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
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.
Business
Lessons Learned: Trusting your Gut to Ecommerce Success

May 3, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

Imagine being told that you’ll never have a job or children and you’ll be on disability for the rest of your life. That’s what doctors told Kenyan-born Jini Patel Thompson when they diagnosed her, at age 17, with Crohn’s Disease. But the now-married mother of three proved them wrong. S...
Shipping & Fulfillment
7 Ways to Improve a Customer’s Shipping Experience

April 30, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Shipping can be one of the most stressful parts of an online transaction. The customer has already paid for a product, but does not actually have it in hand. And the retailer — devoted to excellent customer service — has no control over the carrier. In spite of this, there are some co...
Business
April 2013 Top 10: Our Most Popular Posts

April 30, 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 April 2013, recognizing that articles we published earlier in the month are more likely to make the list than later ones. ...
Business > Merchant Voice
Internet Sales Tax Isn’t About Fairness

April 26, 2013 • Jamie Salvatori

If you listened to the politicians tell it, the story of main street retailers needing online stores to charge and collect sales tax is all about fairness. To again quote McEnroe, “You cannot be serious!” Here’s the “argument” presented by stupid politicians as proxy for the main stree...
Business
How to Monitor, Prevent Fulfillment Errors

April 26, 2013 • Dale Traxler

Ecommerce companies typically focus on acquiring traffic and selling a wide range of products that shoppers will actually buy. Many ecommerce firms track key performance indicators like new visitors, conversion rates, and average order values. But for many ecommerce companies, especia...
Amazon & Marketplaces
Marketplaces: How to Sell More in 2013

April 23, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Online marketplaces like Etsy, eBay, and Amazon offer retailers profitable, high-volume sales channels that can significantly improve the bottom line. But as more businesses discover and use these marketplaces, competition increases, meaning businesses need to market well in these chann...
Payments
Bitcoins: 3 Things Online Merchants Must Know

April 18, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Bitcoin is a mostly anonymous, peer-to-peer electronic payment system that could allow online retailers to accept cash-like payments from anyone, potentially, opening up new market segments and reaching new customers. But bitcoin is not without risks. Earlier this month, a single bitco...
Business
The Importance of Ecommerce Strategy

April 15, 2013 • Dale Traxler

One thing I learned running my ecommerce jewelry business for 10 years was that I was never done. There was seemingly always something new I should be working on. I suspect many other merchants feel similarly. But it's important to ask if you are working on the right things. Are you i...
Business > Merchant Voice
10 ways that launching a website is like planning a wedding

April 12, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

I'm getting married this year and one of the things I've noticed is how many parallels there are between the process of planning a wedding and planning a website launch as I've just relaunched my own website. Just like a wedding, it doesn't matter if it's your first, second or third (w...
Payments
Merchants Using Interchange-Plus Pricing Continue to Overpay

April 11, 2013 • Phil Hinke

Editor's Note: Contributor Phil Hinke is a veteran of the credit card processing industry. He now consults with merchants to help lower their processing costs, believing the credit card industry is often unfair to them. His latest article, below, addresses misconceptions with interchang...
Amazon & Marketplaces
How to Start Selling on the Amazon Marketplace

April 10, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Amazon allows other retailers to sell products on its marketplace, where millions of interested shoppers visit daily. This creates an opportunity for sellers — large and small. It is possible to start selling on the Amazon Marketplace in a matter of hours; the barrier to entry is very l...