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.

Finance
Will LinkedIn Change after Microsoft Purchase?

June 15, 2016 • Marcia Kaplan

On Monday Microsoft announced that it is acquiring LinkedIn — the social media site for business professionals — for $26.2 billion in a cash deal, its biggest acquisition ever. The ...
B2B
Using Site Search to Grow B2B Revenue

June 15, 2016 • Lori McDonald

If you help ecommerce shoppers quickly find what they are looking for, you will likely sell more. To accomplish this, look at your site’s navigation as well as its search ...
Business > Merchant Voice
Developing custom, manufactured products

June 10, 2016 • Eric Bandholz

Building a business requires a lot of moving parts. From cultivating relationships with peers and customers to branding and marketing, there are many factors that go into being successful. But ...
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 ...
Business > Merchant Voice
A tale of overzealous security

June 5, 2016 • Richard Stubbings

I will be publishing my normal monthly post in a week or so. Until then, I wanted to share some stupidity with you, following from “Hacked off” and “Are your ...
Business
May 2016 Top 10: Our Most Popular Posts

June 1, 2016 • PEC Staff

Here are our 10 most popular articles for May 2016, recognizing that articles we published earlier in the month are more likely to make the list than later ones. 25 Free Web Design ...
Payments
Partnering with Credit-card-processing Salespeople, Part 1: Detailed Statements Key

May 25, 2016 • Phil Hinke

The pay of most salespeople in the credit-card-processing industry is 100-percent commission. Salespeople therefore presumably do not want to lose an account from an ecommerce or any other business. Unfortunately, many ...
Business
Avoiding Copyright Infringement in Product Photos

May 17, 2016 • John Di Giacomo

In the last few years, my law firm has handled a growing number of copyright infringement matters, including litigation, involving product photography. With increasing numbers of SKUs in ecommerce stores, the ...
Business
4 Ways to Increase Multi-unit Sales

May 16, 2016 • Stephen Bulger

For many ecommerce retailers, generating sales is often a race to the bottom to offer prices lower than their competitors. While this can be good for consumers, it’s usually bad ...
Business > Merchant Voice
Hacked off

May 15, 2016 • Richard Stubbings

All ecommerce sites are vulnerable to being hacked. No matter how large you are, no matter how much you invest in security and infrastructure, you remain vulnerable. If hackers can penetrate ...
Cross-border Selling
Ecommerce in Taiwan: Thriving Market, Huge Mobile

May 12, 2016 • Gagan Mehra

Taiwan might be a small island but it is big on ecommerce. Taiwan is among the world leaders in terms of ecommerce penetration — the percentage of residents that have ...
Business > Merchant Voice
To grow an ecommerce business, step away

May 11, 2016 • Eric Bandholz

I recently returned from a trip to Amsterdam. It wasn’t a holiday, but a strategy meeting. The three owners of Beardbrand spent a week in the city to focus on ...
Business > Merchant Voice
Dollars per visitor more important than conversion rate

May 10, 2016 • David Sasson

Conversion optimization has been discussed in ecommerce circles since, well, the dawn of ecommerce. Improving conversions can have a major impact on revenue. Making small tweaks to your website — such ...
Local Business
Should Ecommerce Merchants Claim Local Business Listings?

May 9, 2016 • Bill Hartzer

If you are an ecommerce retailer or a servicer provider with nationwide clients, you may not want to claim your online local business listings. In fact, there are situations where ...
Business > Merchant Voice
How I measure ecommerce success

May 5, 2016 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

Most merchants measure ecommerce success by revenue. Shopify’s dashboard notes tell me my website is in the top five percent of those launched in the last 12 months. But I don’t ...
B2B
11 Critical Features for B2B Ecommerce Sites

May 4, 2016 • Lori McDonald

An important part of redesigning or launching a business-to-business ecommerce site is to identify the required features. They can be available out of the box in your ecommerce platform, or ...
Business > Merchant Voice
Why FringeSport uses Shopify

May 3, 2016 • Peter Keller

FringeSport has used Shopify for six years. I started on the platform after reading an early Tim Ferriss blog post, where he pimped the brand. We’ve never looked back. I get ...
Business
April 2016 Top 10: Our Most Popular Posts

April 28, 2016 • PEC Staff

Here are our 10 most popular articles for April 2016, recognizing that articles we published earlier in the month are more likely to make the list than later ones. 19 Free Website ...
Business
Electronically-signed Contracts Enforceable?

April 15, 2016 • John Di Giacomo

When Shakespeare wrote “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” he was not writing about electronic signatures. But, thankfully, the law has mostly evolved to no longer ...
Business
6 Principles for Small Business Automation

April 14, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Entrepreneurs and small business managers are hands-on folks. They are often involved in nearly every aspect of the business — from marketing to fulfillment to accounting to website design. At ...
Finance
6 Alternative Funding Resources for Ecommerce Businesses

April 13, 2016 • Marcia Kaplan

Small businesses often struggle to find affordable funds to keep their businesses running. Online lending solutions offer an alternative to conventional bank loans with the advantages of a much shorter ...
Business > Merchant Voice
Are your passwords secure?

April 12, 2016 • Richard Stubbings

As an online merchant, I have to review my company’s security procedures to retain PCI compliance. Whilst I am not sure of the merits of PCI compliance — I cynically ...
Business > Merchant Voice
Does your company have a soul?

April 9, 2016 • Eric Bandholz

When they hit a plateau on the growth of their business, entrepreneurs often look at ways to initiate a spark. One of the biggest things that companies overlook is the ...
Cross-border Selling
Ecommerce in Australia: Cross-border Shopping Common

April 7, 2016 • Gagan Mehra

According to National Australia Bank, online retail spending in Australia increased by 10 percent, to $17.6 billion, in 2015. This compares to roughly $562 billion for China, the country with ...
Payments
Credit-card-processing Negotiating Mistakes, Part 2: Understanding the Offer

April 5, 2016 • Phil Hinke

This is the second installment of a 2-part series on common mistakes I see from merchants, when they negotiate the rates and fees of credit-card-processing providers. In “Part 1: Terminology,
Business > Merchant Voice
Lessons from a corner shop closing down

April 4, 2016 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

You’ve likely seen a few brick-and-mortar shops go out of business in recent times. I recently saw hastily-printed sheets at local ice cream store — called Lick Me — thanking ...
B2B
7 Mistakes That Will Kill Your B2B Ecommerce Launch

March 23, 2016 • Lori McDonald

I’ve worked in the B2B ecommerce industry for 18 years. I’ve seen it all — good and bad. Here are seven mistakes that often cause failures in B2B ecommerce launches. 1.
Business
Sales Tax: How to Collect, Process for Your Online Store

March 21, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Sales tax is relatively straightforward for brick-and-mortar retail stores. A shopper goes into a store, buys something, and pays the sales tax for the state, county, and city where the store ...
Business > Merchant Voice
The evolution of FringeSport’s KPIs

March 16, 2016 • Peter Keller

How do you run your business? What numbers are meaningful, and on what intervals do you review them? When FringeSport was a side project, I mainly looked at revenue and gross ...
Business
Search-marketing Insights from Connect Search Engine Watch Conference

March 15, 2016 • Richard Sexton

I recently attended the Connect Search Engine Watch Conference in Miami. The conference covered two tracks — “Engage with Organic” and “Innovate with Paid” — over two days. I spent ...