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-
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...
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Merchant Voice
No Video is (far) better than a bad video
November 6, 2011 • Jamie Salvatori
I know a few things about video. While my formal schooling taught me computer science, my father is a professional cinematographer. He taught me how to take photographs and eventually how to shoot and create video. Before I got involved in e-commerce, my business (for about 7 years) wa...
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Finance
Banks React to Durbin Amendment
November 4, 2011 • Marcia Kaplan
When the Durbin Amendment regulating interchange fees on debit card transactions took effect October 1, it appeared that merchants could accrue some cost savings on debit card transactions and perhaps leverage their savings by encouraging customers to use debit cards in lieu of credit c...
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Shipping & Fulfillment
5 Reasons to Consider Fulfillment Services
November 4, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Accounting, purchasing, marketing, and operations are all areas that online and multi-channel merchants must manage. Fortunately there is a growing class of service companies that allows sellers to outsource product receiving, inventorying, packing, and shipping. Fulfillment services a...
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Business
SEOmoz CEO on Raising Venture Capital
November 2, 2011 • PEC Staff
There's no more prominent search-engine-optimization company than SEOmoz. It offers tools for managing search engine rankings that many companies consider essential. The founder of SEOmoz, Rand Fishkin, is notable for his transparency on matters related to running the company. This w...
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Business
What does it mean to sell your business when hundreds of internet businesses are for sale?
November 2, 2011 • Manish Shah
Business for sale marketplace is receiving hundreds of new listings every day and setting your business apart from the competition is becoming harder and harder. There are usually few hundred internet businesses on sale at any given time and in the recent months this number has surged s...
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Business
October 2011 Top Ten: Our Most Popular Posts
November 1, 2011 • David Maier
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 October 2011, recognizing that articles we published earlier in the month are more likely to make the list than later one...
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Business
Entrepreneur Describes Selling an Ecommerce Business
October 26, 2011 • Kerry Murdock
Many merchants dream of building a successful ecommerce business and then selling it. Shirley Tan, the founder of AmericanBridal.com, did just that. She launched the business, built annual revenue to $6.5 million, and then sold it. We spoke with her ...
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Finance
Ecommerce Companies Snag Venture Capital
October 25, 2011 • Marcia Kaplan
While venture capital funding has generally been in the doldrums this year, a few ecommerce software companies — and even some online sellers — have managed to attract equity investors.
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Business
14 Online Resources to Help Start a Small Business
October 21, 2011 • Marcia Kaplan
If you are a discouraged job hunter or someone who has always wanted to be an entrepreneur, you will be pleased to know that the Internet offers an array of resources to help you find the right path to being your own boss. Following are 14 online resources that offer assistance to bud...
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Business
Interview: Yahoo! Small Business General Manager
October 19, 2011 • PEC Staff
There's no more pioneering platform in the ecommerce business than Yahoo!. Its shopping cart powers thousands of ecommerce stores, and its hosting and other small business services help over a million companies. But Yahoo! is changing — the recent departure of its CEO being one indicat...
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Business
10 Online Legal Form Providers
October 19, 2011 • Marcia Kaplan
Hiring attorneys for issues such as incorporation, contracts, or business sales can be extremely expensive for small businesses. The Internet provides less expensive alternatives, with templates offered by a number of firms. The most commonly available forms are for incorporation or LLC...
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Business
Back Office Complexities of Selling on Multiple Channels
October 12, 2011 • PEC Staff
Proponents of selling retail products across multiple online channels don't often discuss the back office reality of managing it all. Merchants who sell on, say, (a) their own ecommerce sites, (b) Amazon, (c) eBay and (d) Facebook must update — on four separate websites — stock quantit...
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Payments
Credit Card Processing: ‘Interchange-Plus’ Pricing Not Necessarily Fair
October 11, 2011 • Phil Hinke
I am not only upset with what I am seeing in the in the card processing industry right now, I am disgusted with how merchants are being taken advantage of.
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Business
X.commerce: An eBay, PayPal, Magento ‘Ecosystem’?
October 4, 2011 • PEC Staff
The notion of combining an online marketplace with a payment platform, a shopping cart and a robust backend is not new. But when the marketplace is eBay, the payment platform is PayPal, the cart is Magento and the backend is GSI Commerce, that is news. eBay calls this new collaboration ...
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Business
Good Internet businesses are sold quickly – If you don’t grab it – someone else will
October 3, 2011 • Manish Shah
I recently finished my assignment with a buyer; let’s call him Mike, who contacted me after losing a good internet business that he liked to another buyer. He said this internet business was selling product line that he and his wife liked and it had all characteristics of good business...
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Finance
Amazon Becomes a Proponent of Uniform Internet Sales Tax
September 29, 2011 • Marcia Kaplan
Two months ago I wrote "California Joins the Internet Sales Tax Fray; Federal Legislation Coming?," a description of the latest efforts by states to get online sellers to pay sales tax. Several new developments warrant another look. California and Amazon Come to Terms After we publish...
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Finance
Ecommerce IPOs for 2011: 3 Down, More to Follow?
September 23, 2011 • Sig Ueland
Groupon's initial public stock offering, which had been pushed back, is now back on. But for how long? With the ongoing market volatility, several prominent Internet companies are reconsidering their IPO plans. Here is a roundup of the ecommerce-related IPO market for 2011, including a...
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Finance
Consumers Use Tablets for Shopping; 70 Million Units in 2011
September 22, 2011 • Marcia Kaplan
When Apple introduced the iPad in April 2010, people ridiculed the name. Nobody is mocking it anymore. While other companies, including Microsoft, tinkered with tablets earlier, none of them made much of an impression on consumers. With its sleek design backed by Apple's marketing magic...
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Business
ChannelAdvisor CEO Discusses Shop.org
September 21, 2011 • PEC Staff
Shop.org is a leading trade association for ecommerce merchants. It's the online division of National Retail Federation, which represents 3.6 million retail businesses worldwide. To discuss Shop.org and its role in helping online retailers, we spoke with Scot Wingo. He's the CEO of Chan...
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Merchant Voice
The Death of Free Shipping
September 21, 2011 • Jamie Salvatori
My highschool economics teacher preached, “There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch”. This holds true for shipping costs. In fact, the costs of shipping are rising faster than inflation. I see our shipping rates rising much faster than increases in the cost of our products. So, if you...
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Finance
Amazon Prime: 5 Million Members, 20 Percent Growth
September 16, 2011 • Marcia Kaplan
For $79 a year, Amazon customers who join the Prime membership program get unlimited free two-day shipping on eligible items with no minimum order size. For $3.99 an item, a ...
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Business
Site Search Complements Navigation, Says SLI-Systems CEO
September 13, 2011 • PEC Staff
By almost any measure, high-level site search increases sales. The need for sophisticated site search is becoming increasingly important for ecommerce merchants, who serve an increasingly sophisticated consumer base. To discuss trends in site search and new developments in that industr...
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Payments
Credit Card Salespeople Don’t Understand Ecommerce Merchants
September 13, 2011 • Phil Hinke
This article is my latest installment on deceptive credit card practices that harm ecommerce merchants. I have worked in the credit card processing industry since 1994 and every year I get more disgusted with the tactics used on merchants. I now own a consulting firm that advises merc...
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Business
Style Guides for the Digital World
September 12, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Written communications are a vital part of ecommerce marketing. How a business presents itself in words may affect how that business is perceived. With this in mind, it is a ...
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Finance
How to Read a Financial Statement
September 8, 2011 • Marcia Kaplan
Having a good accountant is important to the success of every small business. But do you really understand all the terms in the documents your accountant prepares? Relying too heavily ...
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Business
Ecommerce’s Debt to Steve Jobs; 10 Innovations
September 7, 2011 • Sig Ueland
Ecommerce owes Steve Jobs. Aside from launching the first popular personal computer, the Apple co-founder brought about many of the devices and marketplaces that make-up today's online commerce. Here is a list of innovations by Steve Jobs that have affected the ecommerce industry. The...