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Practical eCommerce Articles

Articles, resources, strategy and a community for internet retailers, online business owners and ecommerce developers.

Chart of the Week: SEM/SEO Most Important Marketing TacticJanuary 6

A recent study from SLI Systems asked 319 respondents about the importance of various technologies and tactics in terms of their effect on ecommerce strategy. While the sample for the study was not necessarily large, it tended to support many preconceived ideas about which web technologies and techniques are the most effective for online retailers. Search engine marketing and optimization, which embodies both SEO and pay-per-click efforts, were clearly the most important marketing tools in the survey respondents’ opinion, garnering a vote of “Very Important” from 70 percent of those asked. Email marketing was also an important tactic, a finding which parallels results from a recent Practical eCommerce study.

Product Video: Easy Distribution ToolsDecember 31 2008

Editor's Note: This is part four in our special report on “Video for Ecommerce,” where we describe real stories of online merchants creatively using video to drive sales and grow their brands. Previous installments are linked in below. What’s next once you’ve added product videos to your site? Get the word out. “We know that [consumers] are looking for videos online,” said David Burch at video analytics company TubeMogul.com. “That’s why our goal, and the goal of our merchants, is to be everywhere where video content is consumed.” In August 2008, Burch surveyed 1,114 users of TubeMogul’s free video distribution system. He found 51.6 percent of merchants drawing revenues from their videos online. “And since we published that study,” B...

Ecommerce Know-How: Bot Herding, A SEO Internal Linking TacticDecember 30 2008

A relatively simple SEO linking strategy can improve how well and how often your store's product pages are indexed and displayed in organic search engine results. This linking technique goes by several names. Bruce Clay Inc., an Internet business consultancy, refers to it as "siloing." SEOmoz uses the term "PageRank sculpting." And the Search Engine Roundtable called it "bot herding" in a recent discussion. While these names and practitioners claim subtle differences in meaning and application, the general technique seeks to concentrate PageRank on a site's most important landing and product pages, improving how those pages perform in search engine results. Ecommerce Know-How: Bot Herding Bot herding or siloing can be divided into t...

Chart of the Week: Canadians are Spending More OnlineDecember 30 2008

Online business analyst eMarketer reported that Canadian retailers would sell an estimated $15.5 billion Canadian worth of goods and services in 2008, up some 12.4 percent from 2007's total of C$13.8 billion. By 2012, Canadian ecommerce sales should reach C$22.8 billion, including travel sales, digital tickets, and digital products like software. In spite of this projected growth, Canadian's still trail their U.S. consumers in terms of purchasing online, according to a new study from eMarketer. "Consumers in Canada are avid online product researchers, on par with their US counterparts. But they are much more likely to make a subsequent purchase in-store rather than on a Website," said eMarketer on its website. Related Articles ...

PeC Traffic Report: Use Blog Titles that Reflect Keywords and ContentDecember 26 2008

Blog titles play an important role in how search engines index blog posts. Bloggers that want to get the most web traffic possible seed post titles with important keywords and make interesting promises about the content. Many online retailers use blogs to both communicate with consumers and add search-engine friendly content in the hope of attracting more web traffic. The strategy is a good one. According to an October 2008 study from BuzzLogic and JupiterResearch, 27 percent of Internet users read blogs and nearly one in five consumers are influenced by blogs when they are considering a purchase—so there is little doubt that blogs are effective. But blogging is not any merchant's regular job, so it is easy to overlook one of the most ...