'Special Features' from Practical eCommerce magazine (US)*

Web Design Tips: Converting an Older Table-Based Email Template To CSS

Many email templates were developed using older table-based layouts that "break" easily and are very complicated to maintain.
Tables in HTML are fantastic for displaying tabular data. But as a layout tool they interfere with some dynamic and rich media elements, cause accessibility challenges, hog bandwidth, create maintenance issues, and are more fragile than CSS layouts. And for all of these reasons, it is time to update your broadcast email templates. In this edition of Web Design Tips, I'll quickly show you how to convert a broadcast email template from a table-based layout to a fast and lovely CSS layout. Handle With Care: Table-Based Layouts Break Easily I have a confession to make. One of Practical eCommerce's email templates ...

full story

New Accessibility Guidelines Part III: Understandability

Editor’s Note: The World Wide Web Consortium recently approved new accessibility guidelines. Passed in December 2008, the new “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0” is the official recommendation for web accessibility for the disabled. The new guidelines focus on four fundamental principles:

• Is it perceivable?
• Is it operable?
• Is it understandable?
• Is it robust?

This article addresses “understandability,” and is part three in a series discussing the impact of WCAG 2.0 on your website. The understandability of text is crucial to web accessibility. At broad levels, this means specifying text languages, explaining the meanings of jargon or idioms, and expanding abbreviations to clarify text. It's not just text that can ...

full story

8 Tips for Choosing an SEO Professional

Editor's Note: Greg Laptevsky is a longtime Practical eCommerce contributor and a professional search-engine-marketing consultant. We asked him for tips to help ecommerce companies hire SEO firms. What follows, below, is his response. The checklist below will help you choose the right specialist for your search engine marketing campaigns. 1. Stay away from agencies/companies that guarantee top rankings.
If you’ve been in the business long enough, you know that there are few guarantees with search engine marketing. No company can guarantee top natural rankings on Google, Yahoo!, MSN or any other search engine. Agencies/consultants can, in fact, guarantee that you’ll be able to generate traffic via paid alternatives such as pay-per-cl...

full story

Video Ideas: 4 Ways to Engage Visitors and Increase Sales

Nearly 80 percent of U.S. Internet users spent roughly 5 hours watching videos in December 2008, with an average view time of 3.2 minutes per video, according to a study by comScore. Here are four ways your ecommerce business can use video to engage your visitors and increase sales, no matter what business you are in or what type of prospects visit your website. 1. Solve a Problem
Create a video that addresses or solves your prospect's problem. That is, after all, the point of your business, helping people solve problems. The video doesn’t have to be an Oscar winner - just clear and concise. Use pictures, charts and examples to tell a story. A web cam and screen capture products like Camtasia make it easy to create a movie without a...

full story

Chart of the Week: Facebook Growing Fast, Now Has More Than 200 Million Users

Facebook, the social networking site, now has more than 200 million users with over 100 million users logging in daily, the site said.
In just the last six months, Facebook says that it added more than 23 million new users in the U.S. alone. The Silicon Alley Insider, a trade publication, noted that if Facebook were a country, the number of users would be the equivalent of the fifth most populated nation in the world, behind China, India, the United States, and Indonesia.
"The U.S. had more Facebook users than any other country. However, the largest concentration of users was in the Eastern U.S. and Western Europe," wrote eMarketer in its analysis of the recently released Facebook numbers. "From January to March 2009, peop...

full story

The PeC Review: “Remember the Milk” A Helpful Organizing Tool

Ecommerce entrepreneurs are busy people who manage suppliers, web marketing, merchandising, accounting, and more. Many of these entrepreneurs keep lists on legal pads or stick dozens of yellow Post-it notes to the sides of their monitors like a mane on a lion. Australia-based Remember the Milk is a web-based task manager that can help ecommerce merchants keep, track, and check off any sort of task. Each week, The PeC Review takes a quick look at products and services that could help an online merchant. Our goal is to both rate and identify those products. This week I reviewed Remember the Milk's basic (free) task management tool, awarding it 4 out of a possible five stars.
Video: Remember the Milk Don't Forget an...

full story

Pay-per-click Advertising: Yahoo! Targeting Gets More Focused

Companies are frequently looking for ways to position their products in front of consumers that will most likely result in a conversion or a purchase. While there are several different options for targeting pay-per-click campaigns, the recent advances in Yahoo!’s audience targeting capabilities warrant a close look today. Before we delve into these advances, let’s first look at how targeted advertising works with a PPC campaign. What Is Targeted PPC Advertising? PPC campaigns increase return on investment by targeting keywords used specifically by a segment of searchers. Bidding on more specific, less competitive keywords makes a company's pay-per-click ads more relevant to people who know exactly what they're looking for. In other wo...

full story

Cart of the Week: Shop2Cart

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 Shop2Cart, a Boca Raton, Florida-based hosted cart. We asked Paul Ross, President of Shop2Cart, Inc., to review the cart. We then asked M. J. Votypka, President of Mark Edwards Jewelry, about her opinion of the cart. Votypka uses Shop2Cart for Markedwardsjewelry.com, Nauticalflagjewelry.com and Skeletonfish.com. PeC: Please provide some general background on the cart.
Ross: “The Shop2Cart platform is currently in version 2.1 and is a hosted solution serving over 200 ecommerce websites and growing daily. Sho...

full story

Quick Query: Comodo CEO on Hiring a Social Media Officer

There's much talk about social media sites and there's also talk of how companies can use social media for marketing purposes. One company doing just that is Comodo, a firm that provides online security solutions. Comodo has recently created a “social media officer” job position and Comodo's CEO, Melih Abdulhayoglu, is here to discuss it with us. PeC: Why did Comodo create a social media officer position?
Abdulhayoglu: "Well, humans rode on a horseback for tens of thousands of years and then in less than 100 years, we went from a horseback to a jet plane. What caused that revolution?
What was the trigger to get us from a horseback to a jet plane? The answer was the Gutenberg press, the invention of printing that allowed us to...

full story

PeC Traffic Report: Six Measurements to Improve Email Performance

Good ecommerce merchants know that email campaigns built around opt-in lists are an effective way to reach potential customers. But more than 18 percent of email marketers in the U.S. either don't or cannot measure the return on investment for their email campaigns, according to a new survey. < br /> Some 82 percent of U.S. marketers surveyed are measuring the performance of their email campaigns, according to an eMarketer article, which uses data from eROI, an email marketing agency. This is a very good statistic. Unfortunately, it also means that nearly 20 percent of marketers are not measuring their campaigns, and these marketers are missing the opportunity to optimize their email campaigns. If you find yourself and your online store in th...

full story

SEO: Try Surfing Like a Search Engine Spider

I’m a visual learner. I need to see and interact with things to understand them. It therefore helps me to mimic the behavior of search engine spiders when I’m digging into a site for the first time to review its search engine optimization issues. I like to think of it as “being the bot.”
The key thing to remember is that search engines crawlers don’t have JavaScript, CSS or cookies enabled. They can’t “see” content embedded in media files such as images, Flash, video or audio. You take all this away, and what are you left with? Plain HTML, text and links. In many cases, the entire focus of the page is rendered indecipherable, and in some cases the site isn’t even navigable. It’s an incredible illustration of the structural challenges bo...

full story

Ecommerce Know-How: Developing a Postcard Campaign

A postcard marketing campaign can be inexpensive, and it could increase your store's sales next month. Almost every weekday at about 2 p.m., I trot out to my mailbox, wave at the retired Marine smoking cigarettes on his porch across the street, and collect my U.S. mail. I sort out the Netflix mailer, which the kids are always eager for, assemble the bills and important letters, and peruse circulars and direct mail advertising as I make my way back to my home office. Collecting and sorting my mail is an event and a nice break in my daily routine.
I'm not alone. Many people treat gathering their physical mail with a certain amount of ceremony. Pavel, my mechanical-engineer friend who lives nearby, gets home at around 5:15 p.m. every wor...

full story

Mobile Broadband Growth Slowed in Fourth Quarter 2008

The growth in new mobile broadband subscriptions fell significantly in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to a new report. The total mobile PC data card subscriber base grew 5 percent in the final three months of 2008, compared to 22 percent growth in the prior quarter, according to comScore, a respected Internet measuring and tracking firm. While it is important to not look at a glass half empty (overall PC data card subscriptions grew 163 percent in 2008), the rapid slowdown in new subscriber growth seems to correspond to the much lamented general economic weakness that many nations are experiencing.
Mobile broadband is different than Wi-Fi Internet access. According to comScore, "mobile broadband employs cellular tele...

full story

Selling (And Socializing) On Facebook

Facebook offers ecommerce companies an opportunity to both market their products and connect with their customers. Traffic to Facebook has increased by 149% from February 2008 to February 2009, according to Hitwise, and it’s not just from the young crowd. Visitors over age 35 have increased by 23% over the same time frame. First, Create a Facebook Profile.
eCommerce companies can create Facebook profiles very similar to what is available to individuals. Using Facebook applications, merchants can easily and automatically display content from Flickr, Twitter, blogs and even lists of products. Consumers who are interested in your company and products can become a "fan" and are then automatically notified of your updates. You can also add...

full story

Quick Query: Amazon Exec Explains "Selling on Amazon"

Online retailers are frequently interested in new channels to sell their products. Merchants can consider auction sites and comparison-shopping 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 ...

full story

Survey: Ecommerce Merchants Report Extremes in Sales Growth

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...

full story

The PeC Review: Yahoo! Alerts Can Send You Text Messages

While there are many 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 online retail, many other 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...

full story

Cart of the Week: GoECart

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...

full story