E-Commerce Blog

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 …

Credit:
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…

More:
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…

Go here to read the rest:
Sharable Coupons Can Boost Sales

The Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council recently released a new version of its Data Security Standard (DSS), making minor but important changes and clarifications to the PCI compliance standard that responsible online merchants follow to protect their customers and avoid fines. On November 25 and December 17, 2008, the PCI Security Standards Council will host a series of complimentary webinars to explain the changes to the PCI standards.

Many of the changes were clarifications or expansions, but there are also new more detailed testing standards for some network situations.

Leading credit card brands (American Express, Discover Financial Services, JCB International, MasterCard Worldwide, and Visa Inc.) formed th…

Excerpt from:
New PCI Compliance Standards Take Effect

I like parties, and Social Couture is a high-end party supply website. On its corresponding MySpace site (always a good thing to have, but especially important if your gig is party supplies) Social Couture says, “whether your style is traditional or modern or whether your guests are young or old, our products and services will simplify the way you entertain.” Unfortunately, a descriptive statement like that doesn’t appear on the SocialCouture.com homepage or on any sort of high-level “about us” page. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The site is good-looking with nice graphics throughout. So let’s take it one step at a time and see what’s really under the tablecloth for this installment of “SEO Report Card.”

Home Page Content

As menti…

See original here:
SEO Report Card: Socialcouture.com Stresses Social Media