E-Commerce Blog

Most pay-per-click advertisers are familiar by now with concept of the PPC Quality Score. Advertisers running on the major search engines may think that the variables that Google looks at are the same as those at Yahoo!. Both Google?s Quality Score and Yahoo!?s Quality Index aim to provide a richer user experience for searchers. But advertisers that optimize their Yahoo! Sponsored Search accounts apart from their Google accounts can reap the benefit of a lower minimum bid and a lower cost per click.

Quality Index, in the simplest sense, is Yahoo!?s relevancy measure of a sponsored search ad. Yahoo! assigns a Quality Index to each ad group and each text ad to determine your minimum bid and cost per click. While landing page quality and overall keyword competitiveness are factors in Yahoo!?s Quality Index, the most important factor is your ad?s click through rate (CTR). Here are some quick tips to improve your CTR and Yahoo! Quality Index:

Establish a market-to-message…

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Improving Your Yahoo! Quality Index Score

?Lessons Learned? is an occasional series where we ask seasoned ecommerce professionals about their mistakes and successes. For this installment, we?ve asked Byron Tabor, owner of Rooms Delivered, a company that sells sporting goods and camping equipment on its sites Practicalsports.com and Roomsdelivered.com. Rooms Delivered is based in Dallas, Texas and has been in business since 2006. Tabor is its only employee, and he works with his drop shippers selling over 400 unique products, although he hopes to have 1,000 by next December. Rooms Delivered has annual revenue of $42,000. Here we give you Tabor?s experiences and suggestions.

On general advice would you offer new ecommerce merchants


?You need to learn as much as possible before your start. Research your niche and set up a well thought out plan. Find the people and information that will help you succeed. This will help you make wise decisions. Keep learning, keep growing and keep moving forward. Keep your…

Lessons Learned: Practicalsports.com Owner Byron Tabor

In Field Test, Practical eCommerce has gathered twelve seasoned ecommerce merchants and asked each of them the same questions around a given topic. This month?s topic is order management software.

The participating ecommerce merchants are: Dave Norris, House of Antique Hardware; Justin Hertz, MuttMart; Chris Stump, Only Hammocks; Mike Feiman, PoolDawg; Dan Stewart, Xtreme Diesel Performance; Cindy Barrileaux, Write Your Best; Claudette Cyr, Gear-Source; Kristen Taylor, Juvie; Jeff Muchnik, RedBox Tools; Kara English, Candles & Such.

PeC: Do you use any form of order management software?
Field Tester 1: No.
Field Tester 2: Yes.
Field Tester 3: Yes.

PeC: What brand do you use?
Field Tester 1: N/A.
Field Tester 2: NetSuite.
Field Tester 3: Zoovy Order Manager.

PeC: What shopping cart and accounting software do you use?
Field Tester 1: I use CKGold for my shopping cart and QuickBooks for Mac for accounting.
Field Tester 2: We?re using NetSuite for accounting. Our…

Read the rest here:
Field Test: Order Management Software, Part One Of Three

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…

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Pay-Per-Click Bid Management Strategies