James Maguire

When you’re selling the same products sold by lots of other sites — and countless retail outlets — how do you earn customer loyalty? That’s the challenge facing Scentiments, a South Florida-based site that sells designer perfumes like Elizabeth Arden, Givenchy and Perry Ellis. “Our product is available everywhere,” said Scentiments CEO Howard Wyner. “Our […]

Not content with its current success, BBQGuys plans to launch an e-commerce superstore “If everything stays on schedule, we’re launching a new site in May with about two million products,” says BBQGuys president, Mike Hackley. The new mega-site will be called ShoppersChoice. As ambitious as that may seem, as far as Hackley’s concerned, it’s essentially […]

In case you had any doubt that purchasing keyword search terms is a constant practice among Internet retailers, take a gander at this fact: in the last quarter of 2004, Google, the powerhouse seller of keyword search terms, topped $1 billion in ad revenue — the first time it had broken the $1 billion mark […]

Johnny Tai wanted the best of both worlds. Tai, the administrative manager of CPI, which makes all terrain vehicles, wanted a robust, full-featured e-commerce platform that could handle complex transactions. As a B2B, CPI sells vehicles and parts to dealers across the country and must provide these dealers with a full palette of account management […]

Headquartered in San Carlos, California, AuctionDrop serves the eBay market by eliminating the key hassle that keeps many potential sellers from posting items: it posts the items for them. AuctionDrop has a partnership with United Parcel Service, so sellers can drop off their items at one of the 3,700 UPS Stores across the country. At […]

Business efficiency is something that Sherry Comes knows a lot about. She has to — she has two full time jobs. Comes is an executive IT architect for IBM, so she solves thorny software infrastructure problems for big budget clients on a daily basis. Additionally, she’s the president of CoffeeCakes.com, a Colorado-based site that sells […]

Buying keyword search terms on popular search engines like Google and Yahoo has become an important part — perhaps the most critical part — of the marketing strategy of today’s e-tailers. This common practice, in which merchants pay search engines to present a link to their site to users who search for a given term, […]

In the year 2000, Ducti was a product idea with a Web site, and not much else. The business’s first obstacle was introducing the public to its unorthodox inventory. Ducti sells wallets and other accessories made from Duct tape — an unusual fashion trend, to be sure, but one for which there is an audience. […]

Since 1997, e-commerce consultancy the E-Tailing Group has been buying products from 100 Web sites a year. The Chicago-based firm records and tabulates the results of its shopping experience, using the data to help them advise clients and set e-commerce benchmarks.

It’s a perennial problem among smaller e-businesses: with minimal cash flow it’s hard to finance that most critical of line items, advertising. Yet Jesse Kelly-Landes found a unique solution. Kelly-Landes, who sells original clothing designs from her Austin-based site Amet and Sasha, pools her funds with other small Web sites to buy advertising. She and […]

You could call Lauren Freedman a site doctor. As president of the E-Tailing Group, a Chicago-based e-commerce consultancy, a wide array of online merchants seek her advice. E-commerce executives from companies like Crate and Barrel, Circuit City, the Discovery Channel and others ask her how they can increase the dollar amount of their average orders. […]

According to traditional wisdom, shoes should be a tough item to sell online. Who buys shoes without trying them on? One manufacturer’s Size 9 is another’s Size 8. And can you really fall in love with a pair of shoes by looking at a photo? Yet Shoebuy has figured out a method of tempering customer […]