120 Top eCommerce Blogs You Must Check To Boost Sales In 2017

Whether you’re a new or veteran ecommerce site owner, you’re going to learn a ton from this hand-picked collection of resources.

Yes, reading blogs takes a lot of time – still, we advise you to visit and follow for at least a couple of weeks all the ecommerce blogs on this list, and to add the most interesting ones to your regular reading list.

You can improve the operation of your online shop with the help of all the professional pieces of content and with the expert experiences that you can get to know here: you can optimize your store’s appearance, you can improve the sales method of your products, you can boost your marketing and increase your conversion rate.

We’ve tried to make a list of the best ecommerce blogs for you. Enjoy!

Choose the category you’re most interested in or start reading just by scrolling down.

 

Market & Trends Case Studies Conversion Optimization Customer Management Content Marketing eCommerce UX Social Media Digital Marketing Search Engine Optimization Business Advice Email Marketing Analytics Brand Building Landing Page PPC Extra

 

Market & Trends

 

Get Elastic

Simply, the king of the genre: Get Elastic shares 3 specific and quality articles every week with 200 thousand individual visitors a month: it has ecommerce news, tips and advice for the e-merchants.

The topics are diverse: you can find useful guidance here in almost any field from design to marketing solutions, from conversion optimizing to the improvement of user experience.

By the way, they define themselves as the blog having the most subscribers, and that’s for a reason, since they are followed by more than 17,500 people on RSS.

In this article they explain that cutting-edge retailers identify the trends that have staying power and leapfrog them before the rest.

 

E-Commerce Nation

E-Commerce Nation, launched in France, approaches the issue from its practical aspects, and addresses all opportunities that can make your ecommerce store more and more successful.

It increases its readership dynamically, it publishes diverse articles, covering topics in social commerce, design & development, ecommerce news, marketing, fulfillment, etc. and it tries to build a community at the same time, where different experts exchange experience and opinions.

A very clear comparison of three popular online shop platforms – WooCommerce, Shopify and Magento:

 

Case Studies

 

A Better Lemonade Stand

The blog of Richard Lazazzera, in which he shares his own, first-hand experiences on how exactly a well-operating, cost-effective ecommerce business should be built.

You can read great writings on the blog, it can be useful primarily for novice e-merchants, but you can get a great deal of immediately usable tips on the advanced level as well.

If you want to follow him together with more than 18,000 subscribers, documented to the tiniest details how an online store is built with professional methods, you can’t leave this one off your list.

You would like to launch an ecommerce store? You should definitely read this before getting started:

 

Practical Ecommerce

As its name shows, Practical Ecommerce is designed to smooth the way for the e-merchants towards high profits and steady growth with perfectly simple guides that are unfamiliar to a lot of people.

The site is considered to be a rarity as it is, because it’s been serving online merchants for more than a decade, since July 2005, and the site has become the number one assistant of both the beginner and the intermediate e-merchants.

Reinforced by the professionals of the field having extraordinary experience, they provide those concerned in online commerce with practical, down-to-earth pieces of advice. Beyond the dry strategy and data analysis, they regularly review the actual trends and issues of design and social marketing.

Learn from others, who are already successful on their market! Let’s see an excellent selection form the world of B2B ecommerce websites:

 

National Retail Federation

National Retail Federation is one of the world’s biggest retail organizations that is present in more than 45 countries in the world. You should pay attention to a commercial organization of such a size if only for its dimension and its extensive network. However, National Retail Federation also does you the favour of blogging on the topicalities concerning ecommerce (as well), almost on a daily basis.

Just like the organization, the blog would also like to help primarily the novice, or at least the less experienced participants in the field of ecommerce. It’s a novelty compared to the other thematic blogs that National Retail Federation addresses the legal background of online commerce and its eventual changes as well.

It’s an excellent summary of the currently operating global retail market and trends both from an online and offline point of view:

 

Volusion

Volusion addresses somewhat more important issues on its blog than its competitors. Although it’s dealing with ecommerce website building, even a developer agency’s blog would be envious of the selection of this blog’s topics and the mature professionalism of the articles.

A short but useful article for those who are currently planning to launch their first ecommerce store:

 

BrainSINS

Strategy, novelties and ecommerce prophecies… BrainSINS is an amazingly pulsating and vibrating blog, in the centre of which what else could be than online commerce. B2B, B2C, design and SEO ‒ it’s compulsory for hyperactive e-merchants.

Some simple solutions can prevent you from losing money:

 

Razor Social

Ian Cleary’s speciality field is social media, he varies expertly the different tricks and tools, so that you make the most of your business. There’s no social interface for which Razor Social has no solution, they are quite simply brilliant in this field.

Is it possible that after a while your blog will bring you a large proportion of your revenues?

 

Nosto

This is a blog of a personalization service that is already used by more than 21,000 ecommerce stores. Accordingly, in their articles they are dealing with topics like CTR, average conversion and consequently, the increase of revenues and the soonest possible return on investment. There’s absolutely no doubt that their writings are born of appropriate experience.

In the article we chose, they are providing ideas concerning what types of pop-ups displayable in online shops there are, and in addition, they present particular, already existing examples for each of them:

 

Business 2 Community

On the quite popular business-oriented social networking portal grown from the personal blog of Brian Rice, you can find only quality professional content in the fields of digital marketing, social media, content marketing and social selling.

The useful pieces of content are currently created by more than 15,000 contributors, and with its more than 3 million visitors a month it’s considered to be one of the biggest professional portals.

Every ecommerce entrepreneur likes useful statistics and everyone would like to read the customers’ minds. Let’s see how that’s possible:

 

Instapage

With the help of the landing page creation service, launched in 2012, practically anybody, without any professional web design knowledge, can create nicely layouted, efficiently converting subscription and selling pages.

We found one of the largest landing page surveys in their blog, thanks to the work of Fahad Muhammad. He hasn’t just collected 100 landing pages, but he even analyses them one by one, highlighting their well-working solutions and the ones that need to be tested:

 

Conversion Optimization

 

Got Groove – eCommerce Blog

Technical and marketing information for advanced e-merchants, Got Groove’s thematic blog provides more in-depth articles and analyses. A high-quality professional blog, nevertheless written in a language comprehensible to everyone.

In addition to the analyses, ecommerce communications can’t be left out either, of course. Those who regularly read Got Groove’s blog can obtain a comprehensive knowledge of ecommerce.

Learning from the big ones is not a shame. You can get to know three useful ideas from the example of Amazon Prime Day:

 

eCommerceFuel

A few years ago Andrew Youderian decided to start his own business, and the idea proved to be so good that by now he has become one of the most widely known figures in the ecommerce scene.

Operating two ecommerce stores, he has reached a profit of 1 million dollars within a relatively short period of time, and fortunately, in addition to providing his readers with relevant tips, he regularly shares on his blog the lessons learned from his own experiences.

Free e-books, videos, and, of course, forums help both the beginners and the advanced professionals in becoming as outstanding e-merchants as possible.

An interview with Peep Laja, the extremely popular founder of the ConversionXL blog site on conversion optimization:

 

Kissmetrics

Numbers, information, marketing and all the data that you’ll need for the creation of a successful campaign or an even more successful ecommerce strategy.

Neil Patel, today’s hero of online marketing has put together a site and a connected blog with Hiten Shah, which not only provides ideas and tangible solutions, but also offers an approach to its followers.

You will learn step by step how the data set that seems confusing at first, becomes a well converting online shop that generates significant profit.

You can learn about 8 detailed suggestions, which, if applied, will help you generate higher revenues:

 

Blue Acorn eCommerce Blog

Blue Acorn is one of the developer companies that share with their visitors the enormous amount of experiences in the field of ecommerce that have accumulated during their everyday work. No wonder that several thousands of people visit their blog every month, where the main topic is increasing conversion for online shops.

BlogMetrics ranks the thematic blog of Blue Acorn 6^th in the category of ecommerce, which can be considered very high, especially if you look at how an illustrious group of market players the team has got into with that rank.

You’ll be amazed how enormous improvement in the performance of your ecommerce store can be achieved with some minor but measurable changes:

 

CMSWire

Targeting a niche market within a niche market is always an exciting undertaking, however it could end up either being a success or a failure. On the other hand, founders of CMSWire made such a success of the segmentation of ecommerce consultancy (blogging, communications etc.), that now even advanced e-merchants are visiting them in case they want to browse the latest pieces of content on customer experience.

The site functions as both an ecommerce portal and a community, all the content, all the news, articles and analyses have the purpose of enabling the e-merchants to boost customer experience to the maximum on their own interfaces.

This of course leads to high conversion numbers, and the numbers of the portal, which has been operating since 2003, speak for themselves: every quarter more than 800.000 visitors read the thoughts and ideas of more than 400 professionals on the present and the future of ecommerce and on the highest level service of the customers.

Customer reach through multiple digital channels results in higher revenues as well. Let’s see what Steve Olenski has got to say about it:

 

PrestaShop

It’s an open source code ecommerce application that tries to facilitate the job of online merchants in several languages. We recommend its English blog primarily for beginners, it’s an excellent site where you can lay the foundation of your professional knowledge!

Make the search engine of your ecommerce store better, in order to acquire more customers:

 

Magento

The blog of the developer company of our favourite ecommerce software application, Magento, with novelties, case studies, most of the best practices and with everything that an online merchant working with a Magento store needs to know.

It’s a more advanced blog, for true e-merchants.

Some conversion strategies in the system of Magento, by Jenna Warren, that have been proven to work:

 

Sellbrite

Sellbrite is dealing with multiple channel ecommerce, their blog is also about that. In addition, they are also dealing with customer acquisition, and the most extensive automation possible of ecommerce workflows.

Price is one of the most important factors of marketing strategy. How should you define it? Here’s a little help from William Harris:

 

Neuromarketing

Roger Dooley will show you how to acquire even more returning customers and how to obtain the trust of your customers.

Has your company, or any of your products won an award or ranked high? This is the way how you should communicate that towards your target audience:

 

UpSellit

UpSellit’s team writes mainly about how to boost shopping cart value once you have succeeded in persuading your customer to purchase something in your store. In addition to that, they have excellent articles on the topic of mobile reach and optimization, which is why we recommend them to you.

Thanks to proper testing you can achieve great improvement of results with low costs:

 

Traffic & Sales

What’s the goal of all e-merchants? The boost of turnover and sales. Traffic & Sales enjoys widespread popularity due to simple phrasing and its true stories amounting to impact studies.

Make use of your users in content creation! Believe us, you won’t regret that:

 

HubSpot

HubSpot is the specialist of inbound marketing, but for this very reason they are also good at online commerce. Plus, fortunately they also write a blog about that, and leaving that out of the daily routine would be a mistake.

How to apply the growth-driven design? You can find out here:

 

RevenueWire

They are offering a global ecommerce platform mainly to those companies that are selling digital products.

In addition to the latest news and crispy novelties of the field of ecommerce, they are focusing on making their readers able to realize continuous expansion on the market of “trading” with software applications and services.

How to adjust your prices immediately to the actual consumer demand in your online store?

 

Springbot

Springbot is working on connecting the social media with your ecommerce store, and you can get tips here, which will help you become an outstanding social communicator and a successful e-merchant. Facebook, Instagram and everything that is hot today and may be relevant for you as well.

Everyone likes discounts, which is exactly why you should consider all the options, with the help of which you can make your coupon deals effective:

 

Sweet Tooth

The most important advantage of Sweet Tooth, a loyalty extension for Magento and other ecommerce platforms, founded by Steve Deckert and Mike Rossi, beside the perfectly usable top ecommerce blogs, is that they publish very significant materials on the structure of loyalty systems, on their management and on everything in connection with that.

In our opinion they offer one of the best customer loyalty solutions. They can be of enormous help mainly in the fashion, beauty and sports equipment sectors since, based on the characteristics of these markets, loyalty programmes can be used with great success.

Customers love when you pay special attention to them. Check out how you can build the club of VIP customers:

 

Mouseflow

Mouseflow makes videos of what your visitors do (or don’t do unfortunately) on your site, and they provide conversion tips on their blog. Very useful and informative!

With these suggestions you will undoubtedly increase the standard of your online shop’s marketing activity:

 

The Daily Egg

What do you think? A company, whose job is to make heat maps on your pages based on the activity of your visitors, knows about conversion? Most certainly almost everything. That’s what Crazy Egg does and Daily Egg is their blog, where for example the “good old” Neil Patel publishes as well.

Personalized messages are good, right? And do your users think about it the same way?

 

Optimizely

A blog in the magic circle of the best performing online shops and A/B tests. The optimized, almost excessively personalized ecommerce stores will certainly reach better conversion, and that’s what Optimizely’s blog offers you a helping hand with.

A lot of people leave your online store before they would purchase? Ask them what’s the reason for that!

 

2X ecommerce

On the blog of Kunle Campbell you can find a lot of great interview podcasts he made with ecommerce marketing experts and with owners of successfully operating shops.

Useful advice is provided here on how you can redirect the traffic of the marketplace to your own ecommerce interface that is running parallel with it:

 

CommerceBrain

Yulia V Smirnova’s blog, her articles are mainly on ecommerce marketing and on methods to increase conversion.

A fundamental topic that concerns all e-merchants. The article is on the pricing activity of online stores:

 

Dynamic Yield

The articles of the blog primarily focus on the increase of conversion and on ecommerce personalization, and their references make it quite clear that there is very significant professional experience behind their publications.

The product referral system that they developed themselves is able to adjust the product range not only to the given customer’s personal preferences, but even to the expected weather.

We chose the guide on the exit-intent, which is quite useful in terms of keeping the first visitors, i.e. database building. In addition to the good examples, you can also learn from this article how NOT to do it, in case you apply it in your online shop:

 

Pixel Union

In the blog of the digital agency making Shopify, BigCommerce and WordPress based ecommerce templates and extensions, a quite popular online commerce model, in other words, subscriptions and their correct application are presented:

 

ShipStation

In case you’re selling through multiple ecommerce channels at the same time, order management and serving the needs of the customers requires a lot of time and effort. With the help of ShipStation, you can organize and carry out the tasks related to the orders through a central and intuitive interface.

We chose Jake Gasaway’s article from their blog, which introduces to merchants the advantages and basics of multichannel selling:

 

Shopping Signals

The digital marketing blog of Ryan BeMiller, specialist of B2B and B2C online selling, having more than 17 years of experience, focuses on the increase of the efficiency of ecommerce selling.

A flash sale, run in online shops, is an excellent tool at the introduction of new products or in case of selling off remaining stock. You get useful advice on the successful implementation of this through a specific case study:

 

Smart Marketer

Ezra Firestone has more than a decade of experience and is considered by a lot of people to be one of the best ecommerce experts. Smart Marketer that he established, compiles and publishes in digital format training programmes for salesmen and for online shop owners.

In Ezra’s blog you can find an ever growing, but an already gigantic quantity of useful videos, podcasts and conference materials ‒ categorized, of course.

We chose his article on the exploitation of UpSell opportunities:

 

Rejoiner

Recover, retain, optimize – this is the main message that Rejoiner communicates. They focus on a field within email marketing which is exploited mainly by the bigger ecommerce stores only, and that is the transformation of abandoned shopping carts into conversion.

Think how significant increase in revenue can be realized if you can achieve conversion in case of 15% of the abandoned shopping carts – according to the statistics.

We managed to find one of the best articles – if not the best article – on the topic of “abandoned cart”, which, beside presenting the sad facts, also provides solutions and immediately applicable techniques for online store owners.

 

Launch & Hustle

The mission of this company is to provide the best possible knowledge in the field of marketing strategy and marketing tactics for their clients – who may be start-up companies, businesses in a growth phase, or companies firmly established internationally – in order to ensure the achievement of excellent results and business growth.

How to transform your not too-well-performing B2B website into a lead generating machine? Let’s see some effective solutions!

 

Customer Management

 

E-Commerce Times

The site itself is not as pretty as the nowadays trendy top ecommerce blogs, but leaving it out of this list would be a mistake. They collect all news and curiosities that are related to online commerce, that are closely or a bit more remotely relevant to the topic.

In addition to the news of the ecommerce business world, technical background, mobile platforms, internet security and social media will be addressed as well on the pages of E-Commerce Times.

ECT News Network, which operates the site, claims to be one of the biggest e-business content providers in the USA, E-Commerce Times attracts approximately 50 thousand individual visitors a month out of the traffic of the truly considerable empire.

Monitoring customer behaviour and feedback, and changes made in time to the course of business may be of vital importance:

 

3dcart

3dcart is a less known player among the ecommerce store software applications, still, it’s very much worth paying attention to their blog. In addition to the tricks optimized to their own system, you can often catch practices that leave even an experienced online professional wondering.

Your conversion rate is below 2%? If you want to increase it, read this:

 

Reevoo Blog

Reevoo is dealing with customer feedback and ratings, they’re the best at this. That’s the reason why it’s worth reading their blog, because if anyone on earth really understands customer psychology, it’s them.

One of the biggest pains for an online store is shopping cart abandonment. How to minimize it? Here are some tips:

 

Userlike

In addition to the usual topics, Userlike places particular emphasis on the communication with the customers. Their posts include communication tools and channels, with the help of which you can easily keep in touch with your customers.

If your customers are dissatisfied with you, there’s only a 9% chance of them returning to you. Check out how you can make them happy:

 

Ecommerce Platforms

This is the ideal blog for those who like big comparisons. Catalin Zorzini compares online shop engines, SEO compatible ecommerce platforms – and the list probably could be continued forever – on the basis of various criteria.

If you are a B2B e-merchant, it is a must-read, by Oren Ezra, to ensure a great shopping experience:

 

Guided Selling

Nowadays more and more people believe in smart customer acquisition instead of aggressive advertising campaigns. On Guided Selling’s blog you can regularly read articles on how you can persuade smartly your visitors to purchase and spend less money at the same time.

According to Angela Sokolovska it’s time to add “conversational commerce” to your vocabulary. And she’s perfectly right!

 

XSellco

XSellco, the brainchild of Ray Nolan, is also one of the blogs which share with their readers their extremely valuable experiences gained during their everyday work. Nolan is good at making sales out of data, and at making customers out of visitors – he’s worth paying attention to.

Are you thinking big? In that case, you will have to operate a customer service system outstanding even according to international standards:

 

Bootstrapping Ecommerce

Shabbir Nooruddin claims to have been an e-merchant since his childhood, and on his blog he shares everything on ecommerce marketing: SEO, PPC, social media and lots of other stuff, so that the readers can launch their own highly lucrative business.

In this post, he lists how you can minimize customer fraud, moreover, at the end of the article you can even read a couple of tips from other experts:

 

Help Scout

Almost 73 thousand newsletter subscribers are awaiting regularly the best materials on the enhancement of customer experience, on the most useful ecommerce software applications, and on the establishment of a solid customer base.

A detailed description on how to build your customer service team from scratch:

 

Content Marketing

 

LemonStand

LemonStand, operating in Vancouver, offers a primarily cloud-based online shop system, with special regard to the design solutions, thanks to which you can tailor the user experience as you (more precisely your consumers) like.

Being a designer company, it’s not surprising that they are operating a quite nicely designed, very clear blog site, where they post detailed, comprehensive articles in many topics, e.g. ecommerce web design, content development or online store building.

In today’s fierce competition, it’s absolutely necessary to provide your target audience with outstanding pieces of content. How? Well, you can find the answer here:

 

ConversionXL

Peep Laja is specialized in the increase of conversion, and of course his corporate blog is also on that. General, primary and complementary topics, all in favour of higher conversion and higher sales.

Product description ‒ it does make a huge difference how it’s formatted:

 

BuzzSumo

The company providing assistance in the development of content marketing are giving useful advice in the field of content marketing in particular of course, so that you can have quality and useful text content in your ecommerce store.

With the help of their service, thanks to the recent data and the easy manageability, you can easily find the currently trendy, hot topics, based on which you can create relevant content yourself as well, that you can effectively spread in the social media with the help of opinion leaders.

It’s the headline that sells your content. How to write it well? Steve Rayson tells you:

 

SpyFu

SpyFu is an outstanding search engine optimization tool for “stealing” the most profitable organic keywords and PPC advertisements of your competitors, all this on an intuitive, well-organized and clear interface.

It’s a common mistake at larger ecommerce companies that the different units and teams communicate differently about the company itself. Consistent communication should be “message-based” or “message-forward”:

 

Unbounce

The conversion technologies applied on landing pages have developed to perfection, and the planning and preparation process itself has become an independent speciality field by now. With the help of Unbounce, you can put together and put into operation your landing pages, covering the complete process, without the need for a programmer.

We chose Amy Wood’s article because its content creation approach is perfectly applicable in ecommerce store blogs as well:

 

Hotjar

In order to be able to serve your visitors’ needs in the fullest possible way, you need to know what their needs are and what they do exactly after arriving to your website.

This is which Hotjar quite efficiently helps you with, regardless of what kind of device the users arrive from. You get a complex analysis from A to Z on conversion channels, on filling out questionnaires and on visitor feedback as well, in addition to getting one on the video recordings.

In his article, Brian Lenney presents a complete process – already proved to be working fine at Hotjar –, on the creation of content that your potential clients will definitely be interested in:

 

Ecommerce UX

 

Internet Retailer

Whenever you read Internet Retailer, you always have the feeling that you’ve arrived to the official and global news portal of ecommerce. That’s because in addition to the daily topicalities of the e-business world, e-merchants are assisted with analyses, articles and the “auxiliary sciences” of online commerce as well.

The portal is clear and reasonably minimalist, and as such, it represents a colourful patch in the sometimes way too artistic or vivid world of e-business blogs. We very much like the sites where not only best practices are published all the time, and Internet Retailer has found the perfect balance on the guidance-communications-data gathering axis.

This portal, which covers the field of e-business in an exemplary way, is simply a must-follow site.

With the spread of mobiles it’s indispensable that you optimize your ecommerce store for mobile devices as well. What do you have to pay attention to in terms of that?

 

Shopify

Shopify is one of the leading online shop engine developers of the world. You should pay attention to what they have to say, since they’ve already brought something on the virtual table of ecommerce.

On their blog, they combine the traditional, a thousand times proved commercial approach with the requirements of the internet era, all this in the form of interesting and easily comprehensible articles.

It does matter very much, how your products look in your online shop. It’s worthwhile for you to follow these very detailed, practical pieces of advice by Thomas Kragelund:

 

BigCommerce

It’s also a hosted online shop platform provider company. On their blog you can read mainly about their own development and their ecommerce success story. Their clear site in itself is a true representation of the current trends, but fortunately they also share their experiences with their audience, be it appearance or fine-tuning of the software.

The primary purpose of website design is not the creation of amazement, but that of conversions. The best online shops were selected in the light of that statement:

 

cleverbridge

The blog of cleverbridge will teach you proper pricing methods and will show you how to extract the useful information from an unfriendly data set. German precision in online commerce. Well, that can’t hurt, can it?

You should clarify the difference between these two things below, in case you want to build a stable customer base:

 

Blue Stout

Blue Stout’s blog comes up with podcasts, videos, case studies, and they don’t just talk about ecommerce but they also take active part in it as service providers.

How to make your product pages irresistible? Here’s the recipe from Jenna Compton:

 

My Wife Quit Her Job

A blog of personal tone, sharing experiences of operating one’s own family online shop, that is made mainly for beginner online merchants, but it’s so thorough that even the more advanced find plenty of useful information here.

This article by Steve Chou explains the utmost importance of search functions for your own site:

 

UserTesting

User experience is not a luxury, we hope we don’t have to explain that to you any more. On this blog you will get extremely useful information on how you can improve user experience in your ecommerce store in order to realize higher conversion.

Some basic functions that you will definitely need to manage in your online shop so that your customers are satisfied:

 

eCommerce UX Design

Amazingly great writings again in the topic of user experience. Even you will be surprised how thoroughly they address even the tiniest corner of your ecommerce store.

You find pop-up advertising messages too aggressive? Rest assured, they can be used smartly:

 

Smashing Magazine

The well-known Vitaly Friedman is its co-founder, they are dealing mostly with web-design. But still, what is the most important thing when it comes to user experience? Of course it’s web design. Today it’s not enough even if your site is responsive, there’s a great deal of other factors that are necessary for success. You’ll find them here.

Which is better? Infinite scrolling or a “Load more” button? An interesting study in respect of reliable test results:

 

Goodvidio

They focus on the optimization of product videos. Their goal, and of course the client’s goal as well, is that the videos lead to the highest possible conversion by capturing the customers’ attention and desires, which will eventually result in a highly satisfactory purchasing experience.

The blog specifically focuses on the sales of ecommerce stores realized through the use of videos, on the effect of product videos on the increase of conversion, on YouTube marketing and video marketing in general.

By the way, Gooodvidio is developing a special ecommerce solution that’s capable of automatically finding and collecting the most popular or the most relevant YouTube videos on your products. All what’s left for you to do, is to approve which videos among those should appear on the data sheets of the given products.

Do you have product videos? Are they good? Do the visitors also think they are good and they click through? It’s worthwhile for you to test what it is that really works!

 

eConsultancy

A portal specialized on supporting the global community of online merchants and salesmen, which conducts quite important research and publishes data analyses and useful instructional materials.

We chose the article Greg Randall wrote because it’s one of the best guides on a topic that significantly influences the results of online sales, however, to this day, a lot of ecommerce store owners still don’t put enough emphasis on this issue.

 

Ecommerce Illustrated

Linda Bustos’s blog, relating to her book to be published under the same title, specializes particularly in the optimization of the layout, of the appearance of ecommerce stores.

Including all the important types of sub pages from the opening page to the checkout, it demonstrates with excellent examples the creation of user friendly ecommerce interfaces which are optimized for the increase of conversion.

Optimization for mobiles is a true challenge for online shops. Let’s see some useful tips how it is worth planning filter and sort functions:

 

Envato

This business operating in Australia is one of the most popular social marketplaces among web developers and designers. Their most visited website is ThemeForest where you can view and download a great deal of ecommerce store “themes” as well, in addition to the countless website templates.

If an ecommerce company would like to be among the best, it’s important that they know the latest UI / UX trends:

 

Social Media

 

Buffer Social Media Blog

Buffer – being the supplier of one of the most popular solutions managing social media communication – is not dealing with ecommerce specifically, but their blog is useful for everyone who would like to develop and grow in the field of e-business. We usually visit Buffer’s blog when we’re a little fed up with the dry mountains of data and the umpteenth perfect online marketing strategy.

On Buffer’s blog you can read mainly about the business-wise successful use of social media interfaces, about increasing visitor numbers, and about a modern business approach in general that is based on online communication.

Customer service through social media? Absolutely! Let’s see some great examples of that from Bryan Haines:

 

WiziShop

WiziShop belongs to the relatively small group of European ecommerce experts. They don’t overdo blogging, instead of daily content provision they rather focus on quality.

Their own performance-based ecommerce service is also made for online merchants, and for this reason, they too need to face the current challenges of ecommerce on a daily basis.

It does matter when and how you react on opinions or comments appearing on social networking sites:

 

Demi University

On Demi, they are dealing with online courses, where, not surprisingly, online marketing is taught. On the blog you can get great pieces of advice mainly on your social media campaign, on the management of your interfaces, be it Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn, but of course the list could still be continued.

How to choose the proper social media channels for your business communications:

 

Ecwid

In addition to the news on their own application, you can find quite good tips here on the effective seasonal offers, on email marketing and on the complementary but indispensable ecommerce workflows.

You’d like to have a bigger customer base or more subscribers? Organize a contest! You can find a lot of great ideas here:

 

Social Media Today

Your company has to be present on the interfaces of social networks as well, and it hasn’t been enough for a long time now to use only one of these. Social Media Today are one of the experts of the field, their articles, specifically on ecommerce, assist your successful social media presence.

Did you know that 60% of the traffic arriving to online shops from all social media originates from Facebook? Therefore, it’s worth exploiting better this channel as well. Chris London’s article helps you with that:

 

Hootsuite

One of the best social media management solutions, having more than 10 million users. They’re the best of the profession, so it’s worth paying attention to their pieces of advice.

What do you need if you think for example of the Facebook page of your business? Strategy, good advice, simple tips, which you are able to use as well. You will find all this several times a day on the social media blog of Hootsuite.

If you read this from Dara Fontein, you’ll realize that it absolutely does matter when you post:

 

Shane Barker’s blog

Shane Barker is one of the most widely known specialists of online sales and lead generation, he also publishes his professionally written articles containing his steps applicable in practice as well, on the blogs of Search Engine Journal, Social Media Examiner, SemRush, Hootsuite and Neil Patel.

Among the articles on his blog on digital marketing we chose the one on the quite important potential lying in micro-influencers:

 

Post Planner

Many people don’t have time to look for pieces of quality content on the internet that may be useful for their own community as well, and then to ensure the scheduling of the gathered content.

Post Planner takes this task off your shoulders in order to make your Facebook and Twitter communication more effective, as it is specifically looking for content which has generated high activity within the predefined topic according to the statistics.

Today ecommerce businesses cannot ignore Facebook communication any more. Let’s see what you should focus on:

 

Social Quant:

Twitter is not a social networking site that ecommerce businesses can ignore any more. Social Quant helps you increase the number of your Twitter followers with relevant followers based on the keywords defined by you, thus you can make sure that your tweets get to potential customers who are actually relevant for you.

It’s worth paying attention to their blog, they are one of the most useful sources of information in the field of Twitter marketing, as they are conducting their researches based on the activity of their almost 14 million (!) current users.

Should you have any questions concerning Twitter, you can count on Michael Kawula, the CEO of Social Quant, and David Boutin providing excellent solutions and ideas.

David Boutin’s article gives a helping hand with drawing up several Twitter marketing strategies of proven efficiency:

 

AgoraPulse

AgoraPulse is a relatively fresh player in the field of social networking site management, which has attracted our attention with its very appealing and intuitive user interface. It’s important to note that in contrast to their competitors, in their case only, you can’t just manage social media accounts but you can put together quizzes and promotional campaigns as well.

We chose their article that is of vital importance for practically every ecommmerce business, since with the help of your colleagues you can reach a much larger audience even at the time of launching your online store:

 

Social Media Examiner

Social Media Examiner, founded by Mike Stelzner, is perhaps the most popular social media marketing portal in the world, which currently has already more than half a million newsletter subscribers.

No matter what kind of questions you have in connection with the topic of social media, you will definitely find practical guides, podcasts or expert interviews here in which you will get the answers to them.

SME also organizes Social Media Marketing World, the largest social networking conference in the world today.

Creating good content for the blog of your ecommerce store is not enough, you should also think about attaching attractive, possibly click through rate increasing images to your shared articles. Kristi Hines provides a step-by-step guide of creating quality social media images:

 

Digital Marketing

 

The Sparkline

For those who would not like to read about anything else but building an online shop, about the perfect search engine optimization or about the pinpoint targeting of the social media for that matter, we don’t recommend reading Fizzle’s blog in any case. On the other hand, it’s perfect for all e-merchants craving for a little inspiration, mental ammunition in the middle of a stressful everyday life.

Corbett Barr and Chase Reeves help you win the online race, and in addition, they don’t attack using their power, they prefer the mind game. It’s not specifically an ecommerce blog, but those susceptible to it can successfully build the customer and follower base of their online shop with its help.

One of the cornerstones of marketing communication is the unique selling proposition (USP), with the definition of which we could use a little help:

 

ROI Revolution

It’s a general marketing blog, where they’re addressing exactly the issue you would definitely like to find out yourself as well: how to generate the most profit with the least investment. Let’s go for the best ROI!

Avoid irresponsible advertising costs, concentrate on the return and on the realistic goals:

 

Store Growers

Dennis Moons has been an eCommerce consultant for 5 years, he has tested heaps of visitor and customer acquisition techniques in his own and in his clients’ projects, so he knows what works and what you shouldn’t push.

We believe that the most useful writing for our readers here is this very well prepared online shop marketing guide, “configurable” at the top of the article, which even includes practical steps:

 

ReferralCandy

One of the most popular eCommerce solutions, in which you can easily plan and put into operation practically any kind of referral programme – of course every individual referrer participating in the programme gets a URL and the rewards granted for the referrals can also be easily configured.

It’s an important aspect that the system measures practically all activity in connection with the referral programme, thus you can measure and optimize the programme’s efficiency using the data of the statistics as well.

Which other topic could we have chosen from their blog than Jon Tan’s article? He shows you through 42 specific successful examples how to make everyone talk about you:

 

Mention

With the help of Mention’s service you can’t only monitor the public online discussions about you, but you can monitor the communication of your competitors as well, or, you can find the influencers important to you. All this accompanied by having automated reports prepared.

We have the pleasure to recommend you the article of Patrick Whatman as one of the most thorough guides on digital marketing strategy currently available online. We specifically consider it a required reading for all online businesses:

 

Search Engine Optimization

 

Backlinko

Brian Dean’s blog is about SEO, which is not at all neutral to an ecommerce store owner. He puts a great deal of effort in writing his detailed articles, which has brought excellent results to him in terms of visitor numbers, reputation and very probably revenues of course ‒ all very well deserved.

Without doubt he was not “born into” the first search results pages: he shares all of the SEO techniques that he worked out during the years in his blog and in the training materials of SEO That Works.

For us his blog is in the frontline of SEO.

Go to Backlinko if you’re interested in the relationship between SEO and ecommerce, this post will definitely put several things back into place in your head:

 

Ahrefs

As a relatively new player, Ahrefs managed to become one of the most popular website analysing platforms in the world, which is largely thanks to their huge backlink database.

Mapping and following backlink profiles is a main advantage and SEO is supplemented with competition analysis. A nice arsenal of SEO tools are available, the updated is Keyword Explorer is our favourites.

In their blog you can find guidelines much more thorough than usual, based on enormous quantities of data, in which all you need to know is explained step by step.

In case you’d like to select from loads of useful search engine optimization tips, you will definitely not be disappointed with David McSweeney’s post:

 

SEMrush

The main thrust of this blog is represented by the articles concerning SEO, which is not by chance, because SEMrush is a worthily recognized competitor in the forefront of SEO software applications, thanks to, for example, its specifically accurate tracking of keyword ranking.

The article we chose was written by Tony Messer, it focuses on link building for ecommerce stores describing five immediately applicable methods:

 

Moz

They started as an SEO agency, today they’re developers at the same time, and experts of ecommerce as well. One of the world’s most predominant SEO teams, but they’re present with useful materials regarding other topics as well.

A fine example of this is that they provide suggestions on how you should weed out all the non-attractive and non-useful pieces of content from your website:

 

Neil Patel

Neil Patel. The name simply speaks for itself. So we shouldn’t even write anything else here, however, it still needs to be somewhat explained why already the second blog that the famous online marketing guru is involved in is on this list.

There’s a good chance he knows everything about online marketing, and he even shares a great part of that knowledge on his own blog, which also particularly addresses ecommerce.

Ecommerce and search engine optimization. Very long, very easy to read, very useful:

 

WordStream

Their speciality is PPC, which you undeniably need if you are dealing with ecommerce. It may not be as exciting as a blog on social media, but it’s very advisable for you to read.

A new era is coming in the world of search engine optimization. What will it be like and how should you get prepared for it? Larry Kim provides an answer for that:

 

Search Engine Watch

An enormous amount of information on SEO, search engine marketing and PPC until exhaustion, and on all other areas of online marketing in connection with those for relaxation.

Great opportunities lie in local searches as well. How to take advantage of them? The solution is here:

 

ProRankTracker

They are specialized in the statistics of search engine rankings. They claim they are having the most accurate analytical solution on the market to determine which rank a certain website has on the results pages.

What’s your rank in Google? Well, the question is more complex than you would think…

 

Synup

Although Synup has been in operation only for less than 3 years (in November 2016), currently more than 30,000 businesses are using its marketing solutions that are based on local information. Their software processes a huge amount of data, thanks to which every company can efficiently manage its own location data, its brand building, its awareness promotion and its company analytics.

It may seem to be just a minor problem, but duplicate citation of your company in an online directory may turn out to be quite problematic. Why is that? Read this:

 

YOAST

The Dutch family man, with four children, Joost de Valk founded his now worldwide known company in 2010, which became famous for the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin. Team Yoast has grown to become a team of 50 people by now, and they are active in all areas of website optimization, be it the optimization of speed, navigation or search engine.

In case you want to improve the SEO of your ecommerce store, you should go through this checklist!

 

Rebrandly

Rebrandly claims that creation, management and sharing of “branded” links – with the help of which you can increase the trust towards the links (the click-through rate will be higher), and brand presence as well as brand reputation can also be improved – can be most easily done with Rebrandly.

Did you know that the “presentation” or appearance of links has a significant influence on trust and thus on the willingness to click? The post by Derric Haynie describes just that:

 

Business Advice

 

Demac Media

Demac Media is a team of strategists, designers and developers, who help merchants build and grow ecommerce businesses.

Your business will go only as far as your team can take it. So, who are these eCommerce heroes, and how do you know you’ve found them? To help you, Demac has shortlisted 50+ role descriptions from leading ecommerce companies across North America (downloadable document). Learn the sequence of hiring that leverages your existing team, and save you time in recruiting your next key hire!

 

Veeqo

They offer a platform that makes ordering and inventory processes quicker and simpler, thus saving a huge amount of time for the operator of the online shop.

Both marketing tactics and general retail advice are presented on their blog site. They are not the only ones on this list who deal with the integration of your online interfaces, but since they know the European market in particular, we couldn’t leave Veeqo off the list.

It’s an extremely useful collection of the most important market data covering several fields:

 

Ecommerce Influence

Austin Brawner is an email marketing specialist, he’s a blogger of Ecommerce Influence. We found to be one of the most useful among his articles the one including the list of software applications carefully selected for online merchants.

He doesn’t only list these tools, but he is recommending them specifically based on his own experiences he had with them:

 

PFS

In the blog of the digital agency, familiar with the development of the 5 types of eCommerce platforms, you can find articles on nearly 60 topics relating to online marketing.

It’s the holiday season that’s the most important for you, too, right? Here are some useful hints for the preparations:

 

Segmentify

Segmentify developed an ecommerce personalization solution with which you can tailor the opening page of the online shop, the category page and the product data sheet to the profile of the given visitor.

Here’s an excellent video collection on the TED talks relevant and useful for e-merchants (we’d like to specifically highlight Barry Schwartz’s speech „The Paradox of Choice”):

 

The Future of Customer Engagement and Commerce

The blog operated by SAP Hybris focuses specifically on the latest techniques of convincing the customers to purchase, on future trends, and on B2C and B2B commerce.

It’s common knowledge that a B2B ecommerce company has to be operated with a different approach and different customer management than one to be built on B2C, regardless of the fact that there are common points as well.

In his article, Brian Beck provides useful pieces of advice on building a B2B ecommerce organization, so that you can launch a B2B ecommerce initiative while having a stable background:

 

Quick Sprout

This blog is one of the most successful projects of Neil Patel, which means a gigantic quantity of immediately applicable practical advice for the readers, whether it’s on the increase of your social media followers, on practices of writing truly useful pieces of content, or on search engine optimization. A great challenge to find the time to read (and of course to apply!) them all.

We chose this article because if anyone knows for sure what you need in order to become an “influencer”, or in other words an opinion leader in your area of expertise, than he does, and that represents a huge advantage over your competitors even in case of an ecommerce business:

 

Colibri IO

Social media interfaces are outstanding platforms for you to follow and influence the discussions on your products, but not all ecommerce business persons have the capacity to monitor the newsfeed all day. (It’s another thing if there’s a team for that within the company.)

Of course, Colibri IO monitors not only the social media platfprms, but for example websites, blogs and forums as well, so all you need to deal with is the communication itself.

When launching a new ecommerce store, you might as well issue press releases as part of the marketing strategy. The article by Karol Pokojowczyk, head of Colibri IO, will help you with that:

 

Traackr

Influencer outreach, in other words, addressing the opinion leaders, is probably one of the most important foundation stones of digital marketing. Traackr helps you to find and also to build a relationship with the people that your target audience has confidence in.

Shane Barker provides a detailed, professionally built guide for those who have not yet dealt with influencer marketing, or for those who are already working on it but are not sure whether they do everything properly:

 

Entrepreneur

This is the online version of the magazine established in 1977, which publishes useful articles mainly in terms of topics for small enterprises and with other business topics.

The article we found the most useful is the one that provides an answer to a question frequently asked by commercial companies intending to enter the online market nowadays:

 

ALT Agency

ALT are an award winning web design company from Birmingham, UK, who specialise in eCommerce website design and development.

Infusing Online Sales Psychology into their eCommerce stores, ALT typically grow an average clients conversions by 300% and generate ROIs of £13 for every £1 invested.

Choosing the right eCommerce platform is vital, here’s everything you need to know about getting started with eCommerce:

 

Email Marketing

 

Printful

They’re online merchants themselves, which is why they have a very good knowledge of the seasonal tasks and of ecommerce marketing. What amazing luck that they also share their knowledge on their blog, which we recommend to e-merchants who like simply achievable things.

Approach your target audience with special messages before the holidays come in order to be able to benefit more from the opportunities lying in holiday shopping:

 

Nerd Marketing

Of course you’ll find a lot of info here as well on marketing, but on the blog of Nerd Marketing, alias Drew Sanocki, you can get indispensable information in particular on the threefold topic of business building, growth and expansion.

You can view Drew Sanocki’s video here on how you can check in Google Analytics which dates are the most suitable for sending out marketing emails:

 

MailChimp

You’ve certainly heard from a couple of your competitors that email marketing was dead. When that happens again, keep staring with wondering eyes, because not only has it not died, but it’s more alive than ever.

Hopefully we don’t need to introduce MailChimp by now to you either, however, we definitely need to raise your attention to their blog, since in addition to their own news, the professional material is also interesting.

How many people on your distribution list are Gmail users? How can you make sure they don’t block your letters?

 

AWeber

Email marketing again, from the top of the profession. They’ve been in operation for almost 20 years, more than 100 thousand businessmen use their services throughout the world, so it’s no wonder they have a great deal of experience in this sector.

Clearly structured articles, step-by-step guides so that your letter ends up in the right place, so that it’s opened and read, so that people getting it also purchase from you.

You haven’t considered email marketing communication that important until now? If you read this, you will think otherwise:

 

Ometria

Ometria is developing a multiplatform profiling and marketing automation system for merchants, with the help of which you can efficiently increase customer lifecycle.

What kind of email do you get when you unsubscribe from an ecommerce store’s newsletter? Thanks to the research done by Ometria, you can get to know the most common types of goodbye emails, and of course nothing should keep you from applying the best examples in practice, because even cancelling one’s subscription may result in purchasing later ;)

 

Your About US page is important. Can it be improved? Most probably!

 

 

Analytics

 

Search Engine Journal

They’ve been operating since 2003, they provide content on a social basis, which are created both by in-house and external experts. You can get to know the novelties, experiences, trends, strategies and important personalities of the world of search engine optimization.

You can monitor a lot of key performance indicators, but which are the ones that are really important for you? See Sergio Aicardi’s post:

 

Perpetto

The main topics of Perpetto’s blog are the increase of conversion and customer loyalty, for the achievement of which they find personalized product referral and email automation effective, which is for a reason, since they are experts of these thanks to the solutions they themselves developed.

Customer Lifetime Value ‒ it’s worth dealing with it, let’s see why and how. It’s a detailed description with immediately applicable formulas:

 

Prisync

Prisync is the specialist of competitor price monitoring, the service they developed provides an effective and clear solution to that need. At the time of writing this blog article (November 2016), they are monitoring more than 6 million 200 thousand prices with updates at 3-hour intervals.

Their writing on the most important ecommerce metrics for any business is the one that especially attracted our attention:

 

Smart Insights

Digital marketing strategy guides, templates, immediately applicable practical steps and trainings. This is what Smart Insights offers for small enterprises and start-ups.

In Dave Chaffey’s article you can find quite detailed statistics on mobile customer habits, based on which you can make the sales of your mobile optimized websites and of your applications more effective:

 

Trinity Insight

The digital marketing agency founded in 2006 provides assistance in increasing online selling in a way that at the same time it also reduces the costs of its ecommerce business clients.

Jason Bauman introduces the advantages of the use of Google Tag Manager:

 

Brand Building

 

Eyemagine

On the blog of this ecommerce marketing agency you can find very useful content primarily on topics for online shops, concerning digital marketing and Magento development.

Online marketing and playfulness. Let’s see a gamification strategy elaborated in detail:

 

Brandwatch

It is just as important for online stores to build and maintain their own brand as it is for manufacturers. Thanks to Brandwatch you can get a complete picture of what your customers think of you, be it a social media site or any other kind of public online portal.

With the help of the gathered data you can efficiently plan the marketing strategy, and can shape and have your brand image under control.

An important element of this activity is brand positioning detailed in Kit Smiths’s post:

 

IMPACT

The agency, founded in 2009 by Bob Ruffolo, specialized in inbound marketing helps small and medium sized enterprises with the successful solution of various digital marketing challenges.

Filled with many useful tips, their detailed posts focus on topics like digital marketing trends, content management, customer engagement, UX and many others.

What would you say if your brand was not simply “liked” but it was even surrounded by a cult-like respect and worship? How can you achieve that? Just follow the tips by Ramona Sukhraj:

 

Landing Page

 

Conversion Voodoo

This blog is mainly about the optimization of the efficiently selling landing pages, because even the authors of the blog have been dealing for more than 10 years with creating landing pages and with the implementation of campaigns built on them.

How to plan your landing pages so that they bring the most possible conversions?

 

Lander

Well prepared landing pages that facilitate the decision making of the visitor (in your favour, of course) have an especially important role among the techniques to increase conversion.

With the help of Lander’s service you can design and set up yourself even the tiniest details of your landing pages on an interface made rather for the advanced.

You can find out from Daren Low’s straightforward article, structured in bulleted lists, which are the “mandatory” elements on a landing page that are indispensable for your business success:

 

PPC

 

CPC Strategy

The company is analysing the commercial search channels and it helps the different products and the customers “find each other” as efficiently as possible. Their main area of expertise by the way is the management of cost-per-click advertisements and of different purchasing channels (Amazon Product Ads, PriceGrabber, Shopzilla) – they are sharing the 8 years of experience they have in this field with their readers.

In the article we chose, Leanna Kelly tells you every important detail on Facebook’s new form of advertisement planned for retail businesses:

 

Optimum Click

Optimum Click offers 100% revenue focused campaigns in AdWords and in Bing. It’s one of the few PPC agencies in case of which you can be sure that they won’t use your budget for unnecessary search terms that are irrelevant to you.

Even though there are only a few posts in the blog, written by Erno Horvath, they very well highlight each individual problem on how the efficiency of PPC campaigns can be improved.

You also get an answer here on how many other things you have to pay attention to in addition to search terms:

 

Extra

 

AionHill

And now, let us talk a little about our own blog…

Being a company specialized in the development of Magento ecommerce stores, we are trying to deal with topics related to Magento and ecommerce. We are not focusing only on the subject of development, because we see that professionals dealing with online commerce, and online store owners require more and more help in other fields as well, e.g. increase of conversion, search engine optimization, content marketing, etc.

That’s why we concentrate on writing posts that deal with each individual subject in a comprehensive manner, and provide useful hints for the readers. We are hopeful that our continuously growing blog enriches the ecommerce community’s knowledge base with useful pieces of content week by week.

If you’d like to have a Magento store developed, we warmly recommend our following article that raises important questions and aspects to be considered before you decide who to choose:

 

Have we left someone out?

That’s quite possible, since the internet is huge and it’s full of great content. We love learning, so if you think that we could add some further posts to even this amazingly long list, please let us know in a comment what else you would recommend to an e-merchant.