E-Commerce Blog

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…

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Amazon Payment Service Allows for Advanced Options

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…

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Quick Query: Pilot Identifies Niche With PDF Aviation Maps

For executives like Braden Hoeppner, director of web sales for optical store Coastalcontacts.com, today’s web widgets are a fast and easy way 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 popular…

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Web Widgets Come Of Age For Ecommerce Sites

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…

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SEO Report Card: Icewraps.net

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 …

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Boost Sales with New Google SEO Tools