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.
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Business
Big Data’s Impact on 2013 Holiday Sales
January 2, 2014 • Gagan Mehra
The holiday season has ended and the analysis has begun to understand what worked and what did not for ecommerce merchants. Cyber Monday became the biggest online shopping day in ...
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Business
5 Keys to Mobile Ecommerce Optimization in 2014
January 2, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Web traffic estimates from several trend analysis firms, including comScore, predict that mobile Internet traffic will outpace traffic from desktop or large laptop devices in 2014, further demonstrating just how ...
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Business
2013 Top 25: Our Most Popular Posts of the Year
December 27, 2013 • PEC Staff
As 2013 draws to a close, we’ve compiled a list of the 25 most popular Practical Ecommerce articles of the year, based on the number of page views. Popular subjects included ...
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Payments
3 Examples of Misleading Credit Card Processing Charges
December 20, 2013 • Phil Hinke
Editor’s Note: This is part two of a two-part series. The first installment, “Feds Eyeing Credit Card Processing Industry?,” we published last month. In “Feds Eyeing Credit Card Processing Industry?,” part ...
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Shipping & Fulfillment
4 Tips for Better Ecommerce Returns and Exchanges
December 19, 2013 • Armando Roggio
More than 60 percent of online shoppers returned or exchanged at least one item in 2013, up from about 51 percent in 2012. Importantly, about 95 percent of customers will ...
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Business
5 Ecommerce Challenges for 2014
December 18, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Many ecommerce merchants are enjoying a robust holiday selling season even as some brick-and-mortar stores are seeing relatively flat Christmas sales. To ensure continued growth and success, Internet retailers may ...
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Business
5 Tips for Managing Freelance Contractors
December 17, 2013 • Jerry Jao
Outsourcing non-core or seasonal tasks can allow you to focus on essential duties. It can also be a wise financial decision because hiring freelancers doesn’t come with full-time expenses such ...
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Payments
10 Bitcoin-like Cryptocurrencies
December 16, 2013 • Sig Ueland
A “cryptocurrency” is a peer-to-peer, decentralized, digital currency. In 2009, Bitcoin became the first cryptocurrency to trade on third-party markets. Since then, many cryptocurrencies have been developed and are actively ...
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Business
Lessons Learned: Fashionable Maternity Wear Sells
December 13, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth
Like most working women yet to become mothers, Tania Tan was blissfully unaware how unfashionable and expensive maternity clothing could be. Tan was raised in Sydney, Australia by her Chinese father ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
7 tips to plan for Valentine’s Day gift orders
December 12, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth
Christmas is such a major sales period for many online retailers that it can make you overlook Valentine’s Day, which falls barely six weeks later. Here are seven tips to get ...
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Business
15 Online Shopping Pet Peeves
December 10, 2013 • Gagan Mehra
Being an avid online shopper, I buy from many ecommerce sites. Most of these sites are helpful and effective. But there are some that have annoying features. Here are my top ...
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Finance
Ecommerce Strong on Black Friday, Cyber Monday
December 10, 2013 • Marcia Kaplan
The much anticipated Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping extravaganza showed mixed results with online sales outpacing disappointing brick-and-mortar results. Brick-and-mortar Sales Brick-and-mortar retail sales on Black Friday were disappointing. The tactic ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
What can online retailers learn from the Black Friday frenzy?
December 9, 2013 • David Sasson
Every year I make a trip to at least one store during the crazy first hours of Black Friday. I consider this a pilgrimage of sorts. As online retailers we ...
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Payments
11 Alternative Payment Options
December 9, 2013 • Sig Ueland
Alternatives to entering credit card numbers can provide customers with more payment choices, streamline checkout for mobile devices, and potentially save merchants money. Here is a list of alternative payment options.
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Multichannel order management packages
December 9, 2013 • Richard Stubbings
I use Magento and sell on my own site, six Amazon country sites, and Ebay. That’s a total of eight channels. I would be lost without a package that merged ...
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Business
5 Ways Retailers Benefit from ‘Internet of Things’
December 4, 2013 • Gagan Mehra
Most activity on the Internet depends on human interaction. Email, social media, blogs, video, online shopping — it all requires humans. But there’s another, separate use of the Internet that ...
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Business
Learning from BlackBerry and Twitter
December 2, 2013 • Manish Shah
You may have read that BlackBerry’s recent takeover offer of $4.7 billion from its largest shareholder, Fairfax Financial Holdings of Toronto, collapsed on Nov. 4. Only three years ago, the Canadian ...
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Business
November 2013 Top 10: Our Most Popular Posts
November 29, 2013 • PEC Staff
Each month we compile a list of the ten most popular articles — based on the number of page views — we published that month. Here are our ten most ...
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Shipping & Fulfillment
MasterCard Enters Free Shipping Fracas
November 29, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Global payment firm MasterCard announced that its customers will receive free, two-day shipping from five of the Internet’s leading retailers. MasterCard also offered a premium service that extends the free,
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Business
Which multicarrier package processing tool is right for you?
November 28, 2013 • Jordan Lindberg
“Not everybody’s gonna dig what I dig, but I reserve the right to dig it.” – Whoopi Goldberg Like many online retailers, we utilize more than one carrier to fulfill our ...
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Business
Third-party Cookies vs. Consumer Privacy
November 26, 2013 • Dale Traxler
In “The End of Third-party Cookies Should Not Hurt Retailers,” we addressed how third-party cookies affect privacy and ecommerce. After reading that article, I reviewed privacy issues and what other ...
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Shipping & Fulfillment
Amazon Prime, ShopRunner Forcing Faster Free Shipping
November 22, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Amazon Prime and ShopRunner, which both offer online shoppers free two-day shipping with an annual membership, are changing customer expectations and forcing small and mid-sized online retailers to consider faster ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Focusing on the top 20 percent of your customers
November 18, 2013 • David Sasson
By segmenting customer lifetime value and identifying the top 20 percent, an ecommerce company can develop a focused marketing effort to increase revenues with limited additional spend. As online merchants we ...
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Staffing
How to Hire Holiday Ecommerce Help
November 15, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Booming holiday sales require online retailers to pack and ship more orders, respond to more chat sessions, emails and calls, and closely manage marketing campaigns like pay-per-click advertising or promotional ...
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Payments
Feds Eyeing Credit Card Processing Industry?
November 14, 2013 • Phil Hinke
Editor’s Note: This is part one of a two-part series. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission included merchant account providers in two separate lawsuits it filed against telemarketers earlier this year. The ...
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Amazon & Marketplaces
Data Feeds Critical for Multichannel Success
November 14, 2013 • Dale Traxler
What do Amazon, TheFind, Sears.com, Rakuten.com, Shopping.com, Google Merchant, mShopper, Nextopia, SLI Systems, Catalogs.com, Shopzilla, Commission Junction, and Vendio have in common? They all require a data feed of your products.
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Business
5 Steps to a More Productive Ecommerce Business
November 13, 2013 • Jerry Jao
Ecommerce owners and managers seek improved productivity. Whether you’re looking to scale your business faster, launch new features, or streamline your operations, here are five productivity tips that I practice ...
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Finance
Equity Crowdfunding Edges Closer to Implementation
November 12, 2013 • Marcia Kaplan
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has been widely criticized for dragging its feet in issuing implementing regulations for equity crowdfunding, which was enabled when the Jobs Act was signed ...
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Business
Large Retailers Redefining Ecommerce
November 11, 2013 • Dale Traxler
When showrooming became popular a few years ago, brick-and-mortar retailers realized they needed to change, to compete with lower-priced online stores. Amazon became the target of many brick-and-mortar companies. But ...
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Business
Why some owners sell sooner, not later
November 7, 2013 • Manish Shah
When Sam Hogg went into business for himself, he probably never really expected the company he founded to take off as fast as it did. Launched in late 2008, his ...