One thing I regularly neglect on this blog is the all important SEO aspect of e-commerce. Luckily, Sara Collins, a writer for NerdWallet.com was willing to write on this topic. Her guest post is below: While having a great product may be your first priority, that effort may be wasted unless it’s accompanied by a high quality description. Consumers…
I learned about the minimum effective dose principle after reading Tim Ferriss’ “The Four Hour Workweek”. The concept is so simple and awesome and goes like this: the minimum effective dose is the smallest amount that will produce the desired outcome. So as an example you need to heat water to 212°F (100°C) in order for it to boil. If you…
I recently finished Kevin Kelly’s “What Technology Wants”. Normally I would have written a post about it, but the book covered so many things and went into such depth that it would have been too much of an undertaking, plus I try to keep my blog posts short. There was one thing he wrote about though that has stuck with…
You can’t pick up an Ecommerce magazine or read a blog nowadays without being told that you need a social media strategy. At this point you’d think that every online store has one, but over the last few weeks I’ve been collecting data on hundreds of online stores (who we’ll be contacting soon to pitch our product to) and I’ve…
Fair warning on this post: If you’re not currently structuring your inventory or thinking of redoing it then this might be the most boring thing you’ve ever read. You might want to skip this one. For those of you that are, though, I’ve listed my top 7 things to keep in mind when building out your SKUs. Every single one…
This post is the second part of my Fire Your IT Guy series. In it I explain how I removed complicated and expensive systems from our office and replaced them with web based, user friendly, cheap solutions that don’t require an expert to support them. In this article I’ll talk about how we moved our phone system to the cloud and…
in 2010, after several years of being slowly trained in as our office IT guy, I was finally handed the reigns. It was not a happy moment, as I had experienced many late nights and weekends trying to fix our servers and systems already, and knew that it was now my primary responsibility to figure these things out. I didn’t…
This has been a question I’ve asked many times over the last few years as our inventory has been accumulating. I’ve attended many conference sessions and roundtable discussions and have heard some good suggestions. I’ve summarized the best strategies I’ve heard in this post. Of course, there’s no magic solution and the method depends on how quick you need to…
When it comes to outsourcing, I’ve seen people at both extremes. There are those who believe they can outsource every aspect, and those who think they need to do everything themselves. The brave souls who believe they can outsource everything are most likely limiting themselves in growth because they are probably not actively finding problems and solutions within their businesses,…
When I first started working at Rosenberry Rooms none of us had much experience dealing with ecommerce at the volume we were experiencing. We were set up on a Yahoo store and I was brought on to process orders. The way I would do this was I’d manually copy the text for the packing slip out of Yahoo!, then paste…
