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 | B2B | Cross-border Selling | Finance | Fraud Prevention | Inventory | Local Business | Payments | Shipping & Fulfillment | Staffing-
Business
Legal: Ecommerce Owners Liable to Patent Trolls?
January 24, 2012 • Jeff Jacobson, Jd, Llm
There has recently been an increase in the number of patent claims against website developers and operators. The claims are based on "business method" and software patents for various functions of a website, such as drop-down menus, site search, and other common functions. Many of the...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
January Blues
January 24, 2012 • Richard Stubbings
It's January and Christmas is over. The huge rush of orders has been picked, packed and dispatched. The first week or two of January is also busy with the customers spending their Christmas money. Then the credit card bills come in, the orders dry up, and the problems start. What separ...
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Business
Vat19.com Thrives in 2011, Recap
January 18, 2012 • PEC Staff
We recently spoke with Jamie Salvatori about how his company fared in 2011. He is the founder and owner of Vat19, an established ecommerce business that sells unique gift items. He's also a Practical eCommerce blogger, at "The (eCommerce) Corner Office." Practical eCommerce: How w...
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Payments
Credit Card Processing: Don’t Be Seduced by Teaser Rates
January 12, 2012 • Phil Hinke
Editor's Note: Contributor Phil Hinke is a veteran of the credit card processing industry. He now consults with merchants to help them lower their processing costs, believing the credit card industry is often unfair to them. His latest installment is below. In "Durbin Amendment May Fos...
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Finance
Buying Sites to Boost Traffic
January 12, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Purchasing and maintaining established, niche websites may help online retailers increase site traffic and sales. Boiled down to its essence, much of online retail marketing is devoted to increasing site traffic in the hope that more visitors will ultimately lead to more sales and more...
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Business
Using Real People to Test a Website
January 11, 2012 • PEC Staff
Knowing how consumers interact with an ecommerce site can be greatly beneficial. There's a company that provides real-time user tests, where humans navigate through a site and record their experiences. The results can identify potential problems, which merchants can then correct to impr...
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Staffing
10 Tips to Hire a Great SEO Agency
January 10, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
Staying on top of search engine optimization requires time and effort that many small businesses can’t afford in-house. One obvious solution is to turn to an agency. But which ones can be trusted and which will under deliver and overcharge? Before just picking the number one result in a...
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Staffing
Try Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for Inexpensive Labor
January 9, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Amazon's Mechanical Turk crowd-sourcing marketplace has been online since November 2005 and serves as a way of getting humans to perform common, repeatable tasks that computers have not yet mastered. For ecommerce, the Mechanical Turk service can help produce product descriptions, sor...
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Payments
Layaway: Retro Purchasing Process Reappears Online
January 3, 2012 • Marcia Kaplan
Layaway made a big retail comeback in 2011, with stores such as Sears, Walmart, and Kmart encouraging customers to take advantage of this retro purchase technique. Walmart discontinued layaway in 2006 but brought it back in 2011 for fine jewelry, toys, and electronics. Sears and Kmart o...
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Business
What website seller can do to maximize sale price
January 3, 2012 • Manish Shah
The best thing seller can do to make it very easy to sell the website is by creating a system in which business runs for itself (i.e. without sellers participation). If you can remove yourself from the business for year or more and still maintain the profitability, you can prove to the ...
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Business
Multi-store Merchant Recaps 2011
December 30, 2011 • PEC Staff
With 2011 winding down, we recently asked an ecommerce merchant to recap his company's accomplishments for the year. The merchant is Chad Weinman, founder and CEO of Cat5 Commerce, which operates 10 separate online stores — including RunningShoes.com and TacticalGear.com — from its bas...
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Business
25 Top Articles for 2011
December 29, 2011 • PEC Staff
As 2011 draws to a close, we've compiled a list of the 25 most popular Practical eCommerce articles for the year, based on the number of page views. Mobile apps were predominantly on the minds of our readers in 2011, taking three of the top four spots. Other subjects of interest includ...
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Business
The Changing Online-Payments Landscape
December 27, 2011 • Gagan Mehra
Most every ecommerce site accepts credit-card payments. But the type of cards that merchants accept can affect cart-abandonment rates, and many consumers expect payment options other than the four basic credit cards. Merchants that accommodate these new methods can increase sales. Th...
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Finance
Zynga Falters in Public Debut; Affects Facebook?
December 26, 2011 • Marcia Kaplan
The market for technology stocks is closing the year on a less than happy note and the disappointing public debut of online game provider Zynga did nothing to change the mood. Zynga's Opening Day Zynga's IPO was highly anticipated despite the fact that in the days prior to going publ...
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Shipping & Fulfillment
Notable Views: Fulfillment Outsourcing, Pros and Cons
December 23, 2011 • John Lindberg
Editor’s Note:”Notable Views” is a series where we ask leading experts to address critical, ecommerce-related topics. For this installment, we corresponded with John Lindberg, president of eFulfillment Service, a Michigan-based ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
How we achieved 99% accuracy in order fulfillment
December 21, 2011 • Jamie Salvatori
No matter how much time, effort, and money you put into promoting your business and converting visitors into buyers, you’ll never create repeat customers if you screw up fulfillment. This is partly why I hate out-sourced fulfillment and drop-shipping. Once you lose control over this mo...
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Finance
6 Internet Stock Offerings in 2011; Recap
December 19, 2011 • Marcia Kaplan
Although 2011 is not yet over, it appears it will be a dismal year for the IPO — initial public stock offering — market. As of September, according to statistics compiled by market tracker Dealogic and reported in The Wall Street Journal, 63 percent of all 76 IPOs were trading below the...
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Shipping & Fulfillment
38 Fees and Surcharges from FedEx and UPS
December 16, 2011 • Sig Ueland
When comparing shipping rates from FedEx and UPS, don’t forget to include fees and surcharges. Each shipper has an extensive list of additional costs. So rather than just comparing ‘standard rates,’ determine your shipping needs and then calculate the fees. Here is a list of 2012 fees...
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Payments
Credit Card Processing: ‘Interchange-Plus’ Pricing Not Necessarily Fair, Part 3
December 15, 2011 • Phil Hinke
Editor’s Note: Contributor Phil Hinke is a credit-card veteran who now consults with merchants on lowering their processing costs. Hinke believes the credit card processing industry is often unfair to ...
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Business
How to Secure a Domain Name in Different Countries
December 7, 2011 • PEC Staff
The notion of expanding an ecommerce business into additional countries is enticing for many merchants. Most every country, however, has its own top-level domain name. There's "co.uk" for the U.K., ".cn" for China, and ".fr" for France, as examples. Should merchants interested in t...
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Fraud Prevention
Beware of DDoS Attacks on Ecommerce Sites
December 6, 2011 • Armando Roggio
With the holiday shopping season in full swing, some Internet security experts are worried that ecommerce sites may be especially vulnerable to distributed denial of service attacks from hackers, thieves, or even unscrupulous competitors. A distributed denial of service — DDoS — attac...
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Business
Become a Google Chrome Power User
November 25, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Google Chrome is rapidly becoming one of the most popular web browsers for Internet professionals — thanks to an impressive set of features and short cuts. Learning and using just a few of these time saving tidbits could boost productivity and avoid problems. Here are some tips and tri...
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Finance
Crowdfunding: 5 Things You Should Know
November 24, 2011 • Marcia Kaplan
New crowdfunding sites are springing up every month and more and more entrepreneurs are looking to these sites for money. Despite all the hoopla, crowdfunding is not currently a good alternative for most start-up or small businesses. Here are five things you should know about crowdfundi...
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Business
Email Deliverability: Blacklists, ISP Blocks, Spam Triggers
November 23, 2011 • PEC Staff
Email marketing is critically important to many ecommerce merchants. But what happens if a merchant's email is blocked by an Internet service provider? Or, worse yet, what happens if the merchant's name or IP address lands on a so-called "blacklist"? Email deliverability was the topic...
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Shipping & Fulfillment
5 Reasons to Consider Drop Shipping
November 21, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Drop shipping is an order fulfillment strategy where the retailer does not keep products in inventory, but relies on wholesalers or manufacturers to actually ship orders to customers. This arrangement has several advantages that make it attractive to online merchants. When a customer p...
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Business
New Custom, Top-Level Domains Coming; From ‘Widget.com’ to ‘.Widget’
November 17, 2011 • PEC Staff
The range of possible domain names is about to greatly increase. That's because ICANN, the authoritative body over Internet domain names, is about to add new custom top-level domains — the portion to the right of the period — that could include brand names and other customized names. ...
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Fraud Prevention
3 Types of ‘Return Fraud’ to Monitor this Holiday Season
November 14, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Return fraud, which is expected to cost brick-and-mortar retailers $3.48 billion this holiday season, could also snag online merchants — significantly increasing costs and chargebacks. Return fraud takes several forms but three stand out as real concerns for ecommerce. They are: (1) wa...
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Payments
Credit Card Processing: ‘Interchange-Plus’ Pricing Not Necessarily Fair, Part 2
November 11, 2011 • Phil Hinke
I am a strong advocate of interchange-plus pricing. To date, I have allowed only merchant account providers that offer interchange-plus pricing to bid for my clients' business. However, I am also concerned about how some providers and salespeople appear to be pitching interchange-plus pricing as a panacea for ensuring merchants are being priced fairly.
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Finance
Venture Capital Firms Bullish on Ecommerce
November 10, 2011 • Marcia Kaplan
In "Ecommerce Companies Snag Venture Capital," I discussed several ecommerce firms that recently received venture capital funding. Most of them were ecommerce infrastructure providers. I was curious to find out if VCs prefer business-to-business infrastructure companies to consumer-ori...
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Shipping & Fulfillment
Comparing UPS, FedEx, and USPS: Which is Best Now?
November 8, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Shipping costs are an ongoing challenge for ecommerce merchants, who compete head-to-head over free shipping and seek to avoid shopping cart abandonment. Given this competitive environment, knowing which carrier is best can be a huge advantage. In March, L.L. Bean announced that it wou...