How to Get Started in Ecommerce for Less Than $100

Affordable Ecommerce DevelopmentStarting an ecommerce business can be stressful. Not because it's difficult, but because there's just so much information out there. It's hard to know what to do and when. Sure, you can figure it out through trial and error, but that can get expensive. Fast. Throwing your computer at the wall can seem like a better solution. But, before you launch your laptop at the drywall, keep reading. The four steps I...

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Ecommerce Technology Trends That Will Take Center Stage This Year

mobile ecommerceWith 2016 over and done with, the gears are turning. Q1 of 2017 is well underway, and with it does come the next ecommerce technology trends. Last year turned out some rather impressive numbers for ecommerce. According to eMarketer, ecommerce generated an estimated 8.6% of all retail spending in 2016, hauling in about $1.915 trillion.

Everything told, the retail industry as a whole raked in 27 trillion. China dominated the...

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Deep Dive: Payments

Credit Card Digital PaymentNinety percent of Americans have used a credit card, but far fewer understand the underlying systems enabling their payments. So let’s dive in to see what happens when you swipe your card! Suppose you purchase some carrots from the grocery store. You take out your credit card to complete the purchase, and see a logo with “Visa” on it. That’s the card association. You’d usually see one of the four...

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UX is UI

User Experience is User InterfaceA meme can travel halfway around the world while nuance is putting on its shoes. Ideas bounce around the Twitters, endorsed and adopted wholeheartedly through fear, surprise, or a fanatical dedication to the church of UX. Mobile-first, responsive over m-dot, prototypes over wire frames. These truths we hold to be self-evident. Complex and contextual ideas, reduced to tweetable dogma.   So too the images which attempt to explain User Experience. The...

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Mark Cuban Says This Will Soon Be The Most Sought-After Job Skill

Future Job SkillsWhen Mark Cuban speaks, people listen. The billionaire investor and Shark Tank personality has a slew of wildly successful businesses under his belt. Whether he's commenting on the recent Time Warner and AT&T merger, recommending books for entrepreneurs, or sounding off about the 45th president, the internet hangs on Cuban's every last word. Now his latest prediction about the future of jobs is picking up steam. In a recent interview with...

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What Small Businesses Need to Do to Win in Online Retail

Digital Retail For Small Companies Any company of any size -- whether it’s one employee working out of her basement or a multi-national company balancing millions in revenue -- must consider how digitization is affecting business as we know it. The question is no longer “When do we innovate?” but rather “How do we innovate?” According to Gartner, in the next five years, U.S. CIOs expect their companies’ digital revenues to grow from 16...

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Four Digital Retail Problems and the Answer to All

Digital Retail Problems We are living in the digital age – where online shopping rules and midnight Black Friday purchasing is now being conducted primarily from the couch. But behind the scenes of retailers, combining digital services with existing brick and mortar operations isn’t a walk in the park. According to Gartner’s 2016 Chief Supply Chain Officer survey, 57 percent of CSOs listed the sales shift from physical stores to online retail as one...

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6 ecommerce categories that will take off in 2017

Ecommerce Categories for 2017 Ecommerce continues to make gains among consumers, with more people buying products online than ever before. Indeed, eMarketer recently predicted that worldwide ecommerce sales would total $1.915 trillion in 2016, with $423.34 billion of that coming from North America. And the company forecast double-digit retail ecommerce growth through 2020. Here are six ecommerce categories that will fuel that growth:

1. Grocery and fresh foods

In its report, eMarketer cites grocery as one...

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