SEO, SEM, web design, coding, iPhone, iPad, Android 

When merchants talk about ecommerce conversion, it usually centers around design, button placement and ease of checkout. The process, though, actually starts the second someone lands on any web page. This is why textual content is so important. Here are eight rules for using text on your ecommerce site that eliminate confusion, welcome your new visitors and otherise answer all questions about your products. 1. Don't Assume Customers Understand Your Products Product descriptions and supporting pages–like Frequently Asked Questions and customer service details–are highly important. Not only does word choice help define rankings in search engines, it can help teach visitors about products and how to use them. Oft-used terms are always ne...

If you haven’t started thinking about the 2010 holiday season, now is the time. The economy is still shaky, customers remain fickle, and if you’re not prepared you could miss out on the most important shopping season of the year. Thanks to technological advances, we now have more information at our disposal than ever. Unfortunately, we may not pay attention to important indicators that can help us. Take the last two years for example. If you weathered those shopping seasons you’re probably in a good position to deal with the 2010 holiday season. If you haven’t, pay attention to what has and hasn’t worked for other retailers because the information will likely serve you well. Shoppers will once again be looking for bargains and how ...

Specialized shopping search engines are becoming increasingly important for consumers. Among the largest of these shopping engines is TheFind, which receives more than 25 million visits per month. The products of most ecommerce merchants are likely already featured on that site, as the company uses patented search-engine-type spiders to index most every online product for sale. Siva Kumar is co-founder and CEO of TheFind and he joined us recently to talk about it all. Practical eCommerce: Tell us about TheFind. Siva Kumar: “TheFind is a shopping search engine that's unique because of its comprehensiveness. Using state-of-the-art software, much of it patented, we deliver a complete experience to shoppers. It helps shoppers find...

Editor's Note: We welcome Charles Nicholls as our newest contributor. He's a conversion and analytics expert, and the founder and chief strategy officer of SeeWhy, a conversion and cart-abandonment-recovery firm. He's also the author of “Lessons Learned from the Top Ten Converting Websites,” a study of the top-converting ecommerce sites. In the piece below, Nicholls lists the top converting ecommerce sites, and debunks myths surrounding what's required to have a high-converting site. Ecommerce teams have an understandable fascination with the top ten converting websites. While most websites convert 2 or 3 percent of their visitors to a purchase in the same session, some sites are able to achieve much higher levels, up to a whopping 42 p...

Editor's Note: This is the third installment in our series on social commerce, the process of linking ecommerce with social media sites, such as Facebook. In the second installment, we reviewed the Facebook apps of a number of shopping cart providers. These apps extend the Facebook reach of merchants using those shopping carts. Today, we review six third-party Facebook applications that provide similar functionality, but integrate with many different carts. Our previous installments were "Social Commerce Spotlight: Payvment, a Facebook Storefront Provider" and "Social Commerce: Shopping Carts Extend Reach Into Facebook, Other Social Sites." Voiyk Voiyk provides merchants with the ability to create a Facebook fan page store. The...

If you’ve been selling online for any amount of time, you know how valuable email marketing can be, especially among existing customers. And you may also have pages set up on at least a couple of popular social networks, and you might have a blog. Once separate, these forms of marketing are converging in ways that can be very helpful to online merchants. The state of the art is pretty basic today, but buckle up because things are going to get even more interesting in the coming months. Linking email with social media is conceptually interesting because it combines two different animals: direct response and organic communities. Using email, we still tend to unilaterally communicate to an audience, while social media is about interact...

Ecommerce entrepreneurs and marketers must pay careful attention to website analytics. Like conscientious doctors watching a patient for any sign of improvement, site owners and marketers study many details of visitor data, including which web browsers those visitors are using. Thanks to the efforts of companies like Microsoft and more consumer awareness about the potential virus, malware, and hacking dangers associated with using older browsers, a large percentage of consumers are, in fact, using relative modern ones. But differences in browser versions can cause significant problems in rendering and site performance, and, therefore, may affect customer experience and even sales. IETester is a web tool specifically created to let sto...

"Ecommerce News Around the Web" is our weekly review of articles, blog posts and other news items that could interest ecommerce merchants. Second Quarter Online Retail Sales Show Growth - Shop.org Shop.org's research report for second quarter online sales (done in cooperation with Forrester Research) shows average gross Internet sales grew by 15.1 percent compared to the same quarter in 2009. Over half the retailers who participated in the survey experienced growth of 10 percent or higher. eBay Is Hit with Multi-Billion Dollar Lawsuit - Mashable eBay has been hit with a $3.8 billon lawsuit by east-coast company XPRT Ventures LLC., which claims the auction giant stole its inventions when filing for patents related to PayPal. eB...

There are nearly 600 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 Navin Ganeshan, senior director of product strategy with Network Solutions, a web services company based in Herndon, Va. and Belleville, Ill. Network Solutions acquired an online shopping cart in 2006 called MonsterCommerce, and renamed it as nsCommerceSpace, this week’s featured cart. (See "Related Articles," below.) The nsCommerceSpace ecommerce platform currently serves roughly 10,000 users. We'll also hear from an nsCommerceSpace...

The following is a list of five business practices that online business owners should follow to help protect their business from liability and minimize legal claims. 1. Maintain Clear and Accurate Communication with Customers Clear communications will solve many customer complaint problems, but may also protect you from claims of false advertising and investigation by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Disclosing basic information is required by law, but must be done accurately. Therefore, you should monitor the information you are placing on your website to make sure it accurately depicts your business practices, prices, products, or whatever else you are describing to potential customers to entice them to buy your products or servi...