For today’s time-strapped shopper, boutiques are becoming more popular by the minute. Compared to shopping in an expansive department store, these smaller specialty shops can be much more enjoyable primarily because the selection isn’t as overwhelming. It also helps that the boutique owner has curated a collection of what he or she considers the best of the best, alleviating the shopper from sorting through racks and racks of items. Boutiques, however, aren’t the only respite for time-strapped shoppers. Online shopping...

After a new sales tax regulation went into effect Jan. 1, some eCommerce companies found themselves in scramble mode. For proponents of having online sales treated the same as sales through brick-and-mortar locations, however, their day has finally come true in Illinois, at least partially. Legislators in Illinois have worked for many months to create an online sale tax law to help bolster state revenues. The state’s supreme court rejected an earlier measure because it violated a federal rule against discriminatory...

Nearly 112 million people tuned in to the Super Bowl last year, representing one of the largest television audiences ever. It’s the most watched football game of the year, but as we know, many people are as equally excited for the commercials, which are some of the best you’ll see all year. However, does eCommerce see much action on Super Bowl Sunday? A study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that television viewership hurts online sales. The study, conducted...

The marketers that are on top of their game are the ones that no longer consider driving website traffic a challenge. Those marketers have a slew of tools and techniques at their disposal and have mastered how to use them. Their newest challenge, however, is ensuring that the traffic that lands on their website stays there.   In an eBook produced by Yottaa, a leader in CDN technology focused on website performance, the editors there made a few intriguing statements about...

At the beginning of the year, Forrester released its The Forrester Wave report: Lead-To-Revenue Management Platform Vendors, Q1 2014. In it, Forrester evaluated the leading solution providers in the space, including Act-On, Adobe, CallidusCloud, IBM, Marketo, Oracle, salesforce.com, Salesfusion and Silverpop. This was the first time that Forrester focused its research on L2RM automation vendors. Understanding the results of Forrester’s research, however, must start by understanding lead-to-revenue management or L2RM. According to Forrester, initial L2RM automation solutions came about with the...

The eCommerce business owners who put website page performance at the top of their list of priorities are those who see the big picture. They understand that the online user experience is much more than flashy images and pithy tag lines. They consider page response times to be just as important.    Speaking of those flashy images, however, often times, they are the culprit behind slow-to-load web pages – one of the first reasons a website visitor will leave a site....

As far as most folks are concerned, the actual shopping part of grocery shopping isn’t that bad. It’s the unloading-the-car portion of it that’s not exactly a good time. Loaded up with 12 rolls of toilet paper, an economy sized jug of laundry detergent and a case of soda – amongst all of the other odds and ends – reinforces the case for grocery delivery services like AmazonFresh.     Currently, shoppers on the Amazon website can buy quite a few...

Most everyone knows that a bad experience is more likely to be shared than a good one. For some reason, people are much more inclined to rant than they are to rave. Even writers have an easier time writing a bad review than a good one. In the end, everyone just wants to be a critic.   Because of this little human idiosyncrasy, business owners are uber sensitive to the wants and needs of their customers and clients. And they should...

For anyone who searches for eCommerce news on a daily basis, they would be hard-pressed to not have noticed a new theme that’s been emerging in the search results: India. Although articles about the U.S. industry typically dominate those results, news from India has been showing up more and more.   The success of Indian eCommerce has risen to such a degree that the country is now reconsidering its ban on foreign investments in its eCommerce sector. Amazon and eBay,...

The debate over imposing Internet sales taxes has been a fairly ongoing one since the U.S. Senate passed the Marketplace Fairness Act back in May 2013. And yet again, the legislation, which grants states the authority to require retailers to collect sales tax for online transactions, is in the spotlight.   One of the major reasons that the Marketplace Fairness Act has been contested is the potential blow that it could impose on small business owners. The complexities of drawing sales...