SMB

While many retailers mull the takeaway from this year's Black Friday Cyber Monday shopping event, others may be more interested in the action that took place on Saturday. Online shoppers on Saturday spent $3.6 billion dollars at both large and small retailers, reflecting 18 percent year-over-year gr...

Google plans to use performance badges to warn users of slow-loading websites ahead. It will consider historical load latencies first, and later may expand to signal the likelihood that a page will load slowly based on the user's device and network conditions. The criteria will become increasingly s...

In the age of fast shipping and one-click ordering, a single technical glitch can be detrimental to retail sales. A server outage during the holiday season could be a critical issue. Target is a prime example. Its in-store registers and online services were down for a few hours as recently as Septem...

Faire has raised $150 million in venture capital, which it will use to expand into new markets, improve the Faire marketplace, and build more tools for its customers. The latest round brings Faire's total funding to date to $266 million and gives the company a valuation of $1 billion. Faire is an on...

Fledgling e-commerce company PriceWaiter aims to save customers money, time and energy by negotiating better-than-Amazon deals on top-rated products -- simply, quickly and privately. PriceWaiter's pitch to sellers is that it can help move inventory, maintain more margin, and make MAP moot, resulting...

Gone are the days when businesses just did business. Now, it's almost expected that business values and ethics will play a significant and enduring role in a company's identity. From the products they sell to the way they treat their employees, businesses are finding that they no longer can separate...

It has been my belief for several years that our industry is trending toward the formation of an information utility. I draw this conclusion carefully based on my understanding of how markets develop and commoditize. I consider the beginning of the modern IT era as the early 1970s. You can graph a r...

Implementing shipping software can be a big step in scaling your e-commerce business -- providing a way to create shipping labels quickly, to gain access to carrier discounts, and more. With the holidays not too far away, now is the time to get smart about your options. Before deciding to buy, it's ...

Startups in the U.S. fail at a rate of 90 percent largely due to cash flow problems and the lack of a market need for a product or service. In fact, not even half of startups make it to their fourth year. It's also noteworthy that 65 percent of startup owners admitted to not being fully confident ab...

These days, what business isn't pushing to become more customer-centric? And for good reason --88 percent of businesses view customer experience as a competitive differentiator. A customer-centric culture is a source of long-term strategic competitive advantage. Culture is the one aspect of a busine...

The road to e-commerce business success is hardly a straight and narrow one. Every step in a business lifecycle -- from launch and growth to scale and maturity -- is fraught with peaks, valleys, bumps, hazards and roadblocks. Your plan and reality are usually very different! When reflecting on how c...

Congratulations! You've succeeded in driving online traffic to your product page. So why aren't customers actually clicking 'Add to Cart'? Making successful e-commerce conversions, or transforming your website's visitors into actual paying customers, isn't an easy feat. Expertise on doing it well an...

Finance and accounting technology became the No. 1 software budgeting priority for small and mid-sized businesses, according to a survey conducted last year. Almost 54 percent of respondents were budgeting to invest in accounting tools in the next 12 to 24 months, with those in the retail industry s...

Amazon is keenly interested in protecting the intellectual property rights of its third-party sellers because the company depends upon them for their long-term success. In a recent newsletter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos explained that third-party sellers currently make up a majority of th...