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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Big Data and Artificial Intelligence’s Implications for Democracy?

san francisco, bay area, digital staffingThere is no doubt that the digital revolution has been on full throttle over the past few years. However, for those who understand the magnitude of the situation, the pondering question still remains, "how will such advancements change our world?" Various outlets report that with each passing year, the amount of data produced doubles. For example, in 2016 we were able to...

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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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