Miva Merchant Ecommerce Blog

Special thanks to Steve Fronek of Ten23Media and Rainebrooke for letting us share information from his recent blog post on this topic. 

Are you using Pinterest to help market your ecommerce business online? Just a few months ago, that question would have likely drawn blank looks from most ecommerce store owners.  As the first month of the new year draws to a close, however it is clear that thanks to a growing user base, Pinterest is growing, and marketers are taking notice.

I was unfamiliar with Pinterest until recently—I had heard of it, but I didn’t really understand what it was or how it could benefit an ecommerce business.  It wasn’t until I saw an article in Practical Ecommerce about this topic, and began to see similar articles appearing in the Miva Merchant Twitter feed, that I began to take notice. 

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Today’s blog post comes to us from Miva Merchant Account Manager, Kimberly Hodel

In the past, we’ve shown you how to add Facebook Like and Send buttons to your Miva Merchant store, and just recently, we spotlighted a blog post from 2010 about how to make a custom Twitter feed for your website.

Well, today, we’re here to take it one step further!

Now that we’ve shown you how to use social media in conjunction with your store, the next thing you want to do is track those visitors. You want to know how your efforts are paying off, and if you’ve gone viral yet, right?  We thought so. Welcome to Google Analytics Social Engagement Reports!

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Ask any fly fisherman, and they’ll probably tell you that they prefer certain types of flies over others. Thanks to this week’s Store Spotlight, Discount Flies Online Fly Shop, finding quality flies of all types and in bulk quantities is a quick and simple process. 

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Today is the official SOPA and PIPA protest day, and several websites, including Wikipedia and Google, have either gone dark or blacked out their logos in protest of two pieces of pending legislation aimed to stop the sale and distribution of copyrighted pirated music, movies, and physical goods. 

I knew that this was coming, of course, but it didn’t really hit home until I woke up this morning, and Wikipedia was gone, replaced by a black screen and a message. Craigslist, while not blacked out, had a similar message, as did Google and Amazon.

The names of these bills make them sound like good things, and it’s true that the vast majority of those who oppose SOPA and PIPA are against online piracy.  If passed, however, these bills would do a lot more than help to stop the sale of illegally manufactured, stolen, or pirated goods online. A lot more.

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It’s our favorite time of the year again here at Miva Merchant—Miva Merchant Conference time! Our annual conference will be held at the La Jolla Hyatt Regency in San Diego,  CA from March 7-10, and we are looking forward to networking with Miva Merchant storeowners, developers, and our entire Miva Merchant community!

To celebrate our upcoming conference, we are going to be giving away some very cool conference-related prizes, and anyone is eligible to enter to win.  Simply scroll down to the end of this post and tell us either:

• What you are most looking forward to learning about at this year’s upcoming conference OR
• What is the most important thing that you have learned at a past Miva Merchant Conference that has helped your business grow?

I’ll be posting up the best responses on our Facebook and Twitter pages, and selecting owners of the best-of-the-best-comments to win!

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According to several sources, including CNN Money, the PC isn’t as popular as it used to be, 6% less popular than last year, in fact. And while this may not seem like a large percentage, keep in mind that the average smartphone or tablet can do all or nearly all of the tasks that at one time, users depended on their PC’s to do.

What does this have to do with social, mobile, and tablet commerce?  For one thing, while I’m not trying to say that you can’t engage in (or sell, or promote, or offer) social commerce via a PC-optimized only site, but the fact is that you’re going to run into some barriers when you try to reach mobile or tablet users with either one. 

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Shopping for just the right outfit, shoes, and accessories isn’t always as easy as heading down to the mall. Often, geographical restrictions get in the way.  Shopping for clothes, accessories, shoes, and just about everything else online via ecommerce stores has become a popular and common pastime for this very reason.

Thanks to Miva Merchant, fashion-forward customers wishing to purchase clothing and other items from this week’s Store Spotlight, Blue & Cream don’t have to travel to one of their three physical store locations in order to do so.

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Believe it or not, we’re nearly halfway through the first month of the New Year! Even though 2012 is just getting started, there are plenty of ecommerce and social commerce-related headlines being made. 

Today, we will examine the findings of some recent studies that say that tablet ecommerce will have a big impact in 2012, and find out more about ICANN’s new top level-domain names.

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In 1929, when Waechter’s Fine Fabrics opened its doors for the first time, the fabric store relied on mail-order catalogues and good relationships with shippers and suppliers around the world.  Today, the store continues this distance ordering tradition with its thriving ecommerce store, powered by Miva Merchant.

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Today’s blog post comes to us from Gillian Muessig, Founding President of SEOmoz

SEO is more than SEO. In 1999, it was enough to make sure that keywords were on your landing pages and that your website was crawl-able. By 2003, it was a good idea to add keyword rich text to your H tags, and create horizontal adjust site architecture, and building inbound links took up most of an SEO’s time.

Fast forward to 2012. Social signals are strong and increasing in importance. The industry is maturing and expanding. The Internet marketer’s organic toolbox has a new name: Inbound Marketing or Earned Media Marketing. The distinction is significant. This collection of tools is growing and changing to accommodate major shifts in the search engine algorithms.

Gianluca Fiorelli recently posted this simple graphic illustrating the expanded inbound marketing landscape:

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