Ecommerce Conversations, By Practical Ecommerce

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.