E-Commerce Blog

Practical eCommerce counts over 300 different shopping cart platforms. This includes licensed carts, hosted carts and open-source carts. In this, our new “Cart Of The Week” feature, we’ll feature a specific shopping cart and ask personnel of that cart about its strengths and weaknesses. We’ll then ask a competitor about that cart, too.

In this first installment, we’ve featured Shopify, a hosted solution known for its ease of use and simplicity. We asked Dimitri Onistsuk, Vice President of Marketing, about the benefits of that cart. We then asked Rick Wilson, Executive Vice President with Miva Merchant, a licensed cart and a competitor of Shopify, for his evaluation of Shopify.

PeC: What are Shopify’s strengths?

Onistsuk: Shopify is …

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Cart Of The Week: Shopify

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…

Source:
Shopping Cart Functionality Can Increase Sales

By day Sean Dupuis is a courier for FedEx. By night, he sends out packages of his own: boxes of boots and moccasins and sheepskin bags for his bustling website business called Sheepskin and Things. Stretched thin, he’s able to get it all done because his shopping cart and its third-party integrations do much of the work for him.

“You get home, you check your email, it tells you if there’s a new order, you log into your control panel, you print out the completed invoice and completed airway bill for UPS, you pull the inventory and apply the invoice and airway bill to the package, and out the door it goes,” says Dupuis, age 36.

Multiple integrations into the shopping cart

In the process he’s using seamless 256-bit encryption from Star…

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Third-Party Integrations Make Shopping Carts Easier To Use