E-Commerce Blog

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

For many merchants, the holiday season is the largest sales period of the year. In this “Great Ideas for the Holidays” series, we’ll be asking ecommerce experts for ideas to help online retailers.

For this first installment, we’ve asked Massimo Arrigoni, CEO of Early Impact, which publishes the ProductCart line of licensed shopping cart software products, at EarlyImpact.com, and John Montague, owner of Spotlight Retail, operator of 20 niche ecommerce sites, at Spotlightretail.com.

Offer Free Shipping

“Free shipping is a must. It’s by far the primary reason for shopping cart abandonment according to many studies. To offset the cost of this, focus on high-margin complimentary services like gift-wrapping. Make the fact that you do offer …

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Great Ideas for The Holidays: Part 1

Google Insights, a free and relatively new research tool, provides detailed search data that can help online retailers improve their pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization.

Like it or not, many online retailers depend on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and search engine optimization (SEO) to drive shoppers to their digital stores. If the clicks slow down, so does business. And keeping good-quality traffic flowing has been a real challenge. Retailers, particularly those with annual sales of less than $100,000, have had to constantly massage their PPC and SEO programs, tweaking a keyword here to save 3 cents per click or adjusting a landing page there to make an incremental gain in organic listings. This constantly chang…

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Review: Google Insights Can Help Merchants Optimize PPC/SEO Campaigns

What our friends and relations think matters to us. I care about what my wife thinks of my new shirt, and when I got a 12-inch table saw this summer, I was sure to discuss the tool’s finer points my friend Steve. I am not alone. Shoppers like and trust recommendations and opinions from friends and family. We all talk about the great deal we got from one store or about the horrible shipping experience we had with another store, and our friends are listening.

Simply put, our peers influence us and we them. They help us make many buying decisions, and savvy online merchants can use this rather natural tendency to increase sales and make happy customers this holiday season. Specifically, I am going to describe three ways to use coupon code…

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Sharable Coupons Can Boost Sales