Merchant Voice
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Business
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Merchant Voice
How to increase conversions: two conversion specialists have very different ideas
May 24, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth
How long do you let poor conversions hamper your sales? After the needle hadn't moved on my unit sales after the holiday period, and my conversion rate was sinking, I hired a conversion specialist from Odesk. (No, I didn't have much money to spend.) My conversion specialist 1, whom I'...
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Amazon & Marketplaces
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Merchant Voice
The dreaded Amazon A-Z claim
May 6, 2013 • Richard Stubbings
When you get an Amazon A-Z claim, you must not reply instantly. Your response must be carefully considered, to put your side in the best possible light. You only get one chance to reply. It is best if you do this after you fully investigate and you have calmed down.
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Internet Sales Tax Isn’t About Fairness
April 26, 2013 • Jamie Salvatori
If you listened to the politicians tell it, the story of main street retailers needing online stores to charge and collect sales tax is all about fairness. To again quote McEnroe, “You cannot be serious!” Here’s the “argument” presented by stupid politicians as proxy for the main stree...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
10 ways that launching a website is like planning a wedding
April 12, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth
I'm getting married this year and one of the things I've noticed is how many parallels there are between the process of planning a wedding and planning a website launch as I've just relaunched my own website. Just like a wedding, it doesn't matter if it's your first, second or third (w...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Never Forget The Customer
April 5, 2013 • Richard Stubbings
Ecommerce is a service industry. We should never forget that customers come first. We should always consider what a customer actually wants from us. With Ecommerce we build a site, we build admin systems and procedures, and we try to make everything efficient so we can send out the goo...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Why we abandoned Amazon and eBay
March 26, 2013 • Jamie Salvatori
In business, you must always be on the lookout for so-called Black Swan events. This may seem a bit illogical, but the point is that everything you rely upon in business has the potential to completely upend or destroy your business. Many years ago, my business sold a driver’s educatio...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
The Dreaded Bedroom seller and how to beat them
March 8, 2013 • Richard Stubbings
. With the rise and rise of Ebay and Amazon, comes the “bedroom” seller. It may be more accurate to call them hobby sellers. All Ecommerce retailers know them. They are the sellers who undercut you and sell at cost or less. They appear, hang around for a few months, and then vanish. In...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Book review: The Insider’s Guide to Ecommerce: 440 Business Insights For The Ambitious Online Retailer
March 6, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth
When was the last time you had a pencil and pad at the ready, stopping to take notes as you read a business-related book? When was the last time you kept interrupting yourself: thinking out-loud, researching the points raised, and logging in to check your statstics? When was the last ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Is Affiliate Marketing Dead?
February 22, 2013 • Jamie Salvatori
This is going to be a short blog post and for that I will apologize up front. But, I intended for this to be more of a comment-driven exploration than a “this is how you do this” type of blog post. Recently, we switched affiliate network providers (to one of the most respected in the ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
7 simple website improvements that can make a big difference
February 20, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth
You've probably noticed many ways a website could be improved as you shop online. Here's a handful of ones which I encountered recently on other people's websites, as well as my own, which are so easy to fix. Allow customers time to use coupons I Googled for double basin bathroom van...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Ecommerce in the shrinking world.
February 14, 2013 • Richard Stubbings
I heard on the news tonight that the EU and the USA have started talks on a free trade agreement. No doubt this will take many years to agree, but it is a sign that the world is shrinking and international trade is growing. Many Ecommerce sites are ahead of the game in international tra...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
How 100 retailers responded to a mystery shopper’s Contact Us query
January 23, 2013 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth
How do you respond to the customer enquiries through your Contact Us page? Do you take them seriously? You may be leaving your customer's money and their goodwill on the table. A friend of mine has just launched a baby t-shirt product so out of curiosity and solidarity, we arranged th...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
How to negotiate successfully
January 20, 2013 • Jamie Salvatori
In business, almost everything is negotiable. The key to successful negotiating, however, is figuring out when to spend time and energy negotiating and how to maximize your negotiations. In the business of e-commerce, your biggest expense is typically COGS (cost of goods sold). And as ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Learn from your Christmas Experience
January 5, 2013 • Richard Stubbings
Its January. The Christmas rush is over. The Christmas money has been spent, and the website sales are slowly dying. The number of orders have dropped off the proverbial cliff, as expected. Now is the time to review the web site. Taking into account the previous year's business and how...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Three small business customer service fails and one that works
December 13, 2012 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth
In the lead-up to Christmas I realised how disproportionately annoyed customers can get with some of the businesses that are out there by experiencing unprofessional service first-hand - especially after comparing it to a first-rate one. Company A We're about to renovate our house so ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Minimising “lost” Deliveries over Christmas
December 1, 2012 • Richard Stubbings
One of the often forgotten costs of Ecommerce is theft. Either in transit, or “never arrived”. In the current recession too many chancers try to fund their Christmas from the retailer's pocket. Obviously we do everything we reasonably can to minimise this, but no matter what we do, ther...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Building traffic the right (aka hard) way
November 16, 2012 • Jamie Salvatori
Building an online business starts with traffic. Without traffic, you have no purpose. So, how does one do this? It will take a long time, a lot of hard work, and probably a bit of luck. But you can do it. My website currently receives nearly 50% of its visitors via direct traffic. Thi...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Why free content can give you excellent SEO but poor subscriber growth
November 15, 2012 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth
Getting customers to sign up to your newsletter – and to keep them – is a challenge most of us face. Those who’ve bought from you once are more likely to buy from you again (especially following an email), and those who are newsletter members are more likely to convert into purchasing ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Magento and multi channel selling
November 3, 2012 • Richard Stubbings
These days it is not enough to have a single web site. The E-commerce market keeps evolving and you have to move with it to keep up. When I first started 15 years ago, it was relatively new. It was an extension to your B&M store that brought in extra income. So you have two sales c...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
7 marketing avenues that have been a waste of time and money, and 4 that haven’t
October 29, 2012 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth
I’ve made plenty of mistakes in running my website business, and spending money on certain marketing vehicles is one of them. 1. People ignore banner ads online When was the last time you clicked on a banner ad online? And bought anything from it? I certainly haven’t and I know fro...
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Amazon & Marketplaces
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Merchant Voice
The Perils of Amazon Re-Pricing Software – or Beware Amazon Being Helpful
October 4, 2012 • Richard Stubbings
When Amazon first opened their market place to third party sellers, it was mainly books. These sellers had catalogues of tens of thousands of titles, sometimes hundreds of thousands. The competition was fierce and very much price driven. Sellers had little or no chance of competitively ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Mimic Amazon at your own peril
September 20, 2012 • Jamie Salvatori
Amazon is the largest internet retailer. Copy them and you, too, could end up just like them. Do this at your own peril! In their most recent quarterly results (Q2 2012), Amazon turned in “impressive” results of $7 million in net income on $12.83 billion in sales. That’s the equivalent...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
12 tips for creating a great customer birthday program
September 16, 2012 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth
What’s the one thing people are most fond of, after their name? Their birthday! Annual events like Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day roll around every year, and while not everyone celebrates them, everyone has a birthday. Even if something like 19 million people (7 billion ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Oh No, Its Christmas Again
September 6, 2012 • Richard Stubbings
Its September, and Christmas is coming. Like many gift retailers Christmas is our busiest time of the year. Orders double, then triple, then go through the roof. It is a very hectic time of year. It is always better to plan ahead. No doubt you will concentrate in what to stock, and what...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Whatever I’m doing, I’m not doing it right
August 16, 2012 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth
One of the best things about Practical eCommerce is that you can learn from the wonderful articles and from the advice that online retailers give. However, sometimes a little knowledge is worse than none at all. I'm doing something, but whatever it is isn't right... More unique visito...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
If You Build It They Will Come – Not Unless You Work On It
August 3, 2012 • Richard Stubbings
I often see posts on forums from optimists who want to set up a web site and make money. They seem to have that great optimism that any Ecommerce web site will be a success and save their business, or make them lots and lots of money. The sad fact is that the vast majority of new web ...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
5 ways to expand your product range for free or little cost
July 30, 2012 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth
If you're a small online retailer, you may not want to tie up much – or if things are starting to bite financially, any more - money in purchasing products for your online store. But how can you expand your product selection easily without affecting your bottom line? Here's five possib...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
The Free Traffic Myth
July 6, 2012 • Jamie Salvatori
The obsession over search engine result page (SERP) placement stems from the erroneous thought that traffic gained via this source is free. It isn’t. The cost associated with ranking well for competitive terms is outrageous. Not only will you spend countless hours researching keywords,...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
You’ve got a search box, right?
July 4, 2012 • Jamie Salvatori
Users who use search on your website convert at a much higher rate than those who don’t. On my website, the difference is striking. Visits with search convert about 500% higher than those without search. Please remember, though, that correlation does not imply causation. The simple ac...
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Business
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Merchant Voice
Not the Top Ten Extensions for Magento
June 29, 2012 • Richard Stubbings
When you first install Magento the temptation is to go to Magento Connect and look at all the possible extensions. There are literally thousands of them. The next step is to Google things like “best Magento extensions”, or “top 10 ..” or “recommended ….” just to try to whittle down the ...