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
Lessons Learned: Luis Hernandez, Jr. with The Motor Book Store
March 7, 2011 • PEC Staff
“Lessons Learned” is a series where we ask ecommerce business owners to share their experiences and advice. For this installment, we interviewed Luis Hernandez, Jr., CEO and owner of The ...
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Business
Ask an Expert: Digital Rights Management for eBooks
March 4, 2011 • 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 tracking website trends, cost comparisons, competitors products and inventory. The question comes from Bonnie Leigh, owner of Avant...
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Business
Ask an Expert: Tools for Tracking Sales, Search Results, Competitors?
March 2, 2011 • 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 tracking website trends, cost comparisons, competitors ...
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Fraud Prevention
Radical Ideas to Make Credit Card Payments More Secure
March 1, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Credit cards approvals are not completely secure because the information those approvals rely on — cardholder names, card numbers and expiration dates — is static and relatively easy to gather. Focusing on making payment approvals less vulnerable may be more effective than asking cons...
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Business
4 Ideas to Cut Costs on Your Ecommerce Business
February 21, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Reducing unnecessary spending will help your ecommerce business become more efficient and could increase its profits. But how do you cut costs right now without harming your business's future? Here are four suggestions for cutting costs now. Not every one of these will be applicable to...
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Business
Internet Sales Tax Impacts Amazon’s Affiliates
February 18, 2011 • Jeff Jacobson, Jd, Llm
The battle continues among large Internet retailers and the states over charging sales tax for purchases over the Internet. This is especially the case where the retailer has no “nexus” or presence in the state in which the consumer is located. As I discussed in "Internet Sales Tax: Ye...
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Business
How To Save Money On Shipping and Fulfillment
February 17, 2011 • PEC Staff
Merchants know that the effort it takes to fulfill and ship out orders can be very time consuming. Oftentimes, because of this, cost is the last thing to be taken into consideration. For many merchants, third-party order management software helps expedite the shipping process. Others r...
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Business
6 Common Ecommerce Mistakes
February 16, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce businesses can be founded by massive corporations or by families working out of a garage. It provides a relatively level field for everyone to compete. And, like so many businesses, ecommerce operations often find unique ways to succeed. This article's purpose is to help ecom...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Stop obsessing over your search engine rankings
February 15, 2011 • Jamie Salvatori
As the owner of an e-commerce store, my number one piece of advice to anyone with an online store is to stop obsessing over your search engine rankings. Instead, focus your attention on building your brand. In the real world, we buy stuff from people that we like. The “better” car sale...
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Business
11 Tips for Merchants to Add Suppliers
February 11, 2011 • PEC Staff
Editor's Note: Chad Weinman is owner of Cat5 Commerce, a seasoned ecommerce firm in St. Louis, Mo. that operates HikingBoots.com, TacticalGear.com, and MilitaryBoots.com. He wrote us recently, stating, "I was writing a memo to my vendor relations manager that illustrated some techniqu...
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Business
4 Ways to Waste Money on Your Ecommerce Store
February 8, 2011 • Armando Roggio
The causes of ecommerce failures are diverse, but they frequently end with the proprietor shuttering the operation because it is losing too much money. In this article, I list four activities that I believe can destroy an ecommerce business's bottom line and waste your money. I think th...
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Business
PCI-Council General Manager on Non-Compliance ‘Russian Roulette’
February 4, 2011 • PEC Staff
Most merchants prefer the idea of the credit card industry policing itself, versus lawmakers getting involved. PCI Security Standards Council is the industry's attempt to do just that. But how ecommerce merchants become compliant and meet PCI standards is confusing to many, and the pena...
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Cross-border Selling
Geolocation Helpful to Merchants, Tricky for SEO
February 3, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown
Identifying where an online consumer lives can be helpful to ecommerce merchants. Among visitors to an ecommerce site, there's differences in language, currency, and climate. A clothing merchant, for example, would presumably offer different items to a visitor from Alaska than from, say...
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Business
Day in the Life: Zoovy CEO Brian Horakh
February 3, 2011 • PEC Staff
Editor’s Note: “Day in the Life” is a series where we ask leaders in ecommerce about a single day in their professional lives. For this inaugural installment, we corresponded with Brian Horakh, founder and CEO of Zoovy, a Carlsbad, Calif.-based ecommerce platform provider. Brian Horakh...
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Business
January 2011 Top Ten: Our Most Popular Posts
January 31, 2011 • Kate Monteith
Each month, we compile a list of the ten most popular articles we published at Practical eCommerce that month, based on the number of page views. Here are our ten most popular articles for January 2011. 4 Realities of Selling on Facebook Facebook is becoming a popular avenue for onlin...
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Business
OverstockArt CEO Critiques Holiday Sales Performance
January 27, 2011 • PEC Staff
The holiday selling season is important for many online merchants. This includes David Sasson. He is the founder and CEO of OverstockArt.com, a retailer of reproduced oil paintings. The company saw a 25 percent increase in 2010 holiday sales, versus 2009. We spoke with Sasson to see wha...
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Business
U.S. Agency Official on International Commerce
January 20, 2011 • PEC Staff
Many ecommerce merchants are attracted to selling products to consumers in other countries. But the complexities of international sales can include tariffs, customs and export laws. For United States-based merchants, the U.S. Department of Commerce can help. It has just published a free...
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Business
4 Steps to a Paperless Office
January 20, 2011 • PEC Staff
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Business
10 Mobile Shipping Apps for iPhone, BlackBerry and Android
January 19, 2011 • PEC Staff
Shipping, tracking, and calculating time and cost of shipments are at the heart of ecommerce businesses. Merchants are usually tied to a desktop to make all these choices for shipping ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
You’re backing up more than your data, right?
January 12, 2011 • Jamie Salvatori
Every website owner should be backing up their website and database on a daily basis. If you’re not, set that up immediately. However, this is not what I’m referring to when it comes to backups. I’m referring to all of the critical aspects of your business. Here are some questions to as...
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Business
Shopatron Platform: Manufacturers Sell Products and Retailers Fulfill Them
January 12, 2011 • PEC Staff
Many ecommerce merchants sell products from large manufacturers and suppliers. Increasingly, those manufacturers and suppliers also sell — on a retail basis — the same products. Shopatron is a company ...
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Business
12 New Internet Devices, from the CES Trade Show
January 12, 2011 • PEC Staff
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Business
Lessons Learned: Virgil Dickerson with Suburban Home Records
January 10, 2011 • PEC Staff
”Lessons Learned” is a series where we ask ecommerce business owners to share their experiences and advice. For this installment, we interviewed Virgil Dickerson, CEO and owner of Suburban Home ...
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Business
Survey Results: 46 Percent Say Free Shipping Increases Profits
January 6, 2011 • Kate Monteith
Free shipping is often touted as a surefire way to get more sales, but rolling shipping costs into the product price can also take a big bite out of a profit margin. During the rush of holiday sales, we wondered how many of our readers offer free shipping and if you think it is a worthw...
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Business
Google’s High-Speed Fiber Network Still Progressing
January 3, 2011 • Jeff Muendel
Editor's Note: Google is much more than a search engine. Its many products and services are innovative and, oftentimes, useful to ecommerce merchants. But keeping track of Google takes time. For 2011, we've asked contributor Jeff Muendel to file a monthly post on a non-search Google act...
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Business
25 Top Posts for 2010
December 30, 2010 • PEC Staff
As 2010 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. Social media was predominantly on the minds of our readers in 2010, with articles about Facebook taking the top three spots. Other subje...
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Business
10 Resolutions for Your Pay-Per-Click Account
December 30, 2010 • Scott Smigler
With a new year come new opportunities. It is also a good time to start looking forward to making 2011 more profitable. Here are ten steps to take for the new year to accelerate your pay-per-click advertising efforts. 10. Create After-Holiday Sales As we move into the new year, there...
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Business
13 Little-Known Google Search Functions
December 29, 2010 • PEC Staff
Ecommerce business owners depend on Google’s vast array of tools and services to keep their businesses running smoothly. But, the service that made Google famous – the search engine – can be underutilized by ecommerce merchants and their customers. Need an area or zip code for shipping? Find it on Google. Need to track shipments? Track it on Google.
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Business
Microsoft Announces Major Vulnerability in All IE Browsers
December 28, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Microsoft announced a major vulnerability in all versions of the popular Internet Explorer (IE) web browsers that makes it possible for malicious websites to hijack a visitor's computer. Microsoft said that it did not believe that any serious criminals were either using or previously w...
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Business
Financing for Ecommerce: ProFounder.com Can Help Ecommerce Merchants Raise Money
December 27, 2010 • PEC Staff
Obtaining a loan from a bank to launch that dream ecommerce business can be difficult. But, fortunately there are new funding sources sprouting up that target this niche. “Financing for ...