E-Commerce Blog

All new e-commerce businesses should address one vital question first and foremost: Will you collect and store payment card information on your Web site or offload credit card processing to a PCI-compliant merchant like PayPal? The answer to this question is paramount and should be well thought out when you are planning and developing your e-commerce Web application. When feasible, outsourcing the storage and handling of credit cards to a trusted, capable and PCI-compliant payment processing provider is the most secure and most budget-friendly course of action.

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A Start-Up’s Guide to E-Commerce Security, Speed and Scalability

Excellent online customer service may be worth $17.3 billion in 2010, according to a new Ovum survey commissioned by StellaService. That’s the round figure for the 10.7 percent premium the report suggests customers are willing to pay for good customer service. The survey was conducted across multiple categories — financial services, healthcare, utilities and retail — including both online and brick-and-mortar stores. The total value of great customer service across all categories, both online and off, was found to be $268 billion per year, or a 9.7 percent premium.

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Survey Totes Up Value of Excellent Online Customer Service

With an unwavering focus on Apple’s forthcoming iBookstore, Amazon reportedly has begun pressuring e-book publishers to sign three-year contracts that ensure that no competing retailers will get better prices or treatment. The new tactics come hard on the heels of Amazon’s conflict with Macmillan earlier this year over the publisher’s switch to an agency model, whereby retailers such as Amazon act as agents of the publisher and earn a 30 percent commission on publisher-set prices. Those prices, Amazon asserted, were “needlessly high.”

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Amazon Wrangles Publishers as iBookstore Grand Opening Looms

The global market for mobile phone applications is expected to soar to $17.5 billion by 2012, surpassing the total value of CDs sold, new research forecasts. The revenue from mobile apps is expected to increase at a 62 percent compound annual growth rate from $4.1 billion in 2009 to $17.5 billion in 2012, according to a research report by Chetan Sharma Consulting. In comparison, the total value of CDs sold is only expected to approach $13.8 billion by the same year.

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Report: Consumers Will Be Gaga for Mobile Apps by 2012

Aberdeen surveyed over 100 organizations between December 2009 and February of 2010 to identify the best practices enterprises are using that improve application performance management solutions’ impact on end-user productivity and the business benefits of a “lifecycle” approach to application performance management. The research results reveal that Best-in-Class enterprises focus on a holistic approach to application performance management to reduce the time to identify and resolve critical application performance issues.

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Managing Enterprise App Performance With an Iron Fist