly. With a...
Conversion
Critique Part Five: Customer Experience & Usability

June 6, 2007 • Richard Kerr

The Problem: A blob of home-page text greets the consumer. The Fix: The home page could be improved by relocating its long introduction to either the bottom of the page or, preferably, to the "about us" section. This would free up enough space to display twice as many products as those...
Design & Development
Critique Part Four: Site Search

June 4, 2007 • PEC Staff

The Problem: The results aren't always relevant. The Fix: A search for "snowboard" returns wax as the top result — but no snowboard until the fourth page of results, even though the site has an entire section dedicated to snowboards. Similarly irrelevant results came back for "bindings...
SEO
Critique Part Three: Search Engine Optimization

June 4, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

The Problem: Long, complex URLs create search engine indexing issues. The Fix: Rewrite the URLs to eliminate "stop characters" from the URLs. You might wonder, "why bother?" when the dynamic pages are clearly getting indexed. Even so, studies undertaken by my company, Netconcepts, sho...
Google Ads
Critique Part Two: Pay-Per-Click Advertising

May 30, 2007 • PEC Staff

The Problem: A quick glance at Daddies Board Shop's Google account indicates in-depth keyword research was not performed. The Fix: It appears that the company chose keywords based on insider business knowledge but hasn't considered what terms people actually use to search. For example,...
Business
Critique Part One: General Internet Presence

May 30, 2007 • PEC Staff

The Problem: Daddiesboardshop.com isn't taking advantage of branding opportunities on video and social networking sites. The Fix: Aside from the videos I found on YouTube and Google Video (which are a great start), very little appears externally to distinguish the authenticity of the b...
Business
Daddiesboardshop.com Wins Site Review

May 30, 2007 • PEC Staff

Melanie Loveland and her son Dan built a business together around a mutual passion — snowboarding. What started as a small, brick-and-mortar store in Portland, Ore., has evolved into a full-fledged multichannel merchant. It was a process the owners didn't foresee when the business start...
Business
If Your ‘Baby Is Ugly,’ Fix It

May 29, 2007 • Michael A. Cox

You know those little spur-of-the-moment, do-it-on-a dare things that occasionally bring about permanent change Something like that happened to Shirley Tan. There she was in her third year at Golden Gate College in San Francisco, at work on a degree in international business. A friend...
Conversion
Improve Email Marketing With Co-registration

May 29, 2007 • Dave Young

Email marketing can be a powerful means to boost your company's revenues. However, before you can enjoy the many benefits of email marketing, it's necessary to build a solid email list. One way to do this involves using someone else's newsletter registration to acquire your own new memb...
Conversion
An Analytics Consulting Model for Small Businesses

May 28, 2007 • Dr. Ralph F. Wilson

Nearly all small businesses have a measurement system in place for their website (though too many aren't aware of the analytics data available from their web hosting service for no additional cost).
Design & Development
Online Payment Alternative: Bill Me Later

May 24, 2007 • PEC Staff

Vince Talbert is the vice president of marketing for I4 Commerce (pronounced "eye four commerce"), a company offering the online payment alternative Bill Me Later at. PeC: What does Bill Me Later provide to customers? Talbert: "It is a payment option designed so customers can make ...
Conversion
‘Exclusive Offers’ Help Retain Customers

May 24, 2007 • PEC Staff

Minding the Store is a classic book written by one of the all-time great merchants, Stanley Marcus of Neiman-Marcus fame. Its lessons were extensive, but taking care of the customer and delivering a well-merchandised experience were two of the essential components. Today, it is imperat...
Conversion
Comparison Sites Can Help Boost Sales

May 21, 2007 • PEC Staff

Shopping comparison sites enable merchants to market to the masses, but stepping into a competitive environment like BizRate, PriceGrabber or Shopping.com can seem pretty daunting to the owner of a small ecommerce business. However, three entrepreneurs say getting out of the comfort zon...