Ecommerce Conversations, By Practical Ecommerce

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.