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-
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
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Business
Google’s Domain Registration Service Can Help Small Businesses
August 12, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Only about 45 percent of small businesses have a website. Those businesses without a website aren’t attracting customers online and may be stifling their own growth. In response, the leading ...
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Business
Could These 5 Technologies Change Ecommerce?
August 11, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Five emerging technologies could change ecommerce in just the next few years, giving shoppers new access to products and the ability to customize some items for their particular needs. Mobile computing,
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Finance
Berkery Noyes Exec on State of Ecommerce Mergers, Acquisitions
August 8, 2014 • PEC Staff
Every day, it seems, we read of an Internet-based company acquiring another one, or raising capital, or expanding into a new segment. Mergers and acquisitions for Internet companies are booming.
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Business
How to Register a Trademark, Part 2: Protecting Registration
August 4, 2014 • Elizabeth Lewis
In “How to Register a Trademark, Part 1: Determine Availability,” my article last month, I addressed how you could lose your trademark due to improper filings before your trademark is ...
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Staffing
10 Tools to Research Ecommerce Employee Pay
August 4, 2014 • Sig Ueland
You’ve grown your ecommerce business so much that now you need full-time employees. But how much should you pay your new employees? Here is a list of tools and resources to ...
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Business
July 2014 Top Ten: Our Most Popular Posts
July 31, 2014 • PEC Staff
Each month we compile a list of the ten most popular articles we published that month, based on the number of page views. Here are our ten most popular articles ...
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Business
5 Things to Do When Ecommerce Goes Wrong
July 31, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Things will go wrong. It is a fact of life for small and mid-sized ecommerce businesses. But it is not the end of the world, and there are things you ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Identify your target customers, and market to them
July 30, 2014 • Erica Tevis
A friend moved to Europe last month and launched, with her fiancé, a business aimed at teaching locals the English language. She messaged me and asked for advice on the ...
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Local Business
Ultimate Guide to Using Instagram for your Local Business
July 28, 2014 • Kunle Campbell
Instagram is an image-based social network that was started in 2010 and acquired by Facebook in 2012. It’s seen rapid growth since its inception, picking up a million users in its first two months. It now claims about 200 million members, a 23 percent growth in 2013 alone. Roughly 60 million photos are shared daily on Instagram.
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Business
12 Keys to a World-class Ecommerce Company
July 28, 2014 • Dale Traxler
What makes any company stand out from the crowd? Is it the products? Customer service? Profitability? Growth? Something else? Many observers would answer all of the above and likely add other ...
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Business
4 Reasons to Consider Order Management Software
July 25, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce and retail order management systems help merchants improve order processing, track inventory, sell in online marketplaces, and much more. Every online retail business — ecommerce or brick-and-click — will have ...
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Shipping & Fulfillment
Drop Shipping for Ecommerce, Part 1: Supply Chain History
July 24, 2014 • Jeremy Hanks
To fully address the good and the bad of drop shipping as a supply management technique, I'm going to start with the history and current state of the retail supply chain.
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Business
LemonStand CEO on Starting an Ecommerce Business
July 24, 2014 • PEC Staff
Starting a new ecommerce business can be frustrating, complicated, and risky. LemonStand is a popular ecommerce platform that often caters to startups and new entrepreneurs. LemonStand’s CEO, Danny Halarewich, recently spoke ...
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Business
Lessons Learned: Fashion Retailer Adds Ecommerce to Physical Locations
July 23, 2014 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth
A third generation “rag trader,” Daylan James grew up in Melbourne, Australia but didn’t originally want to enter his family’s fashion business. After studying philosophy, visual arts, and marketing at Monash University ...
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Business
An End to Net Neutrality Could Impact Ecommerce
July 23, 2014 • Armando Roggio
An inability to regulate some of the Internet’s most basic infrastructure could, in theory, make it more difficult for small and mid-sized retailers to compete in the near future. A Federal ...
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Business
Improving Online Customer Service with Technology
July 22, 2014 • Gagan Mehra
Many articles have addressed online customer service and the associated best practices to optimize the experience, reduce costs, and increase loyalty. This post will focus on how technology can improve ...
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Business
4 Guidelines to a Bricks-and-Clicks Business
July 21, 2014 • Jerry Jao
Online retailers are finding the “bricks-and-clicks” strategy to be an effective way to serve and engage shoppers. Perhaps that is why an increasing number of ecommerce merchants — Bonobos, Birchbox,
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Business
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Merchant Voice
5 ecommerce tips (from tourists)
July 18, 2014 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth
If you’ve been lucky enough to take a break recently, you may have visited a tourist attraction or two. What do tourists have in common with online shoppers? Quite a few ...
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Payments
American Express OptBlue Program May Reduce Processing Cost
July 15, 2014 • Phil Hinke
American Express recently came out with a new program called OptBlue, where the final processing rates and fees paid by the merchant are set by the merchant account provider, not ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Preparing for the 2014 holiday season
July 13, 2014 • David Sasson
Many retailers, both online and brick-and-mortar, make most of their profits in the fourth quarter. Consumers in the U.S. typically think about the holiday season only after Thanksgiving. But for ...
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Cross-border Selling
Ecommerce in India Takes Off; Potential for U.S. Sellers
July 10, 2014 • Marcia Kaplan
While China has certainly been the star of international ecommerce, India — the second most populous country in the world — is starting to show some genuine energy. Even Alibaba,
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Magento Go: going going gone
July 9, 2014 • Richard Stubbings
I have always had my doubts over hosted ecommerce solutions. I have never used them. Recently I have been thinking that I was wrong and that they are a viable ...
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B2B
How B2B Distributors Compete with AmazonSupply
July 9, 2014 • Dale Traxler
In “Distributors Beware of AmazonSupply.com?,” my previous article, I suggested that wholesale distributors recognize the threat presented by Amazon in the B2B marketplace and find ways to compete. This article ...
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Business
How to Register a Trademark, Part 1: Determine Availability
July 8, 2014 • Elizabeth Lewis
Many people think that once they register a trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office that their trademark is valid. However, this is an assumption that can end ...
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Business
June 2014 Top 10: Our Most Popular Posts
July 2, 2014 • PEC Staff
Each month we compile a list of the ten most popular articles we published that month, based on the number of page views. Here are our ten most popular articles ...
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Staffing
Executive Compensation at 13 Ecommerce Companies
June 30, 2014 • Sig Ueland
If you’re interested in salary levels at public ecommerce companies, you can locate compensation information at the website of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Federal securities laws require public companies to provide clear disclosure about compensation paid to CEOs, CFO
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Business
Key performance indicators for ecommerce businesses
June 28, 2014 • Jordan Lindberg
“In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.” – Warren Buffett For newcomers to ecommerce, part of the learning process is coming to understand the basic ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
7 ways to lose less money on shipping
June 27, 2014 • Jamie Salvatori
Shipping sucks. It’s expensive, time consuming, fraught with peril, expensive, undervalued by your customers, and did I mention that it’s getting more expensive by the day? You can thank Amazon for ...
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Business
Voice Commerce Ready for Prime Time?
June 27, 2014 • Gagan Mehra
The ability to use one’s voice to shop has been tried by a number of merchants, including Amazon, Ebay, and Domino’s Pizza. But it has not, to date, gained wide ...