Ecommerce Web Site Hosting

<a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>online retailers are frequently interested in new channels to sell their products. Merchants can consider auction <a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>sites and comparison-shopping <a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>sites, for example. And there’s also Amazon.com. Amazon competes with many smaller ecommerce merchants, but also allows those merchants to list products there, too. The service is called “Selling on Amazon” and the executive in charge of it is Sam Wheeler, director of seller services at Amazon.

PeC: What is “Selling on Amazon?”

Wheeler: “It’s an easy and lightweight way for individuals and small businesses to take physical products that they have in their shops and put them on Amazon for sale and Amazon makes it really easy for its customers to find those sellers’ products. The sellers …

<a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>online shopkeepers willing to indicate how their sales were doing in 2009 generally reported extremes, with sales either rising or falling by more than 10 percent, according to a new Practical ecommerce survey.

Practical ecommerce asked a group of its readers how their 2009 sales had fared compared to the first quarter of 2008. By April 7, 2009, 34.6 percent of those responding had seen a 10 percent or greater increase in sales for the first three months of 2009 compared to the same 2008 quarter. Some individuals indicated sales growth of 30 percent or more. Unfortunately, another 28.8 percent of respondents said that their sales had fallen 10 percent or more in the first three month of 2009 compared to the same 2008 period. One merchan…

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While there are many <a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>online tools that can help ecommerce proprietors keep track of their businesses’ reputations and reviews, Yahoo! Alerts, a free notification service, is one of the few that can send those alerts as text messages to a mobile phone, or via Yahoo! Messenger, as a standard feature.

While there are certainly a large number of ecommerce business people working full time in <a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>online retail, many other <a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>online businesses start as part-time, family affairs or as multichannel operations. Yahoo! Alerts SMS (short message service, i.e. text messages) capability is especially helpful for these kinds of businesses.

Imagine a multichannel video game retailer that sells used Wii, PlayStation 3, and X-Box 360 games through an onlin…

Practical ecommerce counts over 300 different shopping cart systems. In this ongoing “Cart of the Week” feature, we profile a specific cart, asking the cart’s owners and users about its strengths and weaknesses.

Here we profile GoECart, a hosted solution with two tiers of pricing, one at $249.95 a month and the other at $499.95 a month. The company is based in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and we asked founder and CEO Manish Chowdhary to explain the benefits of his company’s cart. We then asked Ray Miller, owner of My Wedding Reception Ideas, for his evaluation of the cart. My Wedding Reception Ideas is a GoECart customer.

PeC: Please provide some general background on the cart.

Chowdhary: “The company was founded in 2000. We work with me…

“Lessons Learned” is a biweekly series where we ask ecommerce business owners to share their experiences and advice. For this installment, we interviewed Harvey Jelks, president of Jelks Gourmet Coffee, an <a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>online retailer of roughly 1,500 freshly roasted coffees and Cajun food products. Jelks has been in the coffee business since 1972, and in 1978 he purchased the F.E. Morgan Coffee Company, which has been roasting beans since 1896. Jelks went <a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>online with the business in 1999, and the Shreveport, La.-based store now employs six and garners just under $1 million in annual revenue. Here we give you Jelks’ experience and advice.

Third Party Business Resources

“We do all our own stuff, though we started out having other people do s…

I hear it a lot. People say they know they should use Twitter for marketing purposes, but the idea of “Twittering” doesn’t sit well with them. On a personal level, I have no interest in letting the world know what I’m doing hour-to-hour, much less moment-to-moment. But Twittering on behalf of a company, ecommerce web<a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>sites included, can make a lot of sense, and it can be done without the openness that one might assume.

So, why Twitter? First off, let’s define exactly what “Twittering” is. A Twitter post is a miniature blog that is restricted to 140 characters. The act of Twittering is the process of posting (quickly and easily) these petite, text-only blog entries. The significance and value lies in the same marketing tributary as regula…

To really get the most from web measurements, <a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>online business owners need a clear understanding of exactly what they want to accomplish and how they will measure those accomplishments.

No matter how objective the reporting of analytics software, the meaning divined from its numbers and graphs is somewhat subjective, including our semantics—something that several recent articles have pointed out.

SMART Goals

Term Definitions

A debate is taking place in the analytics world over how certain commonly used terms are defined. I learned about the debate from Neil Mason’s recent column on ClickZ. This discussion of terms, described in more detail below, set me thinking about what analytics are supposed to accomplish, namely h…

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Some 80 percent of <a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>online, network video viewers said they do not mind watching pre-roll video ads along with free streaming television shows. And, 42 percent of consumers said they purchased from brands that advertised on their favorite streaming television shows, potentially making video ads a sales-boosting media for <a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>online merchants.

According to the study from Knowledge Networks, consumers are quite willing to watch ads in exchange for free television programming on network web<a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>sites.

Watch An Ad, See A Video

“Eighty percent of network video downloaders favor watching ads in exchange for free video – up from 67 [percent] in 2006,” stated Knowledge Networks in an official release associated with its How People Use TV’s W…

Google Analytics provides a wealth of information. But many GA account holders do little beyond viewing their <a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>site’s daily traffic and trying to understand terms like “bounce rate.”

In this article, we will learn to segment data in GA to determine the number of paying customers entering a <a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>site from a specific keyword phrase and the landing page(s) they entered the <a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>site on.

Segmenting Keywords, Step By Step

First log into your Google Analytics account. The dashboard gives an important overview of how many visitors your <a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>site is getting and the overall bounce rate. But you must go beyond the dashboard to make meaningful changes to your web<a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>site and develop your marketing strategy.

Click “Traffic Sources,” then “Keywords,” and then the “E…

Each month, Practical ecommerce sends me shopping. I make a purchase from a real <a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>online merchant and create both an article and a video of the shopping experience. My goal is to report back to you about the overall checkout process, customer service experience, web<a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>site aesthetics, and delivery. This review should provide a consumer’s perspective about the featured merchant in particular, and about <a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>online retailing practices in general. To avoid receiving preferential treatment, we do not notify the merchant about the impending review. Think of it as a secret shopper program for the Internet.

In this edition, I vi<a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>sited Source 1 Medical, an Ocala, Florida-based retailer of physical therapy equipment that targets professional physical ther…

Many ecommerce merchants rely on email marketing and many of them, we suspect, wish they could monitor and track emails based on where a recipient lives. Geo tracking would allow for this. To find out more about geo tracking, we interviewed Ross Kramer, CEO of Listrak, an email marketing provider based in Pennsylvania that offers this service.

PeC: What is email geo tracking?

Kramer: “It’s where a person is opening or clicking through a message and we plot where they are coming from. We had the idea that since we were already tracking if a person opened the message and read the message, we figured, ‘We already have the IP address. We could [also] do some geo tracking.’”

PeC: Does the recipient have to click on the message in…

Editor’s Note: This is Part 2 in a two-part series on ideas for ecommerce merchants to save money on credit card processing. The author is Michael Shatz, a veteran of the credit card processing industry. He now owns The Merchant’s Guide, a Massachusetts-based consulting and publishing firm dedicated to helping merchants lower credit card processing fees and improve revenues.

Shatz will soon launch a monthly feature for Practical ecommerce called “Credit Card Report Card,” whereby he’ll grade a merchant’s overall credit card processing set-up and suggest ways for the merchant to reduce costs. To request a “Credit Card Report Card,” email creditcard.report@&…

Practical ecommerce recently asked industry insiders to share a great, innovative idea that could help an ecommerce firm. Here’s what ten of them had to say.

Rich Consumer Experiences Dominate

“Focus on immersive branding and marketing techniques that create unexpectedly fast, fun, and easy shopping experiences. Are your budgets caught up on technology or are you investing in creating that visceral connection to the consumer? What amazes us the most is that very few e-stores provide that connection.”

Michael Benadiba
CEO
OrderDynamics Corporation
Orderdynamics.com

Segment Audiences, Then Localize Messages

“<a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>online retailers need to better segment <a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>online audiences. Once marketers understand an audience’s make-up and behavior, they can…

Practical ecommerce counts over 300 different shopping cart systems. In this ongoing “Cart of the Week” feature, we profile a specific cart, asking the cart’s owners and users about its strengths and weaknesses.

Here we profile AspDotNetStorefront’s ML shopping cart. We asked COO and Executive Vice President Dan Van Kuren to explain the benefits of the cart. We then asked CEO Dana Greaves of Vortx, Inc., a development company that uses AspDotNetStorefront to build <a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>online stores, to also evaluate the cart.

PeC: Please provide some general background on the cart.

Van Kuren: “AspDotNetStorefront ML is the premier shopping cart for Microsoft’s ASP.NET Platform and has been used by more than 10,000 merchants and 6,000 developers since i…

Practical ecommerce will soon publish our “Shopping Cart Roundup” PDF guide. This guide will offer suggestions for choosing the shopping cart that best fits a merchant’s needs. It will also list every shopping cart company that we know of.

One question that most all merchants have in evaluating a shopping cart is whether it has strong search engine optimization qualities. In fact, carts offer different approaches for maximizing seo. SearchFit is a cart that bills itself as “search engine friendly,” and we asked its director of ecommerce, Tim Scott, what, exactly, makes a cart better or worse for search engine optimization.

PeC: Are all shopping carts equally good or bad for seo?

Scott: “No, all shopping cart platforms are not equal…

Editor’s Note: This is Part 1 in a two-part series on ideas for ecommerce merchants to save money on credit card processing. The author is Michael Shatz, a veteran of the credit card processing industry. He now owns The Merchant’s Guide, a Massachusetts-based consulting and publishing firm dedicated to helping merchants lower credit card processing fees and improve revenues.

Shatz will soon launch a monthly feature for Practical ecommerce called “Credit Card Report Card,” whereby he’ll grade a merchant’s overall credit card processing set-up and suggest ways for the merchant to reduce costs. To request a “Credit Card Report Card,” email creditcard.report&#…

Although you might not think of nonprofits as having ecommerce <a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>sites, they do. They accept donations via secure transactions. Rarely will they have a shopping cart, but nonetheless, nonprofits suffer from a number of the same search engine optimization ills that plague traditional ecommerce <a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>sites. Combat Blindness Foundation is one such charity that collects donations via its web<a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>site, and staff of CBF requested this seo review.

Home Page Content

Combat Blindness Foundation volunteer John Pinto laments that donations via its web<a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>site are non-existent. This isn’t surprising given the state of the <a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>site and its seo. For one thing, important keywords such as “charity,” “cataracts,” “donate,” and “donation” are not present on the home pag…

Adding a dynamic product grid or list to any static page in Magento is as easy as adding a few lines of code. The challenge is knowing which lines to add and where to put them.

Magento is a popular open-source ecommerce platform that has been downloaded more than 750,000 times, according to Magento’s web<a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>site. It offers dozens of excellent built-in features and enough flexibility to fit any ecommerce design or requirement. But Magento can seem complicated and could overwhelm a new designer or do-it-yourself entrepreneur.

In this web Design Tips, I hope to show you just how easy it is to make changes to the platform’s default theme without modifying the PHP. In particular, I will (1) show you how to use template path hints to locate PHT…

Often with ecommerce <a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>sites success is not a matter of how good you are but rather how good you look.

Consumers often judge how professional and how trustworthy an <a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>online store is by nothing more than its aesthetics. While many <a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>online retailers are experts in their field (i.e., apparel, tools, and toys), they are not necessarily experts in graphic design or web<a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>site development. They know all about the products they sell, but they may not know much about, say, white space, alpha transparency, or PHP.

In this ecommerce Know-How, I will (1) explain the difference between a web designer and a web developer, (2) provide five tips for selecting a professional web designer and/or developer, (3) offer my opinion about situations you should watc…

Nearly 28 percent of <a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>online retailers now offer personalized product recommendations, according to a recent survey.

Personalized recommendations like those offered on the popular Netflix video <a href=”http://www.gchera.org/go/seo“>site help customers engage. Typically, these recommendation systems use historical customer data and algorithms based on overall customer behavior patterns to offer customers similar or related products.

According to Internet marketing research firm eMarketer, “Until recently only large retailers had the money, expertise and time to develop the complex algorithms that drive personalized product recommendation systems. But the market has advanced and a number of vendors have proven they can deliver real customer value. Now the technology is afford…