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
Credit-Card Processing from an iPhone

January 21, 2009 • PEC Staff

Many ecommerce merchants carry a mobile device, such as an iPhone or a Blackberry. An increasing number of third-party software applications run on these devices. Many of these applications can benefit ecommerce merchants and one example is "Credit Card Terminal," an iPhone app that all...
Business
Lessons Learned: Two Blue Peas’ Sarah Brown

January 15, 2009 • Brendan Gibbons

"Lessons Learned" is an occasional series where we ask ecommerce merchants at varying stages in their business development about their mistakes and successes. For this installment, we asked Sarah Brown, Co-founder of Twobluepeas.com to share her thoughts. The Nashville-based baby boutiq...
Shipping & Fulfillment
Ecommerce Know-How: The Free Shipping Equation

January 13, 2009 • Armando Roggio

In 2009, every major carrier in the United States will be raising shipping rates. Profit conscience online shopkeepers, therefore, should take pause and reevaluate whether or not offering "free shipping" is really a good idea. There is, of course, really no such thing as free shipping...
Business
Lessons Learned: Stacks and Stacks’ Cathy McManus

January 6, 2009 • Brendan Gibbons

"Lessons Learned" is an occasional series where we ask seasoned ecommerce merchants about their mistakes and successes. For this installment, we asked Cathy McManus, Marketing Director for Stacksandstacks.com, to share her thoughts. Stacks and Stacks was formed in 1984 and ten years ago...
Shipping & Fulfillment
The PeC Review: Stamps.com is A Helpful Tool for Many Merchants

December 22, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Stamps.com provides online retailers with a simple-to-use, software-based service that calculates official U. S. Postal Service postage from any PC, formatting printing labels and any required shipping documents. The Stamps.com software, which was developed in conjunction with the Pos...
Business
Pay-per-click Expert on Advertising in a Recession

December 18, 2008 • Kerry Murdock

News reports indicate that revenue growth for Google and other search engines is slowing. Bids on keywords and keyword phrases, some say, are softening. Could all of this be ...
Business
Lessons Learned: Retailer of Paper Products Stresses Cost Control

December 16, 2008 • Brendan Gibbons

"Lessons Learned" is an occasional series where we ask seasoned ecommerce merchants about their mistakes and successes. For this installment, we asked Leslie West, owner of Bluedotpapershop.com, an online paper and design store that offers specialty papers, cardstock and design tools. W...
Amazon & Marketplaces
The PeC Review: Shopzilla Is a Good Site That Could Use Better Instructions

December 15, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Shopzilla.com is one of the Internet’s leading price comparison engines. The site can expose an online retailer’s products to more than 30 million price-conscience shoppers every month, making it a powerful marketing vehicle. But uploading products—particularly for smaller merchants—c...
Business
Profile: eCommerce Owner on Benefits of Niche Retailing

December 11, 2008 • PEC Staff

Many ecommerce merchants occupy niches within a general industry. Spotlight Retail is one of those merchants, but in Spotlight's case, it occupies 20 separate niches around one corporate umbrella. The entrepreneur behind Spotlight Retail is John Montague, the company's owner and day-t...
Fraud Prevention
Ecommerce Know-How: Avoiding Chargebacks and Improving Business

December 9, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Chargebacks are frustrating and expensive assaults on a retailer's bottom line. But practical and smart merchants can learn from some chargebacks, improving their stores' performance, customer satisfaction, and operational excellence. When a consumer asks his or her credit card company...
Amazon & Marketplaces
Amazon Exec on Outsourcing Fulfillment

November 26, 2008 • Kerry Murdock

Every ecommerce merchant must address, at least in some capacity, the issues of fulfillment. One merchant who does this in a big way is Amazon.com. Amazon now offers its fulfillment and warehousing expertise to any ecommerce merchant via its “Fulfillment by Amazon” service.
Business
Video for eCommerce: "Increases Conversion, Drives Traffic"

November 21, 2008 • Kerry Murdock

The use of video in ecommerce sites is becoming increasingly popular. Merchants are using video to both increase conversion rates and to drive traffic to their sites. And video is ...
Business
Christian Science Monitor Editor on Future of News Delivery

November 14, 2008 • Kerry Murdock

The Christian Science Monitor, a 100 year-old Pulitzer-prize-winning newspaper, recently announced plans to drop its daily printed paper in favor of a mainly web-based publishing model. Other newspapers will almost ...
Fraud Prevention
New PCI Compliance Standards Take Effect

November 13, 2008 • Armando Roggio

The Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council recently released a new version of its Data Security Standard (DSS), making minor but important changes and clarifications to the PCI compliance standard that responsible online merchants follow to protect their customers and av...
Business
Yugster.com Shares its Fulfillment Strategy

November 12, 2008 • Mark Ayotte

The old-school approach to order fulfillment doesn’t fly for many Internet retailers. Warehousing, packing, shipping, and return-order processing are labor-intensive and time-consuming. This has led to a trend among online sellers to outsource its fulfillment operations. This isn’t dro...
Business
Effective Return Policies Save Money and Earn Business

November 10, 2008 • Stanley Arul

If there is one thing that every online retailer hates and fears, it’s returns. Many great stores fight to keep return rates below 2 percent of total shipments. Those merchants work with the carriers and shippers, modify their websites, and send customer satisfaction surveys—all of whic...
Business
Bloglist: Market Motive CEO Michael Stebbins

November 3, 2008 • Brendan Gibbons

In Bloglist, we ask ecommerce professionals to share some of their favorite blogs and tell us why they read them. For this bloglist, we talked to Michael Stebbins, CEO of Market Motive, a year-old Internet marketing instruction and services agency that provides online courses and confer...
Business
Lessons Learned: 3tailer Co-Founder Jon West

October 29, 2008 • Brendan Gibbons

"Lessons Learned" is an occasional series where we ask experienced ecommerce merchants about their mistakes and successes. For this installment, we asked Jon West, co-founder of 3tailer, a niche firm based in Charlotte, N.C. with over 50,000 individual products sold on 17 websites. West...
Business
Quick Query: Guidance CTO on Importance of Social Media

October 27, 2008 • Brendan Gibbons

As the landscape of social media changes (with Facebook as its barometer), ecommerce professionals have to face the decision of extending their social marketing and multiplying their influence into different channels. Jon Provisor is co-owner and CTO of Guidance, which specializes in h...
Business
SellPoint CEO on Video and Its Impact On Conversion Rates

October 20, 2008 • PEC Staff

The use of video and rich media can enhance an ecommerce site. SellPoint is a firm that provides video and rich media (for free) to ecommerce merchants and we’ve asked ...
Business
Bloglist: buySafe Founder Steve Woda

October 20, 2008 • Brendan Gibbons

In Bloglist, we ask ecommerce professionals to share some of their favorite blogs. In this installment, we checked in with Steve Woda, founder, chairman and senior vice-president of product and strategy at buySAFE, a company that inspects online merchants, monitors their performance, an...
Business
Field Test: Video Usage On eCommerce Sites

October 15, 2008 • Brendan Gibbons

In Field Test, Practical eCommerce questions several ecommerce merchants about a given topic. This month’s topic is online video, a powerful but not widely used form of marketing that’s driven by mixed motives in theory and varied results in practice. Video FAQ’s and product demonstrat...
Business
TopTenWholesale.com CEO On Vertical-Search PPC Opportunities

October 12, 2008 • PEC Staff

Many ecommerce merchants run pay-per-click ad campaigns on the major search engines. But Jason Prescott, CEO of Toptenwholesale.com, argues that merchants can obtain a higher return-on-investment by advertising on specialized ...
Business
Pay-Per-Click Report Card: Loriswigsite.com

October 10, 2008 • Greg Laptevsky

Lori’s Wigsite sells various brands of wigs for men and women. The owner asked Practical eCommerce to review her pay-per-click marketing efforts and examine how the company’s current agency does the job. Loriswigsite.com is running advertising campaigns on Google AdWords and Yahoo! Sear...
Payments
Amazon Payment Service Allows for Advanced Options

October 6, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Amazon.com has been offering a beta version of its Flexible Payment Service (FPS) to merchants for almost a year now. With many developer-friendly features, some sellers could benefit from adding Amazon FPS to their payment options, especially if they’re already using Amazon to sell the...
Business
Quick Query: Pilot Identifies Niche With PDF Aviation Maps

October 3, 2008 • Armando Roggio

In the United States there will be 590,349 pilots collectively flying some 28 million hours in 228,000 different aircraft this year alone, according to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). To navigate, those pilots use altimeters, global positioning, and good old-fashioned ma...
Business
RatePoint CEO On Reputation Management

September 22, 2008 • PEC Staff

With the existence of social networking and consumer review sites, disgruntled customers can post negative comments about an ecommerce merchant and cause lasting harm. Neal Creighton is CEO of RatePoint,
Business
Pirated Software Rampant Among Personal Computer Users

September 18, 2008 • Michael A. Cox

To somebody who has never owned or made his living creating and licensing intellectual property, it may not be a big deal. Really, who is it going to hurt when someone downloads a piece of software without paying for it and uses it for personal gain? Or, what’s the harm when a kid down...
Business
Profile: Credit Card Veterans Will Target Experienced Merchants

September 2, 2008 • Michael A. Cox

If you’ve got John Waldron and Sloane Bouchever in a three-way on the phone, the best strategy is try and stay out of the way and take copious notes – better yet turn on a recorder. When these two highly successful and motivated online business pros get to talking about merchants and cr...
Business
Video Tutorial: Assessing Accessibility

August 26, 2008 • Brian Getting

There are a number of compelling reasons to make sure that your website is accessible to people with disabilities. In some cases meeting accessibility compliance standards is a legal obligation. However, in most cases (such as ecommerce merchants) it is just a good idea. Not only will...