Page 277 – Practical Ecommerce

Category

Shipping & Fulfillment
Order Management Software Saves Time, Reduces Errors

January 1, 2006 • Michael A. Cox

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” When Charles Dickens opened his classic A Tale of Two Cities with those words he was thinking only about the French Revolution. But his words strike equally apropos in the entrepreneurial revolution of the 21st century. It is the ...
Analytics & Data
Web Analytics: Understanding Visitor Behavior

January 1, 2006 • Brian Getting

In the beginning, there were “hit counters”. Occasionally you will still see one at the bottom of a website, prominently displaying the number of hits over a given time frame. There was a time when the success of a website was gauged solely on this number, with a site that received many...
Analytics & Data
Google Analytics Draws Industry Reaction

January 1, 2006 • Brian Getting

On November 14, 2005, Google announced its free, hosted web analytics service. Based on the Urchin analytics platform, which Google acquired earlier in the year, the service boasts website analysis tools aimed at executives, marketers, and webmasters. According to a Google press release,...
Code
HTML Email: Effectiveness Requires Planning

January 1, 2006 • Brian Getting

Email can be an essential tool for every online retailer. Professional-looking emails instill confidence, build brand awareness, and increase customer loyalty. Retailers can send email communications using HTML that are as visually engaging and effective. There are a couple of points, h...
Marketing & Advertising
Be Careful of the Number 1 Spot

January 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Pay-Per-Click advertising works in an auction-based format, since there are a number of advertisers competing for the same keywords. The higher you bid, the higher your ad will appear. Bids can range anywhere from a few cents to several dollars per click, based on how competitive the in...
Social Media
Successful Blogging: Utilize the Four

January 1, 2006 • Paul Chaney

Everyone remembers the three “R’s” from your school days: Reading, ‘Riting, and ‘Rithmetic. These three areas are considered essential to building a good educational foundation. Similarly, there are also some basic essentials to strategic blogging. I would like to present the four “R’s”...
SEO
Search Engine Optimization: Avoid Complex URLs

January 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

Search engines tend to have problems fully indexing dynamic websites (in other words, sites that are hooked up to a database of content). The kinds of sites that search engines have the biggest trouble with are ones that have overly complex URL structures, including numerous variables ...
Business
Relentlessimprovement.com Succeeds with Nutritional Supplements

January 1, 2006 • Michael A. Cox

Peter Hitesman was a loan officer for a banking institution in what he would consider his past life. It was a job that required an extreme attention to detail, intense customer service, and often times long hours. But he traded that all in one day for a new life as the owner of his own ...
Platforms & Apps
osCommerce Founder: Open Source Encourages Collaboration

January 1, 2006 • Brian Getting

Harald Ponce de Leon had an idea to create an online shopping cart system that would serve as a guide to other ecommerce developers. That was in 2000.
Business
Ten Things You Absolutely, Positively Need to Know When You Get Sued

January 1, 2006 • John W. Dozier, Jr.

It’s one of those unanticipated business problems. The cost of dealing with it can be overwhelming. The risk of loss to you and your business is huge. While you are in the middle of managing ecommerce operations, sales, billing, advertising, fulfillment, and the day to day challenges in...
Conversion
Customer Service Focus – January 2006

January 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

As I have mentioned many times before, communication is the key to excellent customer service. One of the primary ways that merchants communicate with customers is via email. Steve Walker, owner of Rescuepetstore.com said, “If I don't receive proper notification and follow-up from an e...
Conversion
Use Web Analytics to Improve Profits for New Year

January 1, 2006 • Mat Greenfield

I love this quote by Albert Einstein: “Insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result.” It’s a great concept to bear in mind as the New Year begins. I expect many of you are looking for better results from your marketing, and Einstein reminds us that sticki...
Customer Retention
Reaping Holiday Sales in January

January 1, 2006 • Pamela Hazelton

So many online stores put all of their focus into attracting holiday shoppers during the end of the year that they overlook the fact that the month of January can also be profitable. At the very least, planning ahead to handle holiday returns and exchanges can help reduce the burden of ...
Code
An Introduction to CSS: Part 3

January 1, 2006 • Brian Getting

In this tutorial, we will introduce the idea of using CSS to format a web page by using ID selectors. By using techniques from our previous tutorials, we will create an entire page formatted with only CSS.
Code
Encoding Images Using HTML

January 1, 2006 • Brian Getting

Overview One of the most basic HTML elements is the image tag, which is used to tell a browser to display an image on a webpage. While it is a simple tag to learn, the image tag has quite a few attributes that are important to be aware of. For example, using these attributes we can tel...
SEO
SEO Report Card: Balancedlifeproducts.com

January 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

Welcome to “SEO Report Card”, where I assess how well search engine optimized a selected ecommerce site is. For this first installment, our guinea pig is BalancedLifeProducts.com, a small ecommerce site, based in Madison, Wisconsin, that sells meditation and massage products such as yog...
Shipping & Fulfillment
International Shipments Worth the Effort

December 1, 2005 • Brian Getting

One of the greatest attractions of an online business is the vast number of customers that the Internet allows a retailer to reach. Web surfers from all over the world can navigate beyond the boundaries and borders that exist in the physical world to find the products and services that ...
Shipping & Fulfillment
Fulfillment Help: Try Order Management Software

December 1, 2005 • Brian Getting

Online retailers know that there are many steps required from receiving a sales order to actually shipping it. For many retailers, these steps are separate and distinct: Print the order, enter it into accounting software, produce a shipping label, generate an inventory slip, email the c...
Business
eCommerce Sales Taxes: Determine Your Liability

December 1, 2005 • PEC Staff

Nexus – What Is It? Nexus is defined as a “connection” or “link.” In the world of lawyers, accountants and auditors, a nexus is an effective connection of a person or a company to a state so that the state has the ‘right’ to enforce its laws, and more importantly, its tax rules, agains...
Social Media
eCommerce Marketing: Use Email, Blogs and RSS Together

December 1, 2005 • Paul Chaney

Think of things that just naturally go together and what comes to mind? Peanut butter and jelly for one, ham and cheese for another. How about a hammer and nails or a table and chairs? In terms of online marketing, two strategies go together equally as well: email and blogs. Email is t...
Marketing & Advertising
Use Google’s Site Targeting

December 1, 2005 • PEC Staff

Google advertisers, rejoice! If you ever wished you could pick and choose which sites across Google AdSense network your ads will appear, now you can! In a recent development, Google AdWords introduced a new advertising model called Site Targeting, which gives you the ability to target...
SEO
Search Engine Optimization: Writing Effectively

December 1, 2005 • Stephan Spencer

In order to achieve maximum search engine visibility, you need to think a bit like a search engine when writing the copy for your website. Search engines look at the HTML code that makes up your web page and attempts to parse out the textual copy on the page, eliminating the HTML markup...
Design & Development
Optimizing Your Product Images

December 1, 2005 • Brian Getting

Overview Product presentation is more important for an online store than it is for a brick-and-mortar store. Rather than being able to touch an item, inspect it for quality, or try it on as the case may be, an online shopper has only two-dimensional images on which to base their decisi...
Design & Development
Introduction to XML: Creating a Google Sitemap

December 1, 2005 • Brian Getting

Overview Last month, we featured a basic introduction of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and how to begin writing your own XML documents. While we were able to create an XML document to describe data, it may not be clear why this is useful. In an effort to utilize what we learned ...
Code
An Introduction to CSS: Part 2

December 1, 2005 • Brian Getting

In "Part 1" of this CSS tutorial, we learned how to apply CSS styles to HTML tags using tag selectors. Using these tag selectors we could format information using an external style sheet rather than putting all the formatting code into the HTML.
Business
1-800-Bakery.com Links Bakeries with Consumers

December 1, 2005 • Brian Getting

Award winning bakery chef Stephen Pazyra thinks bakery items are more than mere food. To him, baked goods represent comfort foods that evoke nostalgia, bring back memories, and make people feel good. As the co-owner of 1-800-Bakery, Inc., he strives to bring the customer experience of y...
Business
North Dakota Senator Leads National Sales Tax Project

December 1, 2005 • Michael A. Cox

Quick, what’s six-point-five percent of $171 billion. It’s about $11.1 billion. That is approximately the amount of sales and/or use tax revenues that would be due states, counties and cities on the ecommerce activity on the Internet this year, if it were all collectable, based on an ...
Conversion
Home Pages for the Holidays

December 1, 2005 • PEC Staff

With winter approaching, it’s time to start thinking about those holiday decorations, parties and gifts that will make the long, cold nights feel a little warmer and brighter. Whether you celebrate religiously or purely for the fun of it, here are a few sites that prove a little devotio...
Conversion
Customer Service Focus – December 2005

December 1, 2005 • PEC Staff

This month we are focusing on a several online businesses to see how different merchants deliver excellent customer service. We asked four merchants what was the single most important thing they did to deliver quality customer service. Marilyn Lysohir, Owner of CowgirlChocolates.com sa...
Business
Internet Businesses: Pioneers Still Get Arrows in Their Backs

December 1, 2005 • John W. Dozier, Jr.

When I started my first ecommerce company in February 1994 all of my friends thought I was crazy to leave a successful law practice and pursue my vision of the future…the ability to conduct financial transactions in “cyberspace”. There were less than 1,000 websites online worldwide and ...