We're excited that in a little over a week, a group of folks from Classy Llama, including myself, will be heading over to Santa Clara for ZendCon 2012. ZendCon is the PHP conference where the industry leaders get together to learn more about PHP and talk about what the future holds. Perhaps it is just my nerdy side (although, I'm not sure if there is any other side) but it is always invigorating to see how the PHP community has continued to evolve and improve! So, if you are going to be at ZendCon, come on by and visit our booth. We will be booth #320 -- between the Oracle and New Relic booths. Come by just to say "hi," learn more about Classy Llama, or talk about how Magento and Zend have revolutionized open-source eCommerce. We look forward to it!

There's something important missing in Facebook PPC targeting! Hi Facebook. First.  I love so many of the things you do.  In fact, I wanted to talk to you about one of them today:  Your PPC advertising platform.  Except, instead of gushing about how awesome it is (which I believe), I wanted to offer instead an idea on how to make it much better for marketers, more relevant for users... and of course, more profitable for you!  It's simple.  Allow me to target people who have recently changed their status in some way.  My clients would be willing to pay much more for this kind of targeting because it would be far more likely to result in sales.  People change their purchasing habits and brand loyalties during significant changes in their lives, and you just happen to know when...

We're here at the Innovate conference here in San Francisco. Here is intro video shown at the beginning of the keynote:

Variable #1:  Traffic Quality If you sell pencil sharpeners, and most of your traffic is redirected from a Youtube video that shows a guy balancing a pencil sharpener on his nose, it's not very likely that the visitors to your site are interested in purchasing pencil sharpeners.  Your bounce rate will likely be sky-high.  I recently saw a massive increase in traffic to one of our client's sites, increasing their monthly traffic volume by around 30%, but they only made one sale from all of the traffic.  It was a major design gallery hit that caused the traffic.  People were going to the site to look at the design, not buy stuff, so of course, the conversion rate for that traffic source was 0%.  In these cases, the traffic quality would greatly decrease the conversion outcome, despite...

E-commerce traffic is worthless if you are not converting any of your traffic into sales.  The percentage of visits that result in a purchase is called the conversion rate.  So much emphasis is put on generating traffic, but it's only the first step in building e-commerce revenue and profitability.  It is typically very expensive from a holistic resource perspective (money, time, focus, etc.) to generate traffic, so to pay no attention to conversion rate is committing a cardinal e-commerce sin.  There are a few critical components that determine how high your conversion rate will be. Step back for a moment.  What would it take to produce a 100% conversion rate?  Every single time someone visited your site, they would purchase something.  Any time a visitor meets two criteria, they make...

Introduction No matter what you sell online, there are three core constituents to revenue:  Traffic, Conversion Rate, and Average Order Size.  In fact, it's a cubic equation: Revenue = Traffic (#) x Conversion (%) x Average Order Size ($).  So if you generate 21,000 visits in a month with a conversion rate of 3.00% and an average order size of $156.23, your revenue is $98,424.90 (21,000 x 3.00% x $156.23). If you can analyze each of these variables effectively, the e-commerce world is your banana.  I hope that by the end of this article series, you'll understand the "sub-variables" that affect each of these core revenue variables, equipping you with the tools to optimize your e-commerce revenue.  (btw, many of these principles apply to business in general, not just e-commerce) This...