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.

Business > Merchant Voice
Book review: Custom Nation

July 21, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

If you sell online, you can customise online, and if you don't, you're leaving money on the table. So says Anthony Flynn, creator of the customised energy bar company, You Bar, and his co-writer sister Emily Flynn Vencat. Flynn writes a compelling case in his book Custom Nation (BenBe...
Business
5 Things I Wish I Knew Before Opening an Ecommerce Business

July 18, 2013 • Armando Roggio

You might be prepared to open an online retail business. You have the funding, cash flow planned, inventory managed, and even a marketing campaign ready to launch. But there are some other things you’ll want to know before you start doing business. U.S. ecommerce sales grew 13 percent ...
Payments
Beware Credit Card Processing Fees, Especially Refunds

July 17, 2013 • Phil Hinke

Merchants periodically send me their credit card processing agreements after they have negotiated new pricing with their existing provider or when changing providers. Usually, I find that the merchant has done a good job of negotiating rates and monthly fees. However, some of the peri...
Fraud Prevention
Cyber Security for Ecommerce

July 15, 2013 • Marcia Kaplan

Anyone using the Internet should be aware of security issues. But companies that engage in financial transactions and collect customer data need to be especially careful. While much of the emphasis for ecommerce merchants is the protection of credit card information, in the age of big d...
Business
Nurturing An Unrealistic Value for your eCommerce business

July 11, 2013 • Manish Shah

Nurturing An Unrealistic Value Many of us can still hear the admonition of our parents, “You’ve got to learn the value of a dollar.” From our first piggy bank to our current savings and investment plans, we have been faced with the value of our hard earned dollars. What happened when ...
Shipping & Fulfillment
6 Order Fulfillment Extras your Customers Will Love

July 8, 2013 • Jerry Jao

Order fulfillment is a critical part of the ecommerce customer experience. As ecommerce operators, we need to ensure that our customers are taken care of even when the merchandise lands in their hands. Here are six examples of extra services to offer customers when you ship their orde...
Inventory
4 Tips for Finding your Ecommerce Niche

July 5, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Finding your ecommerce niche is an exercise in discovering passions, solving problems, networking, and testing for supply, sales, and competition viability. But once discovered, marketing and selling products to a niche can lead to online retail success. Nearly anything can be sold onl...
Business
June 2013 Top 10: Our Most Popular Posts

June 28, 2013 • 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 for June 2013, recognizing that articles we published earlier in the month are more likely to make the list than later ones. ...
Amazon & Marketplaces
Selling on Marketplaces: 4 Common Mistakes

June 28, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Marketplaces like Ebay and Amazon can be a boon for the bottom line since they present your products to millions of interested shoppers. But a huge audience also means that mistakes can be glaring and costly. Amazon gets something like 21 million visitors a day and more than 100 millio...
Business
5 Ways Big Data Can Help Retail Supply Chains

June 27, 2013 • Gagan Mehra

The supply chain is a critical component of a retailer's business. This article identifies fives ways in which big data can enhance a retailer's supply chain processes. 1. Real-time Delivery Management Tracking delivery of shipped goods has improved over the years. Big data helps impr...
Business
Lessons Learned: Finding the Recipe for a Successful Cake Decorating Website

June 25, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

There’s no one recipe to becoming a successful online retailer. Julie Degnan began with a love of numbers, mixed in an entrepreneurial father, and added a “pinch” of a job ...
Staffing
5 Considerations for Choosing a Developer or Designer

June 24, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Software developers and website designers can be an extension of your online store’s marketing and branding team since these professionals have a significant amount of influence over how your ecommerce site looks and functions. Choosing an individual freelancer or agency to do design o...
Business
Teenage Online Shopping Trends

June 20, 2013 • Marcia Kaplan

Teenagers spend a lot of money. The 35.6 million teens in the United States are accomplished multi-channel shoppers and notoriously fickle, so marketing to them is a challenge. Luckily, this age group is a favorite subject of consumer researchers and a good deal of recent data exists to...
Business > Merchant Voice
Credit Card Processing Sucks

June 20, 2013 • Jamie Salvatori

Credit cards are cool. They make online shopping possible. But credit card processing, the system by which money moves from a customer to a merchant, totally sucks. It sucks for three reasons: cost, liability, and security. Let’s outline each in their stunning absurdity. Credit card ...
Payments
Credit Card Processing: Be Wary of Savings Analyses

June 18, 2013 • Phil Hinke

If you have been reading my articles, you know I do not believe business owners should give their credit card merchant statements to competing providers. Merchant statements disclose the pricing that competitors need to win over the account at the highest possible profit to them. Th...
Business
Are Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode Conversion Killers?

June 14, 2013 • Charles Nicholls

No merchant wants to add steps in the checkout process that reduce conversion. However, merchants often don’t have a choice about 3D Secure, the payment industry program behind "Verified by Visa," "MasterCard SecureCode," and "Amex SafeKey." These programs attempt to reduce card-not-p...
Local Business
How to Sell Online if You Already Have a Physical Store

June 14, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Small brick-and-mortar retailers can find new customers, experiment with new products, and generally grow their business when they start selling online. For established retailers, the first steps toward ecommerce often begin with product preparation, software selection and integration, ...
Shipping & Fulfillment
Shipping: Understanding Time in Transit and Dimensional Weight

June 13, 2013 • Mike Sowa

In my 25 years of experience in fulfillment and operations, I've managed warehousing, order management, and shipping for large merchants, such as Wine.com. I currently am co-founder of ShipJunction, a carrier management platform for ecommerce companies. I've learned over the years that...
Business
Competing Against Multi-channel Brands and Retailers

June 13, 2013 • Dale Traxler

If you sell branded consumer products in your online store, your business is at a high risk because of the multi-channel strategies of manufacturers, marketplaces, and large specialty retailers. Let’s say you sell Under Armour products. One of your items is a "Men’s Coldblack® Player ...
Business
One-third of U.S. Adults Own Tablets

June 12, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Thirty four percent of American adults now own a tablet computer like the Apple iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab, Google Nexus, or Amazon Kindle Fire, up from 18 percent last year. This doubling in U.S. tablet penetration will almost certainly impact ecommerce. Since 2010, the Pew Research Cen...
Business
5 Advantages of Small Merchants over Industry Giants

June 11, 2013 • Jerry Jao

Large online retailers may have the technology, marketing budget, and resources to automatically generate personalized websites or to build sophisticated marketing campaigns, but smaller merchants also have strengths. One of those is the ability to create more personal encounters for cu...
Amazon & Marketplaces
13 Curated Shopping Sites

June 10, 2013 • Sig Ueland

Sometimes shoppers need a little help. Rather than searching through an endless supply of products, they may prefer a selection from the experts or tastemakers they follow. Here is a list of curated shopping sites. Some of the sites offer personalized product recommendations by expert ...
Business > Merchant Voice
Growing Pains

June 8, 2013 • Richard Stubbings

Being successful comes with its own problems. As your customer base grows and your orders come in higher volumes, you need to expand to carry on. Sooner or latter you need to recruit staff to help carry the workload. This is a massive step. No matter how much effort you put into selecti...
Shipping & Fulfillment
3 Tips for Starting a Drop-ship Online Store

June 7, 2013 • Armando Roggio

An ecommerce entrepreneur with passion and great supplier relationships can earn good profits without making large investments or holding lots of product inventory. Drop shipping allows retailers to sell products without holding actual inventory. When a customer places an online order ...
Shipping & Fulfillment
The Perfect Return Merchandise Authorization System

June 6, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Sometimes the shoe just doesn’t fit. Or maybe it was the wrong color. Most every ecommerce business deals with product returns and exchanges, and the ecommerce platform processing those returns often dictates how smoothly the exchange or return goes. A return merchandise authorization ...
Business > Merchant Voice
Price Fixing Cartels

June 3, 2013 • Richard Stubbings

As the rise of the bedroom sellers continue, a new problem has arisen. Suppliers have gotten into the act. Now whilst some suppliers do not care who they sell to, nor how low retailer margins go, other suppliers are more and more concerned about maintaining the quality value of their pr...
Business
The Importance of an Exit Strategy

May 31, 2013 • Dale Traxler

You are an ecommerce business owner. Your revenue and profit are increasing. In "Ecommerce Trends Point to a Bright Future," we confirmed the industry is solid and growing. Why in the world would you consider an exit strategy? First, let’s define "exit strategy." In most cases, it mean...
Business
Pros, Cons of an Ecommerce Acquisition

May 29, 2013 • Dale Traxler

In "7 Strategies to Grow Ecommerce Revenue," my previous article, I explored basic, low risk strategies to grow ecommerce revenue. There is another strategy, however, if you are willing to assume more risk: an acquisition. Let’s face it, ecommerce is very competitive. In virtually eve...
Business > Merchant Voice
How to increase conversions: two conversion specialists have very different ideas

May 24, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

How long do you let poor conversions hamper your sales? After the needle hadn't moved on my unit sales after the holiday period, and my conversion rate was sinking, I hired a conversion specialist from Odesk. (No, I didn't have much money to spend.) My conversion specialist 1, whom I'...
Fraud Prevention
Using Big Data to Prevent Ecommerce Fraud

May 22, 2013 • Gagan Mehra

A recent report estimated the fraud cost for online retailers to be $3.5 billion or 0.9 percent of online revenue. To put it in different words, an online retailer loses, on average, $9,000 to fraud for every $1 million in revenue. This is a significant amount of fraud that, ideally, ...