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 > Merchant Voice
How you can help customers going through a hard time

March 11, 2012 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

If your customer isn’t going through a tough time, they definitely know someone who is. And I’m not saying this because I’m a doom’n’gloom kinda girl – if anything, I’m a bit of a Pollyanna. Of the 774 daily – OK, near-daily – blog posts I’ve written for the past three years, the most...
Shipping & Fulfillment
How to Monitor and Manage Your Wholesale Suppliers

March 8, 2012 • James Hyde

In the beginning, you might be content that your inventory suppliers have simply delivered your goods on time. But as you grow and take on more lines, more staff, or outsource to a fulfillment company, you’ll quickly find that the arrival of poorly marked goods can waste time. In this ...
Business
CyberSource Exec on Credit Card Fraud, Steps to Prevent

March 7, 2012 • PEC Staff

Most every ecommerce merchant has experienced credit card fraud. Credit card companies try to prevent payment fraud, of course, and one — CyberSource — publishes a report on the state of payment fraud each year. CyberSource's chief researcher for that report — called, this year, "2012 O...
Business > Merchant Voice
My Love/Hate Relationship with Product Reviews

March 7, 2012 • Jamie Salvatori

I don’t have product reviews on my website. I may add them at some point. However, I’m quite conflicted about it. My stance may seem odd since the big players in that space would cite years of research showing that adding product reviews to your website will increase your conversion r...
Business > Merchant Voice
Put Retail back on the Agenda

March 6, 2012 • Richard Stubbings

The English have been called a nation of shopkeepers, and I guess that this is in part true. We still have a significant number of independent retailers surviving, even thriving, in spite of fierce competition from supermarkets and large national chains. We stay ahead of them because we...
Fraud Prevention
3 Tips for Managing a Store’s Online Reputation

March 6, 2012 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce marketers can monitor and maintain their stores' online reputation with regular searches and alerts, social media tracking software, and a commitment to good customer service. Reputation management, which is the practice of listening to and responding to what people say about...
Business
Checklist for Qualifying Internet Business Buyers

March 4, 2012 • Manish Shah

So, you are thinking of selling your internet business. You understand the importance of exit strategy planning. You are excited to learn that good internet businesses can be sold quickly.. You have carefully analyzed your financial statements and calculated a fair market value for your...
Business > Merchant Voice
My Seven Big Mistakes

February 26, 2012 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

When people ask me what was the biggest mistake I have made with my luxury astrology report website business, I have to joke, “Which one?!” I have made so many... Big Mistake 1 My website Itsinthestarsonline.com was launched on 19 December 2006 after I interviewed seven website develop...
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...