Brendan Gibbons
Brendan is a staff writer for Practical eCommerce. He is a writer, musician and journalism student at the University of Missouri.
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Design & Development
Optimizing an Ecommerce Site for Mobile Devices, Part 1: Getting Started
November 3, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
In September we published "Volunteer for a Free Mobile-Optimized Ecommerce Site," an offer for one merchant to volunteer for a mobile optimization case study in which we follow the process of creating a mobile site step-by-step. Dozens of merchants submitted their sites, and after a rev...
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Design & Dev Tools
Google Apps: Free Business Tools, Plus Collaboration Services
October 13, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
As Google expands the number of tools and services it offers, it also seeks to package those services so they can be linked with each other and between the main user and other collaborators. This is the idea behind Google Apps, a suite of productivity and collaboration tools. Google l...
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Payments
SSL Certificates: Extended Validation Worth the Cost?
September 16, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
Internet users interact with SSL certificates when they access a web page or transmit data over the web. These certificates help confirm the rightful owner of the site, and that payment and other information is encrypted and safely transmitted. However, one size of SSL certificates do...
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Design & Development
Volunteer for a Free Mobile-Optimized Ecommerce Site
September 6, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
Editor's Note: We published the following article seeking a merchant for our forthcoming mobile optimization series. Many merchants replied, and we selected DecalGirl.com, a seller of mobile device "skins," or coverings. You can follow our series on mobile optimizing DecalGirls' ecommer...
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Business
Overseas Expansion: Tips from a Global Exec
August 31, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
Once merchants are successful in domestic markets, many of them weigh the benefits of expanding their operations abroad. The many challenges accompanying overseas expansion, including language optimization, SEO, taxation and credit card processing, can seem daunting. We asked Jim McGee...
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Design & Development
Google Docs: Word Processing, Collaboration, More
August 17, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
Google offers a variety of useful free tools merchants can use in place of other more costly software. One of these is Google Docs, a free word processing tool with plenty of room for file storage and many unique tools unmatched by other word processors. The most important of these is t...
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Conversion
Three Free Language Translation Programs
July 14, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
While there is no substitute for human linguistic knowledge, there are cheaper ways to translate large amounts of text than by hiring a professional translator. A good way for merchants to circumvent hiring a professional translator is to use a machine translator, sentence by sentence, ...
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Marketing & Advertising
Language Translation: Man Versus Machine
July 8, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
Anyone who has visited a foreign country knows the difficulty of buying products in a foreign language. This confusion can be overwhelming, whether haggling on the street or buying online. But, for ecommerce merchants considering language translation, determining which countries and l...
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Business
Fractured Mobile Market Poses Challenges for Merchants, Developers
May 27, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
With the growth in popularity of several different mobile devices using the Android OS, the mobile environment is becoming increasingly diverse. AdMob, the mobile advertising network that tracks monthly usage statistics on mobile devices, reported that in September 2009, the HTC Dream...
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Marketing & Advertising
The Skinny on Google Maps Street View
May 26, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
For years, Google has sent its search bots to crawl the web, indexing content and images in order to rank search results. As Google Maps has become more complex and accurate, however, Google has been crawling the streets, as well, using vans topped with 360-degree cameras. The goal is t...
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Marketing & Advertising
Too Much Social Media?
May 25, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
Social media can be an excellent way to forge relationships with customers. It can also fall short on expectations of greater traffic or increased sales to an ecommerce site. I spoke with ecommerce marketing expert Michael Stearns about this topic. Stearns is a and CEO of HEROweb Mar...
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Design & Development
Mobile Strategy: Use Same Content, But Optimize Its Appearance
April 29, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
Merchants have options when it comes to mobile optimization. Although W3C has released a list of best practices for the mobile web, there are many different ways to implement them. Experts sometimes recommend developing a separate mobile-optimized site with different content and servi...
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Marketing & Advertising
Facebook App Embeds Product Offers in News Feeds
April 26, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
Most users who currently shop on Facebook do it using applications, Facebook Marketplace, or by using Flash-based applets on Fan pages. But Facebook and Twitter have both demonstrated that the live feed of links, photos, videos, comments and replies is what they’re really interested in....
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Marketing & Advertising
Social Media: Selling on Facebook
April 15, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
Facebook is set to allow developers to create shopping apps directly on merchants’ fan pages. This means that fan pages, which were once mainly marketing channels, can now be used as a point of sale, if merchants are willing to pay a developer to implement the apps. The first step in ...
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Payments
Five Nifty Mobile-Banking Apps
April 13, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
As mobile apps become more sophisticated, mobile banking is becoming a more convenient alternative to online banking. Some mobile banking apps simply replicate the tools available on their website, but others go further and offer functionality possible because of the device itself. Merc...
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Keyword Research
Test: Mobile Search Results For Popular Retail-Shopping Keywords
March 25, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
The number of mobile users is increasing at a far greater rate, it seems, than the number of mobile sites. But some merchants have already begun reacting to the mobile web by optimizing their sites for these devices. In order to get a feel for the current status of the mobile ecommerc...
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Schools & Resources
Mobile Commerce: Four Good Examples
March 18, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
Deciding what to do about the explosive growth of mobile traffic can be difficult. That’s why we’re bringing you some of our picks for the best of the mobile web, with mobile-optimized sites that bring a unique and useful experience for users. Some of these sites are from large retailer...
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Design & Development
To Tap Mobile Buyers, First Determine Their Needs
March 16, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
As the mobile user base swells, it is becoming easier to classify mobile users based on their attitudes towards their phones and the features they use most often. Merchants should consider how mobile customers will prefer to access web content. From that, merchants can decide what kind ...
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Marketing & Advertising
Visual Search to Grow with Mobile Commerce
March 4, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
Visual search is a new technology that's likely to impact the mobile commerce space. It allows mobile users to snap pictures of just about anything on their devices and then search for relevant online content based on the photo itself. This technology is useful for mobile users who ar...
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Design & Development
Mobile Commerce Appeals to Young Adults
February 25, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
While it is true mobile devices are generating more web traffic, merchants should be aware of the demographics of mobile users and the products they are buying. Surveys taken in early 2010 have similar results in the age breakdown of mobile users. One survey by Retrevo, a shopping com...
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Design & Development
Simplicity Key for Mobile-optimized Ecommerce Sites
February 18, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
We recently reported how mobile Internet devices outsold computers in 2009. And, while the percentage of ecommerce sales conducted on a mobile device is still small (0.8 percent is a generous estimate), this number is increasing. Many ecommerce vendors are beginning to offer mobile sol...
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Design & Development
Mobile Commerce: Experts Offer Strategy for Smaller Merchants
February 16, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
Depending on the source, analysts predict U.S. ecommerce merchants will generate in 2010 between $120 billion and $200 billion sales. Mobile commerce is a small fraction of this total. But as mobile usage becomes mainstream, and as a variety of devices expand the mobile web, online reta...
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User Experience
Mobile Commerce: Better to Create an App or a Mobile-optimized Site?
February 4, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
As an increasing number of mobile users access the web, merchants may be unsure exactly how to react. Should they build a mobile optimized site, design and submit an app to be approved by the Apple App Store or Android Market, or something else? Mobile users have different web needs th...
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Payments
Mobile Payment Systems Are Adapting, Developing
January 28, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
Mobile payment processing can help merchants take advantage of the one item people rarely leave home without: a cell phone or mobile device. Accepting payments by text verification has been in practice since 2006 when companies like PayPal began offering a mobile option that allows us...
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Design & Development
AppMakr CEO on Affordable iPhone, Android App Development
January 19, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
The iPhone is now among the most popular gadgets of all-time, but the cost of developing applications for the iPhone App Store has been a barrier for smaller businesses that cannot afford the steep charges of app developers. AppMakr, a service that allows anyone to make iPhone applicati...
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User Experience
Mobile Commerce: Simulators Show Your Site’s Appearance on Mobile Devices
January 14, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
Last week, I cited estimates for the number of Internet-capable mobile devices sold in 2009, and how this has already outpaced the number of computers sold, both portable and desktop. Here I’ll show you some useful tools for determining how effectively your site, in its present form, op...
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Design & Development
Mobile Internet Devices, By the Numbers
January 11, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
Last week, I reported on how the number of mobile devices is exploding worldwide. But coming up with an estimate for the total number of smartphone handsets sold this year is difficult, and numbers vary depending on the source. A report by Smart Analytics stated 43 million smartphones w...
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Marketing & Advertising
Five Innovative Facebook Examples from Ecommerce Merchants
January 6, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
With more than 350 million active users, Facebook’s population has exceeded that of the United States. According to its statistics page, the average user spends more than 55 minutes each day on this social media site, and he or she becomes a fan of at least two pages per month. Since ...
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Design & Development
Notable Ecommerce iPhone Apps
January 4, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
Mobile ecommerce is beginning to manifest itself in several different ways. With the dramatic increase in fast, 3G cellular subscribers in the United States, a burgeoning number of users utilize mobile devices to access the Internet. Merchants should contemplate the appearance of their ...
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Design & Development
Mobile Commerce Is Coming
December 30, 2009 • Brendan Gibbons
The iPhone and iTouch are the fastest-growing technology platforms in history. That is according to Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker, who also predicts that mobile commerce will dramatically grow in the U.S. M-commerce Around the World Japan and some Scandinavian countries are ahe...
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