E-Commerce Blog

An online merchant’s most important marketing and sales tool is a content-rich, visually interesting, and factually accurate website.

In this edition of “Ecommerce Know-How,” I am going to propose six ways to improve your site, and I am offering these methods exactly five months before the holiday shopping season (November) begins in earnest, so that if you’re a business-to-consumer seller, you’ll have time to implement at least a few of these upgrades.

Video: Six Ways to Improve Your Online Store

No. 1: Upgrade Your Product Descriptions, Using Three Sentences Or Less

You’ve likely heard a lot of advice about writing good product descriptions —in fact, look for my take on writing good product descriptions in a forth…

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Ecommerce Know-How: Six Ways To Improve Your Online Store

“Conversion Review” is a high level evaluation of a website that a company has submitted for assessment. When doing a review, we analyze the website as if we were a potential customer with a typical usage scenario. We then assess how well the site does at converting visitors into buyers. For this review, we’ve evaluated It’s In The Stars, a site that has been selling personalized, bound astrology reports as gifts for couples and parents since 2006. For the review, we’ve assumed the following: “I want to buy a personalized gift for my wife.”

Elizabeth Ball, the director of It’s In The Stars, feels her conversion rates could be significantly improved and wants some insight into how she could achieve this.

First Impressions – Am I At the …

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Miva Merchant is among the most prominent ecommerce brands. The company was launched in 1995 as HTMLScript Corporation, and it’s one of the early day shopping cart providers. It rose, and then fell, with the first dotcom boom and bust. In 2005, the company sold to Findwhat.com, a publicly-traded, pioneering online advertising network, which then changed its name to Miva. The new Miva later sold the shopping cart division, called Miva Merchant, to private investors in 2007.

Observers of Miva Merchant have long believed that its business model, selling software licenses to hosting companies for as little as $50 apiece, is flawed. The model provided a small, one-time revenue injection, but left the company saddled with ongoing expenses,…

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Interview: Miva Merchant CEO, EVP on Moving to a SAAS Business Model

Practical eCommerce counts over 300 different shopping cart systems. In this weekly “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 RomanCart, a U.K.-based hosted cart solution, offering cart packages starting at $89.99 a year. RomanCart also offers a free version of its standard cart, which does not include most of its marketing tools. We asked RomanCart representative Simon Leigh to explain the benefits of his company’s cart. We then asked Jonjoe Lewis, who uses RomanCart on two websites, Digitaldogtag.co.uk and Radio-release-keys.com, for his evaluation.

PeC: Please provide some general background on the cart.

Leigh: “RomanCart is a host…

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Cart of the Week: RomanCart

The recent decline in worldwide consumer activity seems to have reached bottom or at least slowed its decline.

“Consumers worldwide appear to be in a holding pattern and we see evidence that consumer spending might be positioned to turn around,” said James Russo, vice president global consumer insights for The Nielsen Company, a worldwide data analysis and marketing agency. “There is no doubt that conditions remain tough for global consumers, with continuing widespread areas of weakness, but levels of decline seem to be moderating.”

February Worse for Just One Country

According to The Nielsen Economic Current scorecard of consumer behavior, only one major GDP nation (Germany) saw worsening consumer activity in February 2009 compared t…

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Chart of the Week: The Global Recession May Have Bottomed Out In February