E-Commerce Blog

Last year I wrote about the potential of applications ? or widgets ? on the Facebook platform. At the time Facebook was one of the only social media entities that had an open platform for anyone to build and share applications. Widgets are popular because users can customize their pages to their needs and desires with those widgets. 
Ecommerce sites can use them to brand themselves, drive traffic to their corporate site, and even generate direct sales from the widget. It used to be that a knowledgeable programmer was the most reliable way to go in creating a widget, but secondary services are making it easier to create applications and widgets without deep programming knowledge.


One such company that is getting very good reviews is Sproutbuilder.com. The company allows users to create ?sprouts,? which are multimedia Flash interfaces that can be created without knowing how to program in either Macromedia Flash or HTML. A sprout can be a widget or a full-fledged website,…

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Facebook Widgets: Consider Sproutbuilder.com

My philosophy on pay-per-click bid management has always been to manage each keyword?s performance in each engine individually. Knowing a keyword?s impact makes it easier to determine the next steps to take in improving the account?s overall performance. I start by looking at a current month?s worth of data and sorting the data based upon three criteria: Cost per conversion, cost per click and number of clicks. The first section is for keywords that have generated conversions sorted by cost per conversion from highest to lowest. The next section is for those keywords that have had clicks but zero conversions sorted by cost from highest to lowest. Lastly, I group the keywords that have had no clicks in descending order of impressions.

Here?s how it works:

1. For the converted keywords, compare the cost per conversion with the optimal cost per conversion that you want to achieve. Modify bids to alter position if the keyword?s cost per conversion is too high.

2. For…

Read the original here:
Pay-Per-Click Bid Management Strategies

eBay expert and Practical eCommerce blogger Danna Crawford was out fishing with her daughters on her birthday, May 15. After a long day with no successful catches, the three went home tired and sunburned to find that Crawford was one of five eBay users to net two of eBay?s most prestigious awards, the 2008 Hall of Fame Award, as well as the 2008 Golden Ribbon Award for Community Seller of the Year.

Even though Crawford is one of eBay?s most active PowerSellers, involved in education, trading assistance and user feedback through the Voices of eBay community, she said the awards still took her by surprise.

?I was so deeply touched that they thought enough of me to give me these awards,? she said.

Crawford was presented with the award at the 2008 eBay Live conference in Chicago, where a short documentary about her humble eBay beginnings told her story to an audience of 15,000.

Crawford joined eBay in 1997. She was a single mother of three, working three jobs and…

Originally posted here:
Practical eCommerce Blogger Wins eBay Hall Of Fame Award

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Name and Numbers, or ICANN, coordinates the domain name system globally. These tasks involve ensuring the domain name system functions properly and that individuals and companies can easily obtain and use domain names for their lawful purposes.

Recently, ICANN announced the expansion of ?top level domain names,? which are the suffixes such as .com and .net. We asked Jason Keenan, Media Advisor with ICANN, how this top level domain expansion will work.

PeC: ICANN has recently approved changes in the issuance of top level domains, such as .com, .net and so forth. Can you tell us about those?

Keenan: ICANN is getting ready to open a new application and approval process for new generic top level domains (gTLDs) in the second quarter of 2009. This will allow for the creation of new Internet extensions ? the part of the domain name that comes after the dot.

It?s important to understand that people would be applying to create a new…

Originally posted here:
ICANN Exec On The New Top-level Domains

The tenet of customer service in the online shopping process is simple: the more you engage potential customers, and provide links relevant to their needs, the more they?ll buy and the longer they?ll remain a customer. As it turns out, the solution to that challenge may be as simple as using shopping cart functionality to its fullest.

Later shopping made easy?User-initiated actions like printing out the items in the cart or emailing a copy of the cart to a friend should be as simple as one click. Some carts offer ?Save for Later? functionality, as well. ?Giving them [these options] creates a bond between your customer and your site,? says MarketLive?s ?The Perfect Shopping Cart? report. ?They?ve left something behind, something they put time into, and they can return whenever they like.? Merchants in The E-Tailing Group?s 7th Annual Merchant Survey Report reported cart-integrated ?email a friend? tools are in the top-half of their cart add-ons with…

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Shopping Cart Functionality Can Increase Sales