If you've ever watched Shark Tank, you know how much backlash an entrepreneur can get for spending too much money on promotions and marketing on a young product or company. Simply put, consistently throwing money at an idea is no way to replace clever, quality marketing tactics, many of which are cheap or completely free. So how do you inexpensively market your ecommerce products?

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When I think about opensource ecommerce, WooCommerce and Magento come to mind. That said, quite a few other opensource solutions exist, and they don't always get their due. Take nopCommerce for example. It's a free, intuitive, clean option with less confusing elements as Magento. This nopCommerce review takes a look at the intricacies of the whole program, including the standout features and whatever unique attributes it has for ecommerce professionals.

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WordPress is an exceptional option for ecommerce professionals looking for more control over their online stores. It does require a little bit of extra work (finding your own hosting, transferring domains, setting up WordPress,) but you gain full control over your online shop, you get to easily add and adjust CSS and HTML, and the options for expanding your site are endless with the help of plugins. WooCommerce is the most popular WordPress ecommerce plugin, but it doesn't have any features for selling tickets. That's why we want to explore the best WordPress plugins for selling tickets to events.

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Amazon bought Whole Foods Market for $13.6 Billion and it has been widely reported. I am not going to rehash what has been put by many publishers. Recode and TechCrunch wrote about the purchase on a Friday that will haunt retail in the US for the next 15-20 years.

Jeff Bezos famously said in 2011, “We are willing to think long-term. We start with the customer and work backwards. And, very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.”  This is the reason why Amazon can innovate unlike any other company in history.

Continue reading Amazon buys Whole Foods – What does it mean for ecommerce?

A few weeks ago when Jack Ma was in Detroit trying to convince small and medium sized businesses to sell to Chinese customers he said something that was largely under reported. Alibaba is hoping to become an economy instead of being a seen as a marketplace exclusively.

The idea is very simple in that Alibaba will be serving 2 billion people and have Gross Merchandise Value of 1 Trillion going through its marketplaces and have 10 million businesses selling on its various platforms by 2020.

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From radical changes to the Shopify brand colors to a sleek new shake-up on the dashboard, Shopify has been hard at work. And recently the Canadian ecommerce platform company announced all of these new roll-outs, along with imagery to help out newcomers and experienced individuals alike.

Over the years, Shopify has been known to release cool new features like the Shopify sections update and constant changes to the Shopify Partner program. We've come to expect Shopify to listen to users and implement the requests as they see fit.

But this update is one of the more drastic we've seen, so we want to highlight the most interesting of the Shopify modifications. Then we'll talk about what each of these updates can do, and if you have to change your thinking or worry about anything startling you or making it harder to do business along the way.

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