October 24, 2017 • Kerry Murdock

In an era when many ecommerce platforms are migrating to large, enterprise-level clients, Volusion is doing the opposite. It’s focused on smaller and mid-size companies, even startups. To discuss it,

September 28, 2017 • Kerry Murdock

It’s been an eventful year for Miva, the pioneering ecommerce platform. Its longtime president became C.E.O. and the company raised $18 million of private equity, which is the first such ...

September 20, 2017 • Kerry Murdock

Magento, the ecommerce platform, launched in 2007, grew dramatically, and was acquired by eBay. When eBay divested PayPal in 2015, it also sold Magento, to a private equity firm. Magento’s ...

August 2, 2017 • Kerry Murdock

Given the ease with which brands and manufacturers can sell their products directly to consumers, many observers believe the future of resellers is limited. Ori Greenburg, an ecommerce veteran and ...

July 25, 2017 • Kerry Murdock

In the United States, ecommerce is mature and sophisticated. That is not the case in Saudi Arabia, where it’s new and challenging. Hamza el Bayed is co-founder of a Jeddah,

April 12, 2017 • Kerry Murdock

Many merchants view Amazon as a competitor, albeit one they are forced to sell on. Brent Bellm, CEO of BigCommerce, disagrees. He believes Amazon can complement an ecommerce business. I ...

March 13, 2017 • Kerry Murdock

The dominance of Amazon and its marketplace is clear. What’s not so clear are the counterfeit items that are also sold there. Rob Dunkel is the founder of 3PM Marketplace ...

January 13, 2017 • Kerry Murdock

The increasing dominance of Amazon has many merchants scratching their heads, wondering how exactly to work with that company, and how that company will impact their own businesses. I recently spoke ...

December 14, 2016 • Kerry Murdock

Without U.S. Robotics, the pioneering modem manufacturer, there arguably would not be a World Wide Web. I recently spoke with the co-founder of U.S. Robotics, Casey Cowell, to discuss that company,

October 30, 2015 • Kerry Murdock

Selling on Amazon’s marketplace can be challenging. There are, to be sure, millions of prospective customers. But there are also many competitors selling there, often at prices that are difficult ...

January 19, 2015 • Kerry Murdock

Steve Case, the co-founder of America Online, is by any measure an Internet visionary. His private equity firm, Revolution, invested, in 2013, $40 million in BigCommerce, a leading platform for ...

July 18, 2012 • Kerry Murdock

Before Google, Netscape, and Internet Explorer, there was Web Marketing Today. Dr. Ralph F. Wilson founded it back in 1995 as a vehicle to supplement his then-fledgling web development practice.

January 26, 2012 • Kerry Murdock

Balancing SEO with usability was the topic when we recently spoke with Hamlet Batista. He is a pioneering SEO innovator and the founder of Hamlet Batista Group, an SEO consultancy.

October 26, 2011 • Kerry Murdock

Many merchants dream of building a successful ecommerce business and then selling it. Shirley Tan, the founder of AmericanBridal.com, did just that. She launched the business, built annual revenue to $6.5 million, and then sold it. We spoke with her ...

May 5, 2011 • Kerry Murdock

Cloud computing is frequently discussed and misunderstood. Among the many hosted, cloud platforms, Shopify is an ecommerce leader.

January 27, 2011 • Kerry Murdock

Most merchants like the idea of the credit card industry policing itself, versus lawmakers getting involved. PCI Security Standards Council is the industry’s attempt to do just that. But how ...

September 28, 2010 • Kerry Murdock

“Lessons Learned” is a series where we ask ecommerce business owners to share their experiences. For this installment we visited with Avrum Elmakis, owner and president of Best Bully Sticks,

September 14, 2010 • Kerry Murdock

Candy Blakeslee once ordered a toy for her dog. She ordered the toy on eBay because she and her husband, Dean, had sold antiques there and she figured it would be a good place to buy dog toys, too. The year was 2000. "I decided I should buy my dog a toy from eBay." said Blakeslee....

August 20, 2010 • Kerry Murdock

July 14, 2010 • Kerry Murdock

By Practical eCommerce's count, there are nearly 600 English-language shopping carts. These include hosted carts, licensed software carts and open-source carts. There are small ones with just a few clients, and large ones with tens of thousands of clients. But, as of July 14, only 40 o...

April 30, 2010 • Kerry Murdock

An ecommerce merchant in St. Louis launched his business in 2006 after having written the programming code for his own shopping cart. That business, called Vat19, sells offbeat gifts (such ...

April 22, 2010 • Kerry Murdock

The proposed acquisition by Visa of Authorize.Net’s parent company is the latest evolution for the storied payment gateway. Visa announced on April 21 its agreement to purchase CyberSource, Authorize.Net’s parent, for $26 per common share, or roughly $2 billion in cash. The deal is exp...

December 21, 2009 • Kerry Murdock

It's not every day that we speak with a Stanford PhD who has funded the construction of schools around the world. That same person started dabbling in ecommerce a decade or so ago and his company is now a publicly traded retailing powerhouse. He is Patrick Byrne, and the company is Ov...

December 7, 2009 • Kerry Murdock

The evolution of Miva Merchant continues. The shopping cart launched in 1995 as "HTML Script." It then renamed itself Miva and quickly gained market share.

October 8, 2009 • Kerry Murdock

Newegg.com, the electronics retailer, intends to raise some $175 million through the initial public sale of its common stock. The company filed registration documents with the U. S.

February 26, 2009 • Kerry Murdock

Bill McKiernan founded a credit card payment gateway company back in 1994 when the concept of an online “buy” button was new. Fast-forward to 2009 and his company, Cybersource, is a publicly-traded (NASDAQ: CYBS) credit-card-processing colossus. It acts as the payment gateway for such c...

December 18, 2008 • Kerry Murdock

News reports indicate that revenue growth for Google and other search engines is slowing. Bids on keywords and keyword phrases, some say, are softening. Could all of this be ...

December 10, 2008 • Kerry Murdock

Many experts predict that hosted software solutions will continue to grow. Software-as-a-service is another term for these hosted solutions, and examples of larger ones are NetSuite.com, Salesforce.com and Google Apps.

November 26, 2008 • Kerry Murdock

Every ecommerce merchant must address, at least in some capacity, the issues of fulfillment. One merchant who does this in a big way is Amazon.com. Amazon now offers its fulfillment and warehousing expertise to any ecommerce merchant via its “Fulfillment by Amazon” service.

November 21, 2008 • Kerry Murdock

The use of video in ecommerce sites is becoming increasingly popular. Merchants are using video to both increase conversion rates and to drive traffic to their sites. And video is ...