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
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, ...
Business
Job Description: ‘Startup Ecommerce Founder’

May 21, 2013 • Dale Traxler

I’ve been browsing the job listings for ecommerce positions at large retailers. They can afford to hire expertise in marketing, supply chain management, human resources, systems, web design, business intelligence, operations, and finance. Small business owners do not have those luxuries...
Business
Lessons Learned: Fall of Communism Leads to Cheap Sheds’ Success

May 21, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

Citizens of Hungary were banned from owning and operating their own businesses from World War II until the communist regime fell in the early 1990s. With no exposure to entrepreneurialism for about 50 years, one Hungarian family, the Panczels, bravely opened a convenience store in Szol...
Cross-border Selling
Cross-border Ecommerce Can Reduce Closeouts, Clearance

May 17, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Seasonal or discontinued products sitting in inventory limit cash flow and may make it more difficult for merchants to invest in newer, faster-selling or higher-margin products. While many retailers discount or close out these products, there may be an opportunity to maintain higher mar...
Payments
Blaming Credit Card Associations for Rate Changes

May 16, 2013 • Phil Hinke

Visa, MasterCard, and Discover generally change rates and terms in April and October. However, they can make changes at other times during the year, as will happen this year. Unfortunately, over the years, some providers have taken advantage of these changes by increasing their rates an...
Business
Adding Alternative Payment Methods to your Online Store

May 13, 2013 • Dale Traxler

Many established merchants offer payment methods in addition to credit cards. The most popular alternative by far is PayPal, but there are other options, too. In my experience, adding a single alternative payment method that allows shoppers to avoid using a credit cards is a good idea. ...
Cross-border Selling
5 Quick Tips for Shipping Internationally

May 10, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Cross-border online sales may account for a significant portion of total ecommerce orders in just the next few years, according to some reports. But for many small online retailers the task of actually shipping a package internationally and understanding all of the associated rules, reg...
Business
Ecommerce Trends Point to Bright Future

May 8, 2013 • Marcia Kaplan

Over the past five years, ecommerce has grown at a pace at least twice as fast as total retail sales and that trend will continue over the next five years, according to published reports. In 2012, ecommerce had a healthy 14.8 percent growth rate over 2011, easily eclipsing the total ret...
Amazon & Marketplaces
Third-party Marketplaces: What Merchants Should Know

May 7, 2013 • Scott Smigler

Many online merchants have embraced third-party marketplaces. They've been seduced by promises of easy revenue growth and enabled by software solutions that make it easy to sell their products on those sites. It’s true that marketplaces can pay dividends for merchants, at least for nea...
Business
Implementing the Online Sales Tax Bill

May 6, 2013 • Dale Traxler

The possibility of Congress passing legislation that requires online retailers to collect sales taxes has been discussed for years. People use to asked me if I was worried about it. I would reply, "Not until legislation is in the final debate in Congress.” Well, that final debate is he...
Amazon & Marketplaces > Merchant Voice
The dreaded Amazon A-Z claim

May 6, 2013 • Richard Stubbings

When you get an Amazon A-Z claim, you must not reply instantly. Your response must be carefully considered, to put your side in the best possible light. You only get one chance to reply. It is best if you do this after you fully investigate and you have calmed down.