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Amazon Payment Service Allows for Advanced Options

Amazon.com has been offering a beta version of its Flexible Payment Service (FPS) to merchants for almost a year now. With many developer-friendly features, some sellers could benefit from adding Amazon FPS to their payment options, especially if they’re already using Amazon to sell their products. Launched in August 2007 as a competitor to PayPal, San Jose, Calif. and Google, Mountain View, Calif., Amazon FPS was touted as being “the first payments service designed from the ground up specifically for developers.” It promised loads of adaptability and a simplified cost structure. Create Multiple Sets of Transaction Rules Perhaps FPS’s most interesting trick is the ability to create many sets of transaction rules at virtually any po...

Quick Query: Pilot Identifies Niche With PDF Aviation Maps

In the United States there will be 590,349 pilots collectively flying some 28 million hours in 228,000 different aircraft this year alone, according to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). To navigate, those pilots use altimeters, global positioning, and good old-fashioned maps, creating an opportunity for one ecommerce merchant. Aviation maps or charts are typically four-foot-by-six-foot rectangles that take up a lot room, are hard to manipulate in a tight cockpit, and wear out easily as pilots fold and refold them flight after flight. Eric Boles, a private pilot and the founder of Skysectionals.com, saw a need and believed that pilots would for pay for smaller, easier to use maps. But bringing a product to market isn’t eas...

Trigger-Based Email Marketing Improves Sales and Customer Experience

Trigger marketing is the next step for the critical ecommerce function of automated email communications. While traditional automated emails follow newsletter sign-ups and orders, trigger marketing sends emails for other events such as particular search patterns, customer birthdays, holidays, or related products. “No matter what the ecommerce niche or industry, we all do too many jobs and we all need to get more relevant to when we touch into the lives of our consumer,” says Dylan Boyd, vice president of sales and strategy for eROI, an email marketing and interactive agency in Portland, Ore. “That’s what trigger email is all about.” Venders Are Working to Make Trigger Marketing Easier There are multitudes of email-marketing service an...

Video Boosts Sales for Online Retailers

At brick-and-mortar retailers, shoppers can stroll the isles, handle items, speak to clerks, and receive well placed merchandising messages. It’s not that easy for ecommerce merchants. They must find new and inventive ways to engage and convert customers; using well written and persuasive content, great photographs, related product links, and cross-selling tools. In this ever-advancing cycle of innovation, merchandising with video might be the next bottom-line booster. “There is a clear trend that a lot more [online] retailers are incorporating video into their user experience…and we know that video works,” said Kevin Ertell, senior vice president of ecommerce at Borders Inc., Ann Arbor, Mich. With the support of its 1,100 retail store...

Web Widgets Come Of Age For Ecommerce Sites

For executives like Braden Hoeppner, director of web sales for optical store Coastalcontacts.com, today’s web widgets are a fast and easy way to improve customer service and create interest. Thanks to the widget behind Coastalcontacts.com’s “Tell a friend” link, “we got more features than we would have initially introduced ourselves,” Hoeppner said, “and we were able to do it a lot more quickly.” Instead of going to an email page, Coastal Contact’s link opens a pop-up box called Social Notes, created by a San Francisco-based marketing-communications company, PopularMedia, Inc. The free Social Notes widget lets users email the page to a friend; post the page to their Facebook, MySpace or Bebo user profile; post it to one of several popu...

SEO Report Card: Icewraps.net

I went on a hike this weekend and it was a lot of fun—until the next day when I began to feel as if I had participated in something more like a death march. My leg muscles were so sore, it was tough to trek through the grocery store in search of ibuprofen. In honor of my pain (it’s my own fault—too much time at the desk), I’ve chosen Icewraps.net as the recipient of this month’s SEO Report Card. The website, designed with icy blue tones, offers "ice packs and heating pads [to] treat your leg pain, elbow joint pain, hip pain, knee pain, foot pain or arthritis pain!" Great keyword placement there, though heating pads don’t seem to be congruent with ice wraps. That's not necessarily an SEO issue, though, so let’s take a look at...

Seven Tactics to Boost Online Banner-ad Response Rates

Ecommerce has been the great equalizer for retailers—a small book store in Iowa can oftentimes compete with Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Amazon for customers in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or the world, but equality isn't always good. There are times when it's good to have a competitive edge (inequality), and if you act fast this could be one of those times. MarketingSherpa, one of the Internet's most reputable marketing sites, has offered up seven tactics for boosting online banner-ad response rates. MarketingSherpa's findings are based on a survey the firm conducted. These findings generally show "how seven design elements have an impact on the effectiveness of online advertising," especially as compared to response rates for ...

Boost Sales with Google SEO Tools

As search engines have gotten better at discovering web content in many forms, manually submitting to them has become less of a focus. But content and distribution platforms continue to expand, and as they do so, the need for manual search engine submission remains an important, if changing, option. Of course, Google is still the king of search engines (some would even say the whole game, but I’m not one of them), and making sure that the search king sees all the attributes of an ecommerce website is important. To that end, it's a good idea for ecommerce web masters and website owners to understand—and hopefully take advantage of—the changes Google recently made to its content submission webpage. Google already offered many submission ...

Magento's iPhone Theme: Mobile Commerce for the Masses?

Magento Commerce, an open source ecommerce platform, has introduced an Apple iPhone specific theme that is potentially the first step toward leveling the playing field for small online retailers who want to compete in the lucrative and booming mobile ecommerce market. Mobile eCommerce Has Massive Potential Mobile ecommerce (often call m-commerce) is coming; 9 million Americans have already made a purchase from a mobile device, and perhaps half of the United States' 250 million odd mobile handset users are willing to make a purchase in the near future, according to a recent study from The Nielsen Company, New York, N.Y. All of those U.S. users plus the billions of consumers in Asia, Africa, and India, where a mobile handset may serve as...

Christmas Is Coming: Six Quick Online Marketing Tips

Christmas is coming. And now is the time for you to take a hard look at your current search engine marketing campaigns. With billions of dollars up for grabs, your online marketing needs to be well-planned, well-executed, and well-optimized. Be Ready When Shoppers Come Calling Here are six quick tips to help you get your online marketing campaigns in shape for the start of the holiday shopping season: Plan Your Promotions Now. Will you offer free shipping and returns, special discounts, or free gifts? Now is the time to decide what special promotions you will advertise to increase interest in your products and give your sales a boost during the holiday shopping season. Evaluate Your Keyword Rankings. Is your website listed in Google’...

Yahoo! Store Users: SSL Servers are Moving

Yahoo! Merchant Solutions, a leading ecommerce provider, is migrating its secure socket layer (SSL) certificates to new servers, improving their system's flexibility, but forcing some e-retailers to make changes to their stores before an October 15 deadline to avoid cart errors. The SSL protocol—as many retailers know—is the industry standard for safe ecommerce transactions, encrypting personal data like an email address or a credit card number to prevent cyber hoodlums and virtual identity thieves from stealing customer information. SSL certificates reside on secure web servers where they encrypt data and offer a store's proof of ownership. Pages secured with this protocol often bare a padlock icon in the address bar or on the lower ri...

Coordinate Pay-per-click Advertising With SEO Efforts

The goal of a pay-per-click advertising campaign is to attract qualified traffic to a website in an effort to have searchers convert on a desired action. That action could be a sale, filling out a lead form, requesting information and so forth. The goal of search engine optimization is the same, yet the pressure of justifying the cost of every click doesn’t exist. So, in both the PPC and SEO worlds, the goals are the same. But why drive traffic, whether you pay for it or not, to a site that may not convert? You may only get one chance to impress a visitor so if your site is not conversion friendly, you may have wasted your one and only chance to get that visitor to convert. If the visitor came from PPC, you have wasted your money a...

Pirated Software Rampant Among Personal Computer Users

To somebody who has never owned or made his living creating and licensing intellectual property, it may not be a big deal. Really, who is it going to hurt when someone downloads a piece of software without paying for it and uses it for personal gain? Or, what’s the harm when a kid downloads music without paying for it. So what if I steal movies online, who gets hurt? Ask the guy who bought the $1,200 graphics program for $89 from a faceless, nameless Internet pirate and he’ll likely tell you that the big software company has plenty of money and it charges too much for its stuff anyway. But to a company like Adobe, that has spent millions in developing its suites of highly regarded programs, it is a big deal. It is lost revenue that ri...

Open-Source Alternatives To Microsoft Office, Part II

In part I of this series we looked at why the use of open-source software is now gaining momentum. Here, we take a look at some of the most-recognized open-source alternatives to Microsoft Office “Light” desktop MS Office alternatives KOffice is one “light” answer to Microsoft Office from KDE, a Minneapolis-hatched open-source software community. With KOffice, “the main benefit is that it’s incredibly light weight,” says KDE spokesperson Wade Olson. “It takes up less space, starts faster, may respond faster, and it integrates with—benefits from the—KDE desktop.” “We have applications that typically match up with Microsoft Office and Open Office as expected, with Excel and Word expectations,” Olson says. “With ours, we also bind in Kri...

Open-Source Alternatives To Microsoft Office, Part I

Ten years ago, a tiny software community launched free Microsoft-like programs for those with UNIX or Linux computer operating systems. A few months ago, this software community—known as KDE—rolled out its first free Office-style software for Windows users. It’s a competitive first for KDE, and indicative of an industry shift. The shift is toward software that works on cross-platform computers and provides a free or low-cost alternative to the long-standing monopoly held by Seattle-based Microsoft. “This recent development is to make sure that all of our applications are cross-platform, working even on Windows and Mac platforms,” says Wade Olson, spokesperson for KDE, makers of the free KOffice version of Microsoft-like writing, sprea...

Video Tutorial: CSS Positioning

The transition from using tables to create a page layout to using Cascading Style Sheets can be difficult to grasp at first, particularly when it comes to positioning elements correctly on the screen. In this video tutorial by Practical eCommerce's chief architect Brian Getting, we will take a look at the various methods that CSS provides for positioning page elements, and how they work. The CSS float and position properties allow designers to fine-tune where they want particular page elements to appear. However, they can be confusing to understand at first, and in this tutorial we will examine what each property does. By showing how to take advantage of these positioning properties, designers will be able to make more informed decisio...

Landing Pages: Five Pointers to Boost Conversions

Website traffic is up. Your pay-per-click (PPC) ads are receiving traffic, and you’re reaching your monthly budget. Sounds like your paid search campaign is working well, right? Well, not necessarily. If you’re like most Internet advertisers, you’re not investing in a paid search campaign simply to get hits to your website. You want those visitors to convert, or take some desired action. To get your paid search visitors to convert, you must hold their hands, telling them what to click, where to go, and how to proceed. Optimizing your landing pages to boost conversions can be a manageable process, and here are five pointers to help. Be Clear, Concise, and Precise Get rid of any page element that distracts from the task at hand. Elimina...

PCI Report Card: Merchant X (A Photography Accessory Retailer)

Welcome to the inaugural PCI Report Card. In previous Practical eCommerce report cards, we’ve always been clear about the name of the merchants we’re grading. However, when dealing with security issues, such as compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, some discretion is required. We’ll be talking about sensitive subjects, such as vulnerabilities on publicly-facing websites and we must keep the identity of the merchant out of the article. Merchant X is an online retailer of photography accessories, processing both ecommerce transactions and phone orders via the Volusion hosted shopping cart. Merchant X asked Practical eCommerce to grade their site for PCI Compliance. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Stan...

Social Media Marketing

Something my employer at Bizzuka said recently sparked my thinking. "What you're doing (in terms of marketing) will not just help us create greater awareness among prospects, but among those considering coming to work for us," he said. It caused me to realize that marketing, especially social media marketing, is not just about building a prospect list. Sometimes, whether intentional or not, it's also about attracting quality talent and/or wealthy investors. An acquaintance, mortgage broker and blogger Brian Brady, said this about the web: "By using these online tools to connect and generate social capital, we're leaving little bread crumbs all over the Internet that show our passion and knowledge." We're everywhere All these vari...

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