Simple E-commerce Stories - How To Tell Them shares storytelling secrets such as how details create trust & why a little romance in About copy is good.

How to Choose the Best E commerce Platform for SEO. An independent, comparative study of all the most popular E-commerce platforms in respect of SEO.

Marty Note
Wow, this is an exhaustive "complete guide" to SEO for ecom. I agree with the ranks their exhaustive research creates with a single caveat. I hate platform ecoms like Shopify and Volusion.

Both work great UNTIL you need to scale and then the limitations of such a template and community serving become clear. That said, for companies just starting or below $5M in annual sales Shopify would be a great place to start.

Magento is complicated and intense. No need to go there until you can pay for it with money and expertise. Great post.

Revolution Has Begun, Now Join & Contribute
Are you as frustrated, bored and wanting more from ecommerce as we are? "We" is five marketing, merchants and Magento programmers who know TOGETHER we change the way we communicate, share and sell things to one another.

Learn More
http://bit.ly/ecom_revolution_google 

If you've been looking for a perfect web template for an on-line retail business you came to the right place, because today I'm gonna show you 16 of the newest and coolest e-commerce website templates.

Content Curation is the "new marketing" & this post shares 6 reasons curating content should be your online marketing's elephant.

Finding the need to curate content acute as we develop HackHeadphones on Shopify. Why create new content when everything we need can be curated from sources such branded websites (using videos from Shure.com), Amazon and other "portal" sites.

We are making sure to give credit where it is due and someone might throw a flag, but bet we can negotiate mutually beneficial terms since using content with attribution is closest thing we have to advertising these days.

How do you build a website and marketplace to sell your products and services? Here are the 5 Best Companies for creating an eCommerce platform and marketplace.

Scenttrail Ratings
We've built stores with three of these five recommendations. Each has its good points and bad. Each is perfect for some and not so good for others. Here are our ratings:

ShopLocket
They don't mention this option, but we love the idea of being able to add a shopping cart to any piece of content without paying a big hosting operation like the 5 mentioned. If your ecommerce needs are small and located in social take a look at https://www.shoplocket.com/ .

Caveat
When you are camped on someone's ground THEY will always gain more benefit than you. The chance of a Shopify store outranking Shopify.com is zero. This issue is only a big deal for stores greater than 50,000 Stock Keeping Units and/or greater than $10M in sales. If you think you will eventually sell $10M+ you may want to create your own store / site. If you think it will take 10 years to reach $10M Shopify may be your best bet for ROI and speed. The PAIN comes when you transfer OFF of their platform, but we can discuss that at another time.

Shopify
Would be our first choice for most small to medium sized ecommerce implementations. The UI is clean and easy to understand. You can be up and running on Shopify in a matter of days. Inventory load is always the biggest pain and they have some ways around that.

Big Commerce
Sounds like Big Commerce fills the promotional hole we felt with Shopify. Most websites aren't very sophisticated in their coupons and promotions. If you are you will find Shopify limiting. Sounds like Big Commerce stepped in to fix the issue. And it can be a big issue since cross talk between offers and coupons can cause a train wreck. If you are sophisticated enough to make free shipping, % off and BOGO offers you may want to use Big Commerce.

Volusion
I wasn't wild about Volusion, but can't remember why. The security stuff the review mentions is marginally important. If you need highly secure ecommerce maybe they are better, but their inner-workings didn't seem as friendly as Shopify or as promotional savvy as Big Commerce.

Magento GO
I built our Story of Cancer store (now down) on Go and was impressed with the powerful business rules they include. Less than 10% of ecommerce sites need such power, but if you do Magento Go is probably your best bet. This is the power to say on a rainy Wednesday you want the price on yellow tops to be down10% when pared with shoes A, B or C. The cross-sale and up-sale wigets are powerful. The promotion, free shipping and coupons are powerful (once you figure out the convoluted logic and that problem is endemic).

Presta Shop
I don't know this option and am suspicious of FREE. Free is a risk because things go BUMP in the night on ecom sites. If you aren't a techie or don't have a techie working for you its good to have someone to call or email in an emergency like if you are bleeding personal information all over the web (say for an example lol). My concern here would be can the code keep up with needed changes (since how do they make money) and is it secure since security thanks to crazed hackers can be a real moveable feast (and I only meant "crazed hackers" in the nicest of ways so to do or say otherwise risks a "just because" attack, you know the attacks they launch just because they can).

Best Online Store Option For YOU?
I've used Magento Go and Shopify. I've also used other Content Management Systems when I managed an Ecom team (for 7 years) including home grown and Magento enterprise.

If you want to start an online store which platform should you use? Let's look at a feature by feature comparison:

Easy To Use - Winner Shopify

Plugin / Add On Development - Winner Magento Go 

Email Integration - Tie (both work well with MailChip et al)

SEO - Magento Go if you KNOW SEO, Shopify if you don't

Promotion - Magento Go if you KNOW ecom, Shopify if you don't

Manage SKUs - Tie
up to about 50,000 after than NEITHER (you've outgrown OPP Other People's Platform if you have more than 50,000 unique stock keeping units SKUs). 

Cart - backend Magento Go
(can do more with logic so ASSUMES you know how to create business rule promotions) frontend (what customer sees) Shopify.

Templates - Tie 

Pretzel Logic - Magento Go
(winning this is not a good thing since it means the platform has its own language YOU must learn or things go bump in the night. Magento Go is willing to be confusing and a pain to add POWER, but 95% will never use that power so if you have a small, fun store steer clear). 

Cross Sale / UpSale
Slight nod to Magento Go again assumes you know ECOM well and cross merchandising is not intuitive but is powerful. 

Overall Winner - Shopify
For most readers of this post Shopify is the best choice.

Magento Go honorable mention
for a specialized niche group that needs powerful business rule based promotion, have between 30k to 50k SKUs and don't mind learning a new language to get the backend power they need Magento Go may be for you.

. If you don't know your crosssale (what you do on a product page to move customers to more profitable or popular choices) or upsale (what you do in the car to build Average Order Value (AOV) then use SHOPIFY. 

Ecommerce Trending
Thought this Google Trends chart was interesting. Pulled the chart to support a 2014 plan to create a new suite of publisher tools and an expansion of how merchants can profitably use crowdfunding and crowdsourcing to drive profits up and costs down.

When I see a chart like green line representing crowdfunding it is a starting gun confirming a trend. Magento being large and in charge doesn't surprise me. Magento is such a powerful open source ecom solution that they are all but rollling up the space.

This chart does look differnet for USA only (Magento isn't as strong here as in Europe). Shopify and Volusion's trends are interesting too. I've used Magento Go, Shopify and Volusion and prefer Shopify for UI simplicity, Magento for ecommerce power and haven't gotten deep enough in Volusion to have an opinion.

ANY GO option where you use their templates, business rules and platform favors the platform provider now and forever, so be aware if you are planning to do $1M or more in online sales "GO" options won't work well.

If you are NOT planing to scale your website into more than a million in sales a GO option may be just the perfect low cost ecommerce option. Here is my Magento Go Store to sell my stuff to help fund our Story of Cancer Foundation:

http://storyofcancer.gostorego.com/  

Our customers made a big impact on the ecommerce industry this holiday season, generating over a half billion dollars in sales. Check out this post to learn even more impressive performance results from our successful merchants.