William Cameron | Beyond the Keyboard

For the 2013 holiday shopping season, consumers will increasingly rely on marketplaces and comparison-shopping channels.  Amazon, Newegg, Ebay, Google Shopping — all have huge numbers of motivated shoppers.  Ecommerce merchants large and small can sell on these channels. But not all of them will do it profitably.   1. Products. Identifying winning products is the first step. Research last year's best sellers, evaluate new products, and consider niche offerings and up-sells.  2. Sourcing and inventory management.  Ensuring product availability is crucial. The necessity of placing orders early and check for add-on items. 3. Product content and feeds. Compelling images, descriptions, and videos are all important for selling products on marketplaces and comparison-shopping channels. Optimize your product content and data feeds. 4. Pricing. Understanding your margins is vital for profitable multichannel selling. Understand dynamic pricing and strategies for mass-market pricing. 5.

Lots of developers understand that object oriented code offers advantages over procedural programming. And so, they begin working on creating objects in their own projects, and eventually feel pretty good about what they've done. After all, if they're using objects, their code must be object oriented, right? Well, not exactly. They quickly find out just how limited their code is when they try to implement the concepts of object oriented programming, like reuse and extensibility. And they quickly find that their code is really procedural code wrapped up in classes, not the grand object oriented application they thought it was. But how can you know ahead of time what kind of code you have? Is there a set of tools you can use to determine if your code is truly object oriented, or is it just procedural code wrapped in classes? Let's take a look at the hallmarks of truly object oriented code and find out. Object oriented code splits responsibilities between classes. The big

Add link back to category that allows sort-by-customer-review. Include star ratings on cross-sells. Use Expert / Staff Reviews Show money back guarantees right on product page when available. Allow customers to ask and answer questions on your page. Include manufacturer’s website URL and contact number on the product page. Enable comments on customer reviews. Know when to offer live chat. Source: http://www.getelastic.com/thinking-positively-negative-reviews/

Shopping cart abandonment is an epidemic in online retailing, with some companies reporting that more than 60% of checkouts end without a conversion. Preventing even a relatively small percentage of these abandoned carts would significantly improve revenues and profits. While purchase price and shipping costs are the leading reported causes of shopping cart abandonment, ease of use is close behind. Fighting Frustration One increasingly popular method used to slash cart abandonment rates is to introduce single-page, Ajax-driven checkout forms that combine the convenience of a single page format with asynchronous form validation. As we start this discussion of the pros and cons of single-page, Ajax checkouts, I need to describe why these two methods—one pagers and Ajax—are employed and what frustrating problems they seek to solve. Single-Page Checkout is Faster, Easier to Understand Single-page checkout is faster and easier so that more customers convert. When you're trying t