Ecommerce Transactions Dominate Mergers and Acquisitions
As consumers become more comfortable purchasing products online – taking share from catalogs and brick and mortar channels – so has mergers and acquisitions activity gravitated toward Internet retail. Ecommerce transactions now dominate the multichannel retail mergers and acquisitions market, comprising 92% of all deals in 2011 – up from 59% in 2006....
Providing Accurate Online Recommendations Post Mother’s Day
Unfortunately, these gift-giving “micro-moments” can skew consumers’ online profiles, leading to a series of irrelevant recommendations for kitchen gadgets and perfume that could haunt the online shopping experience for the rest of the year. That’s why most savvy marketers are now turning to algorithms to identify behavior and appropriately adjust their online recommendations. ...
10 Ways to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment
While there is no silver bullet for reducing shopping cart abandonment, online merchants that attack the issue from many angles will achieve the best results. The good news is that organizations have an arsenal of powerful strategies at their disposal, each designed to address specific reasons for shopping cart abandonment. Here are 10 effective strategies you should try to keep cart abandonment rates low and conversion rates high. ...
How to Recognize Online Fraud
Online fraud moves rapidly worldwide and is often impossible to identify. Here's a few things you need to know about recognizing online fraud....
Online Merchant Fraud a Huge Concern
Ecommerce enjoyed 16% year-over-year growth in 2011, but online merchant fraud grew 22%. Here's why you should be very concerned....
4 Ways to Personalize Your Customers’ Experiences
Knowing who your customers are is what changes their experiences from merely adequate to delightful, and can turn a customer into a raving advocate. Here are four things that you should start to do over the next three to six months to improve customer engagement in an incremental fashion while strategizing for the long run....
A Diamond Retailer Mines Online for Gold
How Rosetta helped Helzberg Diamonds use a multichannel approach to drive a winning holiday campaign....
Bare Necessities Launches Two Digital Catalogs
Hoping to cash in on the burgeoning tablet commerce market, intimate apparel merchant Bare Necessities has launched two new digital catalogs designed specifically for a tablet shopping experience. ...
Why Online Merchants Need to Measure Lifetime Value
LTV is all the purchases the online buyer has made during his lifetime plus the purchases he’s likely to make in the future (discounted in today’s dollars.) Since your initial web sales are always greater than the first sale you make to a web buyer, this refocuses your internal discussions from ad-spend management or sales growth to buyer profitability....
Report: Frequent Live Chatters Demand Special Attention
Live chat patrons are more likely to have higher household incomes, more likely to shop more frequently, spend more, have a college degree, and be between the ages of 31-50, the report says. While this demographic appeals to merchants, frequent live chatters (those who have chatted at least four times in the previous three months) exhibit these traits in an amplified way and warrant special attention. ...
4 Ways to Screw Up Abandoned Cart Messages
Shopping cart abandonment rates are high, but so are conversion rates from post-abandonment emails, so you are missing a sizable opportunity by not sending them. Here are four things you will want to avoid when launching your post-abandonment email program....
How to Optimize Your Email Targeting Efforts
As you look to start, modify or optimize your targeting efforts, here are four questions you can ask yourself (or your team) to get moving in the right direction....
7 Ways to Combat Shopping Cart Abandonment
To some merchants, shopping cart abandonment may be perceived as simply one of the risks when operating an online business. However, as competition continues to grow and customers become savvier, businesses should take proactive measures to attract and retain customers, and provide a unique online experience to decrease shopping cart abandonment rates. In order to do so, here are a few tips and strategies any merchant can use....
SupplyGeeks.com Plans to Compete Against Office Supply Giants
While companies like OfficeMax, Staples and Office Depot seem to hold a monopoly over the world of office supplies, SupplyGeeks.com, a new ecommerce site, is planning on standing out by filling its service center with nothing but “geeks.”...
B-to-b Ecommerce: Creating Support in the Organization
Among the many initiatives an organization takes on in any given year, a b-to-b ecommerce project can be one of the most challenging. Not only do these require resources whose days are filled with conflicting priorities, but it introduces an entirely new sales channel which changes the dynamic of the organization's working business model. Here's why the first tactic in a successful b-to-b ecommerce initiative is often the most overlooked as companies charge full steam ahead – creating support in the organization....
Product Videos Can Increase Visibility and Customer Engagement
When product videos are available on an ecommerce site, one-third of your visitors will watch them – and people who view videos are 85% more likely to make a purchase. Here are some ideas for how you can take your video beyond the product pages to get customers more interested in your brand....
Merchants Turn to Responsive Design
If you rebuild your site using responsive design techniques, all you need is a single template and a separate cascading stylesheet per device type....
Direct Sales Drop 5.4% at Frederick's of Hollywood
Bucking a trend seen by b-to-c retailers, poor sales in its direct channels has hurt apparel merchant Frederick's of Hollywood. Though company chairman and CEO Thomas Lynch attributed a net sales decrease for the second quarter ended Jan. 28 to post-Christmas clearance sales, it was the second straight quarter that direct channels have put Frederick's sales in the red. ...
3 Tips to Capitalize on Digital Marketing Changes
Keeping up with change in digital marketing is never easy, but the emergence of social advertising as a widely accepted marketing tactic, the power of tablets and their users, and the increasing sophistication of search marketers has accelerated change even further. With some powerful trends taking shape over the last year, opportunity abounds for marketers who proactively embrace change to lead the pack. Multichannel merchants should put the following three tips at the top of their priority list. ...
Cooking.com Builds a Relationship With Email
A big reason for Cooking.com's is having success with email marketing, director of email marketing Matt Bunn said, is because it's beginning to treat the tactic as it would its social media channels. That is, Cooking.com wanted to be conversational with its customers, not just throw a deal a day their way. ...
5 Social Media Strategies to Boost Your SEO
While ecommerce enterprises spend hours manipulating meta-tags and embedded HTML keywords, the most cost-effective SEO resource goes unnoticed: social media. Contrary to common belief, SEO is not limited to behind-the-scenes maintenance. Here are five, non-coding-experience-required tips for using social media to your SEO advantage....
Totes-Isotoner Doubles Conversion Rate and Revenue Per Visit
Gloves and rainwear merchant Totes-Isotoner has more than doubled its conversion rate and revenue per visit after implementing SLI Systems’ full-service hosted site search last April. The merchant has also seen nearly twice the number of site visitors who use search, further adding to bottom-line benefits, and is also planning to deploy SLI site search on its mobile website....
Day 3: Tweets from #etail2012
Etail West is in the books, and thousands of tweets cameout of Palm Springs. Multichannel Merchant senior content manager Tim Parry Storified some of the top tweets of Day 3 here. Miss the Day 1 tweets? Read them here. Day 2 tweets can be found here....
Planning a Tablet Commerce Strategy
When you formulate your tablet strategy, you really need to think of a tablet as an integral part of your multichannel marketing strategy. Below are the six key strategic considerations when planning a tablet strategy for your cross-channel campaigns....
More Tweets From #etail2012, Day 2
Day 2 of Etail West is in the book, and thousands of tweets have come out of Palm Springs. Multichannel Merchant senior content manager Tim Parry Storified some of the top tweets of Day 2 here....
Top Tweets From #etail2012, Day 1
Day 1 of Etail West is in the book, and thousands of tweets have come out of Palm Springs. Multichannel Merchant senior content manager Tim Parry Storified some of the top tweets of Day 1 here. ...
How Social Media Transformed Speck Products
Speck Products wanted to boost its online sales and create a constant two-way dialogue with customers. Find out how Speck used social media to transform itself....
OverstockArt.com's 2011 Sales Paint a Nice Picture
It was a very good fourth quarter and year for OverstockArt.com -- which specializes in reproduction oil paintings. The 10-year-old company registered a 43% year-over-year increase in sales during the fourth quarter and 32% for the full year. Find out what the company did to boost its sales....
Behavioral Marketing Program Increases Conversion Rates for Footwear etc.
With technology ever-changing and new products flooding the market on a daily basis, retailers need to step up their game and their sales strategies in order to stay ahead. Like most merchants, Footwear etc., a California-headquartered retailer that sells a large selection of shoe brands online and through nine stores, was struggling to turn browsers into buyers. ...
Consumers Less Tolerant of Poor Website Performance
Earlier this month, Compuware published the findings of a new survey which revealed that consumers are frustrated by poor website performance during holiday 2011 peak traffic periods and have developed even less tolerance for it. This infographic shows why consumers are less tolerant of performance issues and what action they take when they experience poor website performance....
How to Get Started With QR Codes
So you’ve decided a QR code will be a great addition to your next mailer. Where do you start? It can be as simple as entering your web address into one of the many online QR code generators....
A Critical Look at Ecommerce Ratings and Reviews
One of the best ways to improve your own ratings and reviews is to evaluate and emulate what the leaders are doing. This article examines several of the best techniques being used today and describes how you can benefit by implementing similar methods. ...
Best Practices for Risk-based Fraud Management
Listed below are the top-three best practices to consider in the implementation and ongoing assessment of a com¬prehensive risk-based approach to fraud management. ...
Risk-based Approach to Fraud Detection
Once we pivoted the data to shift the view from fraud rates to verification rates, we were able to determine some other interesting insights....
Case Study: Venus Didn't Skimp With Comparison Shopping Engines
Venus uses a combination of marketing channels, including comparison shopping engines. The comparison shopping program had been managed in-house, working to make the most out of Google Shopping and Bing Shopping, the largest “non-CPC” engines. In looking to wring more performance from the program, Venus approached Rimm-Kaufman Group (RKG), who has been managing their paid search program since 2008....
How Web Tags Can Help You See What is Really Working
Where once site owners used to examine web server log files to see how visitors were interacting with their sites, nowadays that job is done with web tags: small pieces of JavaScript programming code placed within the HTML of a Web page. ...
How to Choose the Right Comparison Shopping Engines
Comparison shopping engines can be a great addition to your marketing portfolio. There are a number of engines to choose from, but mak¬ing them successful does take some work. In this article we will go over four critical aspects of running success¬ful comparison shopping engine campaigns....
10 Tips to Create Product Video that Converts
The days of selling with online video have finally arrived. But with so many merchants new to the world of video and so many options for choosing the right creative format, it can be difficult to scale a video initiative that moves products off the shelves. ...
Hale Groves Customers Embracing Product Videos
A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but Southern Fulfillment ecommerce manager Daryl Logullo says video paints a bigger portrait for customers of its Hale Groves subsidiary....
5 Strategies for Better B2B Ecommerce
Strong relationships with customers and partners are critical for B2B businesses, and successful B2B ecommerce strategies need to reflect that....
