Hello my friends. I was amazed to discover this week the number of eBay sellers that did not know about these boxes provided by the United States Postal Service. I decided to get over here to PEC and make this available for all readers. I know everyone is going through "busy times" right now with the holidays, including myself. I will pop in now and then and leave some short blogs with valuable information as we count down to the New Year! Website reads: Sell it on eBay. Ship it with U.S. Postal Service®. eBay and the U.S. Postal Service are happy to offer you FREE co-branded shipping boxes for Priority Mail® and Priority Mail Flat Rate Service. These boxes will be delivered directly to your home at no cost to you. I've been order...

Google Gears is a browser plugin that extends the functionality of your web browser, allowing for developers to create better performing web applications. Gears is an open source plugin that needs to be installed by the client if they choose to use it. Currently it is available for browsers on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. While they claim that for the Mac it is only available for Safari and Firefox browsers, I would bet that Chrome is either already supported or will be soon. Gears offers three modules, each of which adds a type of functionality to the browser that Gears in installed in that developers can take advantage of. The first, called LocalServer, provides a way to cache a web application on the client's machine for offline brow...

We at Artefact have found that the commoditization of e-commerce experiences is an industry-wide phenomenon, to the point where even the patriotic use of red, white and blue doesn’t make much difference. The sites miss obvious opportunities to articulate their brand values or provide deeply engaging user experiences, a sense of wonder and exploration. Perhaps retailers are hesitant to invest in a great user experience, given low stickiness of online users – after all, it is possible that in search for a better price users will abandon a no-matter-how-compelling online experience in favor of another e-retailer who carries the same goods at a lower price. But without developing compelling experiences, isn’t that a self-fulfilling prophecy?...

Since June of 2008, all merchants accepting credit cards have been required to become PCI-DSS compliant. PCI-DSS is a security standard to help prevent and control loses from businesses losing card holder data, specifically credit card numbers. PCI-DSS compliance requires merchants to complete a self assessment security questionnaire, and complete quarterly vulnerability scanning of their servers and network connections. PCI for large businesses has been implemented over the past several years, but compliance is now required for all businesses. PCI-DSS is broken into four groups based on a business's processing volume and the number of transactions they process per year. The largest group, Level 4 (merchants with fewer than 20,000 Visa ...

On a recent trip to the movie theater my eyes were opened up to just how popular mobile technology really is. I’ve read the studies and the articles and I know that I should start thinking about making my site "mobile ready" but it hadn’t really hit me until I took my kids to the movies on a Friday night. It was opening night and the theater was packed. We arrived early so we could be sure to get our candy and get good seats. As we waited for the movie to start I was people watching, mainly a large group of teenagers. I couldn’t believe it. Each and every one of them had a phone in their hand and they were madly texting each other and laughing. They weren’t having conversations by talking, they were texting and they were all stand...

I know that a blog post about DNS, or Domain Name System, records is probably not the sexiest topic out there, but it is one that I think will help developers that are struggling to wrap their heads around what DNS records do. To start with the Domain Name System is what routes requests across the internet, and what allows us to type in pretty domain names to our browsers and have them resolve to the correct server. This is accomplished by DNS records that allow for the translation of a semantic domain name, such as "mydomain.com" into the IP address of the server that needs to receive these requests, such as "12.34.56.98". Obviously the reason for this is pretty evident. Can you imagine how hard it would be to tell you customers to take...

I have been told that I sound like I am about 12 years old on the phone. This can be a problem with some people who don’t want to take me serious as the CEO of my company. The reason I bring this up is because of what just happened to me. I just got off the phone with a sales representative that was hoping to sell me some advertising space on a very well known website. While talking to her she asked me if I needed help with the spelling of the website she was selling. Let’s just say this is a household name that every woman in America knows, not to mention the spelling isn’t tricky. She later goes on to tell me that she feels she should educate me on a few things, and goes on in a very condescending tone about what she felt I neede...

For anyone who’s already experienced getting setup with a merchant account for credit card processing, some of you probably already know what to watch out for. If you are new to payments and you are searching around for a processor for the first time, here are a few tips to help you out. Be careful with the to-good-to-be-true offers. Well, since credit card processing isn’t that familiar to the first time shopper, that might be hard to initially know what’s too good to be true. For eCommerce, if someone is offering rates of 1.9% or less, then you better watch out for hidden fees since that price is at or below the actual cost of credit card processing. With really low rates like this, you will normally get hit by higher than normal ...

I thought I would take a minute to reflect on how the home page of Practical eCommerce has changed over the years. With some help from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which archives websites as they existed in the past, I was able to take a look at how things had changed. To start with, I think that it is important to understand that we as a company have also had some unique challenges in the last couple of years as a publishing company creating a printed magazine targeted at online business owners. That being said, let's take a look at some of the previous home pages that we have had. The Beginning, Circa 2005 Initially, our website was designed to sell magazine subscriptions. As you can see, our home page in 2005 featured a...

I've worked in this industry for some time now and one of the phenomenons I'll never quite understand is the excitement over Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Now I understand that Black Friday is the official kickoff to the holiday season but what I don't understand is the seemingly uncontrollable urge to give the store away in the form of "doorbusters". What's more, I really question whether or not this strategy is even remotely effective online. The basic concept is simple enough (and is as old as dirt) - get people to come in for the "special offer" and then have your salespeople and your merchandisers work their magic, getting customers to add on to their purchase. The problem as I see it is that online shopping is still very much ...

A question I get a lot is how I got started in E-Commerce and why I didn’t start with a brick and mortar store. We still don’t have a brick and mortar store and I honestly don’t see us investing in one for quite some time. We started out by selling our candles at local craft shows. Not to brag but we were always one of the most popular booths at these shows. We would typically sell out hours before the close of the show. Soon customers were calling us after the shows and asking for more candles, and some were asking if they could use our candles as wedding favors. At our last show we introduced more wedding favors and the crowds went crazy! That is how our online store began. I knew that if we could get our products out there we ...

An eBay group called: eBay Selling Tips has launched their first charity event called “Ornaments for Charity “Ornaments for Charity” was launched on November 1 by the eBay selling tips group. This amazing cause will run through November 30th. eBay buyers and sellers are uniting together to help a nonprofit called: Faith Mission, located in Brenham TX. Faith Mission has been helping the victims from Hurricane Ike in addition to many other tasks. Including: Homeless Shelter - Each month a daily average of 40 to 50 people are housed in the dorms for men, women, and families. Approximately 85% of the shelter residents are considered local. Food - Approximately 200 families per month receive food assistance through the Mission. The food...

It is important to me that I have strong relationships with my suppliers especially our drop ship suppliers. I feel it is important to know the people and the company that is representing my company to my customers. A few weeks ago one of my suppliers started having trouble with follow through. Many orders were not shipping, orders were getting lost or they were shipping the incorrect items. I understand that mistakes happen but when it started happening daily I knew I needed to take action. This is when a strong relationship pays off. I knew who to call and talk to in order to get this straightened out. I am one of those people that is usually nice to everyone. Not that day. (Let’s just say you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry...

It seems like every month there's some new payment method that comes online. Layaway, deferred billing, eChecks, not to mention the different checkout tools like Google Checkout and Paypal. So when do you say "enough is enough" and stop adding payment methods? There are times when it pays to be an early adopter, but when it comes to payment methods, we've chosen to see where the dust settles. We offer the standard credit cards along with Paypal, eCheck and Bill Me Later. For our customers, these are the four most important payment methods. We looked at a number of the other alternative payment methods (including Google Checkout) but ultimately found that there was either not enough demand or too high of a price to justify install...

The last two days my Blackberry has been beeping like crazy, and right now I have an inbox of 150+ messages. Am I really that busy? No, not usually but I have had to take some time off to take care of my kids. Both are home sick with the crud that always goes around this time a year. Days off, sick days…this is not something you can really do with a home-based business. In the early years this was one of my major struggles. My office used to be the kitchen table. You really can’t get away from your work with a laptop in the kitchen! I soon realized I needed to move my “office”. My husband and I decided to make our guest room a dedicated office for me. This has by far been one of the best decisions we ever made! It is somewhat ea...

Part 1 - Your Reputation, Domains, and Marketing - by Jeff Stolarcyk Your domain name is the most powerful piece of branding your store has on the Web! A strong, recognizable domain name for your business can bring even more organic traffic to your site. A poor domain name can prevent surfers from ever finding your site. Show the Engines Who You Are! Include keywords or phrases in your domain name to increase high natural search engine rankings. What makes you unique from the competition? What’s important to your industry or exemplifies your approach? Then evaluate your choices. Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool is a great, streamlined resource for investigating search volume. If I’m starting a blog about my favorite pretzels, I could t...

I was reminded today of one of my most beloved of annoyances– hacking CSS to make sure that a website displays consistently on each of the major browsers. Though everyone seems to have accepted it and moved on, cross-browser compatibility will ever remain one of the most frustrating things to a web designer. You spend all your time working on the perfect web layout, only to find that it isn't displaying the way that you thought it would for most of the people that view it. In my experience, there are only three major groups of browsers that you need to accommodate. I'm sure that not everyone agrees, but essentially you have your Internet Explorer group, your Firefox group and your Safari group. Why do I group them like this? The reason ...

I read somewhere recently that suggested that with the rise of text messaging there has been a decline in the use of email. I'm not sure if I buy that one, but I do think that text messaging is an often overlooked method of communicating. Websites such as Twitter have shown the value of text messaging, and I think that as mobile phones become more and more advanced, we will see more and more websites integrating with SMS text messaging services. That being said, let's take a look at how we can send text messages to a mobile phone from a Rails application. Enter the SMS_Fu Plugin To start with, we will need to install a plugin that makes sending text messages almost too simple, called SMS_fu, which was created by Brendan Lim. In order t...

One of the hardest parts of successfully selling online is giving people a reason to come back. As we all know, you can only compete on price for so long before your profit margins completely dry up, so you need to create an emotional response. For PoolDawg, we achieve this by pushing our company's personality. We don't want to be seen as some faceless site that just sells the same pool cues at the same prices as everyone else. We're not big and we're not corporate, so the last thing we want is a site that "feels" like a faceless "big box" store. We want our customers to see that we have a real passion for our industry and the game of pool. We figured out early on that we can't physically be at every major pool event so we had to...

Things in the Rails world seem to be moving pretty quickly lately, particularly as Github becomes more and more popular. One of the things that has been happening is that plugins and gems are being updated faster and faster, and in many cases plugins that are not application-specific are becoming gems. Once such example is the acts_as_state_machine plugin, which has recently been turned into the AASM gem. First off, the reason that some plugins are becoming gems, as I mentioned before, is two-fold. The first is that Rails now includes gem dependencies, as I wrote about last time. But what plugins are good candidates for a gem? As I mentioned, if a plugin is not application-specific, it is a good candidate for a gem since it can be used ...