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.

Finance
5 Reasons for an Ecommerce Business Plan

April 10, 2013 • Marcia Kaplan

Does an ecommerce company need a business plan? Yes, almost any business can benefit from developing a business plan. While many companies prepare a plan solely to secure outside funding, a business plan can also help you focus on what you want your business to be in the future and pro...
Business
Ecommerce Priorities Depend on Lifecycle

April 5, 2013 • Dale Traxler

Knowing your business's lifecycle is important. Before you invest in a new ecommerce platform, or make decisions based on the latest ecommerce trends, be sure you know where you are in the lifecycle of your business. Why is the business lifecycle important? There are many reasons. ...
Business > Merchant Voice
Never Forget The Customer

April 5, 2013 • Richard Stubbings

Ecommerce is a service industry. We should never forget that customers come first. We should always consider what a customer actually wants from us. With Ecommerce we build a site, we build admin systems and procedures, and we try to make everything efficient so we can send out the goo...
Finance
SWOT Analysis for Ecommerce Companies

April 3, 2013 • Marcia Kaplan

A SWOT analysis — Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats — is something many MBA students learn. Unfortunately, businesses frequently treat SWOT like geometry: one of those things you learn but never use again.
Business
March 2013 Top 10: Our Most Popular Posts

March 29, 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 March 2013, recognizing that articles we published earlier in the month are more likely to make the list than later ones. ...
Business > Merchant Voice
Why we abandoned Amazon and eBay

March 26, 2013 • Jamie Salvatori

In business, you must always be on the lookout for so-called Black Swan events. This may seem a bit illogical, but the point is that everything you rely upon in business has the potential to completely upend or destroy your business. Many years ago, my business sold a driver’s educatio...
Business
Ask an Expert: Necessary to Pay Sales Commissions for Online Orders?

March 22, 2013 • PEC Staff

"Ask an Expert" is an occasional feature where we ask ecommerce experts questions from online merchants. For this installment, we address a question about paying commissions to a sales staff for online orders. It comes from George Sajonian, owner of Viva Performance, a seller of automot...
Amazon & Marketplaces
5 Tips for Increasing Amazon Sales by 50 Percent

March 20, 2013 • Armando Roggio

The Amazon marketplace gives online retailers big and small the opportunity to sell to millions of potential customers, significantly increase sales, and acquire loyal shoppers. Competition on Amazon can be fierce. By some estimates, Amazon receives nearly 90 million unique visitors ea...
Amazon & Marketplaces
Google’s ‘Merchant Quality Score’ Could Make Marketplaces More Attractive

March 14, 2013 • Armando Roggio

A possible change to the way Google ranks merchants on its results pages might make multi-channel selling on marketplaces or comparison shopping engines important. During a recent panel discussion at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Conference and Festival, Matt Cutts, who is the head of ...
Business
Lessons Learned: Making Online Bed Shopping a Dream

March 13, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

When Sara Shikhman was 10 years old, she left communist Ukraine with her parents on a one-way ticket across the Atlantic Ocean, and $5,000 hidden in a set of screwdrivers,
Payments
Credit Card Processing: How to React to a Rate Increase

March 13, 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 how merchants should react to ...
Business > Merchant Voice
The Dreaded Bedroom seller and how to beat them

March 8, 2013 • Richard Stubbings

. With the rise and rise of Ebay and Amazon, comes the “bedroom” seller. It may be more accurate to call them hobby sellers. All Ecommerce retailers know them. They are the sellers who undercut you and sell at cost or less. They appear, hang around for a few months, and then vanish. In...
Business
Personalizing the Online Shopping Experience

March 7, 2013 • PEC Staff

Retailers increasingly use data to personalize an online shopping experience. Geo location, shopping and browsing history, weather — all can impact how products are presented to online shoppers. Among the leaders in personalization technology is Monetate. Its co-founder and CEO, David...
Business > Merchant Voice
Book review: The Insider’s Guide to Ecommerce: 440 Business Insights For The Ambitious Online Retailer

March 6, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

When was the last time you had a pencil and pad at the ready, stopping to take notes as you read a business-related book? When was the last time you kept interrupting yourself: thinking out-loud, researching the points raised, and logging in to check your statstics? When was the last ...
Business
How to Research your Ecommerce Competitors

March 5, 2013 • Dale Traxler

Many ecommerce business owners have told me that they pay little attention to their competitors. Most said that they did not have time, or that their competitors’ tactics did not matter to them. But you should regularly monitor your competitors' businesses, for the following reasons. ...
Business
Feb. 2013 Top 10: Our Most Popular Posts

February 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 February 2013, recognizing that articles we published earlier in the month are more likely to make the list than later one...
Business > Merchant Voice
Is Affiliate Marketing Dead?

February 22, 2013 • Jamie Salvatori

This is going to be a short blog post and for that I will apologize up front. But, I intended for this to be more of a comment-driven exploration than a “this is how you do this” type of blog post. Recently, we switched affiliate network providers (to one of the most respected in the ...
Inventory
Reducing Excess Inventory to Free-up Capital

February 20, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Reducing excess inventory, even at a loss, can free-up capital and help a small online retailer grow. Slow selling products sitting in a warehouse — or, for very small retailers, a garage — tie up cash and may make it hard to invest in marketing, new product lines, or site improvements...
Business
Lessons Learned: Discount Cleaning Products Really Cleans Up

February 20, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

New Jersey-born Mike Kawula once bought a franchise that helped him know how to buy a franchise, which led him to create Discount Cleaning Products. Kawula graduated from Ramapo College in ...
Business > Merchant Voice
7 simple website improvements that can make a big difference

February 20, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

You've probably noticed many ways a website could be improved as you shop online. Here's a handful of ones which I encountered recently on other people's websites, as well as my own, which are so easy to fix. Allow customers time to use coupons I Googled for double basin bathroom van...
Business > Merchant Voice
Ecommerce in the shrinking world.

February 14, 2013 • Richard Stubbings

I heard on the news tonight that the EU and the USA have started talks on a free trade agreement. No doubt this will take many years to agree, but it is a sign that the world is shrinking and international trade is growing. Many Ecommerce sites are ahead of the game in international tra...
Finance
Internet Sales Tax: States Take the Lead

February 13, 2013 • Marcia Kaplan

The days of sales-tax-free online purchasing are coming to an end for many consumers. 2012 was a year of inaction on the federal level because the Marketplace Fairness Act that would have required sales tax collection by Internet merchants on a national level never came to a vote. Howev...
Payments
Credit Card Processing: The Cost of Not Auditing Statements

February 13, 2013 • Phil Hinke

I was a keynote speaker at a recent meeting of U.S. and Canadian merchants. Whenever I present, I invite merchants to bring their processing statements and their merchant contracts so I can audit them afterwards. Before starting, I always ask each merchant how often he audits his statem...
Business
21 Key Performance Indicators for Ecommerce Businesses

February 8, 2013 • Dale Traxler

Key performance indicators are becoming common in large corporations as a way to measure and monitor the success of key activities. But they can also play an important role in any sized ecommerce business. A KPI — key performance indicator — is simply a measure of some process, event...
Payments
U.S. Merchants Can Now Charge for Credit Card Transactions

January 31, 2013 • Phil Hinke

In November 2012, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York preliminarily approved a proposed settlement agreement with Visa and MasterCard. As part of the settlement, Visa and MasterCard were required to allow merchants to charge for certain credit card transactions ...
Business
Secrets of getting top valuation for your eCommerce Business

January 27, 2013 • Manish Shah

Ecommerce businesses that sell at the top valuation in marketplace are not the ones where owner invested the last year or two of their time preparing the business and it’s systems for sale. In reality, they are the businesses where the owner has planned, created and perfected the auto-p...
Finance
Equity Crowdfunding Stalls

January 25, 2013 • Marcia Kaplan

When President Obama signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act in April 2012, the clock started ticking on a 270-day period for the Securities and Exchange Commission to write the regulations that would govern crowdfunding. That 270 period is over and no regulations exist. SEC Chai...
Business > Merchant Voice
How 100 retailers responded to a mystery shopper’s Contact Us query

January 23, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

How do you respond to the customer enquiries through your Contact Us page? Do you take them seriously? You may be leaving your customer's money and their goodwill on the table. A friend of mine has just launched a baby t-shirt product so out of curiosity and solidarity, we arranged th...
Business > Merchant Voice
How to negotiate successfully

January 20, 2013 • Jamie Salvatori

In business, almost everything is negotiable. The key to successful negotiating, however, is figuring out when to spend time and energy negotiating and how to maximize your negotiations. In the business of e-commerce, your biggest expense is typically COGS (cost of goods sold). And as ...
Business
Lessons Learned: From Police Officer to Wedding-products Retailer

January 16, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

If Erica Tevis had passed her firearms test as a rookie New York police officer 12 years ago, it’s highly unlikely the New Jersey girl would have become a wedding products online retailer. Tevis, who has a bachelor’s and master’s in criminal justice from St. John’s University and Iona ...