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.

Business
10 Low-Budget Ways to Sell Internationally

February 23, 2012 • Gagan Mehra

In “10 Ideas to Grow Ecommerce Profits in 2012,” my previous article, I suggested that merchants expand into foreign markets to grow profits. In this article, I'll address how to do that without spending a lot of money. 1. Sell on Current Website, Ship from U.S. Your international cu...
Finance
15 Top Crowdfunding Projects on Kickstarter

February 23, 2012 • Sig Ueland

Kickstarter is a crowdfunding site to fund entrepreneurial projects in technology, design, film, art, and other creative fields. The video game project Double Fine Adventure has raised two million dollars from over sixty thousand backers, and the funding still has 19 days to go. Within ...
Business
Crowdfunding Legislation Still Pending

February 22, 2012 • Jeff Jacobson, Jd, Llm

If you want to raise money for your business venture, you generally have a few traditional options. You can (a) ask your family to back your venture, (b) apply for bank financing, or (c) seek investors to participate in your business. Lack of Bank Financing Since 2009, bank financi...
Business
How to Compete on Price Against Large Companies

February 22, 2012 • PEC Staff

Conventional wisdom is that smaller ecommerce merchants cannot compete against larger ones in terms of the prices of their respective products. That may not be necessarily true. We recently spoke with Rodrigo Carvalho, founder and CEO of BlackLocus, a pricing-intelligence service. He ...
Payments
Credit Card Processing: Red Flags for Ecommerce Merchants, Part 1

February 17, 2012 • Phil Hinke

Editor's Note: Contributor Phil Hinke is a veteran of the credit card processing industry. He now consults with ecommerce merchants on ways to lower their processing costs. Hinke believes merchants frequently overpay for credit card processing. His piece below is the first installment o...
Payments
6 New Mobile Payment Developments

February 16, 2012 • Sig Ueland

According to investment bank Barclays Capital, purchases made on smartphones and tablets hit $5.3 billion in the U.S. in 2011, up 83 percent from 2010. While mobile purchases are dramatically growing, how mobile consumers actually pay for those items is dramatically changing. Here is ...
Business
What’s an Inappropriate Product Review?

February 15, 2012 • PEC Staff

A recent New York Times story profiled a merchant that sold leather Kindle cases on Amazon. The merchant, according to The Times, then sent letters to its customers offering a free case if the customers posted a review on Amazon. The story created a firestorm of angst concerning reviews...
Business > Merchant Voice
There is no magic bullet for success.

February 9, 2012 • Jamie Salvatori

Soap box time! I feel like ranting a bit today. I really bristle when I read articles claiming “The 7 Tips to SEO dominance” or “10 ways to effectively market your business” or “Top 5 Mistakes That Will Kill Your Business”. It’s as if there are magic potions to running an online busines...
Shipping & Fulfillment
How to Pack and Protect an Ecommerce Shipment

February 9, 2012 • James Hyde

There are three main aspects to packaging for ecommerce shipments. Protection. Helps prevent damage to the items during transit. Presentation. Gives perceived value to the customer. Cost. Often a limiting factor. In this article, I will address "protection" matters: How to...
Business
How to Source Products from China, and Sell There Too

February 8, 2012 • PEC Staff

There's no bigger name in the ecommerce industry than Alibaba. It was launched in 1999 in China, but it now services millions of businesses and consumers, offering wholesale and retail products worldwide. We recently spoke with its vice president of global sales and service, Brian Wong,...
Amazon & Marketplaces > Merchant Voice
Playing The Amazon Game

February 3, 2012 • Richard Stubbings

Sooner or latter every online retailer will consider selling on Amazon, or are already doing so. Amazon is a huge market, and it would be unwise not to consider it. There are other blogs covering the pros and cons, but none really cover what to do if you decide to take the gamble, and e...
Business
Reducing Shipping Costs for Low-Volume Merchants

February 1, 2012 • PEC Staff

The free-shipping era squeezes smaller merchants. They must match the shipping policies of larger competitors, but they don't receive the high-volume shipping discounts that the larger companies do. Smaller merchants must pay more, in other words, for offering free shipping. There's ...
Business > Merchant Voice
My favorite tools and services

January 25, 2012 • Jamie Salvatori

I use a variety of software in my day-to-day activities running an e-commerce company. Here is a list of my favorites. Hopefully, it’s useful to you as well! Photoshop - If you don’t know how to use any flavor of image editing software, you shouldn’t be in the e-commerce game. As I’ve ...
Shipping & Fulfillment
How to Expand to the U.K. Market

January 25, 2012 • James Hyde

Editor's Note: We welcome James Hyde as our newest contributor. He's a U.K.-based shipping and fulfillment expert with Six Works, a fulfillment firm. Hyde's first article, below, explains money-saving strategies for U.S.-based merchants to sell to U.K. consumers. While the U.S. online ...
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...
Business > 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
Business > 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...