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Showing posts from May, 2021

Guitar Retailer Offers Inventory on Facebook

An increasing percentage of Internet consumers use Facebook. By some accounts, it's the 2nd biggest website and ecommerce merchants are now finding ways to tap into that traffic. One of these is Guitar Syndicate , a recently established retailer of musical instruments and accessories which uploads stock into its Facebook page under a unique store tab. Its co-owner, Scott Burnett, joined us recently to discuss the provider's Facebook strategy. Practical eCommerce: Tell us a bit about Guitar Syndicate. Scott Burnett: "We're a music equipment retailer and we sell guitars, audio accessories, effects pedals, strings and guitar accessories. Our doors opened in March, so it is for a brick-and-mortar place, but the internet is huge for us. We have been building an internet following before launch in 2010." See our products: Magento 2 pos system bigcommerce pos software woocommerce pos system shopify pos system msi inventory management PeC: How long h

Groupon Files for IPO: Rapid Development, No Gains

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Launched in Chicago at November 2008, Groupon filed to go public after allegedly rejecting a $6 billion takeover offer from Google last December. Like other recent filings by ecommerce companies, a few surprises emerged. Groupon is a pioneering advertising and marketing company that has achieved spectacular growth in a brief time period. The subscriber base grew from 152,200 as of June 30, 2009 to 83.1 million worldwide as of March 31, 2011. The business sold 116,231 Groupons in the second quarter of 2009 compared to 28.1 million in the first quarter of 2011. The amount of participating merchants increased from 212 in the second quarter of 2009 to 56,781 from the first quarter of 2011. Andrew D. Mason, Groupon's CEO, took the unusual step of adding a letter filled with bravado from the S-1 filing stating,"We do not measure ourselves in traditional ways," and"We're unusual and we like it like that." We'll soon see if investors enjoy it like that.

Our List of Publicly-Traded Ecommerce Companies

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The growth of online retailing has fostered many businesses in that sector to become publicly owned, selling stocks on major stock exchanges. We've been monitoring publicly-traded ecommerce providers, and we have prepared a list of these, together with publicly traded, pure-play Web businesses which get a material amount of revenue from ecommerce merchants. We have used a rather narrow definition and haven't included companies with a material amount of physical stores or receive a high proportion of earnings from catalogs. Our products: Magento 2 pos Bigcommerce pos software Woocommerce pos app Shopify pos app Commercetools Pos MSI Publicly Traded Ecommerce Companies Amazon.com Inc.. Ticker symbol: AMZN Amazon.com Launched in 1995, Amazon is the largest online retailer in the world. It became a public company in 1997 and expanded sales from only books to software, computer hardware, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, and toys. Amazon also provides data storage and clou

How LinkedIn Makes Cash; Behind the IPO Numbers

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In May, LinkedIn went public. To much fanfare, the business-oriented social networking site sold common shares at $45 each, for a total offering of $352.8 million and a general valuation -- private and public stocks -- of $4.3 billion. It was the largest Internet initial public offering since Google went public in 2004. At one stage on launching, a share was trading at over $94, bringing back wistful memories of the dotcom boom of the late 1990s. At the end of the day, the business was worth $8.9 billion. In contrast, Facebook, the world's biggest social media, but still a private company, may be worth $94 billion if it went public in the not too distant future, according to published reports. LinkedIn's home page. Our products: Magento 2 pos Bigcommerce pos software Woocommerce pos app Shopify pos app Commercetools Pos MSI Encouraging to Other Internet Businesses? Wall Street analysts, venture capitalists, and private technology firms were carefully watching LinkedIn

Can Group Coupons Help Ecommerce Merchants?

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Group-coupon features from firms like Groupon and LivingSocial have become very common. However, is it a marketing approach that's ideal for every small business, particularly the ones that lack a brick-and-mortar existence? Quite a few pure-play ecommerce businesses have started to tap into the trend. By way of instance, OfficeArrow, an internet community for office managers, has an ecommerce platform that contains a"deal-of-the-day" offer for the members. Moreover, Facebook application suppliers North Social and Wildfire have group-coupon-buying apps that merchants can use on Facebook Fan pages. Even some ecommerce platform suppliers -- ShopIgniter is 1 example -- are starting to bring a daily deals component in their platforms. Our products: Magento 2 pos Bigcommerce pos software Woocommerce pos app Shopify pos app Commercetools Pos MSI Attend the Webinar for Group-Coupon Insights On Thursday, March 10, at 3:00 p.m. Eastern U.S. time (12:00 Noon Pacific time), Prac

Durbin Amendment May Foster Deceptive Credit, Debit Processing Charges

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The Durbin Amendment into the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act takes effect on July 21, 2011. One of the critical points from the Amendment requires large financial institutions to cap their debit card interchange fees. Presently, the scheduled cap is 12 cents per transaction. However, that figure may change before July 21. Applies to Interchange Fees, Just Many observers debate the merits of the Durbin Amendment. Whether one thinks the amendment is great or not, Congress is trying to help consumers and merchants alike. Unfortunately, Congress does not appear to comprehend the credit card business; the Durbin Amendment regulates interchange fees, rather than the charges merchants pay to their merchant account providers. Though your merchant account provider won't need to pay more than the capped debit interchange fee, the supplier doesn't need to pass any fee discounts to you, the merchant. Many merchants won't ever see a cent of the reduction. Worse yet, others m

The PEC Review: Shipwire Fulfillment Services

Beginning an ecommerce company is no small job. A prospective online entrepreneur must handle every facet of the company, from choosing products and vendors to promotion. What's more, there's significant competition. As advertising and business guru Seth Godin says,"You can not out Amazon, Amazon." If you are going to be effective, you want to have some competitive advantage, and that benefit is often how you advertise your organization. Third-party Providers Can Help A well-known and often-cited illustration is Zappos, which markets itself as a service company; and it followed through by providing great customer service. Another example may be Nerdbots , which sells a exceptional item, robots. To answer the need to both handle everything and also to distinguish, some business owners turn to third party suppliers that can effectively take over some facet of the business so the company owner can focus on higher-gain regions like setting the above competitive advan

Internet Inventions Covered by Patent Law, States Supreme Court

The Bilski instance involved, possibly, a dramatic shift in U.S. patent legislation. It has been awaiting decision by the U.S. Supreme Court since the fall of 2009, and earlier this week, the Court rendered its ruling. The case involved the range of possible patents, and if an invention has to be tied into a machine to qualify for patents. It might have impacted many tens of thousands of technologies and Internet-related patents. To describe the Bilski choice to us, we talked with attorney and intellectual property specialist Robert Kovelman , together with the firm of Steptoe and Johnson in California. Practical eCommerce: Please outline the Supreme Court's decision on the Bilski case. Kovelman: "The Bilski choice is a substantial situation in patent law for many reasons. Mr. Bilski is an inventor and he had filed a patent application for a variety of methods associated with commodity buyers and the energy economy and how they can hedge against the risk of price shifti

How To Buy Shipping Supplies

Shipping supplies, such as corrugated cartons and bubble wrap, would be the third highest overhead cost (after labor and facilities cost ) in most order fulfillment operations. Whether or not you outsource your order fulfillment or do it in house, maintaining shipping supplies cheap is a high priority for people who ship in bulk. Blanket Purchase Orders Are a First Step in Cutting Costs Most shipping-supplies buyers begin with neighborhood or online vendors and purchase in small lots at published prices. As purchasing volume rises, the next step is to contact the vendor's custom quotation department to negotiate a blanket arrangement subject to quantity discounts. This will require buying bigger quantity, but the cost savings could be significant. See our products: Magento 2 pos system bigcommerce pos software woocommerce pos system shopify pos system msi inventory management These are the stock packaging vendors that we work with at eFullfillment Service, the comp

Highlights in the Internet Retailer Conference

I recently attended the Internet Retailer Conference in Chicago and it was a terrific show. If you can attend just 1 show annually, I highly recommend visiting this one and if you're unable to get to some shows because you're overly involved in your business you want to discover a way to get there. This is the 3rd time I've attended this conference and I have learned alot and flipped the relations I have met into friends in addition to opportunities to grow my company. The keynote speaker was Imran Jooma, head of Sears ecommerce program. Jooma provided a fascinating look into the current and future ecommerce initiatives from Sears. The work being done there will raise the bar for everybody in the ecommerce world. Sears has also introduced into the merchant market, which Amazon has been doing for ages. See our products: Magento 2 pos system bigcommerce pos software woocommerce pos system shopify pos system msi inventory management Along with the speakers an