Let's start with the bad news, and there's kind of a lot of it, before we move on the good news of how to fix it. About three-quarters of online shoppers are unsatisfied with their online shopping experience. The other quarter are, flatly, satisfied, in that even bad pizza is good pizza kind of way.
Sort of anticlimactic, isn't it? The good news is there's a lot of opportunity for satisfying customers, even making them very, very happy.
But first, more bad news. Three-quarters of online shoppers surveyed said website content is insufficient to complete research or purchase a product online always, most, or some of the time. Nearly 80 percent rarely or never purchase a product without complete information, and 72 percent will take off to a competitor that does supply that information.
It seems that consumers really want to buy online, but retailers aren't making it easy for them. Sometimes, it seems like retailers go out of their way to lose customers.
Read more...

On the surface, building a big, well-recognised brand with a small budget would appear to be an unattainable goal - but NetFlorist, one of the country's largest online gifting services with an annual turnover of R37-million, has proven than it can be done.
Established in 1997, as an online supplier of floral gifts and arrangements, the Johannesburg-based company has leveraged its strength and recognition in online flower and gift shopping to substantially broaden the repertoire it offers online shoppers.
Read more on building a big brand on a small budget

Delivering the right product, at the right time, and in excellent condition is key to the success of every online retailer. But when that product has a limited life span, it becomes even more critical.
Executives of online retailer Provide Commerce know this all too well. The company offers ProFlowers brand fresh-cut arrangements through its ProFlowers Division and Web site. Product is shipped from 1 of 56 distribution facilities in the United States, and annual sales total about $300 million. Flowers generate 80% of Provide Commerce's business, with the remainder accounted by fresh fruit, sweets, and premium meats sold by a gourmet food unit under the brand names Cherry Moon Farms, Secret Spoon, and Uptown Prime.
Read more on Supply Chain Visibility Improves Customer Satisfaction
A case study is also available for download

All the recent reports published by the companies with world names try to make people believe that e-commerce has slowed down  but the last report of eMarketer assures that there is no a reason for being anxious as though the development of e-commerce is slow but it still continues. Although consumers are reacting to the economic downturn by spending less, this will create more of a hardship for retail stores than for online retail outlets.

"Store sales will be hit harder than Internet sales because affluent shoppers, who form the core of online buyers, tend to ride out economic downturns better than lower- and middle-income consumers," says Jeff Grau, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, US Retail E-Commerce: Slower But Still Steady Growth.

eMarketer estimates that US retail e-commerce sales (excluding travel) will reach $146 billion in 2008, up 14.3% over 2007.

"Still," warns Mr. Grau, "over the next few years online sales growth rates will steadily decline."

There is little reason for panic, however.

"A drop in the number of new online buyers is an inevitable sign of the maturation of the online retail channel," says Mr. Grau.

In fact, Mr. Grau sees several reasons to be optimistic about the future of Internet retailing.

"Retail e-commerce could get a boost from underserved consumer segments such as seniors and Hispanic-Americans," he says.

To take seniors as an example, by 2011 there will be 25.4 million Internet users in the US ages 62 and older. That represents a 7.6% average annual growth rate-more than twice the 3.1% growth rate eMarketer forecasts for the entire US Internet population.

Seniors today enjoy better health, longer and more active lives, greater free time and higher discretionary income than past generations.

"However, as people age they often begin to experience problems with their vision, hearing, cognitive functions and mobility," says Mr. Grau. "Web retailers should take these factors into consideration."

Source: Ecommerce Journal

A recent survey says the rate of shopping cart abandonment for US online retailers has increased slightly year on year, reaching 59.4% in Q1 2008.

So why do customers abandon their shopping carts and what can be done about it?

According to the survey, which was covered by eMarketer, the top five reasons are:

1. Expensive delivery costs
   
   This was the main reason for 43% of US online shoppers surveyed by PayPal, but is something that retailers should be able to rectify.
   
   Retailers should be looking at their abandonment rates and  experimenting with lower shipping costs to see how this affects conversion rates.
   
   Better still; offer free delivery on orders over a certain threshold, then the customer has an incentive to spent a little bit more.
   
   
2. Hidden costs
   
   36% of those surveyed cited the total cost of the purchase being higher than anticipated as their reason for bailing out.
   
   This is something that can irritate customers intensely and there is no excuse not to be upfront about any costs. Delivery charges should be made clear on product pages, as well as any other costs like gift wrapping.
   
   Retailers should also refrain from adding extra items to shoppers' baskets without asking. I noticed this recently on Currys' website, when an internet security program was added to a laptop purchase automatically. This is guaranteed to annoy people.
   
   
3. Comparison shopping
   
   27% said they were just checking out prices and would look at other websites before deciding on a purchase.
   
   This isn't necessarily a problem for etailers as online shoppers tend to take their time, especially with more expensive products.  
   
   A recent survey found that people take an average of around 34 hours from their first visit to actually making a purchase, while they do some comparison shopping.
   
   Therefore, retailers should make it as easy as possible for customers to do this, by making prices and delivery charges clear, and also by allowing customers to save their baskets so they can easily return to make a purchase.
   
   
4. Unable to contact customer service
   
   This was the reason cited by 16% of respondents, something that retailers should be aware of.
   
   When considering a purchase, customers may often have questions about products or charges, and will require some reassurance.
   
   This can make the difference between making and losing a sale, so a contact number should be provided on every page so shoppers don't have to hunt around for contact details.
   
   Sony.co.uk provides a good example of this, with a clear contact number on every page of the website:
   
   

   

   
   

5. Forgetting usernames / passwords
   
   For 14% of shoppers, forgetting login details was the reason for abandoning their shopping baskets.
   
   To prevent this, retailers should remember user data across sessions, or make it easy for customers to find out or reset their passwords.
   
   Source: e-consultancy

By: Barry Fenning

If you are professional with your search engine optimization efforts and keep your customer in mind before you start considering “what the search engines will think” you will reap a lot more than what you sow. Chances are, if your visitors like your website, there is a very good likelihood that the search engines will like it too.

With this in mind the following 10 tips focus on how to develop your website with your visitors in mind whilst also conducting effective search engine optimization activities. Read more...

Written by Richard MacManus / September 5, 2007

We're well into the current era of the Web, commonly referred to as Web 2.0. Features of this phase of the Web include search, social networks, online media (music, video, etc), content aggregation and syndication (RSS), mashups (APIs), and much more. Currently the Web is still mostly accessed via a PC, but we're starting to see more Web excitement from mobile devices (e.g. iPhone) and television sets (e.g. XBox Live 360).

What then can we expect from the next 10 or so years on the Web? As NatC commented in this week's poll, the biggest impact of the Web in 10 years time won't necessarily be via a computer screen - "your online activity will be mixed with your presence, travels, objects you buy or act with." Also a lot of crossover will occur among the 10 trends below (and more) and there will be Web technologies that become enormously popular that we can't predict now.

Bearing all that in mind, here are 10 Web trends to look out for over the next 10 years...

1. 10 Future Web Trends
2. 10 Tech Future Trends
3. 10 More Future Web Trends

Written by: Jeff Sexton

On today’s highly competitive Google AdWords pay per click (PPC) search engine, it is now more important than ever to ensure that your PPC campaigns are optimized to their utmost potential.You should be achieving maximum return on investment (ROI) for the keywords or phrases that are most relevant to your business and are most likely to provide you with targeted traffic to your website.With ever growing cost-per-click (CPC) prices throughout the various PPC search engines it is essential that you avoid certain mistakes that will undoubtedly result in poorly performing PPC campaigns.

Read More

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

1. Use a title like 'Top 3 reasons why men hate cooking' or ' 5 steps to write a good article' or '10 steps to improve your code'

Note the similarity: they all claim to give you easy to read, point format, no nonesense list. This attracts people, looks like readers automatically assume the claimed item list is fool proof, like some kind of a law. Wierd but it works........

2. Make sure your list of points are on something a typical user would really interested in reading.

like the subject here, 'How to get into the first page at reddit' . Since Reddit is mostly read by techies, Anything on Software, beer, technology, gadgets etc would do

3. In the title, be bold and ambitious on your claims. Bit of exagertion, over emphasizing, use of exclamation marks, etc.

All help win attention. No one wants to spend time reading something ordinary. So make it look like something extra ordinary. You should sound confident about what you have for them in your article.

4. Keep in mind the 'Resume Rule'

When we write a resume or CV, we are adviced to keep to a single page or at least present a short attractive summary. For good reasons too. If the Resume is unable to catch the readers eye and make him interested in the first 5-10 seconds, chances are that he will not even read the rest of the resume. Same goes for links. You have to grab the users attention and make him click on your link. This decision happend within first 5 seconds of reaing your title and readers have lots of links to view so you better fight for every gram of attention (how else to measure attention ?) you could get.

5. At the end of the title indicate that you have a cool video or an image for them to comfortably view.

This is self explainotory. People like to lazily look at a video or an image or to listen to a track rather than reading. It would be nice if you really have a video or an image for them as promised. :-)

7. In the article, leave some intentional mistake for attentive users to notice.

Hopefully this will encourage them to write a short comment pointing the mistake you have put there for them to 'catch'. I bet reddit ranking engine will look at the number of comments an article has. Can you spot the mistake in this article ?

8. Of course ask few of your friends to click on your submission once it appear on reddit 'new' items and ask them to write few comments as well.

May be you can try that on this article itself and see the difference. (see whether the reddit rank moves up noticiably after you ask few of your friends to click on this link)

9. Number of steps you mention in the title has to be a sexy number.
For istance, no one would be that interested on "7 steps to.... " or a "9 reasons why..." on the other hand 10, 3, 5 are 'good' numbers.

Ref:10 proven steps to get into the first page at Reddit (cool video)

12 Can’t Miss Email Strategies Webinar Recap

Thanks again to Carolyn Gardner from Sitebrand for sharing her email marketing expertise with us this morning, and to Power Reviews for sponsoring the event.

If you missed the call, or if you were listening intently and would like to continue the conversation online, right here on our blog — here’s the Coles Notes version of the webcast:

INTRODUCTION

As email users, we expect and value emails that are timely, meaningful and relevant from people that we know and trust. Anything that doesn’t meet this criteria is considered SPAM.

Read Full Article....

By Stas Bekman

This article is a sequel to 12 Things to Do to Improve Your Site's Google Page Rank, which you may want to read first.

This article covers techniques that won't help improving your site's ranking, but instead make it worse. In fact some of those techniques may result in a complete removal of your site from the search engine indexes and a ban. Learn what you should not do if you want to improve your site's Google page rank.

Written by: Howard Kaplan Posted in GrokDotCom

I was having a conversation with the experience team at a major "entertainment" company after my presentation at the Internet Retailer conference a few weeks back. We were discussing ways they could get started on Personas, and how to overcome the challenges they'd faced thus far. Given that this dialog took place just off-stage, we had no expectation of privacy. Then again, I had no expectation that well over 100 retailers would be so interested in this conversation as well. It became "the presentation after the presentation"–so much so that the conference producer had to politely ask me to take the impromptu mob outside into the main hall… sorry again, Kurt –and I promised all those who wanted to listen in that I'd write up my thoughts and take them to a more appropriate vehicle. So, without further ado…

There are 2 ways to begin a Persona project:

1) Hire a firm to conduct research.

Level of difficulty: easy
Likelihood of success: minimal

Expect to cough up tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on this research–and the wise marketer would do everything in her power not to entertain discussions of ROI (at least positive) from this exercise. Expect the resulting research to create beautiful-sounding Personas and make excellent posters to put up on the wall. In some organizations, you may even expect a raise for a job well done, but you'll profit more from selling all your company stock short. (Bryan chronicled this approach in his ClickZ column, but it's worth diving into even further, because the underlying question marketer's are asking when they hire a research firm is an understandable, but flawed one.)

2) Do some "work" yourself (and if need be hire a firm to come in and help wrap up)
Level of difficulty: medium (there's a process that can be followed, you just need to allocate the resources: time or money)
Likelihood of success: great

Read Part 1 and Part 2

by Jean-Philippe Maheu, Friday, December 16, 2005

ONLINE BEHAVIORAL MARKETING IS AN increasingly important, fast-evolving arena that can serve consumers' best interests, and 2006 is shaping up to be a watershed year for the industry. Behavioral marketing delivers positive,measurable results for publishers (higher eCPMs on their run-of-network inventory), advertisers (larger reach of their target audience) as well as many benefits to consumers (free content, free applications, and more relevant ads).

While companies like Tacoda, Revenue Science, Claria, and Direct Revenue have been focused on this market for some time, the large established online media companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have recently announced plans (and for some, preliminary results from early tests) to incorporate behavioral targeting into their advertising offerings. Without a doubt, behavioral marketing is here to stay.

But wait a minute... How do companies do the targeting?

Regardless of the methods (tracking cookies or downloadable applications), behavioral marketing requires some knowledge of users' computer and Web usage.

By Darren Rowse

The article is an outcome of opinion poll with opinions of 103 contributors commenting on "Why Readers Unsubscribe from Blog RSS Feed?". The major reason was found to be "Too Many Posts". Other reasons are like Infrequent Blog Posts, Partial Excerpts Feeds, and so forth. Find out more reasons why the blog readers unsubscribe?