Ecommerce Blog

Although paid listings are displayed in different areas of a Search Engine’s results page than organic listings, most consumers do not readily distinguish the two. The big difference (especially to online advertisers) is that when you click on one type of ad- someone is paying for it. Paid results can be implemented and adjusted rather quickly (via Search Engine Marketing/ Advertising), while organic listings are more of a long term result of a site’s efforts (gained

Original post by blogadmin

Regardless of how smoothly your online business may be running, customer service difficulties are inevitable. The way you handle these difficulties will have a significant impact on your customers’ impression of your business. Unfortunately, one unsatisfied customer can broadcast his or her experience all over the internet with little regard for fairness or accuracy, and few people are willing to purchase from a company they do not trust. Here are some tips to help

Original post by blogadmin

Part Two of the Integration series - the EP crew discuss sharing data between applications with open APIs and and web services.

Host Dave O is joined by Elastic Path Product manager Peter Sheldon and Sales Engineer Shawn Labrecque to delve into integration scenarios common in ecommerce businesses (i.e. tax, shipping, POS, inventory management systems) and also explain the technical tools and technologies used to build and customize EP Connect Web Services.

They also relate some real-life examples of integrations with SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle’s financial and commerce applications, plus custom apps of every variety.

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[Photo by Daveo]

Thanks to the Rambling Canuck for music - Ramble On blog

Original post by Dave Olson

NOTE: CK, one of Elastic Path’s QA Engineers, pointed out a borked link on this podcast so here is a fresh version of Get Elastic podcast Episode #21 featuring Chris Anderson at eTail West. Sorry for any inconvenience and enjoy!

At Etail West trade show and conference, Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, chats about how retailers can capitalize on marketing less popular products and increase sales by optimizing for niche searches plus discuss his career path from physicist to economist (and even banter about free beer) with DaveO and Jason Billingsley.

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[photo of Chris Anderson at
eTail West by DaveO]

Original post by Dave Olson

In this overview of enterprise software integration, host Dave O talks about open APIs, database flavors, application servers and the true meaning of flexibility and intergration over beverages with System Engineers Shawn Labrecque and Peter Sheldon plus Customer Representative Ryan Quaye.

They also present business scenarios benefitting from intergration and discuss the advantages of linking systems together including SAP, Oracle, IBM, JBoss and proprietary systems and survey the risks of not sharing data across channels while chatting at Turk’s West / Cafe Milano in Vancouver.

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[Photpo EP Marketing window of fame
by DaveO]

Music by Rambling Canuck - Ramble On blog

Original post by Dave Olson

Spring into the new season with Spring/Easter homepage graphics, created just for you by our design team. The perfect way to keep your site up-to-date. To save a graphic for uploading, right click on the image and hit Save Image As. Uploading your Spring/Easter Homepage Graphic- From the admin area of your site, click Webmaster and then click on Branding Images. Next to Home Page Graphic, click Browse to find the image file you saved previously. Click on the

Original post by blogadmin

DM News published an article about the crew over at Power Reviews concerning the announcement of a multi-language platform being used by none other than our Vancouver neighbours Mountain Equipment Co-Op whose flagship store is just around the corner.

Anyhow, in the March 8, 2007 article “Voila! PowerReviews lets users review in French, Spanish, Italian and German” by Dianna Dilworth, we are grouped in with PR other partners who are a heavy hitting list of ecommerce vendors.

As regular readers likely know, Elastic Path customers are spread around the globe and many more sell goods internationally - as such, we enthusiastically support cool tools which combine global mindedness and the openness user customer generated content.

Already ready to go along with the French and English used by MEC are Italian and German (apologies to our Icelandic friends) with Chinese, Japanese and Korean coming later this year.

Article snippet after the break to get you started:

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Original post by Dave Olson

Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader from Bloor Research, published an interesting article about how paying attention to site accessibility will improve the shopping experience for impaired users as well as the Internet community at large. In his article “Improved Accessible Search with Elastic Path” at IT Analysis, Mr. Abrahams outlines a few scenarios and explains navigation methods used by impaired shoppers and suggests a few key enhancements - i.e. product specific page URLs and relevant landing pages and accurate titles and descriptions - to help relevant pages float to the top of the search engine rankings.

In his narrative, Peter also advises optimizing your ecommerce store for web visitors using screen readers or speech recognition for text input by using filterable search results plus breadcrumbs navigation history as well as allowing multiple ways to search (i.e. by SKU, name, brand etc.) and holds up Elastic Path’s Optimize technology used in BEA Aqua Logic Commerce Services as an example.

BEA have recently announced a new version of AquaLogic Commerce Server which includes search engine optimisation technologies from Elastic Path which will help the searcher with a disability as well as the time-poor searcher.

Elastic Path - Optimize - ensures that pages are well formed for the search engine spiders to gather complete and accurate index information.

And there are more benefits too … by making your shop easier to navigate and making ‘longtail’ product pages more findable, you will be greatly appreciated by the shopper with a disability who hates browsing through dozens of useless search results - as well as enjoying more fruitful organic search results with fantastic ROI leading to a wider audience across the Internet.

As Abrahams puts forth,

I also believe that designing the searches with impaired users in mind will highlight any usability issues and hence further improve the experience for the whole e-buyer community.

Additional Reading on this topic:

Peter Abrahams’ Accessibility and Search Engine Optimisation article and Massive business case for accessibility

Original post by Dave Olson

A major goal of any online business owner is to give customers complete confidence in buying from his or her own site. And if it is a legitimate business, it is likely that the owner stands behind those items sold. With that being said, why not offer your customers a money-back guarantee? A guarantee can give potential customers the reassurance that if they make a purchase and don’t get what they want, all is not lost. Answer the following four questions to help

Original post by blogadmin

After a “too close” connection in Montreal I sat on the plane wondering how poor airport usability actually is. Those thoughts quickly turned to ecommerce usability and how poor online stores often are as well. The following chart is surprisingly accurate on how both these environments stack up to the paces users put them through.

Do you have any other examples of how these two environments are similar?

Original post by Jason Billingsley

A mistake that many junior developers make is to think that they’re writing code for the computer to understand, but computers don’t understand anything. They process. And computers can process some amazing messes without a hiccup. No, the entity that has to understand the code is the poor programmer (often yourself, weeks or months later) who has to maintain the code.

One of the very easiest things that a programmer can do to help make his code more readable and easier to understand is to adhere to some standard best practices and a rigid format. But let’s be honest…. that’s really hard to do when you’re in a hurry (and we’re always in a hurry). Eclipse offers limited support for formatting, but it doesn’t go far enough. That’s where a couple of my favorite tools come in: Checkstyle and PMD. These tools will force you into submission and remind you to correct your bad habits. So, what are they, and how do they work?

PMD (slogan: Don’t shoot the messenger) and Checkstyle are two fantastic customizable tools that both offer Eclipse plugins to help out a developer who might otherwise, um, forget to keep things in check. Some definitions are in order. PMD is a tool that checks your code for possible bugs, overcomplicated methods, duplicate code - that kind of thing. Why it’s called PMD remains a bit of a mystery. Checkstyle makes sure that your code adheres to a particular format, via means of a configuration file.

I have to be honest here. The first time I was introduced to these plugins I wanted to throw them out within 10 minutes. I absolutely loathed them. How dare it tell me that my method was “too complex”? How annoying to be reminded to enter a space after that bracket! But over time I came to appreciate the consistency of my code. It was nice to have that not-so-subtle reminder that I ought to consider refactoring to make my method a bit cleaner, a bit shorter.

Having used these tools now for several months, I really miss them when using an IDE that doesn’t have them installed. I highly recommend them to every Java developer. They need a little customizing so that they enforce the rules you or your organization care about, but the payoff of having nice, clean, professional-looking code is well worth the initial pain of having a tool force you to squash all your bad habits. So install them, try them out. You’ll thank yourself when a few weeks later you have to understand what you wrote.

Original post by Tom Manning

I along with thousands of website owners am always trying to improve my ecommerce sites. Hopefully that little font tweak that I make half asleep at midnight will lead to some huge increase in sales. Most likely not, but maybe…

In truth, one of the best ways to get good ideas about what to change on your website, is by looking at other websites that have their crap together. Not every mega site does the right things, and you definitely don’t want to go start incorporating every bell and whistle that you can find, but these sites spend a lot of money on testing, so if they have some feature on their site, is it normally for a reason.

Here are some sites with very good features, some of which may be a good idea for your website. These are only ecommerce sites that sell products through a shopping cart and checkout system.

Homepage Design:
Crutchfield - This site’s homepage is excellent. Well organized, not overcrowded, and very effective.

Navigation / Site Architecture:
Victoria’s Secret - Huge amount of content that is very well organized. In my opinion, this is one of the best sites on the internet as an example of how to properly organize a lot of products.

Category Layout:
Academic Superstore - I get to see every product in the category, in a well organized format, and I can tell software will work on my computer from the category view. I can also add a product to my cart without loading the entire product page.

Product Layout:
Circuit City - The products are very clean, and all of the extra information is easily accessible below the overview description. The add to cart button contrasts the rest of the page, and is where I would expect to see it. No surprises. Best Buy on the other hand, has the add to cart button’s on the left side of the product description. Not somewhere that I would look immediately.

Best product photos:
TigerDirect - Their are usually five or more images with every product. Also, not only is the product shown from multiple angles, but the entire contents of the box that it comes in are laid out. No surprises.

Original post by jestep

In a recent online article from ECommerce-Guide.com, two Volusion clients (TheBeerBelly.com and BTTF.com) were featured as profitable niche sites. As mentioned in the Getting Started section, niche products are one of the top three things to look for when finding products to sell online. Niche markets, as bizarre as they may sometimes appear, […]

Original post by blogadmin

Attending conferences can be an expensive proposition. Besides the cost of registration and travel, the opportunity costs resulting from being out of the office can be considerable. The shows can be overwhelming with multiple tracks of presentations and a show floor full of vendors competing for your ear. Here are 11 tips to help you maximize the return on investment from your conference attendance.

Grab the .pdf at Maximizing the Conference Experience - 11 Tips for Smart Attendees post.

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[Poolside in Palm Desert photo by DaveO]

Original post by Dave Olson

Couldn’t attend eTail West? Come along as Dave O and Jason Billingsley chat about the show and discuss favorite podcast interviews, interesting vendors plus the pleasure of making friends with competitors, meeting new colleagues and seeing glazed-over faces. They also ponder offering some tips for conference attendees to maximize ROI on their conference attendance investment.

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[Photo of flamingos in Palm Desert
by Dave O]

Show notes and links after the break …

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Original post by Dave Olson