E-Commerce Blog

With an unwavering focus on Apple’s forthcoming iBookstore, Amazon reportedly has begun pressuring e-book publishers to sign three-year contracts that ensure that no competing retailers will get better prices or treatment. The new tactics come hard on the heels of Amazon’s conflict with Macmillan earlier this year over the publisher’s switch to an agency model, whereby retailers such as Amazon act as agents of the publisher and earn a 30 percent commission on publisher-set prices. Those prices, Amazon asserted, were “needlessly high.”

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Amazon Wrangles Publishers as iBookstore Grand Opening Looms

Excellent online customer service may be worth $17.3 billion in 2010, according to a new Ovum survey commissioned by StellaService. That’s the round figure for the 10.7 percent premium the report suggests customers are willing to pay for good customer service. The survey was conducted across multiple categories — financial services, healthcare, utilities and retail — including both online and brick-and-mortar stores. The total value of great customer service across all categories, both online and off, was found to be $268 billion per year, or a 9.7 percent premium.

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Survey Totes Up Value of Excellent Online Customer Service

All new e-commerce businesses should address one vital question first and foremost: Will you collect and store payment card information on your Web site or offload credit card processing to a PCI-compliant merchant like PayPal? The answer to this question is paramount and should be well thought out when you are planning and developing your e-commerce Web application. When feasible, outsourcing the storage and handling of credit cards to a trusted, capable and PCI-compliant payment processing provider is the most secure and most budget-friendly course of action.

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A Start-Up’s Guide to E-Commerce Security, Speed and Scalability

Deciding what to do about the explosive growth of mobile traffic can be difficult. That’s why we’re bringing you some of our picks for the best of the mobile web, with mobile-optimized sites that bring a unique and useful experience for users. Some of these sites are from large retailers, but the sites exhibit features and design structures that could be emulated by smaller merchants. So, before you go off and design your own mobile site, have a look at some good examples of what is already out there.

Note that we’ve provided mobile screen captures, below, for the examples we cite. You can also load the examples into your own mobile Internet device, of course, or absent that you can use a mobile simulator in a traditional browser, such…

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Mobile Commerce: Four Good Examples

Driving organic search traffic and sales through multinational search engine optimization requires a fusion of keyword relevance and geo-targeting to send location relevance signals. The search engines have to decipher a site’s geo-targeting signals to deliver the right page in the right language with the right SKUs, pricing, currency and availability. Optimizing the geo-targeting signals a site sends is critical to driving organic search traffic and sales in multiple countries.

Consider a searcher in the U.K. who wants to buy a toy for her daughter’s birthday. She searches Google U.K. for “dolls house.” Along with her query, the searcher is unconsciously sending location signals that the search is coming from a U.K.-based IP address an…

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SEO: Grow Multinational Sales With Geo-targeting “Signals”