By now, most developers are familiar with CAPTCHA and how it is used to prevent spam, protect registration pages, and hide email addresses.

In this article, I am going to explain how to integrate the Google reCAPTCHA widget into a website.

Statistics are an important part of any ecommerce website. By measuring the results of our shops, we can find out how we are doing and what we have to change.

Statistics are usually described through tables or graphs. To create a graph system from scratch is usually a bad idea, since it requires a lot of time and money. But we can now use tools that others, such as Google, have developed.

A dashboard is a convenient way to organize the tools that monitor a website’s health. Instead of calling up each application separately, dashboards condense a lot of useful information into one page.

Have you ever considered instituting a payment or layaway plan for a site? The plan could be something like, “Pay 50 percent now and the remainder in 12 monthly payments.” How about a subscription service for digital downloads or any other online content?

Ecommerce is international.

Facebook's JavaScript SDK and OpenGraph API make it possible to access many of the popular social media network's features and thereby provide visitors to your sites or applications with an integrated user experience.

To help web developers get started, Facebook offers documentation and a nifty JavaScript Test Console where you can run your code before you implement it on your site or even bef

Video and other rich Internet media are an important part of ecommerce website development and design.

How you choose to implement video in your site builds should and will vary from project to project.

As an ecommerce developer, you have an opportunity to improve your client's business by integrating video, which is a key contributor to sales conversions.

For the past couple of weeks—in "Part One" and "Part Two" of this tutorial series—I have described how to use the Google Gdata PHP client library to get a specific user's videos and dynamically place those videos on an HTML page.

Product and promotional videos can help ecommerce sites attract and convert more customers.

These powers of attraction and conversion are fueling demand from ecommerce merchants and, thereby, creating opportunities for ecommerce developers willing to insert video into a site renovation or revamp.

Product videos can help an ecommerce business boost sales. How-to videos and entertainment marketing may attract hoards of potential customers.

A common feature on multi-channel retail sites is store finder.

Often online merchants are actually multi-channel purveyors, selling both from their ecommerce-enabled website and a brick-and-mortar storefront.

Finding a merchant's nearest physical location can be an important feature for an ecommerce site. This is especially true if the merchant wants to offer in-store pick up as a delivery option.

This article is Part 5 of a tutorial series demonstrating how to create a basic store finding feature. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 we published previously.

Many successful ecommerce businesses also sell through brick-and-mortar stores. Therefore, having location information on a website can help improve cross channel sales in some cases.

This tutorial is the fourth in a series on how to build a location-finding web application using the Google Maps API, PHP, JavaScript, Ajax, and, of course, HTML and CSS.

Providing store location information is an important site feature for online purveyors that also sell from brick-and-mortar stores, so taking advantage of Google's powerful Maps JavaScript API is a great way to transform what might have been a static list of addresses into an interactive map application.

This article is part three of a tutorial mini-series created to demonstrate how to use

Merchants that sell both online and from physical stores will no doubt want to list physical locations on their websites.

In this tutorial series, I will demonstrate how to create a store locator using version 3 of the Google Maps JavaScript API, PHP, lots of JavaScript, and a MySQL database.

In a recent Ecommerce Developer webinar entitled “Plug-in, Cash Out: How to Effectively Build and Market Your Plugins,” it became obvious that the usefulness of an API really depends on how well conceived and documented it is.

Google's powerful and popular Maps API is an excellent foundation for developing a store-or-location-finding web application.

This is useful, since many online retailers are really multi-channel merchants, selling their wares from physical locations as well as virtual storefronts.

Google now offers a Font API that allows developers to include a limited number of @font-face-rule embedded fonts from Google's content delivery network in their projects.

The CSS @font-face rule allows a web designer or developer to embed fonts directly into a web page and, in this way, use any font for which a license is available.

WordPress, Facebook, and MailChimp are just a few examples of software-driven businesses that are extending their reach through application programming interfaces (APIs). Although there are several ecommerce plugins for WordPress alone, there are far fewer plugins for specific ecommerce platforms and shopping carts.

WordPress, the open source blogging platform and content management system, powers more than 25 million websites around the world, according to its June 2010 user data.

Some 11.4 million sites are hosted on WordPress.com, while another 13.8 million sites use the licensed version of the platform.

Plimus, an ecommerce platform, has released a new API that will allow ecommerce web developers to integrate online sales solutions into website content or applications without requiring users to go to a virtual store or shopping cart.

The new "Buy Anyware API" should make it easier to develop social media shopping applications that run on sites like Facebook; monetize site content; and sell virtual