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.

Fraud Prevention
Is Your Data Vulnerable?

October 1, 2006 • Pamela Hazelton

Having just returned from the MIVA Conference, I’m sure my editor is quite antsy. I’m late with this column— not due to procrastination. I’ve always got something to say, but after I instructed a session on security for online store administrators, I realized that a great percentage of ...
Business
Getting a Patent is Pricey

October 1, 2006 • John W. Dozier, Jr.

Small businesses are interesting beasts. An entrepreneur comes up with an idea and one of the first thoughts is protecting the new business from competition. Big business often protects novel “inventions” through patent registration. Small businesses quickly find out that obtaining a qu...
Business
Thralow.net’s Daniel Thralow

October 1, 2006 • Michael A. Cox

In December of 1996, Daniel Thralow (pronounced Trah-low) sold one pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses on the Internet. Thralow: A local guy said to me, “I’m starting this little group of websites. Give me a hundred dollars and I’ll build you a web page.” So we built this little web page—it ha...
Business
Satellite Radio Superstore Finds Success

October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Three years after launching Satellite Radio Superstore, Matt and Aimee Moffett’s online business is pushing $3 million in sales and their company was recently named one of the top 10 independent retailers by XM Radio. Satellite Radio Superstore is an authorized XM satellite radio deale...
Business
Striking Gold With Diamonds

October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Patrick Coughlin knows that brick-and-mortar businesses need to think outside the box if they want to improve their bottom lines. Coughlin has owned and operated American Diamond Importers, an independent jewelry store in St. Clair, Mich., for almost 15 years. St. Clair is a small, idy...
Business
MyEmma.com’s Clint Smith

September 25, 2006 • PEC Staff

Clint Smith, co-founder of Emma, discusses several important tips to improve email campaigns and addresses that age-old question of whether an email should use images or not. This podcast ...
Business
Four Things You Should Know Before Starting an eBiz

September 25, 2006 • PEC Staff

Renowned ebiz author Sydney Johnson created the now-famous Auction Genius courses to aid people wanting to create their own ebusinesses. She shares some important tips for anyone looking to learn the online retail industry: Tip 1—Start Small Many of Johnson’s students are eager to div...
Business
KEMP’s CEO Kevin Mahon

September 18, 2006 • PEC Staff

Kevin Mahon, founder and CEO of KEMP, and Peter Melerud, the company’s marketing and business development officer, talked with Practical eCommerce’s Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis about what a load balancer ...
Business
Delightful Deliveries’ Eric Lituchy

September 11, 2006 • PEC Staff

Eric Lituchy is the founder and CEO of Delightfuldeliveries.com, a leading site for gift baskets and unique gift items, such as gourmet food items and desserts. Given how important product ...
Business
ChristmasNightInc.com Brings Light to the Holidays

September 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

If you are an admirer of nativity sets on the lawns of homes and churches during the Christmas season, chances are you seen a product from Christmasnightinc.com. Claire Henderson launched the business about seven years ago and has carved out a unique niche selling life-size scenes of t...
Payments
The Rising Tide of Alternative Payment Systems

September 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Alternative-payment systems are flowing into the payment processing industry. During the last two years, many new options have been announced, re-announced, tested, trialed, released or re-released. Many others are in development. Marc Abbey, a Partner of First Annapolis Consulting, sa...
Business
Tech Support: September 2006

September 1, 2006 • Brian Getting

PeC: I keep reading about the Web 2.0. What is that? Brian Getting: Web 2.0 is a term that has come to represent a new way of thinking with regards to developing websites. While there is an origin to the name, that is less important than what people mean when they speak of “Web 2.0 m...
Business
Quick Query: Jellyfish CEO Mark McGuire

September 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

PeC: What is Jellyfish.com? McGuire: _Jellyfish offers merchants a risk-free channel to sell products. By listing on Jellyfish.com, merchants control the price of the product and the amount of profit they desire. The merchant decides on the commission it will pay Jellyfish, and that ...
Business
Legal: Copyright Registration

September 1, 2006 • John W. Dozier, Jr.

Copyright registration is a great concept. In order to put the world on notice of your ownership of certain creative works, the government allows you to send a copy of your work to the U.S. Copyright Office, and it will maintain the records for you. For a small registration filing cost,...
Business
Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson on ‘The Long Tail’

September 1, 2006 • Michael A. Cox

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, calls the phenomenon “The Long Tail,” which happens to be the title of his bestseller. Anderson, a physicist, turned economist, turned editor and author, wasn’t talking about the long tail wagging the dog, although that is exactly what has happened in a marketplace turned upside-down by something he learned studying statistics.
Business
Product Sourcing: Six Questions

September 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

If you’ve got a question about your ebusiness, someone else has probably already asked it. Matt Hedges, customer support manager of Worldwidebrands.com, answers the six most common productsourcing questions he gets from customers wanting to start an online endeavor: Will suppliers car...
Business
Authorize.Net’s Corey Koenig

August 21, 2006 • PEC Staff

Corey Koenig, channel sales manager for Authorize.Net, provides an interesting insight into the landscape of shopping carts and what a payment gateway like Authorize.Net is concerned about. Koenig also discusses ...
Business
What Should I Sell Online?

August 15, 2006 • PEC Staff

Everyone who starts an ebiz faces the question: What do I sell? And most everyone seems to make two classic mistakes in the beginning: They try to sell what everyone else is selling: DVDs, electronics and designer clothing. The problem they encounter is that the market is already s...
Business
The Price is Right!

August 4, 2006 • PEC Staff

Avoiding Common Mistakes A trap many eBiz owners fall into is trying to set their prices by simply adding a percentage or flat amount to an item's cost– they buy a watch for $20, slap another $20 on the price tag, and pass it along to their customers. The problem with this type of pric...
Business
Website Profile: Selling Fish Makes Online Niche

August 1, 2006 • Michael A. Cox

In Meredith Wilson's The Music Man, the opening number has a gang of traveling salesmen pattering cleverly about how a salesman’s got to know the territory and his products. Professor Harold Hill was declared a fake — he didn’t know the territory. When it comes to selling salmon, wild ...
Business
JupiterResearch’s Patti Freeman Evans

August 1, 2006 • Michael A. Cox

Patti Freeman Evans has been in the ecommerce industry before the beginning. For the past 19 years she has been creating customer-centric ecommerce sites, integrating channels effectively, developing innovative marketing initiatives and ensuring high-standard customer service and order-...
Business
Product Sourcing: The Skinny on Government Auctions

August 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Are government auctions really a good source for purchasing products for resale? The answer to that is they can be, but you have to know what you are doing. Where do government auctions get their products? Government auctions can be held online, live ‘in-person’ or sealedbid. They acq...
Business
Trademark Registration

August 1, 2006 • John W. Dozier, Jr.

This article will be the first of three covering trademarks, copyrights and patents. The decision as to whether to register each is based upon unique business considerations. For trademark registration, there is a process to go through in evaluating the cost and benefit of federal regis...
Business
Quick Query: RedRoller.com’s Bill Van Wyck

August 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

What Travelocity does for travel, RedRoller does for shipping packages. The site is built to look and feel like an etravel site. Shipping for small businesses is a day-to-day occurrence. The typical ecommerce business spends close to $1,000 per month and ships 120-150 packages every month.
Business
Tech Support: August 2006

August 1, 2006 • Brian Getting

Question: My web host has different bandwidth levels depending on the price. How can I compute what my ecommerce site's bandwidth needs are? Brian Getting: Bandwidth can be a tough one to understand for most people. I like to use the analogy of a water pipe where the speed of your In...
Business
Website User Agreements

July 1, 2006 • John W. Dozier, Jr.

Website user agreements establish the terms under which the relationship between a visitor and a site is governed. A common practice for small websites is to "borrow" language and attempt to customize the terminology to fit their needs. The problem is that drafting a websiteuser agreeme...
Business
AbeBooks.com Co-founder Rick Pura

July 1, 2006 • Michael A. Cox

Rick Pura just finished writing the software code for "Rick’s Search Engine." He thinks it works pretty well, and he may go into the search engine business. He knows he can write good software; it was he and Keith Waters who engineered the database and system that powers the best-used-b...
Business
Quick Query: Coremetrics’ Jane Paolucci

July 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

PeC: Why is conversion important to ecommerce businesses? Paolucci: Ecommerce businesses are constantly seeking new ways to enhance their websites to drive incremental revenue, reduce costs associated with customer acquisition and sales and increase customer loyalty. While driving ...
Business
Givens Books Partners with AbeBooks.com

July 1, 2006 • Michael A. Cox

When most of us think about an ecommerce website, we think of a place with pictures and descriptions of inventory, which a shopper can toss into a virtual shopping cart and buy with a mouse click. With the advent of portals such as Abebooks.com, there are esellers who don’t have carts. ...
Business
Privacy Policies

June 1, 2006 • John W. Dozier, Jr.

Even at the turn of the 17th century, Francis Bacon had it right: knowledge is power. Today, we are in the midst of the information age and, in relation to customer management and relationships, in the beginning stages of an age of invention. The challenges of managing your business inc...