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We’ve all heard the old adage: Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. What recent 2008 history has taught marketers is the value of online marketing in tough economic times. Consumer purse strings presumably won’t loosen much in 2009, which means marketers have to create smarter online marketing strategies. That in turn means we need to pay attention to what worked last year and what will continue to work this year.

Here are six online marketing lessons from 2008 that will be important to your company’s success this year:

Plan Ahead and Follow Through. In 2008, consumers started their holiday shopping research as early as October. This means retailers should start holiday promotions at Halloween to give “window…

Magento is an open source ecommerce platform designed to empower online merchants and remove barriers in business process and flow. The platform has been downloaded more than 600,000 times, Magento says, perhaps making it the fastest growing ecommerce solution in the market.

With a full feature set—that now includes support for digital products—and a theme based structure, Magento looks and acts like the best of commercial solutions, yet it is free to download.

While I have certainly not used every shopping cart or ecommerce platform available, I have worked with many of them, and I also have experience with enterprise-level content management systems that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Magento out performed them all. It is an…

Well after a long weekend I have moved off our shared hosting onto our Windows 2003 Dedicated Server.  We are running apache with ease. The development of the site is going well, the main CMS has gone into coding.It is definitely getting exciting and hope you all share the same joy.

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Practical eCommerce counts over 300 different shopping cart platforms. In this ongoing “Cart of the Week” feature we profile—but not evaluate—a specific shopping cart, asking about its strengths and weaknesses.

For this installment, we asked Alex Stephens, marketing director at U.K.-based Shopcreator to explain the benefits of her company’s cart. We then asked Richard Henderson for his evaluation of the cart. Henderson co-owns Jorvik Glass, a decorative glass and metal art site with a brick-and-mortar sotre in Castle Howard, a tourist location near York in Northern England.

PeC: Please provide some general background on the cart.

Stephens: “Shopcreator has two fully hosted ecommerce solutions, Transact and Retailer. Both solutions c…

Since 1998 Really Old Records of Natick, Mass. has been offering a selection of “unusual and collectible recordings,” taking full advantage of the Long Tail concept. But the store was slow to ship and did not communicate at all with me after I made a purchase online.

On December 22, 2008 with my house full of the smell of baking cookies and nostalgia, I surfed to ReallyOldRecords.com and began clicking through the inviting lists of long play vinyl records. It was like taking a trip back in time and I enjoyed it. But I was not a usual Christmas shopper. No, I was carefully recording the purchase for this, The Shopping Experience.

Each month Practical eCommerce goes shopping, making a purchase from a real merchant. We create a video of t…

Since 1998 Really Old Records of Natick, Mass. has been offering a selection of “unusual and collectible recordings,” taking full advantage of the Long Tail concept. But the store was slow to ship and did not communicate at all with me after I made a purchase online.

On December 22, 2008 with my house full of the smell of baking cookies and nostalgia, I surfed to ReallyOldRecords.com and began clicking through the inviting lists of long play vinyl records. It was like taking a trip back in time and I enjoyed it. But I was not a usual Christmas shopper. No, I was carefully recording the purchase for this, The Shopping Experience.

Each month Practical eCommerce goes shopping, making a purchase from a real merchant. We create a video of t…

Consumers often judge online stores by visual aesthetics alone, so Internet shopkeepers are wise to use large appealing images, handsome fonts, and occasionally an eye-pleasing curve.

When that curve is added someplace unexpected, say in a border around a text box or an image, it can be especially impactful. In this Web Design Tips, a recurring Practical eCommerce feature, I’ll show you how to use CSS alone to bend the corners of your site’s border elements. I’ll also give you an update on the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) border-radius property in CSS3 and discuss browser compatibility—since Microsoft’s Internet Explorer trails most other browsers in supporting this property in any form.

Rounded Borders in CSS

As you probably kno…

Consumers often judge online stores by visual aesthetics alone, so Internet shopkeepers are wise to use large appealing images, handsome fonts, and occasionally an eye-pleasing curve.

When that curve is added someplace unexpected, say in a border around a text box or an image, it can be especially impactful. In this Web Design Tips, a recurring Practical eCommerce feature, I’ll show you how to use CSS alone to bend the corners of your site’s border elements. I’ll also give you an update on the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) border-radius property in CSS3 and discuss browser compatibility—since Microsoft’s Internet Explorer trails most other browsers in supporting this property in any form.

Rounded Borders in CSS

As you probably kno…

Taking lessons from two marketing disciplines, online retailers and their web designers can build a well structured Internet store organized into themes or categories that will make it easy for shoppers and search engines alike to find important information and product pages.

In this Ecommerce Know-How, I will briefly define search engine optimization (SEO) and information architecture (IA), describe one of the many places where these marketing specialties intersect, and explain how easy and natural thematic structure and linking really is. I’ve also included a video. I should point out that this technique is very intuitive, and many site owners or designers are probably using it to some extent naturally. We are simply putting a name t…

2009 begins in the shadow of global economic recession. The Consumer Confidence Index hovers at 38, a new low in United States, and those consumers that are shopping want deals. So could 2009 be the year of the ecommerce coupon?

According to a Dec. 10, 2008 comScore report, coupon use grew 63 percent for the one week period beginning Dec. 1, 2008 compared to the first week of December 2007 as a source of referral for ecommerce sales. Coupons represented 1.8 percent of all sources of referral for ecommerce sales, comScore said. Similarly Google Insights for Search tracked a 51 percent growth in searches for the keyword “coupon” in December 2008 compared to December 2007.

Since January of 2004, Google searches for the keyword “coupon” h…

“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 discontinued its brick-and-mortar businesses to offer its 21,000 houseware and furniture products online. The business is based in Richmond, Calif., garners between $15 and $20 million in annual revenue and has more than 50 employees. Here we offer McManus’ experiences and suggestions.

Third party business resources

“We started using more third parties about three years ago. We use Celebros for on-site search, Certona for product recommendations, and …

A recent study from SLI Systems asked 319 respondents about the importance of various technologies and tactics in terms of their effect on ecommerce strategy.

While the sample for the study was not necessarily large, it tended to support many preconceived ideas about which web technologies and techniques are the most effective for online retailers. Search engine marketing and optimization, which embodies both SEO and pay-per-click efforts, were clearly the most important marketing tools in the survey respondents’ opinion, garnering a vote of “Very Important” from 70 percent of those asked.

Email marketing was also an important tactic, a finding which parallels results from a recent Practical eCommerce study.

This month’s report card is SolsticeSupply.com, an ecommerce site dedicated to closeout winter goods ranging from skis and snowboards to winter apparel. The site is very pleasant to the eye with large, expansive photos of wintry scenes and skiing action. But how does it do in terms of SEO? Well, pictures are nice, good design can convert, but search engines only see words. With that in mind, let’s take a look.

Home Page Content

This is the first spot where SolsticeSupply.com needs to make SEO improvements, especially with regard to textual content. The homepage – and much of the site – is graphically focused rather than textually focused. While graphics are certainly not a problem, for SEO purposes they need to be balanced with perma…

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For the first time in years, holiday ecommerce sales fell in 2008 as online shoppers, apparently worried about the global economy and their personal finances, cut seasonal spending 3 percent, according to an established Internet tracking firm. But 47.7 percent of Internet store keepers responding to a recent Practical eCommerce study actually had better sales than last year, perhaps indicating that many small online stores outperformed the large multichannel sellers.

A report from comScore, said that total retail ecommerce sales from November 1 to December 23, 2008 were $25.5 billion, down from $26.3 billion for the 2007 holiday shopping season. Separately, an exclusive Practical eCommerce survey did find that approximately 40 percent o…

Boldchat provides online communication software that allows Internet retailers to actively engage customers and potentially increase both conversions and profits.

The Boldchat software (I tested version 5.20.3240.27126) was a responsive and powerful solution for live chat on any ecommerce website. But I wished for better documentation and was disappointed (very disappointed) to see that the chat button, which I was supposed to embedded on my site, and the chat window were built with HTML tables—a technique that many creditable designers try to avoid. Overall, I am giving Boldchat four out of a possible five stars in this The PeC Review.

For the unfamiliar, live chat is the concept of having operators (real people) actively chatting w…