Ecommerce Conversations

In the second of a two-part series, Chris Cleveland CEO of Dieselpoint speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis about how site-search technology improves sales at websites. Cleveland also provides tips on what an ecommerce owner should look for when evaluating various site-search providers, and he discusses the various price ranges for such technology.

In the first of a two-part series, Chris Cleveland CEO of Dieselpoint speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis about how site-search technology improves sales at websites. Cleveland also discusses the differences in search-site technology options and what features can be deployed to improve profit margins and dramatically improve a shopping experience at a website.

Richard Sexton has parlayed his 10 years of brick-and-mortar success into a dynamic multichannel sales business with Carolina Rustica. With a combination of brick-and-mortar and online sales, Carolina Rustica expects to generate about $3.5 million in 2006, a 30 percent increase from the previous year. Approximately 15 percent of his total sales come from his brick-and-mortar store and 85 percent come from his online sales channels. Sexton is looking at adding additional brick-and-mortar locations, but continues to take a conservative approach to company growth. Carolina Rustica was profiled in the November issues of Practical Ecommerce and Richard recently spoke with Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis.

Are you wondering why you should you be pushing products to shopping comparison sites or are you looking for a tool that can help you push products to various shopping comparison sites and public marketplaces? Michael Lambert is the CEO of Merchant Advantage. His company offers a product named Channel Management, a dashboard software application that sits on the merchant’s desktop, giving that merchant the power to manage his entire product catalog to any shopping destination site immediately and without third party assistance. He recently spoke with Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis about the opportunities merchants have selling products at shopping comparison sites and marketplaces and ways merchants can manage the task of pushing data feeds to those shopping areas.

Do you need an order management solution to help manage activity from multiple sales channels? Are you struggling to manage the mounds of paperwork from sales that come to your store from various sales channels? Barney Stone, President of Stone Edge Technologies, the company that produces Stone Edge Order Manager, says merchants tend to begin looking at order management solutions when they reach 10-15 orders per day. He explains what an order management solution does for a merchant, how it can incorporate an inventory management system for merchants selling across multiple channels, how much a typical solution costs, how that solution communicates to shipping and fulfillment operations and how a merchant get a return on that investment.

Do you have trouble with shopping cart abandonment? Research has shown that online consumers abandon their shopping carts 75 percent of the time. Second Bite (www.secondbite.com) integrates with a shopping cart and offers a potential solution for order recovery after a consumer abandons a cart. Chad Herman is the director of business development for Second Bite and he recently spoke with Practical Ecommerce’s Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis.

Ralf VonSosen, vice president of Infopia (www.infopia.com), a company that provides an ecommerce platform to help merchants manage multichannel sales endeavors, speaks about how to begin thinking about selling in multiple channels and what these new sales opportunities can do for help your brand and boost your bottom line. Ralf also outlines several pitfalls that a merchant should be aware of when beginning to diversify sales into other channels.

Michael J. Katz is founder and “chief penguin” of Blue Penguin Development, Inc., a consulting firm helping companies increase sales by showing CEOs how to market to their existing relationships, and which specializes in the development of electronic newsletters. He recently spoke with Practical Ecommerce’s Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis about the importance of communicating with customers, how to get the “genuine you” into a regular electronic newsletter and what types of content to put in these newsletters.

How frequently should I send email marketing messages and newsletters to my customers, what should I put in the subject line to improve the open rate and how to include paid ads in an email newsletter are all topics discussed in this podcast by Practical Ecommerce Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis and Emma’s co-founder Clint Smith. Today’s podcast discusses several important tips to improve email campaigns, and it is the third and final installment in our podcast series with the myemma.com’s Clint Smith.

Are you still using Outlook Express or another text-based email client to email information to your customer base? Are you afraid to convert to and .html-based email service because you think it’s too hard to use? Practical Ecommerce’s Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis continues his discussion on email marketing with Clint Smith, the co-founder of Emma, a web-based email service at www.myemma.com. They talk about how easy it is to use an email service, the types of response tracking those services bring to the table and Clint provides tips on how to build a quality email list.