Ecommerce Conversations

Innovation on the Internet depends on the ability by entrepreneurs to protect intellectual property. But that protection could be threatened by a case pending at the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s known as the Bilski case, and the issue, loosely, is whether patents can be applied to inventions not tied to physical products or transformations of physical products. To help us understand the importance of the case as it applies to the Internet and ecommerce, we are joined by Robert Kovelman, an intellectual property attorney and an expert in U.S. patent law. He discusses the issue with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.

Ecommerce merchants frequently incur development fees to obtain specific features or appearances for their websites. But there are also prebuilt templates that can do this and one maker of them is AlgoZone. It offers hundreds of ready-made templates for, mainly, open source ecommerce platforms. It’s CEO is Pavel Rojkov, and he joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.

When it comes to marketing, many ecommerce merchants think of pay-per-click ads, or search engine optimization or even email newsletters. But there’s one merchant who has successfully used TV advertising. He’s Jamie Salvatori, founder and owner of VAT19.com, a retailer of unusual gift items. He uses Google’s TV ad interface, via the AdWords platform, to great effect. He’s joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock to explain television advertising, and Google’s TV ad platform.

Nearly every ecommerce merchant who uses product videos reports that it increases sales. But there are disagreements as to what to include in a product video, how to produce it and where to show it. Invodo is a company that specializes in assisting merchants with product videos, and its CEO, Craig Wax, is here to help us sort through the video issues that merchants face. He discusses these issues with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.

The rise of mobile devices is affecting ecommerce. More consumers are using these devices to shop online and more merchants are using them to collect payments. Two experts in the credit card business spoke with us about processing payments on mobile devices. They are John Waldron, CEO of Merchant Focus, and Derek Del Conte, CEO of innerfence, which makes Credit Card Terminal, a popular iPhone application.Together, they have just purchased another mobile credit card processor called AppNinjas, and they spoke with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock to review that acquisition and the future of mobile payment processing.

Ecommerce merchants run businesses that can be bought and sold. There’s a market for these businesses, and our guest today is an expert in the buying and selling of them. He’s Mike Handelsman, general manager of BizBuySell.com, a leading business-for-sale marketplace. He joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.

An ecommerce merchant in St. Louis launched his business in 2006 after having written the programming code for his own shopping cart. That business, called Vat19, sells offbeat gifts (such as a five pound Gummy bear), and has grown to 300 SKUs and up to 2,000 shipments per day. How have they done it all? Jamie Salvatori, the founder and owner, is here to explain it to Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.

There is no bigger name in the credit card business than Visa, and there are no bigger names in the payment gateway business than Cybersource and its subsidiary, Authorize.Net. Later this year, all of those companies will likely be combined, as Visa and Cybersource announced recently that Visa intends to purchase that company. To explain the transaction and its impact on ecommerce merchants, Michael Walsh, president and CEO of Cybersource, and John Bodine, its vice president of small business sales, visits with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.

A growing percentage of Internet consumers use Facebook. By some accounts, it is the second most-popular website, and ecommerce merchants are now finding ways to tap into that traffic. One of them is The Guitar Syndicate, a newly-launched retailer of musical intruments and accessories. It uploads inventory from its ecommerce site to a “Store” tab on its Facebook site. The co-owner of The Guitar Syndicate, Scott Burnett, discuss the company’s Facebook strategy with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.

Rick Wilson is the president of Miva Merchant, the pioneering ecommerce platform. Like many ecommerce platforms, Miva Merchant is evolving and it now offers its own hosted shopping cart. Wilson joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock to discuss recent upgrades to that cart, cloud computing generally, and the future of third-party hosting companies.