E-Commerce Blog

Musicforte.com offers songbooks, sheet music and music reference materials to artists and music fans. It relies heavily on search engine optimization for sheet music sales and hosts a social network of over 40,000 musicians.

Unfortunately, the site is suffering from poor conversion rates. Given the direct traffic, Music Forte?s Greg Percifield is somewhat perplexed at why the site?s sales are so low and hopes that a site grading will help shed light on the reasons.

Achieving acceptable conversion rates involves two key steps. First, you need to attract the quality visitors. Second, you need to convert these prospects into buyers. Let?s see how Music Forte stacks up.

Findability

Qualified prospects must first find your website, and once at your site it must be easy for them to locate the products they are seeking. Musicforte.com has a lot of great content to capture specific long-tail (i.e. little known) products. However, for a range of searches both general and more…

Credit:
Conversion Report Card: Musicforte.com

Name: Steve Delgado, Marketing Director
Company: Arial Software

In Bloglist, we ask ecommerce professionals to identify their favorite blogs. For this installment, we asked Steve Delgado, Marketing Director of Arial Software, a company that produces email marketing software and solutions.

Copyblogger.com

The king of copywriting tips for online marketing success. Sometimes short. Sometimes sweet. Sometimes sassy. Always succinct. Copyblogger is a blog for the writer?s writer (defined as the marketing writer who spends the time tweaking the message, reviewing results, then tweaking the message again). This is the person in your company who is always looking for a better way to say it. Of special note: Try the free report called ?Teaching Sells.?

Sethgodin.typepad.com

Marketing guru and Google darling Seth Godin continues to post fresh marketing wisdom with an entrepreneurial twist. Always the promoter of change, Godin?s posts can range from a 36-item pre-…

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Bloglist: Steve Delgado With Arial Software

Name: Chris ?Cartel? English
Title: Director of Online Sales
Companies: HipHopNow, PetsRight, Ramco Worldwide
URLs: Petsright.com (under construction), Ramcoworldwide.com

?I originally had a hosting account with SimpleNet before Yahoo! purchased it, and SimpleNet offered Miva Script like other companies offer PHP. Through the Miva Script forums, I met a guy who programmed a custom shopping cart for me. I launched an online store specializing in independent hip-hop CDs back in 1995 called HipHopNow (a play on the CDNOW name). I used SalesGate to process my credit cards. SalesGate?s security was breached and its sensitive data compromised, so I moved to Miva Merchant. Back then if you knew Miva Script you could go in to modify the code and make changes to the system in the same way you could on an open source project. Then down the line Miva decided to close its system, and I felt it was time for me to move on.?

?My next store was a music download store…

See the original post:
Shopping Carts: The Umpteenth Time?s The Charm

In Field Test, Practical eCommerce has gathered twelve seasoned ecommerce merchants and asked each of them the same questions around a given topic. This month?s topic is shopping carts.

The participating ecommerce merchants are: Dave Norris, House of Antique Hardware; Justin Hertz, MuttMart; Chris Stump, Only Hammocks; Mike Feiman, PoolDawg; Dan Stewart, Xtreme Diesel Performance; Cindy Barrileaux, Write Your Best; Claudette Cyr, Gear-Source; Kristen Taylor, Juvie; Jeff Muchnik, RedBox Tools; Kara English, Candles & Such.

This is the third and final set of responses chosen randomly to maintain anonymity.

PeC: What shopping cart do you use?

FIELD TESTER 7: CKGold by CartKeeper.

FIELD TESTER 8: I use a privately designed shopping cart using Microsoft SQL.

FIELD TESTER 9: Yahoo! Merchant Solutions.

PeC: How long have you used this cart?

FIELD TESTER 7: 18 months.

FIELD TESTER 8: I have used the shopping cart since I bought the company in 2006.

FIELD TESTER…

More:
Field Test: Shopping Carts, Part Three Of Three

In Field Test, Practical eCommerce has gathered twelve seasoned ecommerce merchants and asked each of them the same questions around a given topic. This month’s topic is shopping carts.

The participating ecommerce merchants are: Dave Norris, House of Antique Hardware; Justin Hertz, MuttMart; Chris Stump, Only Hammocks; Mike Feiman, PoolDawg; Dan Stewart, Xtreme Diesel Performance; Cindy Barrileaux, Write Your Best; Claudette Cyr, Gear-Source; Kristen Taylor, Juvie; Jeff Muchnik, RedBox Tools; Kara English, Candles & Such.

This is the second set of merchants who have responded to the following questions. The responses were chosen randomly and arranged to maintain anonymity.

PeC: What shopping cart do you use?

FIELD TESTER 4: We built a custom shopping cart because we needed some very specific functionality.

FIELD TESTER 5: E-junkie.

FIELD TESTER 6: MonsterCommerce by NetworkSolutions.

PeC: How long have you used this cart?

FIELD TESTER 4: Just over three…

The rest is here:
Field Test: Shopping Carts, Part Two Of Three