E-COMMERCE DEVELOPMENT

New article posted on PracticalEcommerce.com: Knowing the right questions to ask will help you to quickly identify the providers depth of knowledge, experience, competency, and overall effectiveness in developing ecommerce systems. In part 2 of this 2 part series I will review; Design & Development, and Hosting & Post Live Support questions.  Ask This Before You Pick Ecommerce Firm II

New article posted on PracticalEcommerce.com: A frequently overlooked aspect of managing an ecommerce website is testing the appearance of that site across different browsers and screen resolutions. For example, your website might render beautifully in Internet Explorer 7, but what does it look like in Safari on the Mac? What about Firefox, or in 1024 x 768 resolution? If you haven’t verified your site in the variety of popular configurations, then there is a good chance you are turning away customers. This article will provide a crash course in browser testing. Website Compatibility Testing Made Simple

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

New article posted on PracticalEcommerce.com: Let's face it, many ecommerce providers will tell you they have the best solution to meet your needs, however, once you start scratching beneath the surface, you might find that the said solution is not the best fit for your business. Knowing the right questions to ask will help you to quickly identify the providers depth of knowledge, experience, competency, and overall effectiveness in developing ecommerce systems. In part 1 of this 2 part series, I will review; General Questions, Business Development, and Investment & Terms. In part 2; Design & Development, and Hosting & Post Live Support. General Questions 1) How long have they been in business and what are their credentials? How many team members do they staff to... Ask This Before You Pick Ecommerce Firm