Page 270 – Practical Ecommerce

Category

Design & Dev Tools
Experiencing Server Overload

November 1, 2006 • Pamela Hazelton

Each month I talk about things I’ve learned by watching how other store owners run their businesses. Not that I don’t make my own mistakes, but I often try to keep my own embarrassing moments to myself. Until now... I’ve talked before about what to look for in a hosting company. I’ve t...
Amazon & Marketplaces
Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne

November 1, 2006 • Michael A. Cox

A doctorate in philosophy from Stanford University probably helps Founder, CEO, and Chairman Patrick Byrne deal with the daily esotericism that goes with running a company like Overstock.com ...
Business
Ongoing Growth Challenges Carolina Rustica

November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Richard Sexton has parlayed his 10 years of brick-and-mortar success into a dynamic multichannel sales business with Carolina Rustica. With a combination of brick-and-mortar and online sales, Carolina Rustica expects to generate about $3.5 million in 2006, a 30 percent increase from the...
Design & Development
Tech Support: November 2006

November 1, 2006 • Brian Getting

What are Technorati tags and what do they do? Technorati is a website that provides an index of the web, allowing people to find up-to-the-minute information and web content. One of the ways Technorati achieves this is by using content tags, which are also used by other sites, that pro...
SEO
SEO: Choosing a Vendor

November 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

Selecting an SEO vendor to help improve your site’s searchengine visibility is fraught with hidden dangers.What if the vendor uses unscrupulous tactics without your knowledge, and you get penalized? What if they make promises that they can’t possibly keep? What if they just aren’t very ...
Conversion
Multichannel Tools

November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Research indicates that multichannel shoppers are more valuable than customers who shop via a single sales channel, but findings by San Francisco-based firm Modalis Research Technologies show that multichannel buyers expect the company to know everything about their transaction history ...
Conversion
Marketplaces: A Great Entry Point

November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

If a merchant is wanting to begin selling online or take a small step toward diversifying into new sales channels, one of the public marketplaces, namely eBay and Amazon, is typically a safe environment for rookies. Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor, says that, as a general rule, his f...
Conversion
Catalogs Make A Comeback

November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Ecommerce is to traditional business methods what a sci-fi cruiser is to a Model T. It’s all about technology, convenience, responsiveness—up-to-date stuff light years away fromthe sepia-toned days ofmail-order catalogs. Or so it would seem. But consider this: the humble catalog is onc...
Business
Carolina Rustica’s Richard Sexton

November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Richard Sexton has parlayed his 10 years of brick-and-mortar success into a dynamic multichannel sales business with Carolina Rustica. With a combination of brick-and-mortar and online sales, Carolina Rustica expects ...
Business
ChannelAdvisor’s Scot Wingo

November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

ChannelAdvisor CEO Scot Wingo discusses the new opportunities businesses have with the advent of new online sales channels. ChannelAdvisor provides consulting and software to help merchants deploy products across multiple ...
Business
Merchant Advantage’s Michael Lambert

November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Are you wondering why you should you be pushing products to shopping comparison sites or are you looking for a tool that can help you push products to various shopping ...
Business
Stone Edge Technology’s Barney Stone

November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Do you need an order management solution to help manage activity from multiple sales channels? Are you struggling to manage the mounds of paperwork from sales that come to your ...
Conversion
Comparison Shopping Sites

November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

With millions of ready-to-buy consumers turning to shopping comparison sites, experts advise retailers to consider participating in one of the Internet's newest sales channels. Shopping comparison sites like Yahoo! Shopping, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, NexTag, Froogle, Jellyfish and other...
Conversion
What Is Multichannel Selling?

November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Defining multichannel selling has taken a new twist in recent years, but the end result is the same for merchants — getting products to sell in the hands of potential customers. In the old days (about 10 years ago), multichannel selling consisted of two options — brick-and-mortar stores...
Business
Infopia’s Ralf VonSosen

November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Ralf VonSosen, vice president of Infopia (www.infopia.com), a company that provides an ecommerce platform to help merchants manage multichannel sales endeavors, speaks about how to begin thinking about selling in ...
Business
Newsletter Tips from Blue Penguin

October 23, 2006 • PEC Staff

Michael J. Katz is founder and “chief penguin” of Blue Penguin Development, Inc., a consulting firm helping companies increase sales by showing CEOs how to market to their existing relationships,
Conversion
Why Your Business Should Be Blogging

October 23, 2006 • PEC Staff

Whereas letter writing was the primary method of communicating with friends, family, heads of state, and businesses 150 years ago, today's blogs have become a major means of interpersonal and mass communication. Before there was telephone or TV or Internet, people actually enjoyed lette...
Conversion
Pay-Per-Call: A Smarter Way to Advertise

October 23, 2006 • PEC Staff

Pay-per-call has been one of the trends in online marketing recently. In fact, pay-per-performance advertising, overall, is gaining ground as more and more businesses discover the high value proposition it provides. Different search engines are incorporating this type of marketing, incl...
Business
Email Marketing Tips from Clint Smith

October 16, 2006 • PEC Staff

How frequently should I send email marketing messages and newsletters to my customers, what should I put in the subject line to improve the open rate, and how to include ...
Code
Flash or HTML: Which to Choose

October 16, 2006 • Brian Getting

The question of whether it is better to design a website using Flash rather than using just HTML has sparked many debates among web developers. For the most part, it seems that developers tend to defend what they know, although there are some important differences between a pure HTML we...
Business
MyEmma.com’s Clint Smith Part 2

October 8, 2006 • PEC Staff

Are you still using Outlook Express or another text-based email client to email information to your customer base? Are you afraid to convert to and .html-based email service because you ...
Design & Development
Email: How It Works

October 7, 2006 • Brian Getting

Email has become one of the primary sources of communication among people in the world today, yet how it works remains a bit of a mystery to many people. In order to shed some light on the subject, let’s follow an email message from the sender to the recipient. Most people use some sor...
Design & Development
How To Start a Video Blog

October 7, 2006 • PEC Staff

Web logs, commonly referred to as "blogs," came into the mainstream about two years ago. Not really a newsletter or traditional .html-page publishing, blogs resemble more of a web-based diary where the creator records their thoughts, posts links or responds to questions. Initially, bl...
Design & Development
Should you consider a .ws domain?

October 4, 2006 • Dr. Ralph F. Wilson

"Exploding" is marketer's hype, perhaps to press full advantage out of GDI's multi-tier affiliate marketing structure (5 levels), "with the potential to earn commissions on unlimited levels as a GDI Master Affiliate."
Design & Development
Tech Support: October 2006

October 2, 2006 • Brian Getting

Question: I keep hearing about a two-tiered Internet. What is that? Brian Getting: Two-tiered Internet refers to the attempt by major telecommunication companies, who provide the infrastructure for Internet communications, to send information across the Internet in two separate speed...
Business
Website Profile – Satellite Radio Superstore

October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Matt and Amiee Moffett launched the Satellite Radio Superstore three years ago have an quickly built their site into one of the top 10 independent retailers for XM Radio. Sales ...
Business
Scene7’s Sheila Dahlgren

October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Scene7 is another leading company in the image management business. Scene7 provides services that can improve the product display features on ecommerce sites including zoom and pan features, online catalogs ...
Business
Equilibrium’s Sean Barger

October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Equilibrium is one company in the marketplace that automates imaging solutions and offers various display options including zoom and pan features. Sean Barger, CEO of Equilibrium, says there’s been a ...
Conversion
Language Translation Creates New Options

October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

For English, press one. Para español, la prensa dos.” The familiarity of this everyday message shows us how companies are increasingly recognizing the need to alter their business practices to reach new demographics through multilingual communications. No speak English According to t...
Code
Tech Support: Isolate CSS and Javascript

October 1, 2006 • Brian Getting

Last month we discussed the separation of content, design and functionality when it comes to developing a website. We introduced the idea that HTML documents should contain primarily content, with as little markup code as possible. The reason for this is that any extra code dilutes the ...