Page 265 – Practical Ecommerce

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Marketing & Advertising
How To Create ‘Buzz,’ Boost Traffic At Your Site

May 21, 2007 • PEC Staff

Over the last year or so, "social media" has quickly become the next "big" thing online. A plethora of social communities with names like Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, Wikipedia and YouTube have popped up to connect people who share common interests. As impressive as all that may sou...
Business
The Entrepreneur, The Optimist

May 16, 2007 • PEC Staff

Patrick Coughlin is experiencing firsthand the same challenges many online entrepreneurs face: It's hard to build a successful online business. Coughlin has owned a successful brick-and-mortar jewelry store in St. Clair, Mich., for 15 years. That business had grown to fill a 3,000-squa...
Business
Ebiz Start-up: Selling Online Is Hard Work

May 16, 2007 • PEC Staff

Seven months into the operation of his new ecommerce store, Pat Coughlin's goal of reaching $1 million in sales is nowhere in sight — but that hasn't curbed his enthusiasm for the online venture. Coughlin, longtime owner of a successful jewelry store in St. Clair, Mich., won an eBay ...
Conversion
Aligning Keywords And Landing Pages

May 16, 2007 • Kevin Gold

As a child you probably played "connect the dots," drawing a line from number to number to create a picture that answered a riddle. Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing presents a similar "connect the dots" scenario. The "dots" are points within the customer experience value chain. This chain...
SEO
SEO Report Card: Error Pages Create Big Issues

May 14, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

Modernmini sells modern-style babies' and children's furniture, toys, bedding and more. Its site is powered by the Zoovy platform. Founder Pazit Kagel, a designer and mother of three, requested a site grade, and I'm happy to oblige. The URLs contain session IDs — a no-no for SEO — bu...
Conversion
Show-Me-The-Money Conversion Ratios

May 11, 2007 • PEC Staff

When I begin an ecommerce optimization engagement, there are four key ratios that I immediately look for. And as strange as it might sound, the site's overall conversion ratio is not one of them — at least not directly. To be fair, the four ratios that I'm primarily interested in are a...
Business
Toolking.com: From eBay to $31 Million Empire

May 9, 2007 • Michael A. Cox

If you order pliers from Toolking.com, you really can't just order pliers. You need to know what kind. Do you want locking pliers? Needle nose pliers? Tongue-and-groove pliers, slip-joint pliers, linesman's pliers, diagonal cutting pliers, electrician's pliers, hose clamp pliers ...
Conversion
Tools To Boost Conversion

May 9, 2007 • PEC Staff

Most ebusiness owners can find ways to increase traffic to their site, but turning a visitor into a buyer remains an ongoing challenge. To get a visitor at your site to do what you want him/her to do - whether it is signing up for a newsletter, buying a product online or some other des...
Conversion
Earn Affiliate Commissions

May 7, 2007 • PEC Staff

Say you run a smaller ecommerce operation that sells specialized running shoes, but nothing else. Your customers might request running apparel, but you don't carry running apparel, and you don't want to stock it. "There are dozens of large companies that sell running apparel," says Dio...
Link Building
SEO: Link Baiting Tips To ‘Juice’ Your Site

May 7, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

Link bait, simply put, is content that is so funny, so interesting, so useful, or otherwise remarkable that it becomes irresistible to bloggers and website owners, who set up links from their pages to the original material. I've seen link bait take the form of Top 10 lists, humorous vid...
Business
Video Tutorial: Choosing the Right Image Format

May 2, 2007 • Brian Getting

Choosing the right image format for publishing images on the web can be tricky. After all, you don't want to spend hours and hours cleaning up a product image and making it look irresistible to your customers, only to have it distorted and ruined when you save it in a web format.
Design & Development
Installing Google Maps On Your Site

May 2, 2007 • Brian Getting

Implementing Google Maps into your website is an easy way to provide rich, interactive map features that can help your customers find your business. Of particular interest to brick-and-mortar stores, Google Maps provides an Application Programming Interface (API) that makes it easy fo...
SEO
SEO Report Card: Need Pages At Product Level

May 2, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

One site review request really stood out in this month's batch. Kyle Kano is the owner and operator of The Honey Jar, and he is just 17 years old. Kyle got the idea for his online business when, on a family trip to Colorado, he noticed a shop selling Honeyville Honey — a product made lo...
Conversion
Free Search-Marketing Tools

April 30, 2007 • PEC Staff

During the last few years, the search engine marketing (SEM) industry has grown significantly. Many new resources have popped up to offer all kinds of information and advice. However, many people find this avalanche of information overwhelming. How can you distinguish the truly useful a...
Staffing
When Is It Time To Hire A Call Center?

April 30, 2007 • PEC Staff

More business is a good thing, but it creates challenges: A backlog of tasks, costly space and equipment demands and, frequently, a phone that won’t stop ringing. Many ecommerce business owners turn to customer call centers for help. That was the case for Revival Animal Health of Orang...
Design & Development
Analysis: The New PayPal

April 26, 2007 • Massimo Arrigoni

To more than 50 million users, PayPal used to signify a peer-to-peer payment exchange that relied largely on email notifications. Not anymore. While PayPal still stands as one of the most recognized brands in the ecommerce world, it’s no longer a single payment system: It's a suite of d...
Conversion
Selling With A Blog

April 26, 2007 • PEC Staff

Interactive marketing has its fashionable trends like any other industry, and the business blog has been its red carpet champion for the past few years. Heck, the blog has gained such widespread popularity that it's almost become passe in some circles — particularly among those who look...
Business
Legal: Your Domain Is At Risk

April 23, 2007 • John W. Dozier, Jr.

The lawyers at my firm represent registrars. We also represent domain name owners. And we sometimes represent domain name thieves (yes, everyone is entitled to an attorney). Here is an insider's perspective on the new dynamics at play in domain name cybersquatting. Most domain owners t...
Design & Development
Basic Definitions: Web 1.0, Web. 2.0, Web 3.0

April 18, 2007 • Brian Getting

“What is web 2.0?” We receive this question often. It likely has as many answers as the number of people using the term. However, since talk of web 3.0 has ...
Platforms & Apps
What Do You Dislike About Your Shopping Cart?

April 18, 2007 • PEC Staff

Readers weigh in on what they would like to see improved with their carts. 1ShoppingCart "We offer live UPS shipping rates, but for some reason 1ShoppingCart is only set up for commercial rates. It should default to residential rates. I would guess there are five residential buyers ...
SEO
SEO: Google Cracks Open Its Black Box

April 16, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

Wouldn't it be great if Google offered insight into how your website stacks up against its super-secret algorithms? What ails your site when it comes to SEO and what could be done better? Google Webmaster Central does just that, by offering a plethora of diagnostic and statistical tools...
Business
Can Product Recommendations Help You?

April 16, 2007 • PEC Staff

Most people prefer to get an opinion before purchasing a product — and if that opinion is from a current user, all the better. This desire to make informed buying decisions has given rise to product recommendation networks, such as Thisnext.com, which allow consumers to express opinions...
Business
Crash Course on Pay-Per-Click Arbitrage

April 11, 2007 • PEC Staff

If you've spent any time on pay-per-click (PPC) forums or in the blogosphere, you've probably heard about PPC arbitrage — the ill-reputed practice that drives bid prices up and makes life more difficult for advertisers. So, what exactly is it, and how can it affect you as an advertiser?...
Business
Yahoo! Panama: So Far, So Good

April 11, 2007 • PEC Staff

Yahoo!'s new paid-search advertising platform is performing well for advertisers. That's according to executives with three companies that have used the new system, known informally as Panama, since its inception earlier this year. Leigh Vosler is paid placement marketing manager with ...
Design & Development
What is Ruby on Rails?

April 9, 2007 • Brian Getting

First there was Ruby, and now there is Ruby on Rails. Ruby is an open-source web-programming language that was developed in Japan in 1995. Ruby resides on your web server and operates similarly to other programming languages, such as PHP, ASP and Perl. “Rails” is a separate pre-built ...
Business
PPC, Copywriting, Product Images

April 9, 2007 • PEC Staff

When jeweler Pat Coughlin decided to expand his brick-and-mortar business to include an ecommerce store, he set an ambitious goal to generate $1 million in online sales in the first 12 months. To pull off that feat, he hired six staff members to lead critical parts of the new endeavor. ...
Design & Development
Why Authenticate Email?

April 9, 2007 • Brian Getting

Mail servers require a username and password authentication for outgoing mail (mail being sent from your computer to someone else) so the servers can maintain control over who is allowed to use the resource. The first, and probably most obvious, motivation is to control email spam. By r...
Business
Self-service Shouldn’t Replace Customer Service

April 9, 2007 • PEC Staff

Customers are satisfied with their ecommerce experiences and in many cases seem to prefer online buying to brick-and-mortar shopping trips. That's what recent studies show — but it doesn't mean virtual merchants should allow complacency to take hold. The web is experiencing unprecedent...
Conversion
Contextual Advertising: What You Need to Know

April 4, 2007 • PEC Staff

If you have considered using contextual advertising through a Google content network — or any other venue — there are a few things to consider before you give it a try. Contextual advertising is what you experience when ads based on the content of a web page you're viewing dynamically ...
SEO
SEO Report Card: The Google Death Sentence

April 4, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

Seasonal online businesses, Gifts By Delivery, have it tough. During most of the year, they live lean while sales slow to a trickle. Then autumn comes and the manna begins to rain down from heaven. For Gifts By Delivery, the ramp-up begins in early October. The fourth quarter last ye...