What is UX and How Can it Help My Business?

UX for BusinessUX design is one of those topics you can’t ignore as a marketer because it has deep roots in everything you do for an online brand. It’s something you and everyone in your team must understand, even if you’re not experts in the field. So what exactly is UX and why is it important to every business? This is the question we’ll be answering today so there’s no more confusion about...

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Shopify: The Invisible Selling Machine

Ecommerce Online Digital ShoppingFrom the ­unlikely setting of Ottawa, Shopify has ­quietly been powering an e-commerce revolution.

Shopify has done a pretty good job hiding itself from the world. The company’s e-commerce platform was involved in purchases by more than 100 million individual shoppers in 2016, yet it is invisible by design, enabling the end-to-end operation of its customers, some 400,000 individual retail shops and brands. It proudly operates not from San Francisco or...

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6 Mistakes Your Ecommerce Store Must Avoid

Ecommerce DesignEcommerce marketers have four basic objectives. To start, they must bring new visitors to their store. Next is to convert more of these visitors into customers. Then they must look at ways to increase the average revenue earned per customer session. Finally, they must create incentives for these customers to return for future purchases. Apart from bringing new visitors to your store, the rest of the marketing objectives are all directly influenced...

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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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How to Build Great Products in the AI World

AI ProductsWhen technology and human ingenuity gets together, everybody in society profits. If you look at graphs of GDP / capita over long time periods (850 years+), the trend is always upwards. The only things that drag this progress down are severe periods of sickness (like the black death) and widespread war (such as WW2). Overall though, technology makes everyone healthier and richer. At this point in our society’s history – technology has...

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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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