Page 269 – Practical Ecommerce

Category

Conversion
Site Search Can Pay Dividends

December 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Improved site search and "recommender" functions not only improve a user's experience at a website, but they can also help improve a site's sales, according to site-search professionals. Converting visitors into buyers frequently hinges on a site's ability to quickly and correctly get ...
Conversion
10 Tips To Improve Usability

December 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

In a brick-and-mortar enterprise, the problem would be so obvious, no one could ignore it. A tangle of abandoned shopping carts full of unpurchased goods means trouble. "All right," any serious business owner would ask, "What's going on here? What am I doing wrong?" Three questions ar...
Conversion
Great Ideas Roundtable

December 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

"What customers want is information. What makes them happy during their shopping experience is finding what they want, checking out hassle-free and feeling secure with their online payments when providing their personal information. What makes them unhappy is when they can not complete ...
Conversion
Need a Stocking Stuffer?

December 1, 2006 • Mat Greenfield

If you're anything like me, your focus dwindles over the holidays. So instead of providing you with tips that you don't have the energy to use, I thought that I'd briefly review some of the books that have shaped how I think about the web. Feel free to copy down this list and use it whe...
Conversion
Yahoo! Search Marketing Releases New Platform

December 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Yahoo! Search Marketing may have been a pioneer in the pay-per-click industry, but anyone who has ever used its advertiser's interface would probably agree that it has been light-years behind Google AdWords for quite some time. The interface is cumbersome, slow and just plain difficult ...
Business
Managing a High-risk Environment

December 1, 2006 • John W. Dozier, Jr.

We conduct a lot of website audits in which we go through a website, identify the legal issues and assist clients in effectively managing risks. We seem to be litigating these issues across the country regularly, so we have a pretty good view of the landscape. You want to get in trouble...
Fraud Prevention
Do Security Measures Boost Conversion?

December 1, 2006 • Kevin Gold

Achieving high performance for your ecommerce business is complicated. It requires building an effective combination of trust, convenience and relevance on your website using technology, design, usability and influence. If you consider industry statistics, you'll quickly realize why it...
Conversion
Local and Geo-target Searches: How Well Do They Work?

December 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Refining your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising strategies to include geotargeted searches can help a business owner focus promotion efforts and get more bang for the buck. However, not all search engines are created equally when it comes to managing a localized campaign. Geo-targeting i...
Business
Customer Experience Matters

December 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

After more than a decade of ecommerce activity and an arsenal of new technology at our disposal, it's still the basics that most sites haven't mastered. Problems in the checkout process and having products that are too hard to find remain among the top issues that irritate customers and...
Business
Siteworx’s Adelle Emery

December 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

What makes customers unhappy at a website? Adelle Emery, director of customer experience at Siteworx, answers the question and gives website owners tips on how to improve the customer’s experience ...
Checkout Tactics
Lowering Cart Abandonment

December 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

With shopping cart abandonment at a high level, ecommerce owners continue to look for ways to motivate shoppers to complete the checkout process. Research from Shop.org indicates shoppers abandon their cart during checkout more than 75 percent of the time. Imagine 75 percent of the gro...
Conversion
5 Benefits of Using Feeds

November 20, 2006 • PEC Staff

What's a Feed? Feeds are a way of sharing content. When you make material from your website available for publishing on other sites, you provide them with a feed. Basically, it's a code that lets them post your articles and blogs. There are different kinds of code - XML, RSS, Atom, etc...
Marketing & Advertising
Creativegood.com Consulting Director Ed Dawidowicz

November 20, 2006 • PEC Staff

Ed Dawidowicz, senior consulting director for Creativegood.com, provides a series of do-it-yourself tips to improve usability and customer experience at your website. He recently spoke with Practical eCommerce’s Mitch Bettis ...
Design & Development
Google Takes On Microsoft Office

November 20, 2006 • PEC Staff

Google's never made a secret of the fact that its vision of your future computer desktop does not include any Microsoft products. For Google, all you'll need is a browser, an Internet connection, and a Google account - everything else is optional! Google will provide for all your comput...
Business
Dieselpoint’s Chris Cleveland (Part 2)

November 13, 2006 • PEC Staff

In the second of a two-part series, Chris Cleveland CEO of Dieselpoint speaks with Practical eCommerce’s Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis about how site-search technology improves sales at websites. Cleveland also ...
Conversion
Making Liquidation Work For You

November 13, 2006 • PEC Staff

Liquidation is a very scary word for most of us. But the reason we get nervous is just because we really don't understand what liquidation is. One man who is extremely familiar with the process is Bob Nelson, president of Power Retailing, a retail consulting firm. Nelson explains liquid...
Conversion
Accessibility – The Wheelchair Ramp to Your Website

November 13, 2006 • PEC Staff

The original creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, dreamed of an information space that was open to everyone on the planet. But like many dreams, imagination took over and the vision became layered with roadblocks that effectively brought down the shutters for many users. Acc...
Business
Dieselpoint’s Chris Cleveland

November 6, 2006 • PEC Staff

In the first of a two-part series, Chris Cleveland CEO of Dieselpoint speaks with Practical eCommerce’s Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis about how site-search technology improves sales at websites. Cleveland also ...
Conversion
Diversify Traffic + Cultivate Subscribers = Win Big in Ebiz

November 6, 2006 • PEC Staff

The Amazon River starts as a drop of rain falling into a tiny trickle of a stream way up in the mountains of South America. At its end, the Amazon pumps up to 300,000 cubic meters of water into the Atlantic Ocean every second during the rainy season. To build from a trickle to a torrent...
Conversion
A Win-Win Situation: Why Affiliate Marketing Works

November 6, 2006 • PEC Staff

Affiliate marketing can be a profitable venture for you, as a merchant or affiliate. It presents you with a great opportunity to increase revenue, and build valuable business relationships. Affiliate Benefits and Resources As an affiliate partner, you're capitalizing on traffic you al...
Design & Development
Get To Know Your .htaccess File

November 1, 2006 • Brian Getting

A valuable tool many web developers either don't understand or aren't aware of is the .htaccess file. The file is available only to websites hosted on servers running the Apache web server, which is the overwhelming majority of hosting servers. An .htaccess file is a small, plain-text f...
Conversion
A Closer Look at Microsoft adCenter

November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Microsoft adCenter was officially launched in May 2006 after a nine-month beta period in the U.S. Surprisingly, however, many business owners and advertisers are not aware of its existence, and, among those who are, some are hesitant to try it out. While Google and Yahoo! have had pay...
Business
Protecting Your Domain Name

November 1, 2006 • John W. Dozier, Jr.

Domain names are addresses. But, of course, a domain name generates traffic, which means it is also a major sales source. The traffic could result from those typing in your name in the address bar of the browser, or it could be from search engines grading your website higher because of ...
Conversion
Usability Report Card: Hummerpartsclub.com

November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

In this Usability Report Card, we’re taking a look at Hummer Parts Club, an ecommerce store selling accessories for the full range of Hummers. I realize Hummers aren’t as innocuous as headsets or vinyl toys, but let’s put the politics aside and concentrate on improving an ecommerce stor...
Conversion
Six Tips For The Holidays

November 1, 2006 • Mat Greenfield

With the holiday shopping season upon us, the size of the ecommerce pie increases significantly. Here are some tips to make sure you get your fair slice: Create seasonal special offers Applying the concept of “showing visitors what they are looking for” is always important, but perhap...
Business
This Month: Adding Staff, Computers and Equipment

November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

As any ecommerce merchant knows, there’s more to launching a successful online business than just launching a website. Patrick Coughlin has owned and operated American Diamond Importers, an independent brick-and-mortar jewelry store in St. Clair, Mich., for almost 15 years. St. Clair i...
Conversion
Sales Tax Initiative Still Initiating

November 1, 2006 • Michael A. Cox

Ever since the Supreme Court of the United States put the burden back on the states to come up with a way to collect sales tax on millions of Internet sales, the Streamlined Sales Tax Project (SSTP) has been chipping away at the monumental task of getting 50 states and more than 7,000 t...
Conversion
Product Sourcing: Online Consignment Business

November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Consignment is a simple concept: taking other people’s products and selling them for a percentage of the sale. According to Skip McGrath, of Skipmcgrath.com, a successful eBay PowerSeller, “[Consignment selling] is the fastest-growing phenomenon on eBay.” The key to successful online co...
SEO
SEO Report Card: Coolbugstuff.com

November 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

This month I’ve chosen a fun, quirky ecommerce site, Coolbugstuff.com about insects. Seth Prezant, founder and “bugmaster” (gotta love that title) at Cool Bug, LLC, explains he had an outside company assemble the website for him, and it has been in operation for almost five months. Unfo...
Design & Development
Quick Query: Second Bite’s Chad Herman

November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

PeC: What does Second Bite do for online businesses? Herman: Second Bite gives the merchant the opportunity to remarket to any individual who, for whatever reason, is not able to complete the purchase at the time of the site visit. We get back in front of that consumer with a target...