Ecommerce Conversations: Recent Episodes
Practical Ecommerce
Listen in as host Eric Bandholz, founder of Beardbrand, interviews interesting entrepreneurs in the ecommerce space.
Host Eric Bandholz's company, Beardbrand, recently completed a migration to Shopify 2.0 and a new premium theme, the fourth since its inception in 2013. Jenny Durre, Beardbrand's in-house designer, managed the entire 2.0 process — selecting the theme, customizing pages, streamlining the layout, and ultimately going live with the new version. She describes it all in this conversation.
A condensed and edited (for clarity) transcript is at: https://pec-ly.com/?6jBh.
Search engine optimization for ecommerce boils down to four buckets. That's according to Jeff Oxford, founder of 180 Marketing, an Oregon-based firm.
Apple's iOS 14 privacy changes have created a windfall for direct mail providers such as PostPilot. Owners Drew Sanocki and Michael Epstein explain how modern postcard programs mimic email campaigns.
Chris Harrison co-founded Liber & Co., a maker of cocktail syrups, in 2012. The Austin, Texas-based company thrived by selling mostly to bars and restaurants. Then Covid hit.
Joel Runyon launched Impossible, a fitness and performance company, in 2010. The company sells digital training programs, apparel, and nutritional supplements. "Sleep," a powder drink, is the latest. It helps high performers recharge and recover via deep sleeping.
Molson Hart launched Viahart, a manufacturer of educational toys, in 2010, selling mainly on Amazon. The company experienced repeated intellectual property theft, which prompted his launch of a second company, Edison Litigation Financing.
Thanh Pham, the founder of Asian Efficiency, a productivity training company, once focused on efficiency to help folks get more done. Then he realized the real driver of productivity is happiness, not time management or focus.
In 2018 Sarah Moret, an accountant and athlete, couldn't find a suitable aluminum-free deodorant. So she made her own. Fast forward to 2022, and that deodorant business is now Curie, a thriving direct-to-consumer seller of personal care and lifestyle goods.
Supply.co, a DTC seller of shaving supplies, endured a tough 2021, as did its founder, Patrick Coddou. By year's end, he was exhausted, burned out. He turned to the Entrepreneurial Operating System, a management framework. The results? "It has changed the company, and it’s changed me."
Joshua McKee founded Atlas Staffing 11 years ago. The company now has five locations in the western U.S., serving a light industry niche. McKee advocates core company values and communicates them to his staff. "Embrace growth," his favorite, refers to personal growth, not financial.
Lea Richards founded Pig of the Month, a DTC seller of barbeque, in 2011. After Apple's iOS 14 privacy change, she shifted to direct mail for customer acquisition — to good results. She explains that switch, the logistics of shipping perishable goods, and more.
Christopher Silvestri is an ecommerce copywriter and UX designer who launched Conversion Alchemy, an agency, two years ago. The key to high-converting copy, he says, is researching the target audience. He explains how he does that, including his go-tool tools and common merchant mistakes.
Ravi Kurani is an engineer and former venture capitalist who launched Sutro, a water sensor manufacturer, in 2012 in India. His initial go-to-market strategy failed. So he moved to California, his home, and shifted to measuring swimming pool water from the drinking kind.
Ayman Al-Abdullah joined AppSumo, the daily deals site for digital goods, in 2015. Annual revenue was $3 million. When he left the company in 2021, revenue was a whopping $80 million. How did he do it? "People development," he said.
Kamil Banc is co-founder with his brother Jeremy of Fragrance One, a direct-to-consumer seller of colognes and perfumes — entirely online. Sales are booming despite buyers never smelling the fragrances. He explains how in this conversation with host Eric Bandholz.
In 2009 Judi Fox began networking on LinkedIn, having lost her job early that year. She now, in 2022, has nearly 39,000 LinkedIn followers. Her business advises companies and professionals on marketing strategies for that platform.
Jon Shanahan is the co-founder of Stryx, the pioneering direct-to-consumer seller of men's cosmetics. The company is soon to launch its products in 950 Target stores. The decision comes with risks. Shanahan discusses those issues and more with host Eric Bandholz.
In 2015 Brenden Marquardt was a Texas-based investment analyst. He met a homesteader named Lori who made custom Murphy beds, those that fold up in a wall. Marquardt was looking for a side hustle. He acquired her business. Fast forward to 2022, and Lori Wall Beds is an eight-figure direct-to-consumer company.
Paul Jauregui first appeared on this podcast in 2020, having launched BK Beauty, a direct-to-consumer beauty brand, with Lisa, his wife, the year before. Unlike many DTC brands, BK Beauty does not rely on Facebook advertising. Affiliate marketing is the company's go-to channel.
In 2010, Spencer Jan and his brother launched Solo Stove, for camping. Fast forward to 2022 and Solo Stove is Solo Brands, a public traded aggregator of ecommerce companies, which rose from its acquisition of Jan's business. What's it like to watch others run a company he founded? Jan addresses it in this episode.
Dennis Hegstad co-founded LiveRecover, a real-time SMS app, in 2018. He sold the company in 2021. "I became bored," he said. So he purchased OrderBump, a Shopify app for product upsells.
Andrew Faris is a former pastor who migrated to digital marketing. From there he rose to CEO of 4x400, an ecommerce aggregator that once owned seven brands. Having recently resigned from that position, he's now assessing priorities and evaluating his next career move. It's a not uncommon position for many executives and entrepreneurs.
I first interviewed Sean McGinnis for this podcast in November 2020. He had recently arrived at Kuru Footwear, a direct-to-consumer shoe manufacturer, as chief marketing officer. One year later, he's president of the company, and sales are booming.
It's been a wild ride for Rick Wilson. He started in ecommerce in the 1990s as a salesman with Miva, the pioneering platform. In 2007 he joined an investor group that purchased the business. Fast forward to 2022 and Wilson is Miva's CEO. He recently completed the company's second capital raise and authored a second book.
Ryan Magin founded Viral Edits, a video agency, roughly two years ago. He creates original and repurposed videos for brands and influencers, focusing on TikTok and Instagram. The business has grown dramatically. The process is much more difficult than it appears, he says, requiring hours of video watching, editing, and nuance.
Having arrived from Estonia 14 years ago, Peep Laja has launched three companies: CXL for e-learning, Speero for conversion consulting, and Wynter for B2B customer intelligence. "I've always been entrepreneurial," he told me. "I like starting things."
Tracey Wallace is a longtime B2B exec and content marketer, having worked at BigCommerce and now, MarketerHire, a marketplace for freelancers. She addresses the post-Covid workforce, the benefits of hiring freelancers, and, yes, how to drive traffic with content marketing.
In 2012, Dean Pohlman was a collegiate lacrosse player who had taken up yoga. It so improved his on-field performance he began teaching the workouts to teammates. That led to DVD recordings, which led to a YouTube channel. He called it "Man Flow Yoga." Fast forward to 2021, and Pohlman is a global authority on yoga instruction for men.
Chris Williamson is a modern-day polymath with a fitting podcast. It's called "Modern Wisdom." Launched in 2018, it's experienced a whopping 30 million downloads across 400 episodes. He told me, "We talk about human nature, marketing, philosophy, life, life hacks, biohacking, fitness, health, pretty much everything."
The pandemic has upended the fitness industry. Having no access to public gyms, millions of folks turned to at-home workouts. According to Matt Reynolds, the founder of Barbell Logic, an online strength coaching company, the shift is permanent. "As the world has opened back up," he told me, "there's been a change of mindset, a paradigm shift in personal fitness training."
Clay Hebert once attended a conference in San Diego. He sat next to a fellow who inquired about his work. "What do you do?" the fellow asked. Describing the encounter, Hebert told me, "That question stumped me." He had fumbled his introduction to Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress.
This episode is different than most. I'm interviewing no one. Instead, I'm addressing a singular topic: bootstrapping, the concept of launching and growing a business without outside investors. My company, Beardbrand, is bootstrapped. It's a beautiful thing.
The year 2021 has been a doozy for Ben Smith. In March, he celebrated an investment round for Disco, his direct-to-consumer skincare company. In April, Disco's customer acquisition cost increased by a whopping 300% with the release of iOS 14.5. In May, he began selling on Amazon, only to see Amazon bid on the exact Google Ad keywords he relied on for traffic to Disco's website.
Andrew Youderian is the founder and CEO of eCommerceFuel, a leading online community of established store owners. He oversees a diverse team and manages a growing business with worldwide members. Surely, one would think, he works long hours with little downtime.
Where can you find a size 24 men's shoe? At 2BigFeet.com. Brandon Eley co-launched the business in 2000, before Google AdWords and long before Facebook and Shopify. "We've seen a lot of changes in 21 years," he said. "Keyword stuffing was legitimate search engine optimization back then."
Solving a personal hardship may be the most common motivator for starting a business. Clark Nowlin's hardship was acidity in coffee. It wrecked his stomach. Golden Ratio Coffee is Nowlin's solution. It's a producer of low-acid coffee. He founded the business last year in Austin, Texas, and it now sells direct-to-consumer in all 50 states.
Patrick Coddou is a direct-to-consumer pioneer, having launched Supply.co in 2015. The company designs, manufactures, and sells premium shaving products — all to great success. Until 2021. That's when Apple's iOS 14.5, which launched in April, upended Facebook's ability to hyper-target ads. Coddou's company relied on sales from those ads. He's retrenched the company and is soon to launch two new products.
Lauren Johnson says high-performing entrepreneurs have similar characteristics as professional athletes. Both have mental traits that lead to inevitable success. She first observed those qualities when working for the New York Yankees, teaching mental performance to accomplished baseball players.
Roman Zrazhevskiy's company, Mira Safety, sells protective gas masks. It launched in 2018, targeting consumers, medical providers, law enforcement, and others. The masks protect against tear gas, chemicals, and, yes, viruses. Still, reaching prospects was a challenge.
Josh Durham knows the downside of entrepreneurship. He founded an ecommerce company in 2015 and quickly grew revenue. Then it went out of business. Fast forward to 2021 and Durham has bounced back. He founded a successful marketing agency, Aligned Growth Management, that builds on his own early-day lessons.
Beardbrand's products are in all 2,000 Target stores. Lindsey Reinders, my business partner, drove that project in 2018. Selling goods to mass merchandisers is a goal of many direct-to-consumer ecommerce brands. Has it worked out for Beardbrand? I asked Lindsey that question and more.
Brian De Groodt launched Dispatch Custom Cycling Components in 2018 after a long career in enterprise software. The company sells bicycle headset caps, which sit atop the stem connecting handlebars to the frame. Customers can customize the caps, adding uniqueness to their bikes.
Nathan Chan seemingly had it all. His business, Foundr, is hugely successful, combining media with entrepreneurship training. He interacts with prominent global founders. Then came burnout. "I experienced burnout earlier this year for the first time ever," he told me. "It wasn't good. I realized I had just ground myself out."
Shreya Patel is a biologist and healthcare administrator who seeks to change how folks clean their home. Products that kill bacteria do more harm than good, she says. And that's why she launched Hyve, a direct-to-consumer seller of household cleaning goods. She says, "Cleaners that kill 99.9% of bacteria leave 0.1% that are likely the most harmful."
Ardon Lukas launched Shirtwascash in 2014, having spent several years in corporate finance. He sells t-shirts, hoodies, shorts, sweatshirts, you name it — all printed with cultural memes or images. Some are edgy; all are interesting. He's the "godfather of memewear," according to his LinkedIn profile.
Bryan DeLuca has a name for folks who build brands within large corporations. He calls them "intrepreneurs." He should know. Having co-founded and then sold a successful ecommerce business, DeLuca worked for a traditional retailer, creating brands within the company.
Chris Cage founded Greenbelly, a maker of high-nutrition meal bars for backpackers, after having left his accounting job and traveling the world. That was in 2014. Fast forward to 2021, and the business is thriving.
Shakil Prasla recently made a big mistake. An astute ecommerce operator and owner, Prasla purchased in late 2020 Covid-related protective gloves at roughly twice the ultimate selling price. His company, Gloves.com, lost $6 million.
Content marketing can be difficult. But not for Kyle Boureston. He's an editor and publisher. His company, Boureston Media, runs seven content sites around niches. He's refined his topic selection and production methods over the years to engage visitors from organic search. Boureston's insights can help ecommerce companies improve their content marketing efforts.
Adam Ryan joined The Hustle in August 2016, four months after its launch. He was a part-time employee responsible for generating advertising revenue. By February 2021, when HubSpot acquired it, he was president. Ryan is now an investor and consultant, advising companies on content strategies that engage prospects.
Having sold Grasshopper, the virtual phone service, for $175 million in 2015, David Hauser assessed his priorities. Grasshopper was his third launch and exit, following ReturnPath (email services) and Chargify (subscription management). "I decided to optimize for happiness, not for return on capital or profit," he said.
Felipe Correa is a pro at product development, custom manufacturing, and logistics. He also knows much about skin lotions, as he had eczema when young. And it's his frustrations with eczema that inspired Goodspread, a direct-to-consumer seller of skincare products that launched on June 7.
On his website, Antonio Centeno lists the businesses he owns. They include Real Men Real Style, a blog and a YouTube channel with millions of readers and subscribers. Menfluential Media is an influencer ad network. And there's Vitaman.com, a direct-to-consumer seller of organic skin and hair products for men. Centeno launched the site in early 2020.
What prompts an entrepreneur to enter the eyelash industry? For Jason Wong, it was watching his girlfriend apply makeup. Just 23, Wong is a Los Angeles-based serial entrepreneur and consultant. His latest company, Doe Lashes, launched two years ago as a direct-to-consumer seller of comfortable, lightweight eyelashes.
Berlin Brands Group started on eBay 15 years ago. It is now a global ecommerce powerhouse, with over $300 million in annual revenue across a dozen or more brands. Managing Director Christian Salza addresses the company's acquisition process, its focus on technology, and more.
Is there a more competitive consumer market than nutritional supplements? I asked that question to Damian Soong, the co-founder of Form Nutrition, a maker and seller of plant-based proteins and food products, which launched in 2017 in the U.K. He and I recently discussed starting the business, nutritional goods, bootstrapping, and more.
Ezra Firestone launched his first ecommerce business in 2007. It sold wigs. He's owned multiple brands since. BOOM!, which sells cosmetics, he co-founded in 2010. He focuses on key management metrics, such as spending 30-percent of ecommerce revenue on advertising.
The viability of open-source ecommerce platforms may seem limited given the rise of SaaS providers. Not so, says Ryan Szrama. He's the founder of Drupal Commerce. He wrote the code in 2005 as an addition to the open-source Drupal content management system. "Suddenly I was skyrocketed into collaborative development with a worldwide reach," he said.
Henry Davis and Bryan Mahoney foresaw in 2018 an avalanche of direct-to-consumer companies that served smaller, niche audiences. Chord, a DTC-first ecommerce platform, is their answer to bringing sophisticated, "headless" technology to smaller firms. "We like to call Chord the first headless platform with a brain," Davis told me.
Peter Keller launched Fringe Sport in 2010 to help folks assemble home-based gyms. He also wanted to make a lot of money. "I was very financially motivated," he told me. Then he attended a seminar a few years ago that focused on a company's purpose, its mission. He spoke with employees and customers. He discovered the real value in Fringe Sport.
The idea for Chisos boots started with back pain. Will Roman, the founder, owner, and lifetime cowboy-boot wearer, injured his back in a motorcycle accident. Wearing boots became painful. So he launched Chisos.com, a high-end, handcrafted bootmaker, in 2019. Quality and craft drive Roman and his outlook on life.
I've interviewed entrepreneurs for this podcast who developed organic consumer-care goods. But none did it before Eric Malka. He and his wife, Myriam, devised shaving oils from their kitchen in 1996 and then launched The Art of Shaving. Their new company, Ingredients, focuses on wellness and sustainability.
Imagine selling home gym equipment online at the onset of the pandemic. Athletic clubs were closed. Consumers were stuck in their houses. According to Kaevon Khoozani, the founder of Canada-based Bells of Steel, the demand for weight-training equipment was “obscene.” “We ran into two giant hiccups,” Khoozani told me.
Most entrepreneurs start with a business idea and then secure the domain name. Peter Askew does the opposite. He purchases domain names and then builds the business. Take VidaliaOnions.com, for example. Askew purchased the name in 2014. It's now a thriving farm-to-door seller of Vidalia onions.
Jay Sauceda launched his ecommerce fulfillment company, Sauceda Industries, in 2013 in Austin, Texas. He says packing and shipping products is easy. What's difficult, he stated, is managing unforeseen events. "The shipping business is, essentially, the exceptions management business," he told me.
Having co-founded Feat Socks in 2015, Taylor Offer hired Aly Raisman, the gymnast, to design and promote a custom sock. It generated $500,000 in revenue. Influencer marketing was clearly effective, and Offer wanted more. "I started looking at the kids that got famous from Vine, the short-video app," he told me.
Marco Marandiz is a musician turned software engineer turned product designer. He's worked for Capital One, HomeAway, and a failed startup. But it was his ecommerce consulting work for companies with unproven inventory that sparked the idea for Drop Party.
Johnathan Ruggiero and his wife Michelle founded Manly Bands, a direct-to-consumer online men's wedding-ring company, in 2016. To compete, their rings had to be unique — really unique. "We try to develop what we call show-stopper products," Johnathan told me. "People might say, 'You have dinosaur bones? That's crazy. You have meteorite? That's nuts.'"
Judson Morgan is a Los Angeles-based actor and director. He owns an agency that creates films and other visual content. He's also a successful ecommerce entrepreneur — with a purpose. He told me, "I have zero interest in making money off of a random product. I wanted to build a real brand that people could resonate with." That brand is Benevolence Los Angeles, an Amazon-focused gift boutique.
Kate Knecht is the fourth-generation owner-operator of Tomlinson's Feed, a family-owned retail business with 16 brick-and-mortar locations in Central Texas. The company is 75 years old. Amid the pandemic and the onslaught of online behemoths, can such a business transition to 2021 consumers? I asked Knecht that question and more.
Braxton Manley was a sophomore at Texas Tech University in 2017 when he attended a workshop on entrepreneurship. The purpose was to conceive a product based on market research. "My idea was cool Apple Watch bands," Manley told me. Fast forward to 2021 and his company, Braxley Bands, is a direct-to-consumer seller of elastic, colorful bands.
Ridge wallets launched via a Kickstarter campaign in 2014. Sean Frank is the company's chief operating officer. Ultra-thin, metal-clad, with RFID protection, the wallets are enormously popular in the U.S., with $50 million in sales in 2020 alone. Influencer marketing has driven much of the growth.
Patrick Coddou's company, Supply.co, sells razors and shaving accessories. My company, Beardbrand, sells beard products. He wants men to shave. I want them to grow a beard. We're both direct-to-consumer ecommerce merchants selling premium grooming products to males. We're direct competitors, in other words.
Industry pundits might say the future of retail is brands, manufacturers, and marketplaces. But don't tell that to Blair Budlong. His company, DecksDirect, doesn't own a brand, manufacture a product, or sell on marketplaces. And it thrives.
Dr. Squatch, Jack Haldrup's company, sells its own natural soaps and other grooming products for men. Revenue in 2020 was roughly $100 million, having exploded from $5 million just 18 months earlier. How does a company grow from $5 million to $100 million in 18 months? I asked him that question and many more in our recent conversation.
The required skills to launch a business are typically much different from managing it for the long term. Bill D'Alessandro has done both. He launched a single ecommerce business in 2010 and then transformed the company into an operator of multiple online brands. He has evolved from performing most every task to focusing on a few.
In 2012 Vivian Kaye was a successful wedding decorator. But she had a problem. The climate in Toronto, Canada, was brutal on her hair. Kaye's solution was hair extensions, which were easy and attractive. Fast forward to 2021, and KinkyCurlyYaki, Kaye's company, sells hair extensions, wigs, and more — all to empower Black women with confidence and beauty.
Finbarr Taylor moved to the U.S. with a goal. "I moved from Scotland to Silicon Valley nine years ago with the express intent of starting a tech company," he said. "I'm doing it, and I'm having the time of my life. I'm in no rush to stop." Taylor's tech company is Shogun, which provides innovative page-builder tools that enhance ecommerce sites. He is co-founder and CEO.
Perhaps no industry has been more disrupted by the internet than education. Online training is booming — from 1-hour courses to college degrees. Take Barbell Logic, for example. It provides one-on-one strength and conditioning training, entirely web-based. Matt Reynolds founded the company in 2016.
Online selling is increasingly competitive, forcing merchants to selfish and shortsighted decisions. That's according to Corey Blake, CEO of MWI, a digital marketing agency. "When we have a scarcity outlook with shortsightedness," he told me, "We're scraping and clawing to keep it all. A better approach is an abundance mentality."
Selling shoes online is notoriously competitive. Zappos, Amazon, big-box retailers, shoe brands — all are vying for a share of the consumer footwear market. Nonetheless, Sean McGinnis's employer, Kuru, is thriving by focusing on foot pain.
An ecommerce company is a collection of platforms, apps, and service providers. That's certainly the case with Beardbrand, the company I launched in 2012. James Wilson is Beardbrand's growth marketing manager. I asked James to describe our technology stack, hoping that the decisions we've made (good and bad) can help other merchants.
The mission of Anthony Frasier's company, ABF Creative, is to broadcast voices and stories from the African American community. He launched the company in 2016 from his hometown of Newark, New Jersey, having founded a tech conference and authored a book. To Frasier, ABF is much more than a business.
Most entrepreneurs in 2020 are uber connected: phone, text, email, Slack — you name it. But to Arri Bagah, the founder of Conversmart, an ecommerce agency, always-on connections means non-stop interruptions. "It's a matter of taking control of my time — trying to be less reactive and more active," he told me. "Receiving all of those notifications prompts you to react."
Kat McKinnon's agency, CopySmiths, produces hundreds of blog posts per month for, mainly, ecommerce clients. She's developed a formula of sorts for getting those posts ranked in Google's search results. "You need between 1,000 and 1,500 words for a blog article," she told me. "Definitely not 600. Avoid 800, unless you're literally just answering a short question. You need a heading that includes a keyword. You need three to four subheadings, H2s. And then within those H2s, you need three to four H3s. H3s are very important."
Dennis Hegstad believes the best way to recover abandoned carts is via text messages. But his messages are not automated or bot-driven. Hegstad's company, LiveRecover, sends one-to-one texts from a real person to folks who have left an ecommerce checkout process without completing a purchase.
"It's peer-to-peer texting," he told me. "We'll send messages from a real person. It's not a drip campaign. About 55 percent get replies. Our total recovery rate on average is about 21 percent, which is really good."
Jordan West launched Little & Lively, a direct-to-consumer children's apparel company, with his wife, Carmen, six years ago in Canada. The business has grown to mid-seven-figures in revenue selling through its website, mostly. He's a master at creating demand for his products before they are available for purchase.
Despite reaching a whopping $100 million in revenue in just two years, Moiz Ali, the founder of Native deodorant, says the initial version was less than stellar. "We had a pretty mediocre product," Ali told me. "We understood that people were looking for [aluminum-free deodorant] and were willing to pay a higher price point for it. But our first attempt wasn't that good."
Jon Shanahan wants men to wear makeup. He's a co-founder of Stryx, a direct-to-consumer manufacturer of concealer and tinted moisturizer for males. The company launched in 2017. Shanahan joined shortly afterward, having created his male grooming channel on YouTube.
In 2007 Steve Chou's wife, Jennifer, wanted to spend more time with their growing family. So she quit her job. Fast forward to 2020, and Bumblebee Linens, the Chou's ecommerce company, is prospering. Steve is now an ecommerce celebrity, having launched the "My Wife Quit Her Job" blog, podcast, and YouTube channel.
The YouTube-to-ecommerce business model may be the best way to build an audience of customers. It worked for Lisa and Paul Jauregui. Lisa’s passion for cosmetics led to her YouTube channel, which educated consumers on the use and selection of those products. And that audience generated customers for BK Beauty, a direct-to-consumer cosmetics brand that the Jauregui’s launched in August 2019.
American businesspeople tend to view Europe as a single market with like-minded consumers and cultures. But Rasmus Cort knows better. His company, Sorry Mom, sells tattoo ointments and lotions throughout the continent. I asked him how a U.S.-based company can succeed there.
By 2017, nine years after launching his t-shirt company, Ugmonk, Jeff Sheldon had expanded into posters and workspace products. Gather, Ugmonk's modular desk organizer, had just completed a successful Kickstarter campaign with two shipping containers of custom manufactured organizers en route, to send to customers. "There's no way my parents were going to let two shipping containers show up at their front door. So I used a 3PL. It was a very bad experience. We ran into every problem imaginable.
Patrick Coddou launched Supply.co with his wife, Jennifer, back in 2015. The company, which sells razors and shaving supplies, is bootstrapped — no outside investors. He has little patience with the concept of lifetime customer value or paying more to acquire a customer than he can recoup on the first purchase. That approach has produced, in five years, a profitable, mid-seven-figure-revenue business that, until recently, had just two employees: Jennifer and himself.
The progression for most direct-to-consumer entrepreneurs is to conceive a product idea and then locate a manufacturer to produce it. But Jaime Schmidt took the opposite approach when she launched Schmidt's natural deodorant in 2010. "I started in our kitchen with batch sizes of maybe 20 deodorants on the stove. The product turned into a business idea. So I kept the manufacturing in-house. I liked the control, which was born out of my love for making."
Ecommerce entrepreneurs understand the need for multiple revenue channels. Relying exclusively on, say, Facebook or Amazon or Google can lead to disruptions. And that's what happened to Allen Walton's company, SpyGuy, which relies on Google Ads for most of its traffic and revenue.
Having founded and sold multiple ecommerce companies, and having worked for numerous ecommerce startups, Web Smith believes broad economic trends determine entrepreneurial success as much as tactical execution. Successful entrepreneurs, Smith asserts, must be polymaths — possessing extensive knowledge across multiple subjects — to understand opportunities. And that's the purpose of 2PM, his latest company.
I asked Sam Parr, the founder of The Hustle, an email newsletter with curated business and technology news, how he has grown his list to over 1 million subscribers. “It’s fricking hard,” he said.
Entrepreneurs tend to become emotionally entwined with their businesses. "It's my baby," an entrepreneur might say when describing his company. But not Rohan Gilkes. "There's no emotion," he told me. "I have no babies. I build businesses for the cash flow."
Aaron Marino says he hates to read. He's bad at grammar and writing, he claims. But he's really good at making videos. "I had a fitness center that didn't work out," he told me. "I started making YouTube videos in 2008 with no idea that I could ever make a buck on that platform." Fast forward to 2020. Alpha M, Marino's YouTube portal, which focuses on male grooming and fitness, has 6 million subscribers. It has spawned multiple ecommerce businesses, including Pete & Pedro (haircare), Teige Hanley (skincare), and Enemy (sunglasses).
What's the most competitive product on Amazon? Smartphone cases. What does Matt Atschul's company, Smartish, sell? Smartphone cases. And it thrives.
Kurt Elster's "The Unofficial Shopify Podcast" has been downloaded more than 1 million times. His agency, Ethercycle, helps Shopify merchants drive revenue and profit. And his newsletter at KurtElster.com contains tips and strategies to scale a Shopify store. "I eat, sleep, and breathe Shopify. I even have a Shopify license plate," Elster stated.
Taylor Holiday runs three successful ecommerce businesses and a thriving, ecommerce-focused ad agency. He's developed definitive views on acquiring customers and advertising performance, among other insights. We recently spoke with Holiday about his ventures, the state of ecommerce, and advertising dos and don'ts.
In March 2015 Ryan Michler owned a successful financial planning company. His clients were medical professionals. He earned a comfortable living. "I was making great money, but I felt like something was missing. I thought there were opportunities to help men. And that's when I started." What he started was Order of Man, a website, podcast, Facebook group, and paid membership to help men become better financial stewards, better fathers and husbands, and better leaders.
Five years ago Greg Mercer was traveling the world, making a living by purchasing white-label goods from China and selling them on Amazon. "I realized that some of my products were doing better than others," he said. "I developed spreadsheets to estimate how well all products on Amazon were selling. I thought it would be cool if I could put this into a Chrome extension. I launched it as a fun, side project.” That side project, Jungle Scout, now has roughly 250,000 worldwide customers and 150 employees.
Conventional ecommerce wisdom is that merchants should sell across multiple channels, manufacture or control their products, and scale. Don't tell that to Brian Goulet, president of The Goulet Pen Company, which sells high-end fountain pens and writing accessories.
"I wanted to be a craftsman," Goulet told me. "That approach shapes our whole business. We have a craftsmanship mentality of high touch, high quality, high level of service — with a lower volume. I was never trying to scale or sell as much as possible. We were after a discerning customer."
Ten years after Goulet co-founded the company with his wife, Rachel, Goulet Pens has 35 employees and 4,500 SKUs — all in its headquarters of Henrico, Virginia — and one sales channel: GouletPens.com. We recently spoke with Brian about launching the business, content marketing, and managing an expanding team.
The global coronavirus pandemic is forcing many companies to adjust to a remote, home-based workforce. TaxJar, a sales-tax management platform, has been entirely remote since its founding seven years ago. All 160 employees work remotely, mainly from their homes. Mark Faggiano is founder and CEO of TaxJar. I recently spoke with him about managing a large, distant team.
In 2008 Robert Patton was coming off his second deployment in Iraq with the U.S. Army. “I was going to do 20 years in the Army,” he said, “But I'd already been on two deployments and was scheduled to go back for a third. I had a family. I didn’t want to spend half of my time in Iraq. So I had this idea.”
That idea was a unique type of men's underwear. Fast forward to 2020 and his company, Sheath Underwear, is on track to record $2.6 million in sales.
Ronnie Teja immigrated to Vancouver, Canada in 2008. He was 22. Fast-forward to 2020 and he owns and operates a thriving ecommerce company that sells men's watches and related accessories across 15 websites, including Branzio.com. His team consists of 30 employees in a dozen countries. We spoke with him about launching his company, acquiring websites, and the challenges of managing it remotely.
The rise of Amazon has prompted some observers to suggest independent ecommerce merchants are threatened. Rick Wilson, CEO of Miva, the ecommerce platform, disagrees. He says independent ecommerce is thriving. His new book "Dragon Proof Ecommerce," offers a roadmap for continued growth.
Anyone who has purchased used books on Amazon likely encountered Thrift Books. It launched in 2003 as a pure-play Amazon seller. It's now the largest used-book seller in the world. Its CEO, Mike Ward, has been with the company since inception. We recently spoke with him about the company, the industry, and the logistics of selling tens of millions of books every year.
This is the final episode in my "Building an Ecommerce Business" series. I've hosted 18 amazing guests who have provided much insight into launching, growing, and selling an ecommerce business. There is no right way to do that. You'll likely find success, however, if you focus on three primary functions: vision, execution, and cash flow.
Launching and then growing an ecommerce business can be both exciting and stressful. Many entrepreneurs hope to someday sell their companies. For this installment in my series on building an ecommerce business, I spoke with Michael Jackness. He is the owner of Terran, a multi-brand ecommerce company. Jackness has sold several ecommerce sites. In this conversation, we discussed the latest sale, and why he made that decision.
An engaged, passionate community around an ecommerce business can drive referrals, loyalty, and repeat sales. But developing and growing that community is not always easy. For this episode in my series on building an ecommerce business from the ground up, I spoke with Andrew Youderian. He's the founder of eCommerceFuel, a popular, private community of ecommerce merchants who communicate via an online forum and, also, at meetups and at an annual conference.
Selling manufactured goods directly to consumers, with no retail middlemen, has exploded on the internet. An entrepreneur with an idea for an original product can design it, find a manufacturer for it, and sell it online. I'm the founder of Beardbrand, an ecommerce business in Austin, Texas that focuses on beard care and men's grooming. This is episode 16 in my series on building an ecommerce business from the ground up. For this installment, I spoke with Jimmy Hayes, the co-founder of Minaal, a manufacturer of "bags and gear for life on the move."
Content marketing for ecommerce businesses is much more than a sales pitch. Done well, it connects with prospective customers and tells the story of a brand. In this episode 15 of my series on building an ecommerce business from the ground up, I spoke with Andrew Snavely, the founder of Primer, an online magazine, and Ryan Hunter Masters, the founder of Show Her Off, and a dance instruction site.
A successful campaign on Kickstarter, the crowdfunding platform, can help validate a business and a product. Catherine Lavery, the founder of BestSelf, a producer of productivity journals and tools, used Kickstarter in 2015 to launch the company. She describes the process to host Eric Bandholz, the founder of Beardbrand.
Launching an ecommerce business takes perseverance, passion, and, typically, money. Raising that money can be time-consuming and frustrating. For this interview, I spoke with Joshua Bingaman and Brad Day. Bingaman is the founder of creative director of Helm Boots, an Austin, Texas-based manufacturer and seller of hand-crafted leather boots. Day is the company's president. We discussed the process of evolving from a start-up, bootstrapped company to one that needs investors, money, and structure.
Shakil Prasla is co-founder of Pro Click Ventures, a holding company that owns and operates 12 ecommerce businesses. He speaks with host Eric Bandholz, founder of Beardbrand, on his process for evaluating, acquiring, and managing multiple firms.
A fundamental decision for many ecommerce entrepreneurs is whether to sell on Amazon. The potential is high but the competition is increasing tough. For this installment 11 in my series on building an ecommerce business, I spoke with Mike Tecku, co-founder of Sky Solutions, which manufactures and sells Sky Mats, a floormat, in high volume on Amazon's marketplace.
Selling apparel online is notoriously competitive. The margins are thin, typically. Inventory management can be complicated with hundreds of SKUs for size and color and styles. This is episode 10 in my series on building an ecommerce business from the ground up. For this installment, I spoke with Mike Schwarz, founder of RibbedTee, a Los Angeles-based manufacturer and retailer of men's undershirts and underwear.
Many ecommerce businesses spend large amounts of money generating video content that few consumers watch. But with the right mindset and strategy, viewers will engage with your videos. YouTube could become a successful channel for your business. This is episode nine in my series on building an ecommerce business from the ground up.
Startups and seasoned merchants alike can run into hiccups with managing customer service. Is it better to do it in-house or to outsource? Should you hire someone from the start? Cody McLain is CEO of SupportNinja, a customer service provider. He addresses the realities of operating a company in the Philippines, tips for business owners looking to expand customer service functions, and more.
A merchant who sells physical products has to figure out how to efficiently get those items into the hands of customers. It can become complicated as the business scales and receives international orders. This is episode seven in my series on building an ecommerce business from the ground up.
Without the right people, a new ecommerce business would almost certainly fail. Refining the hiring process can help find the perfect candidate. For this interview, we spoke with Ayman Al-Abdullah, president of AppSumo, a daily deals site for digital goods, about his hiring process and how it has evolved.
Knowing where to advertise can be daunting to new and experienced ecommerce entrepreneurs alike. There are many options, and it's often unclear which will fit your business. Digital marketing agencies can provide some answers. For this interview, I visited with Alex Hart, founder of Good Joo Joo, an Austin, Texas-based digital marketing agency.
Good copy sells. Generic imagery and descriptions might cause shoppers to move on without giving your product a second thought. Spicing up your copy, whether it be emails, social media, or product descriptions will give your online store a personality to stand above competitors.
In this fourth installment in my series of conversations about building an ecommerce business, I'm visiting with Neville Medhora, founder of Kopywriting Kourse.
The early days of an ecommerce business are among the most important. Growing a business from infancy is complicated and unforgiving. There are many factors to consider, including platforms, inventory, social media, and more.
This is the third installment in my series of conversations about building an ecommerce business. The previous installments were "Part 1: Choosing Partners" and "Part 2: Selecting Platforms."
This time I visited with Andrea Nucete-Elliott, co-founder of TIY Life, a new ecommerce business offering premium hair ties for active women.
Selecting an ecommerce platform is among the most critical decisions of a new entrepreneur. There are hundreds of choices. This is the second installment in my series on launching, growing, and selling an ecommerce business. For this installment on selecting an ecommerce platform, I spoke with Carson McComas. He is the founder and CEO of Fuel Made, a Spokane, Wash.-based ecommerce agency.
This is the first episode of an extended series on launching, growing, and selling an ecommerce business. The topic of this initial episode is choosing business partners. My two partners at Beardbrand are supportive and knowledgeable. Our relationship has been critical to the company's growth. I asked one of them, Lindsey Reinders, to offer suggestions and tips for selecting partners.
Rand Fishkin founded Moz in 2001 as a blog, calling it at the time SEOmoz. It became an industry beacon, helping thousands of companies dissect and improve their search engine optimization efforts. He left Moz earlier this year. His new book, "Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World," is a transparent view of running that company and the lessons learned along the way.
Selling across international borders can provide helpful revenue to many merchants. But the complexity of laws, transit times, and delivery cost can be daunting. Eugene Laney is an authority on international shipping. He's the head of international government affairs with DHL, the worldwide logistics firm.
Amazon has made significant investments in its own private label brands, in areas such as diapers, dog food, and paper towels. The company's private label strategy could be indicative of a burgeoning trend in retail, one that mid-market ecommerce companies could try.
To help us understand, we recently spoke with Ojastro Todd, marketing analyst at One Click Retail, an ecommerce data measurement, sales analytics, and search optimization firm for brand manufacturers in North America and Europe.
The recent South Dakota v. Wayfair decision by the U.S. Supreme Court changed online sales tax. To discuss the details of the decision, and its impact on ecommerce merchants, there's no better observer than Shane Ratigan. He is senior manager, state and local tax for Clark Nuber, and a longtime nationwide authority on online sales tax matters.
In an ecommerce world that is seemingly dominated by Amazon, Eric Bandholz has just moved his company's products away from that marketplace. The company, Beardbrand, is now focused on selling through its own website and through other retail channels. Revenue has greatly increased.
The General Data Protection Regulation from the European Union takes effect on May 25. The law is sweeping, with massive fines for noncompliance. It affects most every company worldwide, large and small. It’s also confusing.
There is no better authority in the U.S. to explain the GDPR to ecommerce merchants than John Di Giacomo. He is founding partner of Revision Legal, a leading Michigan-based internet law firm. He is, additionally, a contributor to Practical Ecommerce.
Mobile optimization used to provide a competitive advantage. But as the mobile internet has grown, responsive websites are no longer optional. They are essential to doing business online. In this Ecommerce Conversation, senior contributing editor Armando Roggio speaks with Madison Minor, founder and CEO of WompMobile, a mobile web platform and development firm, about progressive web apps, accelerated mobile pages, and other new mobile internet technologies.
Organic traffic from Google and other search engines remains critical to many merchants. There is no greater authority on search engine optimization than Stephan Spencer. He's the co-author of "The Art of SEO." He founded the pioneering SEO firm of Netconcepts. He's a worldwide speaker, consultant, and host of two popular podcasts, "Marketing Speak" and "The Optimized Geek."
The postage rates among countries for international shipping greatly vary. Merchants in certain countries, such as China, can ship very cheaply to U.S. consumers with rates that are unavailable to U.S. merchants. Paul Steidler, a senior fellow with the Lexington Institute in Washington, D.C., explains it all.
In an era when many ecommerce platforms are migrating to large enterprise clients, Volusion is doing the opposite. It's focused on smaller and mid size companies, even startups. To discuss it all, we're joined by Volusion's founder and longtime C.E.O., Kevin Sproles.
It’s been an eventful year for Miva, the pioneering ecommerce platform. Its longtime president became C.E.O. and the company raised $18 million of private equity, which is the first such investment in Miva’s 20-year history. Rick Wilson is the former president who is now C.E.O. And he joined us to discuss Miva, independent ecommerce, and the impact of Amazon.
Magento, the ecommerce platform, launched in 2007, grew dramatically, and was acquired by eBay. When eBay divested PayPal in 2015, it also sold Magento, to a private equity firm. Magento's C.E.O. is now Mark Lavelle, a seasoned technology executive who co-founded Bill Me Later, the payment service. He joins us to discuss Magento and the state of ecommerce generally.
Given the ease with which brands and manufacturers can sell their products directly to consumers, many observers believe the future of resellers is limited. Ori Greenburg, an ecommerce veteran and now the CEO of Algopix, a market analysis platform, does not necessarily agree. He joins us today to discuss it all.
In the United States, ecommerce is mature and sophisticated. That's not the case in Saudi Arabia, where it's new and challenging. Hamza el Bayed is co-founder of Ora La Moda, a Jeddah, Saudi Arabia ecommerce apparel company.
Product reviews can play an important role in ecommerce. Something like 9 out of 10 shoppers read product reviews, and many studies over many years have shown that reviews help shoppers to make online buying decisions. To talk about ecommerce reviews, we have with us Paul Kirwin, the CEO and founder of Channel Signal, a product review monitoring analytics firm. You might know a few other companies that Mr. Kirwin has founded like 3Point5 or Experticity.
The Amazon marketplace contains nearly 500 million products, from about 2 million sellers. That's a lot of competition. In fact, being competitive on Amazon is exactly what we're going to discuss in this interview. It's with Casey Gauss, co-founder and C.E.O. of Viral Launch, a software and services platform helping brands to source, launch, and succeed on the Amazon marketplace.
Fast loading web pages are critical for conversions and general worldwide usability. Optimized images can greatly increase page speed. No one is more qualified to address optimized images than Chris Zacharias. He is the founder and C.E.O. of imgix, a real-time image-optimization platform. As an early-day YouTube developer, he created YouTube's HTML5 video player and Feather, an ultra-light version of YouTube that loads quickly in parts of the world with slow Internet connections
By some estimates, more than half of the visitors to an online store will use that store's site search to find products, and hopefully make a purchase. This fact alone makes ecommerce site search important. Since, something less than an effective site search, frankly means that you're failing to meet your customer's expectations.
Today we're going to speak to Dr. Amir Konigsberg, the cofounder and CEO of Twiggle, a search engine that helps ecommerce sites, or an ecommerce site search think the way that customers think.
If you want satisfied customers, your business needs to provide a level of perceived service that's greater than your customers' expectations. For ecommerce shipping is customer satisfaction's frontline, and online sellers should aim to meet shoppers' expectations for fast and free shipping.
Today we're going to speak to Nathan Jones, the president and CEO of Ship Station, a web-based software solution designed to help ecommerce retailers process, fulfill, and ship their orders.
Many small-to-midsize ecommerce merchants view Amazon as a competitor, albeit one they are force to sell on. Brent Bellm, CEO of BigCommerce, disagrees. He believes Amazon can complement an ecommerce business.
The dominance of Amazon and its marketplace is apparent. What's not so apparent are the counterfeit items that are also sold there. Rob Dunkel, is the founder of a company that uses sophisticated data analysis to identify counter-fit and trademark violators on Amazon and other leading marketplaces.
The increasing dominance of Amazon has many merchants scratching their heads, wondering how exactly to work with that company, and how that company will impact their own businesses.
We recently spoke with James Thomson, a former Amazon executive, to discuss the Amazon marketplace, the FBA program, and the Prosper Show, a conference founded by Thomson to help Amazon sellers sort through it all.
Without U.S. Robotics, the early-day modem manufacturer, there arguably would not be a World Wide Web. The co-founder of U.S. Robotics, Casey Cowell, joins us to discuss that company, the early-day Internet, and his current entrepreneurial and civic interests.
Selling on Amazon’s marketplace can be challenging. There are, to be sure, millions of prospective customers. But there are also many competitors selling there, often at prices that are difficult to match or compete with. Our guest today, James Thomson, is a former senior Amazon executive who now counsels merchants on how best to use that platform.
Practical Ecommerce's Ignite 2015 conference contains 39 sessions on topics critical to small and midsize ecommerce merchants, to accelerate revenue growth and compete against larger companies.
In addition, we'll feature two visionary keynote speakers. The first one, on opening day, is John Lawson. He's an ecommerce entrepreneur and a social-selling guru. His address, "The Beyonce Principal: Social Selling Funnel for Massive Results," will emphatically answer the question of how smaller ecommerce merchants can harness social media.
The rise of ecommerce has reduced local brick-and-mortar retail sales and the corresponding sales taxes from those transactions — putting states and localities in a revenue bind. A hodgepodge of efforts from the states and, now, the federal government to address the shortfall, and to tax ecommerce sales, is firmly underway. To explain the status of Internet sales taxes, and the U.S. Congressional efforts at a nationwide solution, we’re joined by Jonathan Barsade. He’s a sales tax expert, and the founder and CEO of Exactor, a sales-tax management platform.
Steve Case, the co-founder of America Online, is by any measure an Internet visionary and pioneer. His private equity firm, Revolution, invested, in 2013, $40 million in Bigcommerce, a leading ecommerce platform for smaller companies. He recently spoke with Practical Ecommerce about that investment, as well as SMB ecommerce generally.
Miva is both a pioneering early day ecommerce shopping cart and a cutting-edge progressive platform. Its President, Rick Wilson, joins us today to discuss, among other topics, how an ecommerce provider remains fresh and relevant over the years.
The co-founder of Retention Science, Jerry Jao, is an expert on using data, lots of data, to grow ecommerce revenues. Beyond that, he’s a gifted Taiwanese-born entrepreneur who proves what intelligence, hard work, and perseverance can accomplish. He recently spoke with Practical Ecommerce's Kerry Murdock on the merits of data-driven ecommerce business, among other topics.
Selling products on third-party websites is not new. What is new is the so-called Facebook Buy button, which allows ecommerce merchants to sell their products potentially on that platform. There is no better expert on third-party selling than Scot Wingo, the long-time CEO of ChannelAdvisor. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce on the Facebook Buy button, among other multi-channel selling topics.
Every day, it seems, we read of an Internet-based company acquiring another one, or raising capital, or expanding into a new segment. Evan Klein, managing director of Berkery Noyes, a leading mergers and acquisitions advisory firm, recently spoke with Practical Ecommerce's Kerry Murdock on the booming M&A market for ecommerce and Internet companies.
Starting a new ecommerce business can be frustrating, complicated, and risky. LemonStand is a popular ecommerce platform that often caters to startups and new entrepreneurs. LemonStand's CEO, Danny Halarewich, spoke with Practical Ecommerce's Kerry Murdock on how to launch a new ecommerce business.
The process of testing different variations on a website can greatly enhance its conversions and performance. A leading A/B split testing platform is Optimizely. Its co-founder and CEO, Dan Siroker, spoke with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Ecommerce site search — including Google’s announcement that it is dropping its Commerce Search platform — is our topic today. Dr. Shaun Ryan, CEO of SLI Systems, a leading site search provider, is our guest. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
An ecommerce merchant deals with lots of data. There’s revenue, profit, customers, traffic, order values, Likes, followers . . . lots of data. One company that helps merchants sort through this data and make decisions is SumAll. Its CEO and co-founder, Dane Atkinson, speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Retailers increasingly use data to personalize an online shopping experience. Geo location, shopping and browsing history, weather — all can impact how products are presented to online shoppers. Among the leaders in personalization technology is Monetate. Its co-founder and CEO, David Brussin, speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Ecommerce merchants strive to answer questions from shoppers. Relevant, helpful answers presumably increase conversion rates. One company offers a solution that relies on past customers to answer questions from prospective ones. The company is TurnTo. Its founder and CEO, George Eberstadt, speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Ecommerce merchants strive for repeat business from existing customers. Our guest today owns a company that has produced a mobile app to encourage repeat orders. He is Dr. Alex Heiphetz. The mobile app is QRwave. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Say you are an ecommerce merchant with an angry customer. The customer is so angry, he posts bad, negative reviews on the Internet about your company that are not true. What can you do? How can you combat? Managing online reputation is the business of our guest. He is Cliff Stein. His company is Reputation Changer. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Most sectors of the retail economy do business on the Internet. That now includes pawnshops. Our guest, Don Battis, is the founder of Pawntique.com, a web-only pawnshop that serves all of the U.S. from its base in New Hampshire. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Every business, ecommerce or otherwise, should maintain accurate books and records. But for some entrepreneurs, the accounting function is intimidating and confusing. Outright.com aims to simplify the accounting process for all entrepreneurs, regardless of their accounting skills. Outright’s CEO is Steven Aldrich. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Drop shipping is the process of selling an item that is then shipped by a manufacturer or wholesaler. Many ecommerce merchants utilize drop shipping, at least in part, to reduce inventory costs and to expand their product offerings. But drop shipping can be complicated, too. We explore the pros and cons of drop shipping in this interview with Jeremy Hanks, co-founder and CEO of Dropship.com, a software platform that automates back-office drop shipping functions between retailers and manufacturers. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Many merchants dream of building a successful ecommerce business, and then selling it. Our guest today — who is now a Practical eCommerce contributing editor — has done just that. He’s Dale Traxler. His former business is Beaded Impressions, a collection of four separate jewelry sites. He joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock to explain the process of selling.
The use of video by ecommerce merchants can increase sales. One company that uses video in innovative ways is TRX Training, a retailer of exercise equipment. It has an extensive YouTube channel, and it features videos on its own ecommerce site. Ian Hackett is TRX Training’s senior director of ecommerce and user experience. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Strategies and ideas to reduce shipping expense appeal to most every ecommerce merchant. Our guest today is a shipping and logistics expert, helping merchants reduce their shipping costs. He’s John Haber, founder and CEO of Spend Management Experts, a shipping and logistics consulting firm.
There’s no bigger name in the ecommerce industry than Alibaba. It was launched in 1999 in China, but it now services millions of businesses and consumers, offering wholesale and retail products worldwide. Its vice president of global sales and service is Brian Wong. He joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock to discuss Alibaba, opportunities for ecommerce retailers on that site, and global trade generally.
The cost of shipping is material to most every ecommerce business. There’s a company that offers smaller merchants discounted shipping rates that are typically available only to high volume sellers. The company is EquaShip. Its CEO, Ron Wiener, speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
We’ve recently asked ecommerce merchants to share their 2011 experiences — good or bad — with us. For this installment, we are joined by Jamie Salvatori. He the founder and owner of Vat19, an established ecommerce business that sells unique gift items. He’s also a Practical Ecommerce blogger, at “The (Ecommerce) Corner Office.” He speaks with us about how his company fared in 2011.
A review of ecommerce sales for 2011 is the topic of our interview today. We are joined by an ecommerce entrepreneur and pioneer who will share his company’s experience. He’s Chad Weinman, CEO of Cat5 Commerce, which operates 10 separate ecommerce stores — including RunningShoes.com and TacticalGear.com — from its base in Missouri. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Every ecommerce merchant has a domain name. For U.S. based merchants, it likely ends in a .com, or a .net, or both. But there are over 200 country-specific top-level domains — such as .cn for China, or .co.uk for the United Kingdom. Should a non-resident merchant reserve those domains, too? And what happens if someone in another country steals a merchant’s name, and reserves it the local top-level domain code? To help us understand cross border domain-name issues, we are joined once more by Gretchen Olive. She’s an attorney and director of policy and industry affairs for Corporation Service Company, a trademark and domain-name service provider. She speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
For many ecommerce merchants, email marketing is a principal source of revenue. A merchant’s email list is critically important to the company’s success. But what happens when a list becomes dormant, and subscribers stop opening or clicking on the emails? Dormant email lists is our topic today. To explain strategies for managing dormant lists, we are joined by Ross Kramer. He’s co-founder and CEO of Listrak, the pioneering email service provider. He speaks with Kerry Murdock of Practical Ecommerce.
Email marketing is critically important to many ecommerce merchants. But what happens if a merchant’s email is blocked by an Internet service provider? Or, worse yet, what happens if the merchant’s name or IP address lands on a blacklist? Email deliverability is our topic today, and to help us understand blacklists and ISP email blocking, we are joined by Laura Atkins. She’s co-founder of WordToTheWise, an anti-spam consulting and software firm.
The range of possible domain names is about to greatly increase. That’s because ICANN, the authoritative body over Internet domain names, is about to add new top-level domains — the portion to the right of the period — to include brand names and other customized names. To explain these new top level domains to us, we are joined by Gretchen Olive. She’s director of policy and industry affairs for Corporation Service Company, which consults with companies on domain name and trademark matters. She speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Ecommerce merchants strive to increase the number of visitors to their sites that actually purchase products. Increasing those conversions frequently requires experimenting with new approaches. Merchants can test which of these experiments increase sales, and which do not. The testing can be automated, sophisticated — and it produces results. To explain multi-variable ecommerce testing to us, we are joined by Mark Simpson, the founder and president of Maxymiser, a testing, personalization and conversion-optimization firm. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Many merchants dream of building a successful ecommerce business, and then selling it. Our guest for this interview has done just that. She’s here to describe the process — and the post-sale emotions of it all. She is Shirley Tan, the founder and former owner of AmericanBridal.com, which is now owned by TheKnot.com. She speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Yahoo! Small Business remains a leading, hosted platform for ecommerce businesses. But the company itself has experienced turmoil — the CEO was recently fired — and critics of the shopping cart platform say it’s dated. The man in charge of that platform is Tom Byun. He is vice president and general manager of Yahoo! Small Business, and he speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock on the state of Yahoo! and its hosted shopping cart.
The rush to sell products across multiple ecommerce channels is fine until a merchant starts to manage the back office complexities of updating inventory, prices, product descriptions, and then sales and shipments. Without automation that entire process can be a nightmare. Our guest today runs a company whose goal is to eliminate the complexities of selling across multiple channels. He is Fred Lizza, CEO of Dydacomp, makers of Multichannel Order Manager. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock on how merchants should best utilize third-party selling channels.
Sophisticated site search helps consumers find products on an ecommerce site, and therefore increases sales. But site search can also work with faceted category navigation to help consumers. The blending of site search with faceted category navigation is our topic, and to explain it we are joined by Scott Zielinski, co-founder of SearchSpring, a leading search solution provider. He speaks with Kerry Murdock of Practical Ecommerce.
The notion of combining an online marketplace with a payment platform, a shopping cart and a robust backend is not new. But when the marketplace is eBay, the payment platform is PayPal, the cart is Magento and the backend is GSI Commerce, that is news. eBay calls this new collaboration x.commerce. Its general manager is Matthew Mengerink. He speaks here with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Networking and exchanging ideas can help many online retailers. One organization that promotes this type of activity is Shop.org, the trade association for online merchants. Our guest today is the CEO of a leading ecommerce services firm, and he’s just been elected to the Shop.org board of directors. He is Scot Wingo. His firm is ChannelAdvisor. And he’s here to discuss Shop.org and its role in helping ecommerce merchants. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
The need for sophisticated site search is becoming increasingly important for ecommerce merchants, who are all serving increasingly sophisticated consumers. By almost any measure, high-level site search increases sales. To discuss trends in site search, and new developments in that industry, we are joined by Shaun Ryan. He’s the CEO of SLI Systems, a pioneering site search provider. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
There are innovators and trendsetters in the ecommerce business. Our guest, Harley Finkelstein, looks for these innovations, and trends, and then shares some of them with us. In this month’s installment of “Innovators and Trendsetters,” Finkelstein — who is chief platform officer with Shopify, the hosted shopping cart — discusses three interesting ecommerce sites with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock
The Durbin Amendment to the U.S. Dodd-Frank legislative package affects ecommerce merchants. That’s because the Amendment greatly lowers the rate — called interchange — that Visa and MasterCard charge for the processing of debit cards. But, importantly, it does not automatically lower the fees that merchants actually pay to their merchant account providers. Our guest today is a longtime veteran of the credit and debit card industry. He’s Sloane Bouchever, the founder of Interchange Plus Solutions, a merchant account provider, and he’s here to suggest ways for merchants to make certain they receive the lower debit card rates. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
The migration to online retailing is putting U.S. states in a bind. Their reliance on sales tax from local brick and mortar retailers means that as local sales lessen, so does the sales tax revenue from those transactions. Some of these states are now attempting to expand who is liable for sales taxes, and some states now say this includes companies with local Internet affiliates. Our guest today, Oliver Roup, is the CEO of VigLink.com, an affiliate marketing company. He says targeting affiliates is wrong. He suggests another solution, and he’s here today to discuss it with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
The ecommerce industry in the U.S. is robust. It’s also robust in other industrialized countries, while other regions lag in ecommerce activity. The state of worldwide, online retailing is our topic today. And to help us understand it, we welcome Joanne Bethlamy. She’s with Cisco, the worldwide technology
Physical, brick-and-mortar retailers market products with end-caps and special placements in an aisle, where retailers are typically paid for those promotions by wholesale suppliers. Ecommerce merchants can now do similar merchandising, and receive similar payments, from a new ad platform. The platform is from Dijipop, and its founder and CEO, Ji Kim, speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
The efforts by state governments to collect online sales taxes is impacting affiliate marketers. That’s because a group of states is attempting to expand the nexus definition to include affiliates in those states, and thereby force retailers with those affiliates to pay sales taxes. Our guest is an affiliate marketer, and he’s here to discuss how all of this is impacting his business. He’s Oliver Roup, founder and CEO of VigLink, an affiliate marketing management company. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Most ecommerce merchants own several domain names, perhaps buying and selling them as opportunities occur. One merchant in Missouri just purchased a domain name. He paid $700,000 for it. The domain is RunningShoes.com, the merchant is Chad Weinman of Cat5 Commerce — owners of MilitaryGear.com, TacticalGear.com, HikingBoots.com, among other sites — and he joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock to discuss it all.
Cloud computing is a term that’s frequently discussed, and also frequently misunderstood. Google Docs would be an example of cloud computing, whereas Microsoft Office — locally installed on a computer — is not. In the ecommerce industry, there are many hosted, cloud platforms. One of the leading ones is Shopify. Its chief platform officer is Harley Finkelstein, and he joins us to discuss cloud computing and hosted platforms. He speaks with Kerry Murdock of Practical Ecommerce.
The balancing of copyright law with the dissemination of information on the Internet can sometimes get tangled. And nowhere is that more evident than in the recent, so-called “orphaned books” case, which involves Google’s attempt to scan and distribute the content of out-of-print books. To help us understand that federal case, and the broader implications of applying U.S. copyright law to the Internet, we are joined by Ed Green. He’s an attorney with the firm of Coats and Bennett, and he’s an expert on intellectual property law. He speaks with Kerry Murdock of Practical Ecommerce.
Attempts to simplify the administration and collection of Internet sales taxes might be the most daunting task in the ecommerce industry. There are thousands of state, county and city taxation districts in the U.S., and they all have different tax rates, and rules. But the Streamlined Sales Tax organization is attempting to make it easier for ecommerce merchants and its executive director, Scott Peterson, is here to update us on that organization’s progress. He joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
There is nothing more confusing to ecommerce merchants than credit card processing. The rates wildly fluctuate and the monthly statements are hard to follow. But yet, credit card processing is key to virtually every ecommerce business. To help us understand how merchants can save money on their processing costs, we are joined by Sloane Bouchever. He’s a credit-card ecommerce pioneer, having left Authorize.Net in 2003 — as a senior vice president — to launch what would become a leading ecommerce credit card provider. His new company is Interchange Plus Solutions, and he joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Rick Wilson The evolution of Miva Merchant continues. That pioneering platform, which first launched in the late 1990s, was acquired almost four years ago by an independent investor group that included seasoned technology executives. They have moved to upgrade the platform, enhance the company’s revenue, and generally ensure its long-term survival. One of those executives is Rick Wilson, now the company’s president and chief operating officer. He joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock to discuss the company’s recent acquisition of Hostasurus — its largest third-party host — among other topics.
There are many countries with fast-growing economies — and fast-growing Internet audiences — that are not natively English speaking. How do ecommerce merchants reach those countries, and those audiences? Through translation and localization, mainly. We’re joined by an expert on those topics. He’s Christian Arno, founder of Lingo24, a global translation and localization firm. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Most merchants like the idea of the credit card industry policing itself, versus lawmakers getting involved. PCI Security Standards Council is the industry’s attempt to do just that. But how ecommerce merchants meet the PCI’s standards is confusing to many, and the penalty for not being compliant is hard to understand, too. Bob Russo, general manager of the PCI Security Standards Council, is with us today to help sort out these and other questions. He joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
The holiday selling season is important for many online merchants. This includes David Sasson, the founder and CEO of OverstockArt.com, a retailer of reproduced oil paintings that experienced a 25 percent increase in 2010 holiday sales, from 2009. He joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock to discuss what worked — and what didn’t work — for OverstockArt this past holiday season.
Many ecommerce merchants want to sell products to consumers in other countries. But the process is not as easy as selling domestically. The complexities can include tariffs, customs and export laws. But for United States’ based merchants, the U.S. Department of Commerce can help. That department has just published a free PDF guide to help merchants with export sales. And the official responsible for the guide is with us in this interview. He’s Ken Walsh, International Trade Specialist with the U.S. Commercial Service, an agency of the Department of Commerce. He joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Many ecommerce merchants sell products from large manufacturers and suppliers. Increasingly, those manufacturers and suppliers also sell the same products. There’s a company, Shopatron, that refers sales from manufacturers’ ecommerce sites to retailers, who then fulfill orders to customers and profit from the sales. The CEO and founder of Shopatron is Ed Stevens, and he joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
The adoption of product videos on ecommerce sites continues. Most every merchant, seemingly, can benefit from product videos and we are joined here by a product video expert. He’s Craig Wax, CEO of Invodo, a video company for ecommerce merchants, and he’s here to discuss product videos that convert with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Merchants contemplating mobile optimized ecommerce sites should also consider specialized mobile site search. SLI Systems is a leading provider of ecommerce site search solutions, and that company has just launched a mobile search option. Shaun Ryan is the CEO of SLI Systems, and he’s here to discuss specialized mobile site search with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Mobile commerce is coming. Many merchants, both large and small, are contemplating their mobile commerce strategies, and one merchant that has just launched a mobile version of its ecommerce site is ThePopcornFactory.com. The person responsible for marketing that company and that site is Tom Russell. He’s senior vice president for the parent company of ThePopcornFactory.com, and he joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
The notion of adding additional revenue to an ecommerce business presumably appeals to merchants. And, increasingly, one way to do that is with the use of subscriptions. Amazon Prime may be the best example of a merchant selling subscriptions, but there are many ways smaller merchants can do it, too. To discuss the possibilities of subscription revenue, we welcome Massimo Arrigoni, the CEO of Early Impact, which has just launched a new hosted subscription management platform. He joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
The lack of capital can prevent an ecommerce business from growing. But many merchants are unsure as to how to obtain capital, or how the funding process works. Our guest today has raised many millions of funding dollars over his career, most recently with RatePoint, the reputation management firm. He’s Neal Creighton, RatePoint’s co-founder and CEO, and he joins us to explain the funding and venture capital process. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Every ecommerce site has a web host. Some are hosted by shopping cart providers; others are hosted by third-party companies. And increasingly, many are hosted by cloud providers, where bandwidth and usage can adjust with the seasonal needs of a site. Our guest today has recently switched the hosting of her ecommerce site to the cloud environment. She’s Theresa Fox, managing director with SoundsTrue.com, a publisher of products and services that encourage spiritual development. She joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Ecommerce merchants are innovators. And many in that industry continually find new and better ways to sell products online. One of those companies is Spotlight Retail, an ecommerce firm with 30 niche websites. Its new “Spotlight Visualizer” enables consumers to see how an item will look, in consumers’ own environments, prior to purchasing it. John Montague, the founder and owner of Spotlight Retail, is here to discuss it with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Financial management is critical to ecommerce companies. But the tools to manage financial matters vary, and many of them don’t automatically integrate with a merchant’s ecommerce site, making the financial tracking and reporting process even more burdensome. To help us understand financial management for ecommerce firms, we are joined by Jim McGeever, chief operating officer for NetSuite, the hosted, all-in-one ecommerce and management platform. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Comparison shopping engines can drive traffic to an ecommerce site. But there are over 120 such engines, and how to decide which of them to use–and whether to use them at all–is our topic today. We are joined by an expert in comparison shopping engines and a pioneer in ecommerce generally. He’s Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor, an ecommerce software and service provider. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
You could argue that a center of the online, retail art world is in Kansas. That’s where OverstockArt.com is located, and in nine years it has grown to be a leading, online retailer of original art reproductions. The founder and CEO, David Sasson, has grown the business from inception to where it is today, and he’s with us to discuss it all. He joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Specialized shopping search engines are becoming increasingly important for consumers. And among the largest of these shopping engines is TheFind.com. The site receives over 25 million visits per month, and, for ecommerce merchants listening to this, most every ecommerce product is already on that site, as the company uses patented search-engine type spiders to index virtually all products for sale online. Siva Kumar is co-founder and CEO and TheFind, and he speaks here with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Most every ecommerce merchant either uses QuickBooks or is familiar with it. There’s a new 2010 version of that program that includes new document management, online banking and other features. To discuss QuickBooks 2010 and future Intuit plans, we’re joined by Alex Hood, product management leader for QuickBooks desktop for Windows. He joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
The Bilksi case involved, potentially, a dramatic shift in U.S. patent law. It’s been awaiting decision by the U.S. Supreme Court since the Fall 2009, and today the court rendered its opinion. The case involved the scope of potential patents, and whether an invention must be tied to a machine to be patent eligible. It could impact many thousands of technology and Internet-related patents that are not tied to such machines. To explain the Bilski decision to us, we are joined by attorney Robert Kovelman, an intellectual property expert. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Alibaba is a leading force in global, business-to-business ecommerce. The company is based in China and it links millions of wholesale suppliers with businesses that resell those products. The company has allocated $100 million (USD) to invest in U.S. ecommerce-related businesses and it just announced the first such investment in acquiring Vendio, the U.S.-based ecommerce platform. Joining us to discuss that acquisition, Alibaba generally, and the future of ecommerce is David Wei, chief executive officer and executive director of Alibaba. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
There are more consumers that don’t speak English than those that do. And how to reach those non-English-speaking prospects is our topic today. Merely translating a website is only part of the challenge. To help us understand all of the issues surrounding the language translation of an ecommerce site, we are joined by Swamy Viswanathan, vice president for Language Weaver, a translation company. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Innovation on the Internet depends on the ability by entrepreneurs to protect intellectual property. But that protection could be threatened by a case pending at the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s known as the Bilski case, and the issue, loosely, is whether patents can be applied to inventions not tied to physical products or transformations of physical products. To help us understand the importance of the case as it applies to the Internet and ecommerce, we are joined by Robert Kovelman, an intellectual property attorney and an expert in U.S. patent law. He discusses the issue with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Ecommerce merchants frequently incur development fees to obtain specific features or appearances for their websites. But there are also prebuilt templates that can do this and one maker of them is AlgoZone. It offers hundreds of ready-made templates for, mainly, open source ecommerce platforms. It’s CEO is Pavel Rojkov, and he joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
When it comes to marketing, many ecommerce merchants think of pay-per-click ads, or search engine optimization or even email newsletters. But there’s one merchant who has successfully used TV advertising. He’s Jamie Salvatori, founder and owner of VAT19.com, a retailer of unusual gift items. He uses Google’s TV ad interface, via the AdWords platform, to great effect. He’s joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock to explain television advertising, and Google’s TV ad platform.
Nearly every ecommerce merchant who uses product videos reports that it increases sales. But there are disagreements as to what to include in a product video, how to produce it and where to show it. Invodo is a company that specializes in assisting merchants with product videos, and its CEO, Craig Wax, is here to help us sort through the video issues that merchants face. He discusses these issues with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
The rise of mobile devices is affecting ecommerce. More consumers are using these devices to shop online and more merchants are using them to collect payments. Two experts in the credit card business spoke with us about processing payments on mobile devices. They are John Waldron, CEO of Merchant Focus, and Derek Del Conte, CEO of innerfence, which makes Credit Card Terminal, a popular iPhone application. Together, they have just purchased another mobile credit card processor called AppNinjas, and they spoke with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock to review that acquisition and the future of mobile payment processing.
Ecommerce merchants run businesses that can be bought and sold. There’s a market for these businesses, and our guest today is an expert in the buying and selling of them. He’s Mike Handelsman, general manager of BizBuySell.com, a leading business-for-sale marketplace. He joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
An ecommerce merchant in St. Louis launched his business in 2006 after having written the programming code for his own shopping cart. That business, called Vat19, sells offbeat gifts (such as a five pound Gummy bear), and has grown to 300 SKUs and up to 2,000 shipments per day. How have they done it all? Jamie Salvatori, the founder and owner, is here to explain it to Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
There is no bigger name in the credit card business than Visa, and there are no bigger names in the payment gateway business than Cybersource and its subsidiary, Authorize.Net. Later this year, all of those companies will likely be combined, as Visa and Cybersource announced recently that Visa intends to purchase that company. To explain the transaction and its impact on ecommerce merchants, Michael Walsh, president and CEO of Cybersource, and John Bodine, its vice president of small business sales, visits with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
A growing percentage of Internet consumers use Facebook. By some accounts, it is the second most-popular website, and ecommerce merchants are now finding ways to tap into that traffic. One of them is The Guitar Syndicate, a newly-launched retailer of musical intruments and accessories. It uploads inventory from its ecommerce site to a “Store” tab on its Facebook site. The co-owner of The Guitar Syndicate, Scott Burnett, discuss the company’s Facebook strategy with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Rick Wilson is the president of Miva Merchant, the pioneering ecommerce platform. Like many ecommerce platforms, Miva Merchant is evolving and it now offers its own hosted shopping cart. Wilson joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock to discuss recent upgrades to that cart, cloud computing generally, and the future of third-party hosting companies.
The process of collecting and processing online payments is confusing. There are many parties involved, and the fees are oftentimes difficult to decipher. One company that hopes to clear up the payment process, and to simplify payments from international customers, is Adyen. Its president of North America, Peter Caparso, joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
The American Dream, for many aspiring merchants, is to work at home, own a business, watch after their kids and enjoy it all. Our guest today does all of that. She’s Kara English, the co-founder of Candlesandsuch.com. She taught herself the ecommerce business, launched a site, and prospered. All from her home. She discusses it with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Mobile commerce will likely affect most every ecommerce merchant in one way or the other. NetSuite is a leading ecommerce platform with many ecommerce merchant customers. Its solutions are among the most comprehensive on the market. Malin Huffman is a principal product manager at NetSuite in charge of the company’s mobile efforts, and he joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock to discuss NetSuite’s view of the future of mobile commerce.
There’s site search, and then there’s money-making site search. The former will match words and phrases, and the latter will help consumers find what they are looking for and then suggest items they may not have known they needed. A leader is sophisticated site search is SLI Systems, and its CEO, Shaun Ryan, joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Running a successful ecommerce site takes skill and hard work. But what about running 24 of them? That’s what Brad Likens does. He’s the co-owner of Best Service Stores and, in four years, his company has grown to over $20 million in annual sales with 24 separate ecommerce sites. He does this from his headquarters in suburban Kansas City, and he joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Entrepreneurs are using ecommerce sites in innovative ways. One of these entrepreneurs is Matt Schenck, who, out of personal frustration, decided there had to be a better way for consumers to purchase original art. That idea is now ArtQuiver.com, a groundbreaking ecommerce site that offers high-quality, original works of art directly to buyers. Schenck joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock to discuss the concept, the website and the first year of Art Quiver.
Sounds True is a Colorado-based provider of products and services to enable spiritual development. It was founded in the 1980s, and its business model is both interesting and sophisticated. It sells products via wholesale channels. It offers classes and instruction. It publishes a catalog. And it has an ecommerce site with a custom platform that sells both physical and digital products. The manager of this site is Theresa Fox, Sounds True’s managing director – direct and digital, and she joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
An increasing number of consumers access the Internet via mobile devices. This has looming implications for ecommerce merchants who must decide what platforms their customers will use in the future. Third party services can help owners migrate their sites to mobile devices, and one of those is Mobile Site Optimizer from Covario, the SEO software and services company. Its creator is Stephan Spencer, Practical Ecommerce’s longtime SEO contributor, and he joins Kerry Murdock to discuss Mobile Site Optimizer and mobile strategy generally.
Service-related businesses are finding new customers and new marketing opportunities online. This includes restaurants, which have increasingly embraced the web to promote menu offerings and dinner specials, and to facilitate reservations, provide directions and more. A restaurant that has used its website to do all of this in an innovative way is manna, with a vegan-focused menu located in the heart of London. Its owner is Roger Swallow and he joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
There are dozens of credit-card-fraud prevention services. Some cost money, some are free, and their approach to fraud prevention can vary. So, what are small merchants to do to prevent fraud, and how much money should they spend in the process? A fraud-prevention expert is here to address that for us. He’s John Hammond, technical account manager with Authorize.Net, the credit-card payment gateway company. He joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Product reviews on ecommerce sites improve conversions. But they also help with customer relations and, recently, even physical-store merchants have used them. But merchants, both online and in physical stores, should carefully plan the use of product reviews, and develop ideas for soliciting valid ones. To help us sort through the use of product reviews, we welcome Pehr Luedtke, the CEO of PowerReviews, a leading product-review provider. He joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Most every ecommerce merchant has experienced credit card fraud. But some merchants have experienced more fraud than others, and fraud-prevention efforts vary from merchant to merchant. Cybersource, the payment gateway company, tracks all of this. For 11 years now it has assembled an online fraud report called “Online Payment Fraud Trends, Merchant Practices and Benchmarks.” The architect of the report, and the survey behind it, is Doug Schwegman, CyberSource’s director of customer and market intelligence. He joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Used books are big business. Just ask Amazon.com, or Abe Books or Alibris. You can even ask Adam Bertram. He’s been selling used books for two years under the name of Books by Bertram. He’s made a nice part-time income from that business, and he’s here to discuss selling books, managing multiple marketplaces, juggling inventory and more. He joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Volusion is an early day hosted shopping cart platform that has grown to represent 18,000 online stores. The company has recently upgraded its platform and to explain those upgrades, among other ecommerce topics, we are joined by Volusion’s chief operating officer, Clay Olivier. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
There’s a company that sells specialized clothing and gear to law enforcement and fire-protection professionals. The company is 511 Tactical. Its business model largely relies on a dealer network, but even so, its ecommerce site grosses roughly $10 million per year. That’s not bad for a small portion of the business, and how that site got to that level is our topic today. It’s 511Tactical.com and the ecommerce manager is Brian Rogers, who joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Etsy.com was launched in 2005 as an online marketplace for handmade items and vintage goods. It has since grown to include hundreds of thousands of sellers, and many more buyers. It reportedly facilitated over $180 million in annual transactions in 2009. Many of Etsy’s sellers are part-time craftspeople, and one of those is Arkansas-based Laurie Marshall, who has been selling hand-sewn crafts and vintage items on Etsy since 2007. Her two sites there are Punkinhead.etsy.com and Girlchild.etsy.com. She joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Mobile devices could be the next major platform from which consumers shop for products. But, for ecommerce merchants, there are issues with mobile commerce having to do with screen size, product-image display and payments. Payments on a mobile device, from a consumer to a merchant, can be difficult. But there are companies seeking to simplify paying for products via a mobile device. One of them is mPayy and its CEO and founder, Conrad Sheehan, joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
The start of the New Year brings new energy and vitality for many online merchants. Many of them are looking to jump start sales, trim expenses and otherwise grow and improve their businesses. For ideas to help with this, we visited with a seasoned ecommerce expert. He’s Lin Shearer, senior marketing manager with ProStores, a leading ecommerce platform. He joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
There are numerous options for ecommerce merchants who want to learn new skills that can be applied to their business. Full Sail University is one of those online options. With a physical campus in Winter Park, Florida, the university offers online programs in fields such as web design and development, Internet marketing, and graphic design. Ani Gasti is Full Sail’s director of faculty development. He talks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kevin Patrick Allen about educational options for ecommerce merchants.
The days of being tied to a desktop computer are long gone. Ecommerce merchants can work wirelessly with laptop computers, personal digital assistants, and increasingly, smart mobile phones. Quickoffice is a Texas-based software company which focuses on providing mobile office software. David Brennan is Quickoffice’s vice president of ecommerce . He speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kevin Patrick Allen.
It’s not every day that we speak with a Stanford PhD in philosophy who has funded the construction of schools around the world. That same person started dabbling in ecommerce a decade or so ago and his company is now a publicly-traded retailing powerhouse. He’s Patrick Byrne and the company is Overstock.com. He joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock to discuss holiday sales strategies, among other ecommerce topics.
Nearly every ecommerce merchant has experienced disgruntled customers or angry competitors who post dishonest comments about his or her business. This could be in so-called complaint sites, forums, blogs or other online venues. Internet attorney John Dozier says there are steps merchants can take to limit the damage from these attacks, and he joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock to discuss these steps and his new book, Google Bomb.
Stephanie Leffler started selling sunscreen products online while in college. That was around the year 2000. She became frustrated with her web developer, and decided to produce a shopping cart herself. That cart became MonsterCommerce, an early-day, hosted ecommerce platform that she sold in 2006 to Network Solutions. She’s an ecommerce and Internet pioneer, in other words, and she joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock to discuss her new venture, Juggle.com.
Ecommerce merchants want to affect behavior. More specifically, they want consumers to buy from them. Dr. BJ Fogg is a professor at Stanford University who studies how technology can be used to change behaviors in positive ways. He is also the creator of the Fogg Behavior Model, which illustrates the three elements, he believes, must converge for a behavior to occur. Dr. Fogg speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kevin Patrick Allen for this “Ecommerce Conversation.”
Social media has become a mainstream tool that businesses are increasingly using to interact with their customers and boost sales. SocialGrub is a new service that helps businesses in the restaurant and retail industry optimize their social marketing efforts.
Sam Rubin is co-founder of SocialGrub. Mr. Rubin is a restaurant and email marketing veteran. He created SocialGrub to further assist his clients with marketing their brands by utilizing social networks.
He speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kevin Patrick Allen for this “Ecommerce Conversation.”
Jill Exler is founder and CEO of Jexbo.com, an online retailer of books that have been self-published by their authors. She founded the business in 2007, after having been frustrated by the options to sell her own self-published book. Exler’s business is based in Michigan, in the U.S., but she divides her time between there and Germany. She joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Doing business on the Internet requires the use sophisticated software and complicated processes. Many of these innovative products have been patented; Google and Amazon, for example, 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 developers, we are joined by Lawrence M. Hadley. Mr. Hadley is a seasoned intellectual property attorney and a partner in the firm of Hennigan, Bennett and Dorman, in Los Angeles. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Video provides a compelling way for retailers to sell products. But is it for every ecommerce merchant? And, is it being fully utilized?
One man who has a strong opinion on the matter is Justin Foster. He’s the founder of The Video Commerce Consortium, a group of ecommerce professionals, online marketers, and technologists dedicated to advancing the use of video in ecommerce. He’s our guest in this “eCommerce Conversation” with Practical Ecommerce Contributing Editor Kevin Patrick Allen.
Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance is a complex issue that’s difficult for ecommerce merchants to understand. It’s also a complex issue for vendors. But it cannot be ignored. Massimo Arrigoni is the co-owner of Early Impact, developer of the licensed shopping cart ProductCart. He has thoroughly studied the PCI compliance issue. In this Ecommerce Conversation he gives us a vendor perspective on becoming PCI compliant.
Cynthia Snyder is the founder of Yonder Star Christmas Shop, a Pennsylvania-based online seller of Christmas Nativity scenes. Snyder launched the business in 2000 using a Yahoo! shopping cart. She joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock to discuss the business’s history and its current operations.
Running a business is challenging even when the economy is growing. But during a recession, it can be especially tough. Scott Dunlap, CEO of NearbyNow, understands that. NearbyNow, Inc. was founded in 2005 to simplify shopping for consumers who browse online but buy in stores. The company was showing solid growth until the economic downturn. That’s when NearbyNow management had to rethink their business model. We hear about Dunlap’s experience in this conversation with Practical Ecommerce’s Kevin Patrick Allen.
TransFS is a comparison shopping website for credit card processing providers. Sean Harper is the company’s CEO and co-founder. He joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kevin Allen to discuss the state of credit card processing for smaller online merchants, including PCI compliance rules.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission recently announced changes to its “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising”. Those changes address endorsements by bloggers and others who accept payment to review a product. Failure to follow the rules can result in substantial fines.
In this “Ecommerce Conversation,” Practical Ecommerce’s Kevin Patrick Allen talks with Julie O’Neill, of the Washington D.C. office of the law firm Morrison & Foerster. She’s a former staff attorney for the FTC in New York and offers guidelines pertaining to your business relationship with bloggers and reviewers.
It has become conventional wisdom that an email list is a vital weapon in your marketing arsenal. And in the world of email marketing there is no bigger name than Constant Contact. Eric Groves is senior vice president, market development for Constant Contact and he’s the author of the new book The Constant Contact Guide to Email Marketing. We hear Groves’ insights for merchants in this conversation with Practical Ecommerce’s Kevin Allen.
Online shoppers are increasingly relying on video to demonstrate a product or explain its use. But for many ecommerce merchants, producing, embedding and playing the video is a complicated, confusing process. There’s a company, however, that provides all of these video services on a self-serve basis, for a low monthly cost. It’s called Faculte.com and its founder is Maher Hakim, who joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
In the field of tracking and reporting on Internet traffic, there’s no more prominent name than comScore. It was founded in 1999 to track and report on ecommerce activity and, since then, it has diversified to track online advertising, socializing, searching, and much more. It’s now a publicly traded company, too, and its director of industry analysis is Andrew Lipsman, who tells us how it is that comScore knows all of that information. He joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
There’s no more innovative ecommerce company than eHobbies.com. Founded in 1999, it has grown to become a leader, if not the leader, in its field of hobby and toy retailing. Ken Kikkawa is the CEO of eHobbies.com. He also writes “The (eCommerce) Corner Office” blog at Practical eCommerce, and we’re pleased that he’s joined us to discuss ecommerce merchandising and, in particular, steps to prepare for the holiday ecommerce-selling season. He joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
The technology exists for ecommerce merchants to track where their visitors live. Digital Element is a firm that provides this geo-tracking service, which allows merchants to change their home pages and other landing pages based on, say, whether a visitor lives in Alaska or Florida. The technology behind this service is IP addresses. Every computer on the Internet has an IP address and, in this follow up interview, we asked Digital Element co-founder and executive vice president Rob Friedman what, exactly, is an IP address. He joins Practical eCommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
There was a time, in the 1990s, when the only place to buy a domain name was at Network Solutions. That storied company has since had its up and downs, but no one disputes the pioneering nature of its products. Recently, Network Solutions redesigned and repositioned its website and its product offerings. This includes its newly-named shopping cart, nsCommerceSpace. Julia Dalton is senior product manager – ecommerce services, with Network Solutions, and she joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
The ability to target consumers is important for many ecommerce businesses. In fact, many businesses could benefit greatly from knowing where a consumer lives, so that the offer, and even the language, can be tailored to that geographic area. Well, there’s a company that provides that level of targeting to online merchants. It’s called Digital Element and its co-founder and chief operating officer is Rob Friedman, who joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Microsoft’s new search engine is called Bing. It launched on June 3, 2009 and observers have already described it as a dramatic improvement over Microsoft’s previous search engine efforts. Most every ecommerce merchant relies on search engines, and many of them, we suspect, will be interested to learn how Bing affects their businesses. Dave Wascha, Microsoft’s Senior Director of Bing Shopping, joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock to discuss it all.
For many retail observers, the name Zappos is synonymous with great customer service and ecommerce well executed. The company was launched in 1999 as an online, footwear merchant. It has since grown into a retailing powerhouse, with 2008 sales reaching just over $1 billion dollars. In 2007, Zappos, a purely ecommerce firm, began publishing a printed catalog. That product is now a four-times-a-year magazine/catalog mix, and Zappos mails it to several million prospects annually. Jeanne Markel is Zappos’s Director of Casual Lifestyle and Performance. She’s involved with the execution and production of the catalog and she joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
The U.S. Virgin Islands are located roughly 90 miles east of Puerto Rico, in the Caribbean Sea. The islands are known for their white sand beaches and clear blue water. But a new Virgin Islands based economic initiative wants e-businesses to know there are significant federal tax advantages to doing business there. This new initiative partners the University of the Virgin Islands with private technology providers. It’s called “eCommerce Island,” and its chief marketing officer is Steve Rohrlick, who joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Miva Merchant is an early day shopping cart. First launched in 1995, it rose, and then fell, with the dot-com boom and bust. Findwhat.com, a publicly traded company, purchased Miva Merchant in 2004. Findwhat.com subsequently renamed itself Miva, only to sell the Miva Merchant shopping cart division to a private investor in August 2007. That investor is Russ Carroll. He’s now the CEO of Miva Merchant, and he joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
There is much talk about social media sites, and there’s talk of how companies can use social media for marketing purposes. One company doing just that is Comodo, a firm that provides online security solutions. Comodo has recently created a “social media officer” job position and Comodo’s CEO, Melih Abdulhayoglu, is here to discuss it with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Online retailers are frequently interested in new channels to sell their products. In addition to a merchant’s own ecommerce site, he or she can consider auction sites and comparison shopping sites, for example. And there’s also Amazon.com. Amazon competes with many smaller merchants, but it also allows those merchants to list products there, too. The service is called “Selling on Amazon” and the executive in charge of it is Sam Wheeler. Wheeler is Director Seller Services at Amazon and he’s here with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Many ecommerce merchants rely on email marketing and many of them, we suspect, wish they could monitor and target emails based on where a recipient lives. This would allow for offers specific to a market or geographic area. Well, Listrak, an email marketing provider based in Pennsylvania, now offers email “geo tracking.” Listrak’s CEO is Ross Kramer, and he joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock in this interview.
Millions of Internet users are blind, deaf or are otherwise unable to use a website in a traditional manner. Ensuring that a site functions well for these users is called accessibility, and our guest for this interview is an expert on that topic. Joseph Dolson is CEO and founder of Accessible Web Design, a St. Paul, MN based firm that designs and consults on accessibility matters. He joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Jordan CollettaThe shipping of products is a crucial function for most every ecommerce merchant. And there’s no company more prominent in the shipping business than UPS, who has recently announced upgrades to its “UPS Ready” program. Jordan Colletta is vice president of customer technology marketing for UPS, and he joins Practical eCommerce’s Kerry Murdock to discuss those upgrades. Mr. Colletta has been with UPS since 1975 and in his current position he’s responsible for all of UPS’s ecommerce marketing functions.
Andrew HazenThe use of domain names to enhance an ecommerce “footprint” is growing in popularity. We’ve asked Andrew Hazen, the founder and CEO of Prime Visibility, a Long Island, NY-based Internet marketing firm, to explain domain-name strategies to us. Hazen is an Internet pioneer, having founded Prime Visibility in the late 1990s. The firm specializes in search engine optimization and pay-per-click ad management, and its clients include Fox News, Lauren Hutton, Adelphi University, among others. Hazen joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
John EngatesRackspace is a preeminent hosting company. It was launched in San Antonio in 1996 and now, in 2009, the company’s stock is publicly traded. Rackspace’s 2008 revenues exceeded $500 million and it has data centers located around the globe. John Engates is Rackspace’s chief technology officer and he joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock to discuss cloud computing and other hosting trends.
John DozierJohn W. Dozier, Jr. is an attorney, a former Internet executive and a pioneer in the practice of Internet law. His firm, Dozier Internet Law, focuses exclusively on Internet and ecommerce issues. He joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock to discuss legal risks that confront smaller ecommerce merchants, and how best to avoid them.
Sanjay AurorA robust site search function can increase conversion rates for ecommerce merchants. Correcting color matches (“tan” vs. “sandstone”), correcting misspellings, and suggesting alternative products are all products of a high-level site search. Sanjay Arora joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock to explain all of this. Arora is CEO of Nextopia, a Toronto-based site search provider.
Derek Del ConteDerek Del Conte is co-founder of Innerfence, a developer of iPhone applications. Innerfence’s latest app is “Credit Card Terminal,” which allows the processing of credit card transactions on the iPhone, and merchants who sell products off-site or remotely could benefit from it. Del Conte joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
TinaKellyNews reports indicate that revenue growth for Google and other search engines is slowing. Bids on keywords and keyword phrases, some say, are softening. Could all of this be an opportunity for ecommerce merchants to increase PPC ad spend and gain more customers? We asked this to Tina Kelly, a pay-per-click advertising expert and an Online Marketing Manager for Netconcepts, a pay-per-click and search-engine-optimization marketing firm.
Kevin_Sproles What, exactly, makes for a high-performing ecommerce site? We asked this question to Kevin Sproles, the founder and CEO of Volusion, a hosted shopping cart firm that boasts over 10,000 clients. Sproles is an ecommerce pioneer, having founded Volusion in 1999. It is now a leader in ecommerce solutions, and Spoles has seen thousands of ecommerce sites over the years. He is also Volusion’s Chief Software Architect and he speaks here with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
JohnMontagueMany ecommerce merchants occupy niches within a broader industry. Spotlight Retail is one of those merchants, but, in Spotlight’s case, it occupies 20 separate niches (and 20 separate ecommerce sites) around one ecommerce platform. The entrepreneur behind Spotlight Retail is John Montague, the company’s owner and day-to-day manager. He discusses niche retailing with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
ALTMost every ecommerce merchant must address the fulfillment of orders and the logistics of storing inventory. Amazon.com does this in a big way, and it now offers its fulfillment and warehousing expertise to all merchants via its “Fulfillment by Amazon” service, which we discuss with Tom Taylor, Vice President of Fulfillment by Amazon. Taylor discusses the benefits of outsourcing these functions, and how Amazon can especially help merchants with international orders. He is joined by Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
ALTThe use of video in ecommerce sites is becoming increasingly popular. Merchants are using video to both increase conversion rates and to drive traffic to their sites. And video is affordable to produce, especially when a merchant does it himself. To explain all of this, including syndication and streaming options, Justin Foster, founder of The Video Commerce Consortium, joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
ALT The Christian Science Monitor, a 100 year-old Pulitzer-prize-winning newspaper, recently announced plans to drop its daily printed paper in favor of a mainly web-based publishing model. Other newspapers will almost certainly follow suit over the next few years. To discuss The Monitor’s decision and the future of news delivery, John Yemma, the editor of The Monitor, joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
ALTGail Goodman is CEO of Constant Contact, a leading self-service email marketing company with over 220,000 customers worldwide. She joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock to discuss email marketing in a slow economy, the challenges of running a (fast growing) public company and how merchants can best use email marketing.
ALTNinety per cent of cell phone users in the U.S. can receive text messages. Marketing to these cell phone users via text messages could be an opportunity for ecommerce merchants. mobileStorm is a text-message-marketing company and its CEO, Jared Reitzen, visited with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock on how text-message (also known as short message service, or “SMS”) marketing works.
ALTNetSuite is a pioneer is providing hosted software solutions to small and mid-sized businesses. NetSuite’s ecommerce platform is used by thousands of businesses worldwide, and, as a testament to its success, the company’s common stock is now publicly traded. We asked Zach Nelson, NetSuite’s CEO, about software-as-a-service, NetSuite and the future of ecommerce. Mr. Nelson joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
ALTThe use of video and rich media can enhance an ecommerce site. SellPoint is a firm that provides video and rich media (for free) to ecommerce merchants and we’ve asked its CEO, Rick Martin, to discuss the use of video and how, exactly, it increases the purchase conversion rate for online merchants. Mr. Martin joins Practical Ecommerce publisher Kerry Murdock.
ALTMany ecommerce merchants run pay-per-click ad campaigns on the major search engines. But Jason Prescott, CEO of Toptenwholesale.com, argues that merchants can obtain a higher return-on-investment by advertising on specialized virtual search engines. He discuss this with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Neal CreightonWith the existence of social networking and consumer review sites, disgruntled customers can post negative comments about an ecommerce merchant and cause lasting harm. Neal Creighton is CEO of RatePoint, a firm that provides reputation management tools for ecommerce merchants. He joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock to discuss ideas for managing a firm’s online reputation, including RatePoint’s reputation management solutions.
ALTCraig Vodnik is vice president, North America, for Cleverbridge, an ecommerce platform that helps online merchants sell software, music and other digital products. Vodnik joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock, and offers his ideas for the best way to sell digital products online and how to maximize international sales of digital products.
Melih Abdulhayoglu is founder and CEO of Comodo, a firm that provides Internet-security and fraud prevention services to ecommerce and other web-based firms. Adulhayoglu received in 2008 an Ernest & Young “Entrepreneur of the Year” award and is an authority on online security. He joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock, who asked him about the logic of EV SSLs, site seals and other steps that ecommerce merchants can take to ensure a safe shopping environment.
David Heinemeier Hansson created the Ruby on Rails software framework and is a partner in 37signals, producers of the popular Basecamp suite of online collaboration tools. Hansson joins Practical Ecommerce Publisher Kerry Murdock to discuss Ruby on Rails, web development and the state of ecommerce.
Dan Robbins is Vice President of Marketing at Enquisite, a search analytics company that follows customers from search to conversion. He joins Practical Ecommerce Publisher Kerry Murdock to discuss Enquisite and how it can supplement a merchant’s other analytics programs.
SLI Systems CEO Shaun Ryan discusses site search and SLI’s hosted site search solution with Practical Ecommerce Publisher Kerry Murdock.
Keirsun Scott is Social Media Director for OneUpWeb, an online marketing consulting company. He joins Practical Ecommerce Publisher Kerry Murdock to discuss the benefits of social media for ecommerce merchants, citing examples of companies who make use of social media.
Amit Das, Managing Director for the U.S. division of Worldwide Business Research, speaks with Practical Ecommerce Publisher Kerry Murdock about the upcoming virtual ecommerce trade show, eTailXpo.
Jim Rue is a freelance and technology journalists, and recently attended the Annual Book Expo. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce Publisher, Kerry Murdock, about the migration of content delivery to digital format, and what the future holds for printed content.
Jody Hartwig is the Vice President of eBusiness at Netconcepts, a company specializing in natural search marketing and ecommerce. She joins Practical Ecommerce Publisher Kerry Murdock to discuss Microsoft’s new Live Search cashback program.
Michael Shatz is the publisher of The Merchant’s Guide, a resource to help ecommerce merchants lower their credit card fees. He joins Practical Ecommerce Publisher Kerry Murdock to discuss credit card payments and how his guide can help merchants understand credit card issues.
Damon Schechter is CEO and Founder of Shipwire, a shipping and storage solution for ecommerce merchants. He joins Practical Ecommerce Publisher Kerry Murdock to discuss Shipwire and how it can help merchants get their inventories out of their garages.
Jason Keenan is the Media Advisor with ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Name and Numbers, which regulates domain names globally. ICANN was created in 1998 to perform various Internet administrative tasks previously done by a range of bodies including universities, private companies and the U.S. government. Keenan joins Publisher Kerry Murdock to discuss ICANN and the future of the domain name system.
Rhett McNulty is Chief Operating Officer for ShopIt, a social networking sales application for ecommerce merchants. He joins Practical Ecommerce's Kerry Murdock to discuss ShopIt and the value of social networking.
Sweta Duseja is Product Marketing Manager for nCircle, a security risk and compliance monitoring firm. She joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock to discuss PCI (payment card industry) compliance and data security risk.
MarketMotive CEO and Co-founder Michael Stebbins joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock to discuss MarketMotive’s subscription-based consulting, lessons and strategy help for ecommerce merchants.
Colin Rule of PayPal and eBay speaks with Practical Ecommerce Publisher, Kerry Murdock, about online dispute resolution between buyers and merchants.
Carr-Jones and Kerry Murdock talk about Bling! It, Vertus’ new photo-editing software designed to improve product photos.
Join Mitch Bettis as he discusses ecommerce insurance with Nancy Callahan, Vice President of AIG Insurance.
Crawford and Pat Callahan talk about upcoming social media classes offered by Danna, as well as her eBay experience.
Burke and Pat Callahan discuss social networking as a requirement for doing business in the future.
Justin Hertz and Pat Callahan explore the elements of a successful website, including how to distinguish yourself from the competition.
Reid Carr and Pat Callahan discuss the intricacies of a case study Carr co-authored — Cricket Communications: Less Is Definitely More
Toffer Winslow and Pat Callahan delve into ChoiceStream’s 2007 Personalization Survey, including the potential of personalized recommendations — good and bad.
Carolyn Gardner joins Pat Callahan to discuss methods of proactively managing the customer experience via “web personalization.”
Pat Callahan and Eady discuss the attributes that led to Fabric.com becoming the largest online retailer of fabric.
Pat Callahan is joined by Bjorn Espenes for a timely discussion about what merchants should be focusing on in the coming weeks before the holiday season.
Pat Callahan is joined by Alex Rampell. The two discuss the details of TrialPay, a unique payment platform, which allows customers to pay for one item by trying or buying something else.
Pat Callahan is joined by Kevin Smith, as the two discuss copyright infringement and how businesses can protect themselves.
Contributing Editor Pat Callahan is joined by Baruch Goldwasser for an interesting conversation about, among other things, the future of ecommerce.
Contributing Editor Pat Callahan is joined by Rand Fishkin, the CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz.org. The two discuss search engine optimization and writing successful blogs.
Practical Ecommerce and Sue Chapman, director of merchandising solutions at Mercado Software, discuss how online retailers should prepare for the upcoming holiday shopping season, including how to fine tune a website for the holidays.
Practical Ecommerce and Sue Chapman, director of merchandising solutions at Mercado Software, discuss how online retailers should prepare for the upcoming holiday shopping season, including how to fine tune a website for the holidays. Part 2 of 3.
Sue Chapman, director of merchandising solutions at Mercado Software, discusses how online retailers should prepare for the upcoming holiday shopping season, includng how to fine tune your website for the holidays.
Betterphoto.com’s President and Founder Jim Miotke continues his discussion of the intricacies of product photography.
Betterphoto.com’s President and Founder Jim Miotke discusses the intricacies of product photography.
Practical Ecommerce is joined by Betterphoto.com’s President and Founder Jim Miotke. The two discuss the latest in photography, including tips and tircks for product photography.
Listen in as Practical Ecommerce Contributing Editor Pat Callahan is joined by Matthew MacDonald, author of Creating Web Sites: The Missing Manual for the second part of this interview. The conversation includes a topical discussion about the future of both websites and ecommerce.
Listen in as Practical Ecommerce Contributing Editor Pat Callahan is joined by Matthew MacDonald, author of Creating Web Sites: The Missing Manual. The conversation includes a topical discussion about the future of both websites and ecommerce. Part 1 of 2.
Vince Talbert, vice president of marketing for I4 Commerce, discusses the Bill Me Later function that ecommerce merchants can implement at their sites. Talbert outlines the benefits merchants have with using alternate payment options for their online endeavors.
MOTIF Modern Living operates a unique contemporary furniture outlet just 10 minutes south of downtown Austin, Texas, and it launched a website last year. Its president, Steven Lora, is facing the start-up challenges that most online operations face. He discusses the hurdles his ecommerce business has with marketing its online site and search engine optimization. He also talks about the special challenge he faces with shipping, given the cumbersome nature of handling furniture.
Chuck Bankoff, director of web services for web design firm Wsieworks.com, provides tips on what questions should be asked by merchants when they are hiring a website designer. Bankoff also outlines various things merchants should be aware of when working with designers and the importance of setting performance benchmarks. In addition, he issues a caution about any designer who tosses out a flat price for design services.
Stephan Spencer, senior contributor for Practical Ecommerce and author of the popular SEO Report Card for the magazine, talks with SEO specialist Jonathan Hochman about the value of Wikipedia, using the resource as a way to build knowledge about and traffic to your website, tips about avoiding "linkspam" and things you should definitely not do to anger the Wiki editors.
It takes a special type of visionary to create an entirely new marketplace. Thomas Parkinson and his brother Andrew launched online grocer Peapod in the late 1980s. As pioneers in online selling, they have weathered the storms of changes in technology and market whims. Peapod was a key player in the dot-com bust, and the company has survived to tell about it.
Peapod serves about 260,000 customers from Boston to Milwaukee and from Washington, D.C., to Long Island, N.Y. Thomas Parkinson continues his discussion with Practical eCommerce’s Michael Cox in the second installment of a two-part podcast, and discusses the company’s history, its struggle to survive and what’s in store for the future of one of the Internet’s online pioneers.
It takes a special type of visionary to create an entirely new marketplace. Thomas Parkinson and his brother Andrew launched online grocer Peapod in the late 1980s. As pioneers in online selling, they have weathered the storms of changes in technology and market whims. Peapod was a key player in the dot-com bust, and the company has survived to tell about it. Peapod serves about 260,000 customers from Boston to Milwaukee and from Washington, D.C., to Long Island, N.Y. Thomas Parkinson talks with Practical Ecommerce’s Michael Cox in the first of a two-part podcast, and discusses the company’s history, its struggle to survive and what’s in store for the future of one of the Internet’s online pioneers.
Organize.com began in 1998 in Riverside, Calif., as Organize Everything — one convenient place to shop for storage and organization solutions. For those who have a garage or closet in need of some serious organizational help, Organize.com features a full slate of organizational products, shelving, boxes, bins, hangers and storage systems.
About a year after its beginning, the company launched a website. That channel propelled sales to about $10 million annually, 92.5 percent of which is generated through online channels.
Kevin Watts is director of ecommerce for the company. He spoke with Practical Ecommerce’s Mitch Bettis about the company’s growth and the success it has had in a niche market.
As with many great products in the marketplace, the diaper caddy was conceived out of necessity. Melissa Bramlage, a mother of two, needed a product that could hold all the essential baby care items in one convenient location. It seemed that every time she needed to change her child’s diaper, the new diaper was on the opposite end of the house from the place she left the ointment. Melissa visits with Practical Ecommerce’s Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis about the process of conceiving, creating, manufacturing and selling a unique product in the marketplace as well as her experiences running the company’s website, Sarabearbaskets.com.
Roman Kagan has built a successful niche business selling hard-to-find appliance parts to do-it-yourself types around the country. The site was launched in 1999 and has grown to about $5 million in annual sales with 150,000 unique visitors per month. Kagan’s custom-built site search functions help customers find appliance parts for which they are looking within a few clicks. What started as a site featuring about 300 products has grown to showcase more than 1 million parts for 170,000 appliance models.
Zimini offers a digital couponing and promotion platform to provide merchants and marketers with a robust set of geographic, demographic and interest-based targeting tools. If you’re an online or brick-and-mortar retailer who wants to offer a product coupon, a product like Zimini could be the answer. Consumers select a variety of personal interests (e.g., Italian food, dogs, travel, etc.), and Zimini allows a merchant the ability to target specific customers based on the criteria the consumers posted. It’s an inexpensive way to get a coupon in front of a customer who is specfically interested in your type of products.
A Foster & Smith catalog is a familiar sight at the home of many pet owners. Whether a household includes dogs, cats, birds, reptiles or other animals as pets, Foster & Smith has been a resource for more than two decades for pet owners to purchase supplies and products. Gordon Magee is Internet marketing and analysis manager for the company, and he discusses the company’s evolution from vet clinic, to catalog operator, to pet supply business to its successful online sales channel. In the late 1990s, the company launched a website that now boasts 1 million unique visitors per month and generates about $125 million annually, accounting for 57 percent of the company’s total revenue.
Jeff Stibel is the CEO of Web.com, a company providing an all-in-one hosted solution for business owners wanting to launch a website. Jeff discusses how easy it is for a business owner to launch a website, and how all-in-one solutions make it easy by combining hosting, shopping carts, SSL certificates, marketing services, design templates and more into a single package. Stibel also discusses why service-based businesses should launch a web presence. He notes that service businesses can create various online services including those that allow customers to download coupons for restaurants or other services that help schedule appointments to get a car fixed or schedule a visit with a physician.
What is one sure-fire way to reduce shopping cart abandonment? Ed Dawidowicz, senior consulting director for Creativegood.com, provides his advice in the second part of an interview with Practical Ecommerce’s Mitch Bettis on improving customer experience at your website. Dawidowicz identifies some of the frequent errors web site’s make with navigation and design. He also answers that age-old question of whether blue is the best color for text-based navigation link and whether that link should also be underlined.
Patricia Elkins caught the ecommerce bug just like many people do by successfully selling a few items on eBay. It wasn’t long before Elkins was building a dynamic niche business on eBay selling one-of-a-kind tapestries. The business has grown to more than $500,000 in sales, and it’s evolved from an eBay-only store to one that incorporates its own website at Treasurebeyondmeasure.com.
A latter-day devotee of minimalism is Craig Newmark. Newmark is the founder of the intensely successful Craigslist.com, and, as far as he is concerned, less is definitely more when it comes to website design and his business. Craigslist is minimalist by design, or perhaps the lack thereof, since the only thing the self-proclaimed nerd from New Jersey wanted to provide his visitors was service and convenience and he wanted to do it free of charge, if it was at all possible.
Shaun Ryan, CEO of site-search provider SLI Systems, discusses distinctive aspects of his product with Practical Ecommerce’s Mitch Bettis. The two discuss the benefits of faceted search, learning navigation, the impact both have on a website’s organic rankings in search engines and the cost to implement such technology.
Stephan Schambach, CEO of Demandware, provides a host of helpful tips to improve a customer’s experience at your website in a recent interview with Practical Ecommerces Mitch Bettis. Schambach also provides a distinctive opinion of shopping cart abandonment rates, and he discusses the reasons he thinks shoppers leave a site. He also discusses the differences in online shoppers compared to those who shop in a brick-and-mortar store and notes how quickly an ecommerce business can unravel if his software isn’t successfully integrated and helpful to customers.
What makes customers unhappy at a website? Adelle Emery, director of customer experience at Siteworx, answers the question and gives website owners tips on how to improve the customer’s experience at a site. She also discusses the differences in how people shop online compared to how they shop at a department store and how that should impact an ecommerce owner’s thinking. She recently spoke with Practical Ecommerce’s Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis about improving usability and customer experience at an ecommerce site.
Ed Dawidowicz, senior consulting director for Creativegood.com, provides a series of do-it-yourself tips to improve usability and customer experience at your website. He recently spoke with Practical Ecommerce’s Mitch Bettis about the importance of keyword mapping and custom landing pages for key search terms to provide better experience for customers. He also discusses the importance of observing customers using your site and the types of things you can learn when you observe online shoppers in action
In the second of a two-part series, Chris Cleveland CEO of Dieselpoint speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis about how site-search technology improves sales at websites. Cleveland also provides tips on what an ecommerce owner should look for when evaluating various site-search providers, and he discusses the various price ranges for such technology.
In the first of a two-part series, Chris Cleveland CEO of Dieselpoint speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis about how site-search technology improves sales at websites. Cleveland also discusses the differences in search-site technology options and what features can be deployed to improve profit margins and dramatically improve a shopping experience at a website.
Richard Sexton has parlayed his 10 years of brick-and-mortar success into a dynamic multichannel sales business with Carolina Rustica. With a combination of brick-and-mortar and online sales, Carolina Rustica expects to generate about $3.5 million in 2006, a 30 percent increase from the previous year. Approximately 15 percent of his total sales come from his brick-and-mortar store and 85 percent come from his online sales channels. Sexton is looking at adding additional brick-and-mortar locations, but continues to take a conservative approach to company growth. Carolina Rustica was profiled in the November issues of Practical Ecommerce and Richard recently spoke with Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis.
Are you wondering why you should you be pushing products to shopping comparison sites or are you looking for a tool that can help you push products to various shopping comparison sites and public marketplaces? Michael Lambert is the CEO of Merchant Advantage. His company offers a product named Channel Management, a dashboard software application that sits on the merchant’s desktop, giving that merchant the power to manage his entire product catalog to any shopping destination site immediately and without third party assistance. He recently spoke with Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis about the opportunities merchants have selling products at shopping comparison sites and marketplaces and ways merchants can manage the task of pushing data feeds to those shopping areas.
Do you need an order management solution to help manage activity from multiple sales channels? Are you struggling to manage the mounds of paperwork from sales that come to your store from various sales channels? Barney Stone, President of Stone Edge Technologies, the company that produces Stone Edge Order Manager, says merchants tend to begin looking at order management solutions when they reach 10-15 orders per day. He explains what an order management solution does for a merchant, how it can incorporate an inventory management system for merchants selling across multiple channels, how much a typical solution costs, how that solution communicates to shipping and fulfillment operations and how a merchant get a return on that investment.
Do you have trouble with shopping cart abandonment? Research has shown that online consumers abandon their shopping carts 75 percent of the time. Second Bite (www.secondbite.com) integrates with a shopping cart and offers a potential solution for order recovery after a consumer abandons a cart. Chad Herman is the director of business development for Second Bite and he recently spoke with Practical Ecommerce’s Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis.
Ralf VonSosen, vice president of Infopia (www.infopia.com), a company that provides an ecommerce platform to help merchants manage multichannel sales endeavors, speaks about how to begin thinking about selling in multiple channels and what these new sales opportunities can do for help your brand and boost your bottom line. Ralf also outlines several pitfalls that a merchant should be aware of when beginning to diversify sales into other channels.
Michael J. Katz is founder and “chief penguin” of Blue Penguin Development, Inc., a consulting firm helping companies increase sales by showing CEOs how to market to their existing relationships, and which specializes in the development of electronic newsletters. He recently spoke with Practical Ecommerce’s Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis about the importance of communicating with customers, how to get the “genuine you” into a regular electronic newsletter and what types of content to put in these newsletters.
How frequently should I send email marketing messages and newsletters to my customers, what should I put in the subject line to improve the open rate and how to include paid ads in an email newsletter are all topics discussed in this podcast by Practical Ecommerce Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis and Emma’s co-founder Clint Smith. Today’s podcast discusses several important tips to improve email campaigns, and it is the third and final installment in our podcast series with the myemma.com’s Clint Smith.
Are you still using Outlook Express or another text-based email client to email information to your customer base? Are you afraid to convert to and .html-based email service because you think it’s too hard to use? Practical Ecommerce’s Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis continues his discussion on email marketing with Clint Smith, the co-founder of Emma, a web-based email service at www.myemma.com. They talk about how easy it is to use an email service, the types of response tracking those services bring to the table and Clint provides tips on how to build a quality email list.
Matt and Amiee Moffett launched the Satellite Radio Superstore three years ago have an quickly built their site into one of the top 10 independent retailers for XM Radio. Sales at their site should hit around $3 million this year and that means there are plenty of orders to keep their 12 staff members hopping. Matt and Amiee have also started selling products on eBay and are close to launching a store for Sirius satellite radio products. The Satellite Radio Superstore was profiled in the October edition of Practical Ecommerce. Matt spoke with Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis about some of the challenges they have faced, including how to manage thousands of orders from multiple sales channels.
Scene7 is another leading company in the image management business. Scene7 provides services that can improve the product display features on ecommerce sites including zoom and pan features, online catalogs and improve product images. Sheila Dahlgren, senior vice president of marketing and corporate communication at Scene7, recently spoke to Practical Ecommerce’s Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis about the benefits of product display software.
Equilibrium is one company in the marketplace that automates imaging solutions and offers various display options including zoom and pan features. Sean Barger, CEO of Equilibrium, says there’s been a number of studies showing that people are more likely to buy a product if they can see the details — the front, the back and close-ups — especially for items that are detail-oriented, such a jewelry and electronics. He recently spoke to Practical Ecommerce’s Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis about the benefits of product display software.
AuctionCheckout offers a competitively priced merchant account package that is an alternative to PayPal. It’s one resource in the marketplace that can be used by an ecommerce owner to serve as a merchant account on his site and also be integrated on an auction site like eBay and Overstock so an ecommerce owner doesn’t need multiple payment channels. John Waldron and Sloane Bouchever acquired AuctionCheckout (www.auctioncheckout.com) in mid-July and recently spoke to Practical Ecommerce’s Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis.
Clint Smith, co-founder of Emma, discusses several important tips to improve email campaigns and addresses that age-old question of whether an email should use images or not. This podcast is the first in a series of podcasts with Clint Smith covering email marketing.
Kevin Mahon, founder and CEO of KEMP, and Peter Melerud, the company’s marketing and business development officer, talked with Practical Ecommerce’s Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis about what a load balancer does and noted some of the tell-tale signs of when a small business owner will know it’s time to deploy a load balancer.
Eric Lituchy is the founder and CEO of Delightfuldeliveries.com, a leading site for gift baskets and unique gift items, such as gourmet food items and deserts. Given how important product images are to a web site, in particular those selling food products, Eric speaks about his site’s incorporation of product display software and that software’s special features — like it’s zoom and pan technology.
Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine discusses niche markets, changes in the marketplace, and more.
Claire Henderson is the owner and president of ChristmasNightInc.com, a business and website that have evolved through the years, but simple principles have guided her business since its inception: Know your product, know your market and provide great customer service.
Mike Randolph is the founder and CEO of AbleCommerce. He discusses the merits of a software shopping cart solution, how that differs from hosted solutions like Yahoo! Stores and various trends he sees in the ecommerce landscape that ecommerce owners need to be aware of.
Manish Chowdhary of GoECart outlines in great detail his vision of the future of online shopping carts as well as discussed some of the differences between software solutions and hosted cart solutions.
Dimitri Krakovsky is the vice president of product, Yahoo! Small Business. He discusses the merits of a hosted shopping cart solution and various trends he sees in the ecommerce landscape that ecommerce owners need to be aware of.
Julian Green, director of ProStores, discusses the landscape of shopping cart options for small ecommerce businesses, some of the merits of a hosted solution and trends that might impact ecommerce owners.
Corey Koenig, channel sales manager for Authorize.Net, provides an interesting insight into the landscape of shopping carts and what a payment gateway like Authorize.Net is concerned about. Koenig also discusses PCI compliance, something each ecommerce merchant is required to follow.
Mark Baartse, the creator and operator of Shopping-Cart-Reviews.com visits about different shopping cart software, how to choose software, and what people can expect from Shopping-Cart-Reviews.com.
Steve Woda, the chairman and founder of Buysafe.com, talks about merchant credibility and Buysafe.com’s efforts to make Internet shopping a safer experience.
David Steel, CEO of Zoovy.com, talks about internet auction services, Zoovy.com, and touches on some new Web 2.0 topics such as the use of AJAX.
Roy Banks, President of Authorize.Net, speaks with Michael Cox about payment gateways and Authorize.Net.
Harald Ponce de Leon and Christian Lescuyer of the osCommerce Project talks with Practical Ecommerce.
One of the heads of the Streamlined Sales Tax Project Dwight Cook, a state senator from North Dakota, talks with Practical Ecommerce.
Stephanie Leffler, the CEO of shopping cart provider Monster Commerce, talks with Practical Ecommerce.
Before Google, Netscape, and Internet Explorer, there was Web Marketing Today. Dr. Ralph F. Wilson founded it back in 1995 as a vehicle to supplement his then-fledgling web development practice. An ordained minister, Dr. Wilson was also launching a new church at that time. “The church wasn’t going all that well, actually,” he says. “I was stuck at 50 years old without a job.”