Page 273 – Practical Ecommerce

Category

Conversion
Q&A: Outlook for Search Advertising Prices

August 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Will ecommerce firms pay more or less for paid search ads in the near future? Google’s net profit in 2005 exceeded 30 percent of gross revenue. This is a huge profit margin compared to many other companies and industries. Yahoo!, MSN and Ask.com are investing heavily for a portion of t...
Conversion
Vertical Search Could Mean Better ROI

August 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Raise your hand if you’ve implemented or managed a Google AdWords campaign for your online business. Instantly, thousands of hands just touched the sky. According to JupiterResearch, advertising trends online have mirrored those in traditional television and print media. What many onli...
Conversion
PPC Expense: What Is A Customer Worth?

August 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

When determining how much to spend on a pay-per-click campaign, an etailer should first calculate what a customer is worth to his business. Getting a customer to purchase a single product isn’t the goal of most ecommerce site owners. However, most owners fail to calculate the potential...
Business
Website Profile: Selling Fish Makes Online Niche

August 1, 2006 • Michael A. Cox

In Meredith Wilson's The Music Man, the opening number has a gang of traveling salesmen pattering cleverly about how a salesman’s got to know the territory and his products. Professor Harold Hill was declared a fake — he didn’t know the territory. When it comes to selling salmon, wild ...
SEO
SEO: Harness the Power of CSS

August 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a technology popular with web developers who care about web standards and accessibility. But it should also be a technology embraced by anyone who cares about SEO. It's amazing You can do amazing things with CSS. For example, you can completely eliminat...
SEO
SEO Report Card: KayakFishingStuff.com

August 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

In many ways this site was a breath of fresh air. From an SEO standpoint, Kayak Fishing Stuff is doing a number of things right, and it shows in their No. 1 rankings in Google for “kayak fishing," "fishing kayak” and "fishing kayaks." Of course, there is still room for improvement, but ...
Business
Jupiter Research’s Patti Freeman Evans

August 1, 2006 • Michael A. Cox

Patti Freeman Evans has been in the ecommerce industry before the beginning. For the past 19 years she has been creating customer-centric ecommerce sites, integrating channels effectively, developing innovative marketing initiatives and ensuring high-standard customer service and order-...
Conversion
Email Marketing Fosters Long-Term Relationships

August 1, 2006 • Kerry Murdock

The use of email is changing the way businesses communicate with their customers. Rather than using email solely to offer products for sale, many businesses now use it to communicate helpful information to shoppers who request it. This helpful information creates a relationship with a s...
Business
Product Sourcing: The Skinny on Government Auctions

August 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Are government auctions really a good source for purchasing products for resale? The answer to that is they can be, but you have to know what you are doing. Where do government auctions get their products? Government auctions can be held online, live ‘in-person’ or sealedbid. They acq...
Conversion
Use In-store Kiosks to Promote Website

August 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

When was the last time you were shopping for an item you just had to have, only to discover when you got to the store you couldn’t buy it in the color or size you wanted? If you are like most retail shoppers, you have experienced an out-of-stock situation recently. This is one of the m...
Business
Trademark Registration

August 1, 2006 • John W. Dozier, Jr.

This article will be the first of three covering trademarks, copyrights and patents. The decision as to whether to register each is based upon unique business considerations. For trademark registration, there is a process to go through in evaluating the cost and benefit of federal regis...
Conversion
Pay-Per-Call: New Player on the Scene?

August 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Online advertising is heating up and growing quickly in popularity. However, many companies are missing out if they don’t have a website or if their services are not fit to be sold over the web. Fortunately, a new version of paid advertising has emerged recently — pay-per-call. Pay-per...
Conversion
Rethinking Conversion Rates

August 1, 2006 • Mat Greenfield

When I'm not writing for Practical eCommerce, I spend my professional life running a “boutique” web-consulting firm. As a result, I get involved in numerous sales meetings. I’ve noticed something of a trend recently with companies evaluating our services asking for third-party “research...
Business
Quick Query: RedRoller.com’s Bill Van Wyck

August 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

What Travelocity does for travel, RedRoller does for shipping packages. The site is built to look and feel like an etravel site. Shipping for small businesses is a day-to-day occurrence. The typical ecommerce business spends close to $1,000 per month and ships 120-150 packages every month.
Analytics & Data
Email: Confidentiality Required

August 1, 2006 • Pamela Hazelton

I get thousands of emails each day. A good majority are spam, and I use Cloudmark (the best system I’ve found) for filtering them. Being in business, however, I still have to take the time to scan them all, making sure I’m not missing an initial request for work from someone who may hav...
Business
Tech Support: August 2006

August 1, 2006 • Brian Getting

Question: My web host has different bandwidth levels depending on the price. How can I compute what my ecommerce site's bandwidth needs are? Brian Getting: Bandwidth can be a tough one to understand for most people. I like to use the analogy of a water pipe where the speed of your In...
Design & Development
Use Scripting for Dynamic Websites

August 1, 2006 • Brian Getting

One of the first tasks when planning a website is to develop a strategy for delivering content and functionality to visitors. Since a website is a collection of HTML documents, the most basic approach is to simply code the information you want into these documents. Using this method re...
Conversion
Web Design: Function Trumps Form

July 11, 2006 • PEC Staff

A well-designed site is important, but it will not be the key factor in determining your sales success. It's not uncommon for a business owner to turn to a design-oriented person to help create a website for his company. That may, however, be a mistake. Conversion specialists routinely...
Business
Website User Agreements

July 1, 2006 • John W. Dozier, Jr.

Website user agreements establish the terms under which the relationship between a visitor and a site is governed. A common practice for small websites is to "borrow" language and attempt to customize the terminology to fit their needs. The problem is that drafting a websiteuser agreeme...
Conversion
Five Great Conversion Tips

July 1, 2006 • Mat Greenfield

These conversion tips can be implemented by a business owner in just a few days with the possible aid of a competent web programmer. When implemented, the tips can make a profound difference on the conversions rates of an ecommerce business. The tips are: Simplify your home page. ...
Conversion
There’s More to Conversion Than a Sale

July 1, 2006 • Lisa Wehr

Consider the long and short of e-retailing. As competition rises and tracking becomes more sophisticated, ecommerce merchants are looking for more ways to improve their sales performance. The answer may lie in how they define success. There’s more to a conversion than a sale. Here’s wha...
Conversion
Turning Visitors Into Customers

July 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

It may be the most common problem ecommerce businesses face: plenty of traffic but few sales. Converting visitors into customers is a blend of both art and science and, once it’s understood, it’s a skill that will reap rewards for a company’s bottom line. The Web Analytics Association ...
SEO
SEO Report Card: Zearth.Blogspot.com

July 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

Since this month’s article is on blogs and SEO, it makes sense for me to evaluate an etailer’s blog for this month’s SEO Report Card. Zearth.com’s staff operates a blog at Zearth.blogspot.com, although they are relatively new to the concept. They’ve had it up for just a few months. They...
Business
AbeBooks.com Co-founder Rick Pura

July 1, 2006 • Michael A. Cox

Rick Pura just finished writing the software code for "Rick’s Search Engine." He thinks it works pretty well, and he may go into the search engine business.
Conversion
Measuring Conversion Success

July 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

An ecommerce site with 6 to 9 percent of its visitors making purchases can be considered a success, according to conversion experts. With an industry standard hovering around 1 to 2 percent, most sites are failing to capture all the business they can have. Once a company makes a commit...
Conversion
Integrating Bricks and Mortar with eCommerce

July 1, 2006 • Kevin Gold

Today‘s shopper expects convenience. Merchants integrating brick-and-mortar stores, ecommerce sites and catalogs will increase repeat purchase rates and achieve higher levels of customer satisfaction. In any multi-channel retail consumer interaction, traffic and sales are being driven ...
Google Ads
Tips & Tricks for Discovering Lowcost Keywords

July 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Keywords are considered the lifeline of any successful pay per click campaign. If you select the wrong ones, you can zip through your entire advertising budget without getting anything in return. If you choose the right ones, you can beat your competition to the punch and get a better R...
Product Pages
Showcase Products Via Podcasts

July 1, 2006 • Pamela Hazelton

I’m addicted to the They Might Be Giants podcasts. I'm convinced they helped sell tickets for their latest tour by offering up free music, coupled with tour advertisements, in their weekly podcasts. I'll bet podcasting some of the tours' live performances also helped. But, can podcasti...
Business
Quick Query: Coremetrics’ Jane Paolucci

July 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

PeC: Why is conversion important to ecommerce businesses? Paolucci: Ecommerce businesses are constantly seeking new ways to enhance their websites to drive incremental revenue, reduce costs associated with customer acquisition and sales and increase customer loyalty. While driving ...
Conversion
Web Design: Multiple Roles

July 1, 2006 • Mat Greenfield

A web redesign project is not a one-man assignment. Certainly technology has made it possible for a single graphic designer or programmer to build a site, but not a high conversion site (in my humble opinion). Instead, I think there are a number of key roles that must be fulfilled in o...