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Practical eCommerce asks industry insiders each month to share a great, innovative idea that could help an ecommerce company. Here’s what ten of them had to say for the December 2009 installment. Shop First, Ask For Registration Later “Allow shoppers to check out before asking them to register with your website. The information learned at check out, such as name, address and email, can be used to create customer accounts. Eliminating this extra step in the online shopping process gets you one step closer to a completed order.” Jeffrey Cohen CIO/CTO PM Digital -- Offer a Branded DIY Gift Wrapping Kit "Many shoppers don't use gift wrapping services because they prefer to save the money, or they might want to check what they boug...

When two people are able to communicate we generally assume that they know the same language, and that is the key to understanding each other. This applies to the world of computing as well, where the set of standards are called protocols. During this article we plan to present in a nutshell the most common TCP/IP protocol types. We wont get in-depth, so dont expect university course-style material just the basics.
- Before we move on, let's fully grasp the concept of protocol and explain how more of those build up a structure called the OSI model. How are they important to us? Finally, we'll get into enumerating the popular TCP/IP protocols. These are the ones we need to be familiar with, since our applications...

There are more than 350 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 Ryan Jones, co-founder of PrestoBiz, the parent company of PrestoStore ecommerce software. The company headquarters are located in Brookfield, Wis., and there is another office in Madison, Wis. According to Jones, "We’ve served several thousand merchants as of late 2009, and roughly 2 million shoppers visit our promotion networks each year looking to buy products from our merchants." The PrestoStore promotion networks include the ...

"Merchant Talk" is our weekly discussion with a practicing ecommerce merchant. For this installment, we visited with Jill Exler, the founder and CEO of Jexbo.com, an ecommerce site for authors to sell their self-published books. Practical eCommerce: Tell us about your site. Jill Exler: “The site is Jexbo.com and it's a mix of my name, Jill Exler, and 'books,' so I have the J-E-X-B-O. It’s a place for self-published authors to sell their books directly to the readers. I launched it in 2007 after I had written a book and I was going to have it self-published and then I thought, ‘Wait a minute, where am I going to sell it?’ I looked at some huge, established websites, and there are a lot of sites where writers can sell their books...

Doing business on the Internet requires the use of sophisticated software and complicated processes. Many of these innovative products have been patented. Google, Amazon and others hold many hundreds of patents, but the U.S. Supreme Court may be about to greatly restrict the issuance of patents. To help us understand the case at hand and its relevance to software and Internet businesses, we spoke with intellectual property attorney Lawrence M. Hadley, with the firm of Hennigan, Bennett and Dorman in Los Angeles. Practical eCommerce: The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments recently on a case that could affect the issuance of patents for software and other Internet processes. Could you explain this case? Lawrence M. Hadley: "Well,...

Editor’s note: Payment Card Industry compliance is a requirement for virtually all ecommerce merchants. But it's also a complex and difficult topic to understand. With that in mind, Practical eCommerce is teaming with Coalfire IT Audit and Compliance, a firm expert in PCI matters, in a series of articles aimed at answering merchants' questions about PCI compliance. For the first article in this series, we get the insights of Coalfire co-founder and president Rick Dakin. We asked Dakin two questions that we believe are representative of those that many merchants have. We'll continue asking him and other Coalfire representatives questions throughout the series. Dakin helps clients develop balanced approaches for effective IT governance a...

Let’s take a moment to map out a cheap and effective social media strategy. Understand that cheap does not mean easy. This will take a dedicated effort and a lot of hours. But those hours could be more valuable than a high-priced advertising campaign. Step One: Commit Yourself to Communication It is imperative that you recognize the difference between communicating and selling. Never sell. Just listen, help, and tell. If you advertise via social media, your audience will not welcome you and you will not be effective. Build relationships and the sales will follow. Think of social media as the world’s largest cocktail party. You are there to mix, mingle, and work the room. You can hand out business cards but don’t personally try...

Yesterday I had the pleasure of sitting at the back of “Handcrafted CSS“, a workshop led by Dan Cederholm and Ethan Marcotte. The workshop was based on their recently published book of the same name, if you don’t own a copy definitely add it to your holiday shopping list.

As attendees leafed through the book during the breaks I realised how much of I have relied on and enjoyed learning about web design and development from books. Funnily enough Dan’s first book, “Web Standard Solutions“, released in 2004 was the the first book I ever bought on CSS. It turns out it was the first CSS book for many designers I know. It taught me a lot and is still very relevant.

It got me thinking about the most inspiring web related books I have on my shelf. Here in no particular order are my personal top five. Some of them have been updated and superseded but all remain great reference material.

• Web Standard Solutions by Dan Cederholm
• Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke
• The PHP Anthology by Harry Fuecks et al (1st edition no longer available)
• The Definitive Guide to Django by Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss
• DOM Scripting by Jeremey Keith

What are your favourites? Link up your must have’s in the comments, I have an Amazon voucher I need to spend and love a good read.

If you are like most online retailers, roughly 97 out of every 100 visitors leave your site without buying anything. You can spend a lot of money on marketing, but those dollars will be wasted if you can’t convert visitors to buyers. There are countless articles that address ways to improve on-site conversion and usability. I think it is time to look beyond some of the basic principles and discuss some of the advanced techniques you can adopt to gain an edge over your competition. 1. Get The Basics In Order None of the ideas below will help if your site doesn’t have good usability aspects such as easy-to-follow navigation, quality product content, an easy checkout process, and easy-to-find customer service. These are basic, foundatio...

Vreebit.com claims to be the only Internet tool you’ll ever need. That’s a pretty ambitious claim. The site has been getting a significant amount of press lately, and has generated quite a bit of buzz online.