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

Trigger marketing is the next step for the critical ecommerce function of automated email communications. While traditional automated emails follow newsletter sign-ups and orders, trigger marketing sends emails for other events such as particular search patterns, customer birthdays, holidays, or related products.

“No matter what the ecommerce niche or industry, we all do too many jobs and we all need to get more relevant to when we touch into the lives of our consumer,” says Dylan Boyd, vice president of sales and strategy for eROI, an email marketing and interactive agency in Portland, Ore. “That’s what trigger email is all about.”

Venders Are Working to Make Trigger Marketing Easier

There are multitudes of email-marketing service an…

Trigger-Based Email Marketing Improves Sales and Customer Experience

At brick-and-mortar retailers, shoppers can stroll the isles, handle items, speak to clerks, and receive well placed merchandising messages. It’s not that easy for ecommerce merchants. They must find new and inventive ways to engage and convert customers; using well written and persuasive content, great photographs, related product links, and cross-selling tools. In this ever-advancing cycle of innovation, merchandising with video might be the next bottom-line booster.

“There is a clear trend that a lot more [online] retailers are incorporating video into their user experience…and we know that video works,” said Kevin Ertell, senior vice president of ecommerce at Borders Inc., Ann Arbor, Mich.

With the support of its 1,100 retail store…

Video Boosts Sales for Online Retailers

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