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QuickBooks is the leader in small-business accounting software. According to Intuit, which produces QuickBooks, nearly 50 million people use it or a similar Intuit product. Intuit releases a new version of QuickBooks annually. The 2010 version was just released on Intuit's site. The upgrade price is $179 for single user license of QuickBooks Pro. To determine the principal benefits of the 2010 version, we spoke with Denise Loter, a Certified QuickBooks Pro Advisor. Loter owns EBS Associates, a Portland, Ore.-based accounting firm that offers QuickBooks training solutions, as well as small business accounting services. Loter said that she recommends her small business clients purchase the QuickBooks upgrade each year. For the 2010 ve...

In 2007, the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth began studying the usage of social media. That research has shown “that social media has penetrated parts of the business world at a tremendous speed.” The study focuses on “The Inc. 500”—a list of the fastest-growing private U.S. companies compiled annually by Inc. magazine. The research indicates that 91 percent of the Inc. 500 companies are using at least one social media tool. But, as pointed out in a previous Practical eCommerce article, there is a difference between just using social media for your business and using it effectively. For this "Chart of the Week," we look at one particular component of the University of Massachusetts Dartmou...

GetResponse, an email marketing solution, announced a new application programming interface (API) aimed at helping small-to-medium sized businesses integrate their platforms with the company's email marketing tools. The new GetResponse Developer Zone includes some 30 API hooks that make it possible to add GetResponse functionality to all of the systems that an ecommerce merchant depends on, including databases, content management systems and the ecommerce platform itself. This means that merchants using GetResponse can programmatically create dynamic emails when buying events take place. These dynamic emails are, in essence, an advanced mail-merge feature that uses a single template with multiple customizable fields ready for condi...

When we launched our webinar series several months ago, our goal was to address topics that can help ecommerce merchants improve their businesses. To date, we’ve hosted nine, one-hour webinars and we’ve covered, among other subjects, online merchandising, search engine optimization, shopping carts, email strategies and sales taxes. On Tuesday, Nov. 24, we’ll address multi-channel selling, where merchants sell products concurrently on their own websites and on established marketplaces, like eBay. Many merchants have found success selling in multiple channels, and we’ll be discussing this and offering ideas to help others, hopefully, do the same. Partner with Outside Experts For each of the webinars, we partner with third-party compa...

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who has filled out the survey so far. There were almost 150 responses in the first day and some common themes are coming through. Your feedback is really valuable – thanks.

This blog has undergone a few changes in 2009 including two visual redesigns (a modified Woo Theme and the current look and feel by Mike Kus), the addition of a Twitter powered news feed and a ramped up publishing schedule. We want to make Think Vitamin even better in 2010 and as a result of recent organisational change it now has a full time editor to oversee the development of the blog and it’s content.

Earlier this year Ryan asked for contributors and since then we have published many of the submissions. If you wrote in and haven’t heard from us we apologise. I have a full inbox of great article suggestions and will be getting in touch shortly.

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Read any online marketing book, blog, or journal—Practical eCommerce included—worth its salt, and you’ll be told to “know your customer.” In ecommerce, getting to know your customer and building rapport with that customer takes time. It also takes an exchange of information that is often more than just transactional. One of the many ways that you can affect customer relationship building is via contests, content, or other services that shoppers register for or provide information for via a web form. With this in mind, let me introduce you to FormSpring. FormSpring enables ecommerce merchants to build contact forms, surveys, landing page forms, transactional forms, and more that are easy to integrate, require no software, and demand...

There are more than 350 online shopping carts. And each week we feature one, interviewing both the cart's developer and a customer. "Cart of the Week" is not a review or an evaluation, but rather an opportunity to learn about a shopping cart from the people who build it and use it. This week, we'll hear from Oleg Chehovsky, head of marketing for Pentasoft Corporation, developers of Avactis shopping cart. The company is headquartered in New York City, and, according to Chehovsky, it serves "tens of thousands" of users worldwide. We'll also hear from an Avactis shopping cart customer, Brina Bujkovsky, owner and CEO of The Younique Boutique. PeC: Please provide some general background on the cart. Oleg Chehovsky: "Avactis is a PHP/M...

"Bloglist" is an occasional feature where we ask ecommerce professionals the blogs that they read, and why. For this installment, we asked Sean Schofield, the creator of the Spree open-source ecommerce platform and a Practical eCommerce blogger. Schofield, a Ruby on Rails developer, is also the CEO of Railsdog, a technology consulting firm specializing in web application and ecommerce development. Schofield told us the blogs he likes, as well as podcast and screencast sites he visits. Get Elastic Provides a nice overall discussion of various ecommerce topics. It's a good reference for customers when they have questions about a specific topic since the Get Elastic blog posts usually have detailed examples with pictures. I don't re...

Earlier this week, Practical eCommerce shared three important questions to ask about your shopping cart. Today, as part of our ongoing PCI compliance series, I’ll take a look at options for ecommerce merchants currently using a shopping cart that is not PA-DSS (payment application data security standard) validated. More specifically, I’ll share the insights of hosting director Matt Whitted of Cybrhost, a web hosting provider specializing in ecommerce. Cybrhost has alerted its subscriber base to the July 1, 2010 deadline for shopping carts to become PA-DSS compliant and Whitted has fielded numerous inquiries from merchants regarding the mandate. Whitted says he recognizes that many of the more than 350 shopping carts, by Practical e...

The online shopping experience has changed dramatically over the past ten years. I know. In 1999, as a radio reporter in Silicon Valley, I was given an assignment: Conduct your Christmas shopping online, using a pre-determined list of items. A fellow reporter was given the same list, understanding that all of his purchases would be made at brick and mortar retail outlets. It was a race. He easily won. There were a number of factors that limited my ability to shop online effectively: I was slowed by a dial-up connection, the number of retailers which offered online sales was limited, and the checkout process was inefficient and time-consuming. Consumers, at that time, were also less-knowledgeable about how to find what they were ...