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: Avalara Founder Rory Rawlings
September 10, 2007 • PEC Staff
Rory Rawlings is the founder and chief tax automation officer of Avalara, Inc., a Washington-based firm that provides sales-tax-compliance applications for ecommerce merchants. PeC: Avalara helps ecommerce firms manage sales tax compliance. Could you explain? Rawlings: There are ove...
-
Business
Betterphoto.com’s Jim Miotke
September 7, 2007 • PEC Staff
Callahan is joined by Betterphoto.com’s President and Founder Jim Miotke. The two discuss the latest in photography, including tips and tricks for product photography.
-
Business
Sunfitters.com's Bill Mirabito
September 4, 2007 • PEC Staff
Launching a business takes a tremendous amount of planning and research, but launching a multichannel endeavor within a 12-month period can provide a unique set of challenges. Bill Mirabito, founder and president of Sunfitters, has done just that. In November 2006, the company launched...
-
Business
Insider Hosting’s CEO Steve Mizrahie
August 22, 2007 • PEC Staff
Callahan is joined by Insider Hosting’s CEO, Steve Mizrahie.
-
Business
GuardedID’s George Waller
August 22, 2007 • PEC Staff
There are so many ways for thieves to steal identities that it's hard to keep up with it all. Take, for example, keylogging. This occurs when thieves track the keystrokes of unsuspecting Internet users via surveillance software, called a keylogger recorder. If a thief can successfully i...
-
Business
The Law Of Data And Information Security
August 20, 2007 • John W. Dozier, Jr.
I don’t need to recite the many security breaches that have led to major financial losses for companies over the past twelve months. Every business should already know the risks of leaving credit card and account information exposed. Basically, the risk is total loss of your business, a...
-
Business
Convention(al) Wisdom: The Best Pay-Per-Click Seminars
August 8, 2007 • PEC Staff
One fortunate thing about being in the pay-per-click industry today is that there is easy access to a lot of useful and high-quality information. Whether it is magazines (such as this one), blogs, websites, and conferences and tradeshows — all are meant to help you grow your business th...
-
Business
Matthew MacDonald, Author Of Creating Websites Part Two
August 1, 2007 • PEC Staff
Listen in as Practical eCommerce Contributing Editor Pat Callahan is joined by Matthew MacDonald, author of Creating Web Sites: The Missing Manual for the second part of this interview. The ...
-
Business
Netshops.com Finds Its Niche
July 29, 2007 • PEC Staff
Company Name: NetShops Established: 1999 Revenue: About $62 million Products: Niche specialty stores Shopping Cart: Custom Quote: "We saw the opportunity to acquire and build sites...around a specific need." NetShops launched its first site in 2001 and in the past six years has amass...
-
Business
Matthew MacDonald, Author Of Creating Websites
July 26, 2007 • PEC Staff
Listen in as Practical eCommerce Contributing Editor Pat Callahan is joined by Matthew MacDonald, author of Creating Web Sites: The Missing Manual. The conversation includes a topical discussion about the ...
-
Business
Bloglist: Marshall Sponder
July 22, 2007 • PEC Staff
In Bloglist, we ask ecommerce professionals to identify their favorite blogs. For this installment, we asked Marshall Sponder with Now.SEO. Name: Marshall Sponder Company: Now.Seo and IBM.com Blogs: Webmetricsguru.com, Artnewyorkcity.com Contributor to: Smartmobs.com, Biggreenblog.com ...
-
Business
Earn An Ecommerce Degree
July 22, 2007 • PEC Staff
Many online entrepreneurs may feel like they have earned an ecommerce degree from the school of hard knocks. However, for those interested in a more traditional education experience, there are degree programs specializing in ebusiness. Bachelor and master's degrees in ecommerce are ava...
-
Business
The Ins And Outs Of Importing
July 22, 2007 • PEC Staff
Importing can provide your ebusiness with cutting-edge products at rock-bottom prices. But it's a complicated process, and not one you want to go through alone. "Customs brokers and freight forwarders are your gateway into the world of international trade," explained Customhouse Broker...
-
Business
Learning Bookkeeping Basics
July 12, 2007 • PEC Staff
Poor financial management is one key contributor to why more than 50 percent of small businesses fail in the first five years of existence, according to the Small Business Administration. Because ecommerce has such low barriers to entry — a few bucks for a hosted shopping cart and a fe...
-
Business
Interview: UPS V.P. On Shipping Technology
July 11, 2007 • Michael A. Cox
When Jordan Colletta talks about the way we used to ship and track and deliver goods before it became a way of life for thousands of e-entrepreneurs, he knows what he's talking about. For three years, starting in 1975, he was one of those guys you see running in and out of businesse...
-
Business
The Law Of PPC Advertising
July 9, 2007 • John W. Dozier, Jr.
Many of the legal issues existing today have little, or no, clear legal authority to guide us. This is because many of the abuses are: • Not discovered. • When they are discovered by the advertiser, they are settled confidentially. • When litigated it can take years to get a decision...
-
Business
Boosting Your Programming Skills
July 4, 2007 • PEC Staff
If you're tired of calling your web design firm every time you want to make a minor tweak to your site, there are online courses you can take to boost your knowledge in HTML, JavaScript, cascading style sheets and more. In fact, there are so many online options to improve programming s...
-
Business
Video Tutorial: Rounded Corners with CSS
July 2, 2007 • Brian Getting
Rounded corners present a unique challenge to website designers, particularly when using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to create layouts that are search engine friendly and scalable. In an attempt to de-mystify some of the techniques used to create visual effects, such as rounded corner...
-
Fraud Prevention
Click Fraud Not Top PPC Concern
June 27, 2007 • PEC Staff
Click fraud has been a popular topic of discussion for a number of years, and it doesn’t appear the issue will fade away anytime soon. The industry is full of various numbers thrown around putting the click fraud rate anywhere from .02 percent (claimed by Google) to 30 percent or more. ...
-
Fraud Prevention
Click Fraud: What To Do When You’ve Been Cheated
June 11, 2007 • Greg Laptevsky
So you think you’re a victim of click fraud, and the question is now what? Well, it’s time to play “cyber detective” and get refunds from pay-per-click (PPC) engines for the wasted dollars. But keep in mind, because click fraud eats away search engine revenue in the form of reimbursed c...
-
Business
Bloglist: Ecommerce Potpourri
June 7, 2007 • PEC Staff
In Bloglist, we ask ecommerce professionals to identify their favorite blogs. For this installment, we've asked Thomas Holmes with logic+intuition. Name: Thomas Holmes Founder, logic+intuition Company: logic+intuition *Blogs: *Yclick.it, Thomasholmes.info [Grokdotcom.com] This blo...
-
Business
Critique Part One: General Internet Presence
May 30, 2007 • PEC Staff
The Problem: Daddiesboardshop.com isn't taking advantage of branding opportunities on video and social networking sites. The Fix: Aside from the videos I found on YouTube and Google Video (which are a great start), very little appears externally to distinguish the authenticity of the b...
-
Business
Daddiesboardshop.com Wins Site Review
May 30, 2007 • PEC Staff
Melanie Loveland and her son Dan built a business together around a mutual passion — snowboarding. What started as a small, brick-and-mortar store in Portland, Ore., has evolved into a full-fledged multichannel merchant. It was a process the owners didn't foresee when the business start...
-
Business
If Your ‘Baby Is Ugly,’ Fix It
May 29, 2007 • Michael A. Cox
You know those little spur-of-the-moment, do-it-on-a dare things that occasionally bring about permanent change Something like that happened to Shirley Tan. There she was in her third year at Golden Gate College in San Francisco, at work on a degree in international business. A friend...
-
Business
The Entrepreneur, The Optimist
May 16, 2007 • PEC Staff
Patrick Coughlin is experiencing firsthand the same challenges many online entrepreneurs face: It's hard to build a successful online business. Coughlin has owned a successful brick-and-mortar jewelry store in St. Clair, Mich., for 15 years. That business had grown to fill a 3,000-squa...
-
Business
Ebiz Start-up: Selling Online Is Hard Work
May 16, 2007 • PEC Staff
Seven months into the operation of his new ecommerce store, Pat Coughlin's goal of reaching $1 million in sales is nowhere in sight — but that hasn't curbed his enthusiasm for the online venture. Coughlin, longtime owner of a successful jewelry store in St. Clair, Mich., won an eBay ...
-
Business
Toolking.com: From eBay To A $31M Empire
May 9, 2007 • Michael A. Cox
If you order pliers from Toolking.com, you really can't just order pliers. You need to know what kind. Do you want locking pliers? Needle nose pliers? Tongue-and-groove pliers, slip-joint pliers, linesman's pliers, diagonal cutting pliers, electrician's pliers, hose clamp pliers, super-...
-
Business
Video Tutorial: Choosing the Right Image Format
May 2, 2007 • Brian Getting
Choosing the right image format for publishing images on the web can be tricky. After all, you don't want to spend hours and hours cleaning up a product image and making it look irresistible to your customers, only to have it distorted and ruined when you save it in a web format.
-
Staffing
When Is It Time To Hire A Call Center?
April 30, 2007 • PEC Staff
More business is a good thing, but it creates challenges: A backlog of tasks, costly space and equipment demands and, frequently, a phone that won’t stop ringing. Many ecommerce business owners turn to customer call centers for help. That was the case for Revival Animal Health of Orang...
-
Business
Legal: Your Domain Is At Risk
April 23, 2007 • John W. Dozier, Jr.
The lawyers at my firm represent registrars. We also represent domain name owners. And we sometimes represent domain name thieves (yes, everyone is entitled to an attorney). Here is an insider's perspective on the new dynamics at play in domain name cybersquatting. Most domain owners t...