Ecommerce Conversations

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 appl...

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 M...

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, Mich...

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 Sy...

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 NetSuit...

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...

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 manage...

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...

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 he...

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 gatewa...

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 PowerR...

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 r...

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.