Until recently, selecting the optimum e-commerce platform for a multichannel business was a race to keep up with evolving technologies. The applications morphed at such blinding speed that the needs and requirements you defined when selecting your system easily could be obsolete by the time that system was up and running. Today's technology isn't evolving any slower — if anything, the pace of e-commerce change continues to accelerate. But the main differentiators among systems these days are less in the features and functions they support than the services they offer, flexibility, scalability, technical support, and the vendors' approach to charging for licenses or services. In short, your biggest challenge in selecting a platform may be determining which provider will be your best business partner going forward.
E-Commerce
I had breakfast with a couple at a conference recently. The woman was the founder of a business that sells beads to home hobbyists for bracelets and necklaces. Her partner runs the back-office operations for the business. I asked how they started their business.
In the traditional catalog arena, 
profitability analysis is pretty straightforward: Merchandising contribution margin is composed of demand, returns, net sales, cost of goods sold and advertising expense. In e-commerce, merchants have a different kind of profit analysis and planning process, due to the dynamic nature of the web.
The nature of the internet business model allows more centralized inventory control and more efficient order and fulfillment management than a retail store network. And of course with centralized fulfillment, online merchants don’t incur the cost of distributing inventory around the country, or even throughout a region. In addition, they can extend or cancel promotions depending upon demand and inventory levels.
Hi. My name is Melissa, and I like to play online marketing games. There, I said it. As a jaded journalist, I thought the whole concept of online marketing games was silly. I mean, it's obvious what marketers are trying to do here, right? Get you captivated by an online game and then, when you're sucked in so deep, try to sell you something you don't need or that's too expensive. Oh, and they also may make it hard to get out.
Coolibar, an e-retailer that sells items such as sunscreen and sun-protective swimwear, used a service to help it see how customers were navigating and experiencing its retail site. It quickly realized it needed to speed up its site response time. Read More...
Traditional load-testing methodologies can measure the strength of an enterprise's internal infrastructure. However, if external, third-party components aren't delivering snappy Web application performance, customers likely won't care whose fault it is - they'll just go away. Load testing 2.0 is a way to assess your Web app's performance from the customer's point of view.
Savvy shoppers don’t waste time clicking through multilevel navigational menus. Studies show they head right to the internal site search box and type item numbers, brand names or keywords to find specific items. If they don’t know what they want, then they may browse your navigation. But when they know exactly what to look for (or at least think they know), that box is your salesman.
The Internet provides marketers with the ability and responsibility to know their customers in much greater depth than does the retail model. The Web model also enables marketers to exploit that knowledge far more effectively.
That headline seems dated, doesn’t it? Like it’s 1999 or something? Actually, I very much have 2009 in mind. Through the eyes of merchandise sellers of all kinds — retail, catalog, dot-com, B-to-B, brand marketers, all of the above — using the Internet for e-commerce continues to be a work in progress even a dozen-plus years after it hit the mainstream.
