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Amazon's marketplace accounts for most of the revenue for thousands of merchants. Therein lies the fear.

At most small and medium-sized e-commerce retailers, prices are typically set and updated in an ad hoc fashion without one clear owner. The process often starts by using a gross margin target, followed by some comparison with competitors, and then some adjustments from there. Many of these retailers would quickly admit that this isn’t an optimal strategy, and that they are likely leaving money on the table — and they’re often right. The authors’ experience with price testing has shown that there is actually a significant amount of money left on the table when pricing is left un-optimized.

Identify and target personas of keywords, competitors, Reddit discussions, and more.

Developing large-scale datasets has been critical in computer vision and natural language processing. These datasets, rich in visual and textual information, are fundamental to developing algorithms capable of understanding and interpreting images. They serve as the backbone for enhancing machine learning models, particularly those tasked with deciphering the complex interplay between visual elements in images and their corresponding textual descriptions. A significant challenge in this field is the need for large-scale, accurately annotated datasets. These are essential for training models but are often not publicly accessible, limiting the scope of research and development. The ImageNet and OpenImages datasets, containing human-annotated

Open-source platforms are flexible, composable, and highly customizable. Here's the all-new update to our longstanding list.

The benefits of Amazon's "Look inside" book label applies to many products. Apparel, bags, housewares, and more could experience more conversions with an inside peek.

One person's trash may well be another's "come up," or what the rapper Macklemore calls hidden treasures in the song "Thrift Shop," but only if secondhand shoppers follow the rapper's lead and dig through ...

General Partner Connie Chan on how leading brands are using AI and other technology to combine the serendipitous discovery of offline shopping with the infinite options of online shopping. Today, most of the Western world revolves around search-based online commerce. This means that most shoppers type directly what they want into a store search bar,...

Optimizing your ecommerce checkout process is crucial to reduce cart abandonment rates, as it affects...

Google's targeted ad initiative AdSense was initially launched as “content targeting advertising” 20 years ago this month. Here’s how it changed the internet.

Make it easy for your customers to do business with you.

Meta descriptions do not influence organic rankings. But the descriptions appear in search snippets more often than not and thus impact clicks on organic listings.

Why does every store suddenly look the same?

Cost-plus pricing on the surface seems straightforward. But then market forces intervene.

Everything these days is a subscription. And honestly, on reflection, subscriptions are complete horseshit.

Whether or not you should pursue a catalog strategy is a question that deserves significant thought. As digital marketing becomes more complex, it may make a lot of sense to send out correctly designed catalogs to the right customers. For e-commerce retailers without physical stores, catalogs can effectively mimic stores’ sensory experiences to enhance customer affinity. For multichannel retailers, by understanding the channel preferences of current customers through transactional data, multichannel retailers can add an effective catalog marketing channel to their store and e-commerce channel strategies.

Today's consumers expect free shipping for most items. But it's not always obvious for merchants to know when and how to offer it. Here's our all-new update for analyzing shipping costs and free delivery.

When it comes to making money online you’re going to have a lot of options at your disposal. Frankly, it can be quite overwhelming just choosing an online

Your #1 resource for digital marketing tips, trends, and strategy to help you build a successful online business.

Since Benchmark’s investment in Ebay 15 years ago, we have been fascinated by online marketplaces. Entrepreneurs accurately recognize that the connective tissue of the Internet provides an opportunity to link the players in a particular market, reducing friction in both the buying and selling experience. For example, my car tax check is an online platfrom that allows you to book a slot for a complete history and guidance of your car taxes and other details. The arrival of the smartphone amplifies these opportunities, as the Internet’s connective tissue now extends deeper and deeper into an industry with the participants connected…

336 Vintage Christmas Catalogs & Holiday Wish Books with 302,605 total catalog pages from Sears, Montgomery Ward and JCPenney over the years.

The Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche is nothing if not determined in its quest to acquire Illumina, the San Diego-based leader in genetic-sequencing equipment. In January, after Illumina’s board rebuffed Roche’s initial overtures, Roche made a $5.7 billion tender offer directly to shareholders. When that didn’t succeed, it extended the offer to midnight last Friday. Now […]

This paper appeared in VLDB'19 and is authored by Maurice Herlihy, Barbara Liskov, and Liuba Shrira. How can autonomous, mutually-distrust...

Reputation management is essential for any brand. Your company's future may depend on what’s been said about it in posts, comments, reviews, and rankings. Fortunately, there are affordable tools to help. Here is a list of tools to manage your brand’s reputation.

Luxury brands should use their digital channels to support and enhance their high-quality customer experiences. This requires providing product details that spark interest, balancing visual design with other priorities, and avoiding interruptions that risk cheapening the brand.

Your #1 resource for digital marketing tips, trends, and strategy to help you build a successful online business.

Video is increasingly impacting ecommerce. Consumers use it for purchase decisions. Influencers live-stream product endorsements. And brands deploy video for engagement and product offerings. Here is a list of platforms for shoppable video.

Shoppers' actions on an ecommerce site create opportunities for automated, triggered emails. Such behavior-based email automation is a sure-fire tactic to drive revenue.

Constant bargain hunting makes us value all the wrong things about shopping.

Need to spice up descriptions for bland products? Use these themes and examples the next time you’re describing a back-to-school backpack or plain white t-shirt. You’ll soon understand how to look at ordinary products differently.

Boost brand awareness, increase site visitors, and drive conversions with personalized advertising. AdRoll's been trusted by 140,000+ brands for over 15 years.

Find the latest Design news from Fast company. See related business and technology articles, photos, slideshows and videos.

CommerceHub and ChannelAdvisor are now united as Rithum. We empower top brands, suppliers, and retailers with durable, profitable e-commerce solutions.

Why does the ecommerce community have such a blind spot when it comes to unique product descriptions? Syndicated descriptions produce duplicate content. Why is duplicate product copy accepted so blindly? The answer depends on whether you’re the syndicator or the site using the syndicated content.

The way we live our lives has an impact on our work. Long lists of typical chores may turn your

Competitive poaching refers to the practice of bidding on ads for a competitor’s search terms, in order to poach customers searching for that brand. It’s a common tactic in the world of digital ads — but is it effective? The author shares results from the first-ever empirical study of this practice, which found that poaching can work well for higher-end brands, but may backfire for lower-end or mass market offerings. Specifically, the study found that when an ad poached customers who searched for a high-end brand, users clicked on it more, but when an ad poached a low-end or mass market target, users were less likely to click. Of course, the author notes that clickthrough rate is just one metric, and there may be other ways in which a poaching campaign could be harmful or beneficial. But these findings can help marketers add a bit of science to the art that is digital advertising, helping them to optimize campaigns for their unique products and customers.

Optimizing content for organic rankings requires knowing how Google will interpret searchers' intent — informational, commercial, or navigational.

Keywords are an important building block for ecommerce marketing. Developing and maintaining a keyword list may help an ecommerce business understand shoppers and do a better job of marketing to them. In the context of search engine optimization, searchers' words or phrases summarize their thoughts, questions, or needs. Those keywords represent the language people use to ask for help finding resources online.

The final step in product photography is optimizing the images for search engines and page speed. This is the 14th installment in my series on helping ecommerce merchants create better product images. In this post, I'll address making your photos faster to download and more visible in Google's image search.

Business-to-business marketplaces are among ecommerce's leading growth trends, yet many industries remain under-served, especially for raw materials.

Reputation management is essential for any brand. Your company's future may depend on what’s been said about it in posts, comments, reviews, and rankings. Fortunately, there are affordable tools to help. Here is a list of tools to manage your brand’s reputation.

Shoppers search an online store's policy pages for details on shipping, returns, and more. Rarely are these vital pages engaging. But they should be.

Should we still be talking about online and offline retail, or about trucks versus boxes versus bikes?

Writing product descriptions sounds simple. But it takes planning. The best descriptions address a broad audience, which is why many companies employ marketers to help. When writing descriptions for the masses, focus on the following three elements.

A recurring subscription model is a powerful tool for growth and profit — if you can get subscribers. "A lot of brands install our subscription software

Well, if you are planning to sell your stuff online and make money, then there are a few top eCommerce platforms that would help you out. Shopify is the

You’ve downloaded TikTok and browsed the videos. Now you’re wondering what content to create for your ecommerce business. There are many types of videos to attract leads without dancing on camera. Here are 11 ideas for all types of merchants.

There’s a reason that online ticket sellers hit you with those extra fees after you’ve picked your seats and are ready to click “buy.” Pure profit. A

Burlington shut down online sales in March right before coronavirus lockdowns. But it's among the discount retailers that have endured the pandemic surprisingly well, even opening new stores.

Why Amazon Needs a Competitor and Why Walmart Ain’t It

Making things look nice can take a long time, either due to lack of resources or abundance of opinions. This could delay launches, frustrate people, and waste precious energy. Those are high costs for startups or companies hoping to move fast. Is it worth it? Long ago I got fed

Looking to grow your affiliate marketing site but aren't sure which affiliate network is right for you? Here's everything you need to know.

Tips on running successful Black Friday sales for creators and Indie Hackers

How can dropshipping tools give you the edge in the competitive world of e-commerce? We take a look at the 11 best dropshipping tools you should be using.

Read more in the DTC Briefing, a weekly Modern Retail column about the biggest challenges and trends facing the DTC startup world.

If e-commerce was a market for L’Oreal, then it would be the biggest in terms of market value, worth nearly €5 billion ($5.9 billion).

What is behavioral marketing? Here's how email marketing, demographics, and upsells can be used to monitor and act on customer behavior.

Convenience and security increasingly impact online selling. That's especially the case for the upcoming holiday season, as consumers will likely seek flexible, seamless payment options. Here are four payment methods to consider for this year's holiday selling.

Shopping on Facebook and Instagram is finally here. With the recent launches of Shops on both apps and Live Shopping, Facebook is facilitating easier commerce across its platform. Here is a list of tools to help you sell on Facebook and Instagram.

Brick-and-mortar retail businesses are turning toward ecommerce to generate revenue — online and click-and-collect. As they make this digital transformation, those merchants will likely have questions about ecommerce platforms, themes, and design. While all of these are important, a company's focus should be on products and marketing first, in my experience.

Our top ecommerce builders are based on objective performance data, feature set & value. Check out ecommerce platforms now.

A ecosystem of buyers, sellers, and brokers creates a thriving M&A market for digital businesses.

Brands have long been able to bid for the premier slot at the top left of Amazon’s listings, but during the pandemic the online retailer has begun using this position for its private-label items, raising antitrust concerns.

2020 was the year East Fork ceramics planned to become profitable. Now, that's likely no longer on the table, but the company is using a new model to better handle its balance sheet: pre-sales. Now, new product lines will all be for sale before they're manufactured, as a way to get capital in as early as possible.

Greetings, everyone. This post begins a series on Web Monetization and serves to document my learning...

AliExpress lets you unlock top brands' bestselling electronics, clothing, homewares, toys, sporting equipment, auto parts and more so you can live better for less.

On ecommerce sites, saving shopping-cart items for possible later purchase must be discoverable and low-effort.

Buyer Experience Benchmarking of 5 Top eCommerce Sites Dec 2018 Ken Leaver

Unexpected service fees and special-delivery costs should be disclosed early in the shopping process to avoid losing customers.

Coupons and other discounts should be easy to apply and shopping carts should clearly display how the total was affected by the promotion.

Buying a domain at the asking price? That's like buying a used car at the asking price. Doing your homework pays off.

Retailers seek to avoid markdowns and sell out of the season at full margin, but it isn’t easy to predict how much inventory to acquire. In this post, I'll address four online merchandising tactics that balance consumer demand with inventory levels, to maximize profits.

A product qualified lead (PQL) is a lead who has experienced meaningful value using your product through a free trial or freemium model. Learn how to use them in your organization here.

SaaS products may be the future of how we work, but that future will only happen if we can learn how to build trust with your customers.

Amazon is so new, and so dramatic in its speed and scale and aggression, that we can easily forget how many of the things it’s doing are actually very old.

Not every SaaS company has endless spare money. One of the biggest piggy bank breakers are the tools we use—and it adds up fast.

Google Analytics is a powerful, free web analytics platform. However, it has gaps that are better served by other tools. I'll address those gaps and tools in this post.

The box has never looked better.

Untuckit is using Amazon to offload older styles -- preferring the marketplace as an alternative over the traditional outlet store.

PopSockets opted not to be a direct vendor to Amazon. Instead, it chose one major reseller to represent it on the marketplace. But, Amazon would not allow it. So, PopSockets walked away.

Shopify App Store: customize your online store and grow your business with Shopify-approved apps for marketing, store design, fulfillment, and more.

Shopify is partnering with a network of more than 20,000 app developers and agency partners to build profitable businesses.

Express and Ann Taylor are just two of several established retailers that have launched clothing rental subscriptions in recent months.

Editor’s note: This article by now-a16z general partner Alex Rampell was originally published in 2012 in TechCrunch.  The biggest ecommerce opportunity today involves taking offline services and offering them for sale online (O2O commerce). The first generation of O2O commerce was driven by discounting, push-based engagements, and artificial scarcity. The still-unfulfilled opportunity in O2O today is tantamount to...

PopSugar said it expects to have 20,000 subscribers by year's end to its text message program, which it's used to sell protein bars and housewares.

I'm a longtime seller on Amazon's marketplace. I also mentor many sellers and help brands to improve their marketplace sales. And I belong to various

Building a product that connects to multiple third-party products is a common approach — an annotated twitter thread exploring strategic…

Many online retailers unintentionally train consumers to expect discounts. Clothing stores are amongst the worst offenders. Constant discounting makes full-price shoppers believe they’re being overcharged. They often won’t shop until the next sale, which leads to a vicious cycle. It is a rare company that doesn’t get asked for discounts. In this post, I'll review 10 ways to offer clients a discount.

Connect with developers sharing the strategies and revenue numbers behind their companies and side projects.

I'm often asked why I started FringeSport. People inquire, "Of all the things to do, why sell barbells?" I tell them that if I wanted only to make money,

Amazon turned an event into a blockbuster. Here’s a roadmap for retailers who want to replicate its success.

Lessons learned from opening a brick-and-mortar retail store may apply to online merchants, providing insights about promoting products, driving sales,