E-Commerce Blog

Garnering inbound links from websites with good PageRank is a mainstay of search engine optimization. Links are like votes for a given website in the eyes of search engines, and their number and quality have much to do with determining the outcome of search engine results. That’s why – as long as links matter to search engines – you’ll see them being bought and sold.

A new service called InLinks.com matches advertisers (e.g. link purchasers) with bloggers (e.g. link providers) who get paid to have links added to their blog content. The website says, “InLinks allows you to purchase links within the content area on web pages. You search for instances of your top keywords and replace those static keywords with a hyperlink back to your we…

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SEO: Buying Links is Risky Business

Holiday shopping is well underway this year, which means many consumers have already begun looking for those special gifts. And many consumers worried about economic conditions save time and money by purchasing their gifts online, rather than traveling to a traditional brick and mortar location. Despite this, some retailers may still be having trouble coaxing online shoppers through virtual checkout lines. But knowing when consumers are ready to buy makes it easier for retailers to do just that. To turn your browser into cold hard cash, consider these tips.

1. Free Shipping–Online sales peak the week before Christmas. Holiday shoppers are waiting for retailers to offer last minute sales. Offering free shipping or another last minute v…

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6 Quick Tips to Capture Those Holiday Sales Now

Practical eCommerce counts over 300 different shopping cart platforms. In this ongoing “Cart Of The Week” feature, we profile—but not evaluate—a specific shopping cart, asking about its strengths and weaknesses.

For this installment, we asked Taunia Kipp, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Information Officer at Mountain Media, a hosted shopping cart, to explain the benefits of her company’s cart. We then asked Palen Conway for his evaluation of it. Conway is COO of Georgiamills.com, a retailer of area rugs that switched to Mountain Commerce seven years ago.

PeC: Please provide some general background on the cart.

Kipp: In 1998, while working to implement content management and ecommerce systems for Mountain Media’s clients, the deve…

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Cart of the Week: Mountain Commerce Emphasizes Search Engine Friendliness

So you have your ecommerce website up and running, and you wonder if you need any specific terms and conditions to govern transactions on your site. The answer is yes. Because if a problem should arise, having terms and conditions may help resolve that problem in your favor.

Prior to the customer purchasing anything from you, make sure they check a box agreeing to the terms and conditions. This will bind the customer to any reasonable and legal terms. The purpose isn’t to trap or trick a customer but rather to enable both the customer and company to agree in advantage to terms.

The following are examples of the categories (with suggested text) you should consider when drafting terms and conditions. These examples demonstrate the usual …

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Every ecommerce merchant must address, at least in some capacity, the issues of fulfillment. One merchant who does this in a big way is Amazon.com. Amazon now offers its fulfillment and warehousing expertise to any ecommerce merchant via its “Fulfillment by Amazon” service. To explain this service, and how it could help smaller ecommerce merchants, Practical eCommerce recently spoke with Tom Taylor, vice president of Fulfillment by Amazon.

PeC: Can any merchant outsource his fulfillment and/or warehousing to Amazon’s Fulfillment Services?

Tom Taylor: Absolutely, yes. We originally started with the idea of Fulfillment by Amazon soliciting to our customers who really wanted to have a better shopping experience, but we realized …

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Amazon Exec On Outsourcing Fulfillment