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
Quick Query: Volusion COO on Platform Upgrades, Tips to Merchants
January 26, 2010 • PEC Staff
Volusion is an early-day hosted shopping cart platform that has grown to represent 18,000 online stores. The company has recently upgraded its platform and to explain those upgrades, among other ecommerce topics, we spoke with Volusion's chief operating officer, Clay Olivier. PeC: ...
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Business
Merchant Talk: Etsy Seller Enjoys the Artistic Community of the Marketplace
January 18, 2010 • PEC Staff
"Merchant Talk" is a weekly discussion with an actual ecommerce merchant. For this installment we visited with Laurie Marshall who sells hand-sewn crafts and vintage goods on Etsy.com, an online marketplace for artists and craftspeople. Marshall runs two stores on Etsy, Punkinhead.ets...
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Fraud Prevention
The PeC Review: VeriSign Badge and EV SSL Instill Trust
January 11, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Customers want to feel safe when they make online purchases. They need to know that the credit card or account data they are providing to the merchant is transmitted and handled in a secure way. To protect customer information, an online merchant will comply with the Payment Card Indus...
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Business
Quick Query: ProStores Exec Lin Shearer
January 7, 2010 • PEC Staff
The start of the year brings new energy and vitality for many online merchants. Many of them are looking to jump start sales, trim expenses and otherwise grow and improve their businesses. For ideas to help merchants will all of this, we spoke with a seasoned ecommerce expert. He's Lin ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Hello 2010
January 1, 2010 • Ken Kikkawa
The holiday orders have all been delivered and hopefully we have made thousands of children and adults happy with their gifts of toys and hobbies. Whether it was an RC car, train set, model kit, model rocket set or slot car set, hours of fun were spent together with friends and family ...
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Cross-border Selling
Ask an Expert: European Payment Solutions
December 30, 2009 • 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 concerning European payment solutions from Rashda Ali, commercial manager, Europe, with Comvita.com, a New Zealand-based retailer of healt...
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Shipping & Fulfillment
Free Shipping: The How-to Economic Model
December 29, 2009 • John Lindberg
Free shipping is a growing trend in the ecommerce industry. As the owner of an ecommerce fulfillment company, I work with hundreds of successful webstore merchants and am in a unique position to see both the threats and opportunities posed by free shipping strategies. Different Type...
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Business
Quick Query: Full Sail Educator on Online Learning
December 28, 2009 • PEC Staff
There are numerous options for ecommerce merchants who want to learn new skills that can be applied to their business. Full Sail University is one of those online options. With a physical campus in Winter Park, Florida, the university offers online programs in fields such as web design ...
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Business
Internet Attorney on Online Defamation
December 24, 2009 • PEC Staff
Nearly every ecommerce merchant has experienced disgruntled customers or angry competitors who post dishonest comments about his or her business. This could be in so-called complaint sites, forums, blogs or other online venues. Internet attorney John Dozier of the law firm Dozier Intern...
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Business
Ecommerce Know-How: Taking Advantage of Online Education Opportunities
December 24, 2009 • Kevin Patrick Allen
An online education can come in a variety of forms and it can mean a lot of different things. It might mean a traditional college degree offered via the Internet. It could come in the form of a single unaccredited course taken simply because it offers an opportunity to grow one’s skil...
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Business
Managing the Technological Side of Your Business When You Don’t Understand Technology
December 23, 2009 • Kevin Patrick Allen
A businessperson doesn’t necessarily understand technology. Nor does a technology expert necessarily understand business. But the two fields certainly do intersect in the world of ecommerce. So how does an ecommerce merchant who is lacking in technological understanding, manage a suc...
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Business
Ask an Expert: Managing Outside Developers
December 21, 2009 • PEC Staff
Editor’s Note: This is the inaugural edition of "Ask an Expert," a new Practical eCommerce feature in which ecommerce merchants submit a question to be answered by a fellow merchant or an industry colleague. Our goal with “Ask an Expert” is to allow you to tap into the collective know...
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Amazon & Marketplaces
Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne on Holiday Sales, Free Shipping
December 21, 2009 • Kerry Murdock
It's not every day that we speak with a Stanford PhD who has funded the construction of schools around the world. That same person started dabbling in ecommerce a decade or so ago and his company is now a publicly traded retailing powerhouse. He is Patrick Byrne, and the company is Ov...
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Payments
The PeC Review: PayPal’s Website Payment Pro is a Good Value for Small Merchants
December 18, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce is not possible without online payment processing. You might have the best products. You might have the best website. But, if customers cannot order and pay for products online, you’re not in the ecommerce business. PayPal’s Website Payments Pro is an all-in-one payment proc...
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Business
MonsterCommerce Co-founder Stephanie Leffler ‘Juggles’ New Venture
December 15, 2009 • PEC Staff
Stephanie Leffler started selling sun protection products online while in college. That was around the year 2000. She became frustrated with her web developer and she decided to produce, with her partner, a shopping cart herself. That cart became MonsterCommerce, an early day hosted ...
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Fraud Prevention
The PeC Review: Filtrbox for Reputation Management
December 11, 2009 • Armando Roggio
An increasingly social Internet has transformed Facebooking moms, tweeting trend-followers, and Digging teens into powerful brand and product influencers. And as your ecommerce business grows, you should be concerned about what these social Internet influencers are saying regarding yo...
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Business
Lessons Learned: Fairytale Brownies Relies on Catalogs, Empowers Employees
December 9, 2009 • Kate Monteith
"Lessons Learned" is a series where we ask ecommerce business executives to share their experiences and advice. For this installment, we interviewed David Kravetz, the catalog and web team leader of Fairytale Brownies, an online brownie gift store based in Phoenix, Ariz. Fairytale Brow...
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Business
Lessons Learned: Boyd Badten of PrintingForLess.com
December 3, 2009 • Ankush Agarwal
"Lessons Learned" is a series where we ask ecommerce business executives to share their experiences and advice. For this installment, we interviewed Boyd Badten, director of technical service for PrintingForLess.com, a pioneering, online printing company located in Livingston, Mont. ...
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Business
Merchant Talk: Self-published Author Migrates to Ecommerce
November 26, 2009 • PEC Staff
“Merchant Talk” is our weekly discussion with a practicing ecommerce merchant. For this installment, we visited with Jill Exler, the founder and CEO of Jexbo.com, an ecommerce site for ...
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Business
Quick Query: Internet-related Patents In Jeopardy, Attorney Says
November 25, 2009 • PEC Staff
Doing business on the Internet requires the use of sophisticated software and complicated processes. Many of these innovative products have been patented. Google, Amazon and others hold many hundreds of patents, but the U.S. Supreme Court may be about to greatly restrict the issuance ...
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Business
QuickBooks 2010 Helps Merchants “Go Paperless”
November 23, 2009 • PEC Staff
QuickBooks is the leader in small-business accounting software. According to Intuit, which produces QuickBooks, nearly 50 million people use it or a similar Intuit product. Intuit releases a new version of QuickBooks annually. The 2010 version was just released on Intuit's site. The ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
UPS vs. FedEx vs. USPS. Which is best?
November 20, 2009 • Ken Kikkawa
The holiday craziness begins a week from today. But long before the anticipated ramp up in sales takes place, experienced merchants have already taken a look at an important component ...
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Business
Bloglist: Sean Schofield, Creator of Spree Ecommerce
November 19, 2009 • PEC Staff
"Bloglist" is an occasional feature where we ask ecommerce professionals the blogs that they read and why. For this installment, we asked Sean Schofield, the creator of the Spree open-source ecommerce platform and a Practical Ecommerce blogger.
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Payments
When a Shopping Cart is Not PCI Compliant: Three Options for Merchants
November 19, 2009 • Kevin Patrick Allen
Earlier this week, Practical eCommerce shared three important questions to ask about your shopping cart. Today, as part of our ongoing PCI compliance series, I’ll take a look at options for ecommerce merchants currently using a shopping cart that is not PA-DSS (payment application data...
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Payments
PCI Compliance: Three Important Questions to Ask About Your Shopping Cart
November 17, 2009 • Kevin Patrick Allen
There are a number of matters an ecommerce business must address to become PCI compliant. For one, an online merchant’s shopping cart must be certified via the PCI's PA-DSS process. A merchant's web hosting environment and payment gateway have to be secure. And a merchant’s own inter...
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Business
Quick Query: Shopping Cart Developer on PCI Compliance
November 16, 2009 • PEC Staff
Editor’s note: Payment Card Industry compliance is a requirement for ecommerce merchants. In an email to Practical eCommerce, PCI Security Standards Council General Manager Bob Russo stated, “All businesses that accept credit card data must be compliant with the DSS (Data Security Sta...
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Business
The PeC Review: Onehub Enables Virtual Collaboration
November 13, 2009 • Armando Roggio
As an online merchant’s business grows, it is important to add new staff that will manage such things as operations, fulfillment, marketing, design, and customer service. But adding staff and growing an ecommerce business does not necessarily mean leasing office space and hiring locally...
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Business
Lessons Learned: Micheline Hellwege of The Collector’s Hub
November 11, 2009 • Kate Monteith
"Lessons Learned" is a series where we ask ecommerce business owners to share their experiences and advice. For this installment, we interviewed Micheline Hellwege, owner of The Collector's Hub, an online store based in Howell, Mich. The Collector's Hub sells collectibles, figurines and...
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Business
Merchant Talk: Cynthia Snyder of YonderStar.com
November 9, 2009 • PEC Staff
Merchant Talk is a weekly discussion with an actual ecommerce merchant. The new Practical eCommerce segment gives small, online business owners an opportunity to hear from their peers in the ecommerce space. For this inaugural Merchant Talk we spoke with Cynthia Snyder, owner of YonderS...
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Business
Lessons Learned: Will Seippel of GoAntiques
November 5, 2009 • Ankush Agarwal
"Lessons Learned" is a series where we ask ecommerce business owners to share their experiences and advice. For this installment, we interviewed William (Will) Seippel, CEO and chairman of WorthPoint, the parent company of GoAntiques, a subscription-based information service for antique...