Amazon & Marketplaces

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...

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 ...

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...

May 6, 2013 • Richard Stubbings

April 23, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Online marketplaces like Etsy, eBay, and Amazon offer retailers profitable, high-volume sales channels that can significantly improve the bottom line. But as more businesses discover and use these marketplaces, competition increases, meaning businesses need to market well in these chann...

April 10, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Amazon allows other retailers to sell products on its marketplace, where millions of interested shoppers visit daily. This creates an opportunity for sellers — large and small. It is possible to start selling on the Amazon Marketplace in a matter of hours; the barrier to entry is very l...

March 20, 2013 • Armando Roggio

The Amazon marketplace gives online retailers big and small the opportunity to sell to millions of potential customers, significantly increase sales, and acquire loyal shoppers. Competition on Amazon can be fierce. By some estimates, Amazon receives nearly 90 million unique visitors ea...

March 14, 2013 • Armando Roggio

A possible change to the way Google ranks merchants on its results pages might make multi-channel selling on marketplaces or comparison shopping engines important. During a recent panel discussion at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Conference and Festival, Matt Cutts, who is the head of ...

October 23, 2012 • Armando Roggio

eBay is a global marketplace and an opportunity for online sellers, including businesses as small as garage-based, family operations — or as large as major ecommerce merchants. In the second quarter of 2012, eBay's marketplace helped to sell approximately $3.1 billion in clothing, shoe...

October 4, 2012 • Richard Stubbings

When Amazon first opened their market place to third party sellers, it was mainly books. These sellers had catalogues of tens of thousands of titles, sometimes hundreds of thousands. The competition was fierce and very much price driven. Sellers had little or no chance of competitively ...

August 28, 2012 • Armando Roggio

Shopping comparison sites and services let online shoppers compare products' attributes and prices in a relatively neutral environment. These services also give merchants a channel to market to some of the web’s savviest consumers. Several companies track and analyze shopping compariso...

July 13, 2012 • Marcia Kaplan

For consumers, the cost of shipping has been one of the major drawbacks of ecommerce. During the last holiday season, free shipping made a comeback as merchants tried to ensure that consumers would buy online. So popular was the promotion many merchants continue to offer it. Now, with t...

July 5, 2012 • Armando Roggio

Amazon offers a software as a service ecommerce platform with solutions ranging from a quick shopping cart for individual sellers and small businesses to enterprise level services. What's more, Amazon promises that its Webstore solution is both good quality and easy to use. Is that re...

May 6, 2012 • Richard Stubbings

One of the biggest challenges to Search Engine Optimisation for any Ecommerce site is the range and variety in the stock. All SEO tutorials and teach yourself books seem to assume you are selling a small range. Typically 'widgits'. They talk about doing keyword analysis on widgets, find...

February 3, 2012 • Richard Stubbings

Sooner or latter every online retailer will consider selling on Amazon, or are already doing so. Amazon is a huge market, and it would be unwise not to consider it. There are other blogs covering the pros and cons, but none really cover what to do if you decide to take the gamble, and e...

May 17, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Although deal and coupon sites appear to have focused on services or brick-and-mortar retailers, online sellers can still use these services to drive additional traffic and find new customers. The rise in popularity of Groupon, Living Social, and other deal sites has created a new adve...

May 4, 2011 • Sig Ueland

For years states have fought Amazon.com to force the ecommerce giant to collect sales tax — the states, desperately looking for cash, versus Amazon, vehemently defending its practices as well ...

June 29, 2010 • PEC Staff

Alibaba is a huge force in global, business-to-business ecommerce. The company is based in China and it links millions of wholesale suppliers with businesses that resell those products. The company ...

October 23, 2009 • Armando Roggio

A new "self-promotion" tool lets merchants selling on Yahoo!, CafePress, Etsy, or Cartfly promote their products on leading social media sites, access a social media advertising network, and post a Flash-based widget on their blog or other sites. Sellit is a "bolt-on" solution that pr...

June 10, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Shopster is a unique combination of a hosted ecommerce cart and a relatively easy supply-chain solution that promises to help many small merchants get up and running with a functional and fully-stocked online retail business. The Calgary, Alberta, Canada-based company provides its cust...

April 13, 2009 • PEC Staff

Online retailers are frequently interested in new channels to sell their products. Merchants can consider auction sites and comparison-shopping sites, for example. And there's also Amazon.com. Amazon competes with many smaller ecommerce merchants, but also allows those merchants to list...

February 26, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Although many ecommerce merchants consider Amazon to be tough competitor, some online shopkeepers can boost sales and send traffic back to their own site using two of Amazon's ecommerce services. Selling on Amazon and Product Ads on Amazon are two Amazon services that many retail ecomm...

December 15, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Shopzilla.com is one of the Internet’s leading price comparison engines. The site can expose an online retailer’s products to more than 30 million price-conscience shoppers every month, making it a powerful marketing vehicle. But uploading products—particularly for smaller merchants—c...

May 7, 2008 • Bill Hartzer

If you consider yourself an online retailer, you most likely are familiar with the major pay-per-click (PPC) search-advertising providers: Google, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and MSN. Advertising on these search engines can bring sales to your site. However, you may be missing out on a lot...