Category

Amazon & Marketplaces

In an ecommerce world increasingly dominated by Amazon and other huge marketplaces, we address how independent merchants can best use those channels to grow their businesses and brands. We analyze selling tools, listing optimization strategies, multichannel selling options, back-office efficiencies, pros and cons, common mistakes, and much more.

Amazon & Marketplaces > Merchant Voice
Ecommerce brands vs. Amazon sellers

June 27, 2016 • Peter Keller

I’ve worked in ecommerce for 15 years. When I started, those of us in the industry made the rules as we went along. No one knew for sure what would ...
Amazon & Marketplaces > Merchant Voice
For marketplace selling, know written and unwritten rules

June 18, 2016 • Richard Stubbings

If you are selling on a third-party site like Amazon or Ebay, it is important to understand the rules — the written rules and the unwritten ones. The unwritten rules ...
Amazon & Marketplaces
Amazon Payments: Pros, Cons for Ecommerce Merchants

June 9, 2016 • Bruce Harpham

Fewer than 10 percent of Amazon’s 304 million customers reportedly used Amazon Payments on third-party sites in 2014 and 2015. This, potentially, could be an opportunity for ecommerce merchants that ...
Amazon & Marketplaces
Getting Sales Tax Setup Right on Amazon

December 3, 2015 • James Thomson

Every seller on Amazon has the responsibility of paying sales tax in those U.S. states where it has tax nexus. When the tax isn’t paid, that seller builds a tax ...
Amazon & Marketplaces
How to Sell an Amazon Marketplace Business

November 16, 2015 • James Thomson

Most Amazon sellers have enough on their plates keeping their businesses running and maintaining sales and profits. But no matter how long a merchant lasts on Amazon, there may come a ...
Amazon & Marketplaces
How to Overcome Negative Feedback on Amazon’s Marketplace

October 7, 2015 • James Thomson

Say you are shopping on Amazon and you find the perfect product to buy. But you notice that the seller offering the product has 90 percent positive feedback. Yes, one ...
Amazon & Marketplaces
7 Overlooked Holiday Tactics for Amazon Sellers

September 15, 2015 • James Thomson

For many ecommerce merchants, the holiday shopping season is the busiest, most critical time of the year. On Amazon, things can get crazy for sellers, even if they have been ...
Amazon & Marketplaces
Fulfillment by Amazon Necessary for Marketplace Sellers?

August 20, 2015 • James Thomson

Amazon launched Fulfillment by Amazon ten years ago as a mechanism to help sellers scale their fulfillment and customer service operations. Yet, the single most important feature had nothing to do with operational effectiveness,
Amazon & Marketplaces
7 Common Mistakes of New Amazon Sellers

July 21, 2015 • James Thomson

It’s easy for new Amazon sellers to get caught up in the excitement of 240 million shoppers. But, while Amazon recruits more than 100,000 new sellers each year to the ...
Amazon & Marketplaces
6 Things to Love About eBay Product Pages

July 3, 2015 • Armando Roggio

Founded in 1995, eBay is one of the original ecommerce pioneers. So it would stand to reason that as eBay has gone from startup to earning more than $17.9 billion ...
Amazon & Marketplaces
5 Tradeoffs for Selling on Amazon

June 23, 2015 • James Thomson

For six years I worked for Amazon, most recently as head of Amazon Services, that part of Amazon that recruits 100,000 new sellers to the Amazon marketplace each year. During my tenure, feedback ...
Amazon & Marketplaces
Amazon Sues Fake Product Review Websites

April 23, 2015 • Marcia Kaplan

Ecommerce merchants know the importance of favorable customer reviews. Results of a 2013 survey of 1,046 American consumers by research firm Dimensional Research show that 90 percent of consumers who ...
Amazon & Marketplaces > Merchant Voice
The end of automated Amazon repricing?

December 15, 2014 • Richard Stubbings

We all know of Black Friday and the sale prices offered on that day to kickstart holiday sales. But the repricing software Repricer Express created an entire new meaning to ...
Amazon & Marketplaces > Merchant Voice
Amazon’s version of Christmas customer care

December 7, 2014 • Richard Stubbings

At this time of year, more than any other time, you have to work harder at customer care. This is due to two main reasons. Firstly, you have a much ...
Amazon & Marketplaces
SEO: Optimizing Product Content on Amazon

November 14, 2014 • Jill Kocher Brown

In “SEO: The Case for Optimizing Amazon,” my article last week, I reviewed the growing importance of optimizing products for Amazon’s massive internal search engine. In this article, I’ll describe ...
Amazon & Marketplaces
SEO: The Case for Optimizing Amazon

November 7, 2014 • Jill Kocher Brown

Some ecommerce businesses, especially those that manufacture the products they sell online or acquire their products at a deep discount, are experimenting with optimizing on Amazon alongside their existing websites.
Amazon & Marketplaces
Is Amazon Planning a Shipping Revolution?

October 2, 2014 • Armando Roggio

Amazon is rapidly adding new fulfillment centers, sorting packages for carriers, and even delivering some orders directly to customers. Could these initiatives hint at a revolution in ecommerce shipping? The answer ...
Amazon & Marketplaces
ShopRunner Joins Forces with Alibaba to Sell in China

August 14, 2014 • Marcia Kaplan

When I last wrote about ShopRunner two years ago, the company’s main marketing pitch was its free two-day shipping and free returns with a $79 annual membership or an $8.95
Amazon & Marketplaces
6 Tips for Making Money on Etsy

May 16, 2014 • Armando Roggio

Etsy is a marketplace for crafts, art, and vintage items that empowers home-based entrepreneurs, collectors, and handicraft makers to sell their products to an audience of millions. But like any ...
Amazon & Marketplaces
Alibaba IPO Likely Largest in U.S.; Analysis

May 15, 2014 • Marcia Kaplan

The Alibaba Group, the Chinese ecommerce juggernaut founded in 1999, is likely to become the largest U.S. IPO of all time. The company earlier this month filed papers to begin ...
Amazon & Marketplaces
SEO: Why Amazon’s Navigation Works So Well

April 11, 2014 • Jill Kocher Brown

Judging by the number of Google searches for which Amazon ranks, it’s easy to see that Amazon is doing a lot right when it comes to search engine optimization. It’s ...
Amazon & Marketplaces
Amazon Raises Fee for Prime Shipping

March 17, 2014 • Marcia Kaplan

After floating the idea that it might raise the fee for Prime shipping to $119 from the current $79, Amazon settled on a $20 increase, to $99 per year. In ...
Amazon & Marketplaces
Anticipatory Shipping: Amazon’s Approach to Influencing Purchases

March 12, 2014 • Marcia Kaplan

One Amazon obsession is faster package delivery. When CEO Jeff Bezos shared his idea of delivery by drone with 60 Minutes, many ridiculed him. Now Amazon has a new idea ...
Amazon & Marketplaces > Merchant Voice
Does 2014 mark the beginning of the end for Amazon?

January 31, 2014 • Richard Stubbings

Probably not, but it is certainly going to be a difficult year for Amazon in Europe. Legislation in Europe is significantly different than in the U.S, in two major ways,
Amazon & Marketplaces
Data Feeds Critical for Multichannel Success

November 14, 2013 • Dale Traxler

What do Amazon, TheFind, Sears.com, Rakuten.com, Shopping.com, Google Merchant, mShopper, Nextopia, SLI Systems, Catalogs.com, Shopzilla, Commission Junction, and Vendio have in common? They all require a data feed of your products.
Amazon & Marketplaces
Alibaba User Experience Director on Design, Usability

September 27, 2013 • PEC Staff

The appearance and functionality of an ecommerce site affects its sales. Is the site attractive? Is it easy to navigate? Do core functions work? Is it fast? Does it render ...
Amazon & Marketplaces
Alibaba Attorney on Intellectual Property Theft

September 5, 2013 • PEC Staff

Most every ecommerce company owns intellectual property — photos, product descriptions, logos, brand names, designs. Many online companies have experienced the theft of their intellectual property from other websites, often ...
Amazon & Marketplaces
Selling on Marketplaces: 4 Common Mistakes

June 28, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Marketplaces like Ebay and Amazon can be a boon for the bottom line since they present your products to millions of interested shoppers. But a huge audience also means that mistakes can be glaring and costly. Amazon gets something like 21 million visitors a day and more than 100 millio...
Amazon & Marketplaces
13 Curated Shopping Sites

June 10, 2013 • Sig Ueland

Sometimes shoppers need a little help. Rather than searching through an endless supply of products, they may prefer a selection from the experts or tastemakers they follow. Here is a list of curated shopping sites. Some of the sites offer personalized product recommendations by expert ...
Amazon & Marketplaces
Third-party Marketplaces: What Merchants Should Know

May 7, 2013 • Scott Smigler

Many online merchants have embraced third-party marketplaces. They've been seduced by promises of easy revenue growth and enabled by software solutions that make it easy to sell their products on those sites. It’s true that marketplaces can pay dividends for merchants, at least for nea...

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