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"Ecommerce News Around the Web" is our weekly review of articles, blog posts and other news items that could interest ecommerce merchants. Google Suggestions for Online Retailers - Retail-eCommerce Most everyone is aware of the fact that Google will make suggestions when users type in search terms. Have you ever looked at the suggestions for searches on your store name or products you carry? This article says it might be a worthwhile exercise from an SEO perspective. No-cost Web Marketing Tools You Can't Do Without - Groove Commerce What online marketing tools do you use time and time again? This post contains a list of six free tools sure to fill the bill. Amazon Web Store and Shopping Carts of the Future - exciting commerce ...

There are more than 500 online shopping carts. And each week we feature one, interviewing both the cart's developer and a customer. "Cart of the Week" is not a review or an evaluation, but rather an opportunity to learn about a shopping cart from the people who build it and use it. This week, we'll hear from Mitchell Harper, co-founder and product marketing manager for Interspire, the company behind BigCommerce online shopping cart. Interspire's North American headquarters are in Austin, Texas, with engineering teams located in Sydney, Australia and London, England. "BigCommerce is the SaaS [software as a service] version of our licensed ecommerce platform, Interspire Shopping Cart," said Harper. The company launched BigCommerce in S...

Deciding what to do about the explosive growth of mobile traffic can be difficult. That’s why we’re bringing you some of our picks for the best of the mobile web, with mobile-optimized sites that bring a unique and useful experience for users. Some of these sites are from large retailers, but the sites exhibit features and design structures that could be emulated by smaller merchants. So, before you go off and design your own mobile site, have a look at some good examples of what is already out there. Note that we've provided mobile screen captures, below, for the examples we cite. You can also load the examples into your own mobile Internet device, of course, or absent that you can use a mobile simulator in a traditional browser, such...

Driving organic search traffic and sales through multinational search engine optimization requires a fusion of keyword relevance and geo-targeting to send location relevance signals. The search engines have to decipher a site’s geo-targeting signals to deliver the right page in the right language with the right SKUs, pricing, currency and availability. Optimizing the geo-targeting signals a site sends is critical to driving organic search traffic and sales in multiple countries. Consider a searcher in the U.K. who wants to buy a toy for her daughter’s birthday. She searches Google U.K. for "dolls house." Along with her query, the searcher is unconsciously sending location signals that the search is coming from a U.K.-based IP address an...

Many experts predict that mobile commerce will eventually exceed traditional website sales. We wonder how many ecommerce sites are already optimized for mobile devices; and we're curious what your view of mobile commerce really is. The goal of this month's Practical eCommerce survey is to learn what readers think about the usefulness of mobile web devices and to predict their future use in ecommerce. The March survey consists of four questions that seek your views on mobile web devices. We want to know if your business will likely be materially impacted by mobile commerce in the future, and whether your site is already optimized for mobile devices. We wonder if you use an iPhone, a Blackberry, or any other mobile web device. And, we won...

Editor's Note: This is our monthly installment of "Everything Google," a feature on products and services from Google that can help ecommerce merchants. The author is Bill Hartzer, the owner of BillHartzer.com, a SEO, pay-per-click and ecommerce consulting firm in Dallas. Google Product Search is a price comparison service. Users can search for retail products and the search results then list vendors selling those items. The search results include photos, prices and links to the vendors' ecommerce sites. Google does not charge any fees for listings; it makes no commission on the sales of the products, and it doesn't accept payment for products to show up first. Google first launched its product comparison service in 2002 under the nam...

As the mobile user base swells, it is becoming easier to classify mobile users based on their attitudes towards their phones and the features they use most often. Merchants should consider how mobile customers will prefer to access web content. From that, merchants can decide what kind of user experiences they can affordably deliver. Experian Simmons’s recent 2010 American Mobile Consumer Report breaks down mobile users into segments by their attitudes towards mobile devices. It’s an excellent way to analyze the various ways people use their mobile devices. Simmons estimates that nearly one half of mobile users are pragmatic adopters or social connectors, indicating that, in the U.S., most mobile users still use their devices prim...

Americans made 14.5 billion Internet searches in February 2010, according to comScore, the Internet tracking firm. Google users accounted for roughly 9.5 billion of those searches, equating to an approximate 65.5 percent market share, up .1 percent from January. Microsoft beat Google in percentage gain between January and February, however. In January Microsoft controlled 11.3 percent of the market, and by the end of February it held 11.5 percent, according to comScore. Yahoo!, Google’s closest competitor in terms of market share, lost the most ground when it dropped from 17 percent market share to 16.8 percent. Ask Network, which includes the Ask.com search engine, also lost market share, dropping from 3.8 percent in January to 3.7 ...

Many online merchants wish to edit their own images but do not want to purchase expensive photo-editing software. Luckily, there's Aviary. Aviary is a free online design suite that offers much of the power and capability of expensive desktop software. Aviary's mission, according to its website, is to make creation accessible for artists of all genres. Aviary Video Tutorial [video] In this video tutorial, I will give you an overview of the Aviary Design Suite. To begin, I will walk you through registering for an Aviary account. Registration is crucial if you wish to utilize all of the features in Aviary, many of which are very helpful. Next, I will give you an overview of the main page and discuss the Aviary applications that are ...

Many small- to medium-sized online retailers are entrepreneurial companies. Their owners and employees often have diverse responsibilities, and it is common for a single person to handle multiple tasks, such as customer service, email marketing, order processing and website design. Unfortunately, not everyone is able to simultaneously be a great retail marketer, shipping clerk, and coding guru. This means that site development and site performance can suffer. LABjs ("Loading and Blocking JavaScript") is a free-to-use JavaScript, designed to improve site performance. And LABjs is easy enough to use that even merchants with a limited understanding of HTML will be able to implement it. Depending on how many JavaScripts your site is load...