Business
An ecommerce site is a business. Our Management & Finance category addresses online payments, funding needs, employee issues, merchant profiles, key metrics, multichannel and omnichannel strategies, cross-border analyses, inventory management, accounting topics, sales taxes, and much more.
Amazon & Marketplaces | B2B | Cross-border Selling | Finance | Fraud Prevention | Inventory | Local Business | Payments | Shipping & Fulfillment | Staffing-
Business
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Merchant Voice
Europe-based merchant accesses GDPR
April 23, 2018 • Richard Stubbings
The E.U.'s new data protection law goes into effect on May 25. Many businesses here in Europe and elsewhere have ignored it. That is a mistake. Failure to comply could result in an eye-watering fine of $20 million. If your company does business or communicates with any consumer in Europe, you should comply, or at least take steps to comply.
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Amazon & Marketplaces
How to convert Amazon buyers to your customers (without breaking the rules)
April 16, 2018 • Phil Masiello
An ecommerce brand has to decide whether to sell its products on Amazon's Marketplace, which is the dominant buying resource for today’s consumer. Independent brands can use Amazon as a tool to obtain customers. Through proper merchandising of their products, brands can turn Amazon buyers into their own loyal customers.
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Amazon & Marketplaces
Ecommerce Briefs: Walmart, Amazon Vie for Flipkart; Etsy and Adidas Refocus
April 11, 2018 • Marcia Kaplan
“Ecommerce Briefs” is my occasional series of news and developments from online merchants. In this installment, I’ll address the competition between Walmart and Amazon to acquire Flipkart, India’s dominant marketplace. I’ll ...
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Business
Lessons Learned: Battic Door Thrives in Energy Conservation
April 10, 2018 • Jennifer D. Meacham
Massachusetts-based Battic Door is 15 years in the making. With a credit-card investment of $5,000, owner Mark Tyrol has turned his home-insulation ideas into $1.5 million of annual sales. “I found ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Pros and cons of meeting with suppliers
April 4, 2018 • Peter Keller
The primary reason to not visit my suppliers is I do not care about them. For example, if I am drop shipping from a supplier that is significantly larger than FringeSport, there may be no need to cultivate a relationship. The main reason, however, to visit suppliers is to build relationships. If you treat suppliers like you're doing one-time deals, they're going to treat you in the same way.
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Business
The Next Generation of Ecommerce Management
April 2, 2018 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce is disruptive. It has changed the way millions of people shop. But the management of many ecommerce businesses has not evolved. It often operates, seemingly, as an old-world dictatorship or a fiefdom. What follows are several ideas to organize and manage an ecommerce business in 2018 and beyond. Some of these are concepts may seem revolutionary. But, then again, so is ecommerce.
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Business
March 2018 Top 10: Our Most Popular Posts
March 30, 2018 • PEC Staff
What follows are our 10 most popular articles for March 2018, recognizing that articles we published earlier in the month are more likely to make the list than later ones. How ...
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Finance
ICOs Are the Newest Form of Alternative Funding
March 28, 2018 • Marcia Kaplan
If words like cryptocurrency, cryptocoin, Bitcoin, and blockchain befuddle you, you're not alone. Even the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is having a hard time keeping up with all the new alternative funding mechanisms. The latest funding craze is an Initial Coin Offering, an "ICO," which is a new form of crowdfunding using cryptocurrency.
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Cross-border Selling
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Merchant Voice
Yandex.Market, in new joint venture, seeks non-Russian sellers
March 27, 2018 • Maksim Komonov
A leading Russian bank and the largest online Russian marketplace have announced a joint venture that will likely improve cross-border ecommerce. Sberbank is the largest and most trusted saving bank in ...
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Amazon & Marketplaces
17 Amazon Seller Tools to Find Profitable Products
March 25, 2018 • Connor Gillivan
As an Amazon merchant, I'm always looking for the next best product to sell — a high-potential item that no seller has discovered. In this article, I will share 17 Amazon seller tools that help source new products. Select a tool from the list, put together a standard process, and hand it off to a team member. Keep the process running at all times. It will increase your chances of finding that next best product.
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Local Business
SEO: Store Locators Good for Bots, Good for Shoppers
March 23, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
If you have more than one physical location, in addition to your ecommerce site, you need a store locator. Slapping all your store addresses on a single web page and calling it done doesn’t cut it for shoppers or for natural search performance. An optimal store locator should be searchable for your customers and also crawlable for the search engines.
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Shipping & Fulfillment
Fulfillment Requirements of Retailer-owned Marketplaces
March 21, 2018 • Stephen Bulger
There are many marketplace options other than Amazon for merchants. We all know about eBay. Big retailers such Walmart, Costco, Home Depot, Best Buy, Nordstrom, and Dick’s Sporting Goods offer marketplaces, too. In this post, I'll address fulfillment requirements of retailer-owned marketplaces.
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Fraud Prevention
10 Ways That Artificial Intelligence Helps Merchants
March 21, 2018 • Gagan Mehra
The term "artificial intelligence" refers to software that learns from experience. It mimics the human mind in that it changes responses based on data. Self-driving cars and voice-enabled devices rely on artificial intelligence. Retail businesses can also benefit. In this post, I'll list 10 use cases of how artificial intelligence helps merchants.
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Local Business
Costco Finally Embraces Ecommerce
March 15, 2018 • Marcia Kaplan
While Walmart, Amazon, Kroger, and Albertson's compete for online supremacy in groceries and household goods, Costco has until recently remained aloof, firmly committed to serving customers at its physical stores. The company, which operates on a membership basis, has 49.9 million member households.
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B2B
6 Impressive B2B Ecommerce Sites
March 14, 2018 • Lori McDonald
Offering a compelling ecommerce experience to B2B buyers requires a process of continuous improvement. It can be helpful to examine other B2B ecommerce sites, to learn. Grainger and Amazon Business are often cited as leading examples. But there is also value in learning from smaller, innovative B2B companies. In this post, I'll address six impressive, independent B2B sites.
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Staffing
When Hiring an SEO Pro, Look for These 11 Skills
March 14, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Hiring a search engine optimization professional is challenging. It’s relatively easy for a would-be practitioner to portray “book-learning” as actual, on-the-job experience. But I’m a firm believer in the importance of soft skills — personal qualities that enable someone to work well in a role with others — in hiring a quality SEO pro.
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Entrepreneurs fool themselves about productivity
March 5, 2018 • Peter Keller
There is no shortage of advice on how entrepreneurs can be more productive and more effective. Over the years, I have become better at both. But I sometimes believe that I’m being productive when, in fact, I’m wasting time. Here are three ways that entrepreneurs often fool themselves about productivity.
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Amazon & Marketplaces
Walmart’s Ecommerce Sales Up 23 Percent in Fourth Quarter 2017
March 1, 2018 • Marcia Kaplan
Last month the Department of Commerce announced its estimate of U.S. retail ecommerce sales for the fourth quarter of 2017. The Department issues two sets of figures. One is seasonally ...
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Business
February 2018 Top 10: Our Most Popular Posts
February 28, 2018 • PEC Staff
What follows are our 10 most popular articles for February 2018, recognizing that articles we published earlier in the month are more likely to make the list than later ones. HTTPS ...
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Amazon & Marketplaces
Protect your brand on ecommerce marketplaces
February 23, 2018 • Phil Masiello
Marketplaces can help brands add incremental sales — and build awareness. The more avenues on which the consumer sees your brand, the more recognizable it becomes. As your brand gains recognition, consumers will remember it and will be more likely to purchase. But selling on marketplaces could backfire if you don't utilize the tools correctly.
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Business
Failure to Manage Sales Tax Exemptions Could Cost (Big) Money
February 22, 2018 • Shane Ratigan
As time and technology move forward, sales tax auditors’ focus has shifted. Nowadays, auditors are discovering assessable errors in sales tax exemption certificate management. Sellers who regularly make sales to other businesses or exempt organizations can find themselves open to negative audit results if their exemption documentation management is lacking.
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Comparing KPIs for 2 websites in first year of trading
February 19, 2018 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth
Now that My Event Décor has been live for just over 12 months, it’s time to check its metrics and compare its growth against the first year of My Wedding Décor. Both My Event Décor and My Wedding Décor took several weeks to make the first online sale — the former recorded its first online sale within 37 days of launch, the latter within 21 days.
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Cross-border Selling
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Merchant Voice
4 payment aggregators to use in Russia
February 18, 2018 • Maksim Komonov
In this post, I'll list four major payments aggregators in Russia. There are many more, but these four are trusted by Russian consumers and businesses, as well as international companies. When choosing a payment aggregator, consider these key points.
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Fraud Prevention
Staying Ahead of Fake Product Reviews
February 18, 2018 • Gagan Mehra
In the competitive world of online commerce, not every merchant is honest. Some post fake positive reviews for their products to entice shoppers. Others post fake negative reviews of competitors' products to dissuade potential buyers. Both are examples of product review fraud. It's dishonest to competitors and, also, to shoppers that rely heavily on the reviews. If a retailer does not stop the fraud, shoppers could lose trust in the reviews and cease purchasing from the site.
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Business
Manage Your Business Blog with a Kanban Board
February 15, 2018 • Armando Roggio
Content is an important part of ecommerce marketing. Often, content marketing begins with a consistent, well-written, and well-managed blog. For sole proprietorships and small businesses, it is possible to manage a ...
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Amazon & Marketplaces
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Merchant Voice
3 hooks to lure shoppers away from Amazon
February 14, 2018 • Richard Stubbings
In 2017 nearly 50 percent of all U.S. ecommerce sales went through Amazon. In the run-up to Thanksgiving, the rate was even higher. It is thus difficult to ignore Amazon if you want to succeed in selling online. But that is not to say that you have to follow other Amazon sellers and chase the price to the bottom. Instead, look carefully at the behavior of your target customers and determine how best to profit from them.
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Amazon & Marketplaces
Ecommerce Briefs: Alibaba Eyes Kroger; Walmart Partners with Rakuten
February 14, 2018 • Marcia Kaplan
“Ecommerce Briefs” is my occasional series of news and developments from online merchants. In this installment, I’ll address grocery wars, international expansion by Amazon and Walmart, and Pepsi’s embrace of ecommerce. In an effort to diversify and expand, Alibaba, the Chinese ecommerce giant, is following in Amazon’s footsteps with its “New Retail” initiative — acquiring brick-and-mortar stores in China and looking to make similar acquisitions overseas.
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Business
From Retail to Manufacturing, Kanban Improves Efficiency
February 12, 2018 • Armando Roggio
Kanban is a project management approach that can be applied to nearly any step-by-step process to increase efficiency, reduce waste, and help a business improve. Although Kanban was developed in the 1940s and 1950s to boost manufacturing efficiency at Toyota factories in Japan, the system has been adapted to many industries, including software development, publishing, and retail management.
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Business
Create Google Docs from a Google Sheet
February 8, 2018 • Armando Roggio
Your business can use Google Apps Script to pull data from the rows and columns of a Google Sheet and create individualized Google Docs that include only the information needed. This can make your business and the folks running it more productive. Here's an example.
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Business
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Merchant Voice
My experience with product reviews
February 6, 2018 • Peter Keller
I'm a huge believer in product reviews for ecommerce sites. I have been for years — since the start of online reviews. I remember when Amazon first utilized reviews, in the early 2000s. I was working for LivingDirect, a retailer of home products. We marveled at reviews. What a strange innovation. A customer could post a review on the site — any review, any customer.
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