Creating a successful e-commerce operation is no easy task. Take the grueling process of creating a successful company offline and add to it a multitude of complexities from online marketing challenges to technical issues and you have an ecommerce operation. When I reflect back on my experience during the last 12 years in creating ecommerce websites and online portals, it is difficult to contribute the success or the failure of an ecommerce operation to a single issue. It is usually a culmination of several issues that can make or break the company. And I’ve learned from seeing ecommerce sites fail …

On most ecommerce websites category pages and their categorization schemes are driven by a business process giving very little attention to the heart of any transaction: the online visitor.

Ultimately, a category page plays an important supporting role in funneling traffic to product pages. Amazon.com, for example, expects the visitor to navigate to the product page to add an item to your cart.

Content is King!

The statement above has become the holy grail of blogging. No matter what we do content still is and will forever be the main catalyst to drive your blog to success. Without an eye catching, attention grabbing content it is hard to persuade readers to “hang” around your blog and compel them to subscribe. We have all seen blogs that have been launched around the same time but one hits the rock bottom whereas the other reaches the heights of success. They both might be expert in the same field, but one rises and the other fails. …

I experienced one of the most valuable lessons in the late 90s when I ran my first business, Quill Publishing. At Quill we had achieved the majority of our business and financial goals and had taken great strides to carve a nice niche for ourselves. Everything seemed to go exactly how I had envisioned and hoped.

Until one day…

Email marketing offers a great opportunity to connect with current customer as well as potential prospects. Compare for example traditional website visitors to subscribers of an opt-in mailing list. Site visitors include those who land on the site by mistake and may not be interested in what you have to offer. An opt-in mailing list on the other hand provides a segment of visitors who are interested in a particular topic who actively chose to subscribe to your mailing list.

Here is the painful truth: Visitors do not care about you or your company. They come to your site with different objectives and goals fueled by unique personalities and many times just browsing or surfing the net. So, what can you do to persuade them to take an action?

An old client of mine called in yesterday to ask for some help. I helped architect an enterprise e-commerce website back in 2001. The website integrated with a complex back office solution (SAP/ Oracle) that handled all the counting aspects of the system. The client was hoping to upgrade portions of the system to allow visitors to their website to enter coupon codes. Also at surface this may seem to be a fairly forward and easy to implement task, however, it must be said that there are usually some technical challenges when attempting to integrate several systems. As I …

One of the most important ways the internet revolutionized marketing is by adding true accountability to it. Pre-internet there was no real way to measure the result of running marketing efforts. There was a clear separation between spending money on a marketing campaign and getting some measureable and quantifiable results for that campaign. There were no tools to give real detailed data on the success of a campaign. And even in the cases where some information could be collected, most marketing professionals did not care much for it since after all it’s the job of the accounting department to …