E-COMMERCE DEVELOPMENT

New article posted on PracticalEcommerce.com: Many successful ecommerce businesses focus their marketing efforts on search engine optimization, shopping feeds, email, affiliates, and pay-per-click advertising. However, websites that sell consumable products — such as supplements, batteries, food, snacks, vitamins, beverages, and condiments — can tap into a new revenue source: the "auto ship" program. 'Auto Ship' Programs Generate Repeat Sales

New article posted on Noupe.com: Let’s face it: sales make the world go round. But as a Web designer, you’re concerned more with fonts, color, hierarchy and images than with the sales process. Some believe that designs sell themselves; while this may be true for a few designers, it is certainly not the case for most. How To Sell Your Designs Without The Sales Pitch

Column: Best Practices Get You Only So Far (Harvard Business Review -  April 2010) Next practices are all about innovation: imagining what the future will look like; identifying the mega-opportunities that will arise; and building capabilities to capitalize on them. Apple’s Steve Jobs and Tata Motors’ Ratan Tata do just that. I help executives unearth opportunities by focusing them on big problems that their companies will benefit from by tackling. They must ask six questions: Is the problem widely recognized? Does it affect other industries? Are radical innovations needed to tackle the problem? Can tackling it change the industry’s economics? Will addressing this issue give us a fresh source of competitive advantage? Would tackling this problem create a big opportunity for us? If you look for ways to dev

Original Article: The Way I Work Paul English of Kayak We hold design meetings at one another's desks throughout the day. We do design interaction like that, where everyone can hear and anyone can jump in. If anyone needs to make a private phone call, there are a few private offices, but our general philosophy is that an open environment facilitates intellectual intensity. When an e-mail comes in, I read it and decide immediately: Delete, reply, or delegate? The engineers and I handle customer support. When I tell people that, they look at me like I'm smoking crack. They say, "Why would you pay an engineer $150,000 to answer phones when you could pay someone in Arizona $8 an hour?" If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they'll actually stop