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.

Local Business
12 Search Terms Local Business Owners Should Know

February 18, 2016 • Kathleen Fealy

During a recent visit to a local flower shop, I spoke with the owner about online marketing strategies, objectives, and tactics. She actively participates in social media marketing but finds search marketing too intimidating due to so much industry jargon.
Business
Why change ecommerce platforms?

February 16, 2016 • Kenny Kane

One of the best parts of being an ecommerce consultant and storeowner is corresponding with all the amazing entrepreneurs who have found their niche and disrupted it. This time of ...
Payments
Credit-card-processing Negotiating Mistakes, Part 1: Terminology, Exits

February 15, 2016 • Phil Hinke

This is the first article in a 2-part series on common mistakes I see merchants make when negotiating rates and fees or analyzing the offers from different credit-card-processing providers. Credit-card-processing Negotiating ...
Local Business
Understanding Google Local Search, with Mike Blumenthal

February 12, 2016 • Web Marketing Today

Google local search should be an integral part of any local business marketing strategy. To help business owners understand how best to maximize its value, Web Marketing Today interviewed Mike Blumenthal, a recognized industry expert on Google local search trends and practices.
Local Business
4 Affordable Brand Monitoring Tools for Local Businesses

February 11, 2016 • Kristine Wirth

Brand monitoring is a way to observe what people are saying about your business on the Internet. One of the better ways to keep track of this information is to use a brand monitoring tool.
B2B
How to Attract B2B Buyers to Ecommerce

February 11, 2016 • Marcia Kaplan

Today’s B2B buyers have fewer constraints than those of 10 years ago. To decrease costs, even enterprise companies are streamlining their purchasing processes, including increased online purchasing without the traditional ...
Business > Merchant Voice
What’s the future for smaller ecommerce retailers?

February 10, 2016 • Richard Stubbings

With the growing dominance of Amazon and Ebay for everyday consumer items, what future is there for the smaller ecommerce business? Amazon and Ebay both emphasize price. Many shoppers on those sites ...
Business > Merchant Voice
Beardbrand’s photography process

February 9, 2016 • Eric Bandholz

Photography should be a high priority for ecommerce merchants. There are tons of guides on how to take great photographs. This article won’t be one of those. Instead, I hope ...
Business
How to Set Retail Discounts, for Ecommerce

February 8, 2016 • Armando Roggio

One-day sale, holiday sale, Presidents’ Day sale, or just about any sale you can imagine: Online retailers frequently offer top-grade products at a discount, broadcasting these specials via email or ...
Local Business
6 Local Business Online Marketing Essentials

February 8, 2016 • Paul Chaney

There are many online marketing avenues that a local small business could take, but which are essential and stand the best chance of ensuring success? After all, business owners have a limited amount of time to pursue marketing activities, so they need to focus on those that are most productive.
Local Business
10 Great Local Marketing Ideas for February 2016

February 5, 2016 • Web Marketing Today

Each month, Web Marketing Today gathers advice from marketing experts, to help local businesses market online with greater impact. This month, we focus on real estate and share ten great ideas from Realtors and other industry-related marketing professionals.
Business
8 Low-cost IoT Vendors for Retailers

February 2, 2016 • Gagan Mehra

In “‘Internet of Things’ Helping Ecommerce Merchants,” I explained how IoT could make smaller retailers more efficient and save money. This post takes IoT a step further, by listing affordable ...
Local Business
4 Content Ideas to Improve Local SEO

January 28, 2016 • Bill Hartzer

Local SEO isn’t just about optimizing your business website any longer. It’s about maintaining a healthy presence online within the community and engaging with your customers and prospects through your site and on social media.
Business > Merchant Voice
Unfair taxes squeezing my U.K.-based business

January 27, 2016 • Richard Stubbings

I am based in the U.K. Some of the challenges that affect my ecommerce business at first appear different from U.S. businesses. But, in fact, many of these challenges apply ...
Business > Merchant Voice
Lessons from changing ecommerce platforms

January 25, 2016 • David Sasson

My company, overstockArt, recently changed ecommerce platforms. It was a complete change of our website, not just look and navigation, but the entire underlying technology. We switched from the Yahoo store ...
Local Business
Local Marketing: Position Yourself as a Community Expert

January 25, 2016 • Paul Chaney

In a recent installment of "10 Great Local Marketing Ideas," a monthly series we run here on WMT, Lisa Sanderson, a real estate agent in Stroudsburg, Pa., asked, "Have you ever searched online for information on your local area and couldn’t find what you were looking for exactly?"
Business
Omnichannel selling: Bigcommerce, Amazon, Facebook

January 21, 2016 • Kenny Kane

In my post last month, I touched on the fact that I was experimenting with omnichannel selling in 2015. If you’re not familiar, omnichannel selling is a fancy way of ...
B2B
Choosing a B2B Ecommerce Platform: Weighing the Risks

January 21, 2016 • Lori McDonald

When considering a B2B ecommerce platform, it is important to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the software solution you select. There are, in my experience, three types of software ...
Business
Supplier Representatives Can Help Online Retailers Grow

January 17, 2016 • Armando Roggio

It is an important milestone for online retailers when they graduate from ordering solely and often blindly with wholesale catalogs or on B2B websites to working with a skilled supplier ...
Business
Small Retailers Better Able to Adopt Unified Commerce

January 13, 2016 • Armando Roggio

More than three quarters of retailers, including large, established chain stores, plan to unify or connect the software that manages their sales and fulfillment across multiple sales channels — in ...
Local Business
4 Local SEO Predictions for 2016

January 13, 2016 • Bill Hartzer

There is never a shortage of articles about predictions for the new year, and the same holds true where SEO is concerned. Here is my list of predictions for 2016 — four in all — that will affect local SEO. Review them and start making plans to address the upcoming changes.
Business > Merchant Voice
Technology stack for Beardbrand

January 12, 2016 • Eric Bandholz

I’ve always appreciated other companies opening up about their business. So I’d like to share a bit of details on our technology platform. As of January 2016, our business is ...
Business
‘Native’ Advertising Subject to New F.T.C. Regulations

January 11, 2016 • Elizabeth Lewis

The rise of so-called “native” advertising on websites has prompted the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to issue standards on the presentation and content of that advertising. After almost two years ...
Shipping & Fulfillment
Reducing ‘Waste’ in Ecommerce Fulfillment

January 6, 2016 • Michael Manzione

One of the best ways to improve profitability in your warehouse is to reduce or eliminate waste. I addressed this in my last article, “Streamline Ecommerce Fulfillment with 5S Methodology,”
Business
Should Online Retailers Offer Senior and Military Discounts?

January 5, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Discounts for special consumer groups, like senior citizens and those with military service, may help online retailers increase sales and build loyalty. But offering these types of discounts online can ...
Business > Merchant Voice
The perils of pre-orders

January 3, 2016 • Richard Stubbings

A few years ago, much of my business was built on customers ordering products in advance of the products’ release. Pre-orders allowed us to know what the likely demand was ...
Business > Merchant Voice
You lose money under-promising and over-delivering

January 2, 2016 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

There seems to be a well-meaning but misguided belief that as online retailers we should under-promise and over-deliver to make our customers more loyal. But I don’t believe this to be ...
Business
2015 Top 25: Our Most Popular Posts of the Year

December 24, 2015 • PEC Staff

As 2015 draws to a close, we’ve compiled a list of our 25 most popular articles of the year, based on the number of page views. Popular subjects included search engine ...
Inventory
Inventory hiccups highlight 2015

December 23, 2015 • Kenny Kane

As 2015 comes to a close, it is a good time for self-evaluation. Hopefully, you’ve met or exceeded your revenue goals, and come in under on the expense side. Regardless ...
Business
Absence of U.S. Regulation Leads to Web Accessibility Lawsuits

December 15, 2015 • Armando Roggio

In the absence of clear U.S. government regulation or even clear guidance, there have been many web accessibility lawsuits that simultaneously bring attention to web accessibility and, perhaps unfairly and ...