Expert Advice

Too many e-commerce companies treat shipping as a commodity. The ones that don't, win. Amazon and Zappos are prime examples of companies that care about fast fulfillment, and they have millions of loyal customers because of it. The good news is that you don't have to offer free next-day shipping t...

Aimed at improving the security of payment card data and reducing fraud, PCI DSS 3.0 standard, which took effect on Jan. 1, introduces changes that extend across all 12 requirements. It no doubt will mean some shakeups for many organizations when it comes to their day-to-day culture and operations.

By now, if you're an IT professional and you're in an organization that has PCI-DSS in your scope -- that is, you store, process or transmit credit card data -- you probably already know that an update to the standard, Version 3.0, was released late last year. With this update come a few changes to ...

The Internet of Things is a key driver of accelerated growth of cloud-based alternatives to traditional on-premises systems and software, and as the new year begins to unfold, it is gaining momentum. The idea of the IoT evolved from the more narrowly focused concept of machine-to-machine communicati...

The raft of problems connected to the launch of HealthCare.gov appears to have sunk the fortunes of the private contractor paid for running the site. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, charged with overseeing the health insurance marketplace, announced Saturday that it had awarded Accen...

The TV industry has been quick to move into the app market, and these offerings may foster a new era for television services. The term "app" was initially coined for small applications that run on mobile devices and fulfill a particular purpose, but apps are now common to several platforms, notably ...

As most security and compliance pros already know, PCI 3.0 is now officially out. The specific changes it includes have already been covered in quite a bit of detail elsewhere in the industry press, so I won't cover them all again here. However, one area that is often less discussed is how to use th...

For e-commerce companies, the time has finally arrived. After months of extensive preparations, the holidays are here and the top business priority is to drive conversions. Many of these companies have applied valuable lessons from 2012 and previous years by implementing basic Web performance-optimi...

The holiday shopping season is right around the corner, and that means e-commerce companies are now in the midst of the great run-up to the holidays -- an all-out sprint to get every possible new feature, bug fix and version tested and released in time for the big crush. This year, the stakes have b...

The Internet of Things has been receiving quite a bit of attention. Definitions vary, but at its core the concept is a simple one: Extend computing and data-processing capability to the physical world around us. The earliest manifestations of this are starting to be seen already in the growth of sma...

"In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes," wrote Benjamin Franklin in a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy in 1789. You have to wonder if Old Ben wouldn't add cyberattacks to that list were he alive today. We live in a world in which hundreds of thousands of new threats ar...

In the world of small business, mergers and acquisitions are a dime a dozen. For marketing organizations, however, they can cost a lot more in terms of the effort required to communicate them effectively. M&As mean integrating two separate brands into a unified message -- one that must then be c...

In the world of small business, mergers and acquisitions are a dime a dozen. For marketing organizations, however, they can cost a lot more in terms of the effort required to communicate them effectively. M&As mean integrating two separate brands into a unified message -- one that must then be c...

In retail, the holidays are the best of times and the worst of times. The trick to troubleshooting shipping issues is to manage for the best scenario but expect the worst, especially during peak intervals. Prime shopping season demands that deadlines and customer expectations are managed accordingly...

Although the cloud marketplace is growing rapidly, the current rate of growth will continue only if a broader set of strong channel companies emerge to extend the reach of today's cloud leaders into new industries and geographies. I've been suggesting for years that building more channels to market...