I have been paying quite a bit of attention to eCommerce over the past year following latest news, product innovations and trends. 2011 was an exceptional record breaking year, as was 2010, 2009, 2008, 2000…(I think you get the point). Each year eCommerce is growing bigger then the last. Here, in no particular order are, are the top 5 eCommerce trends for 2012.

1. Social Media Integration

As the Social Media phenomenon continues to expand through Facebook, Twitter and now Google+, businesses are expanding into this space recognizing that having a social media strategy is well worth the additional effort (If you are addicted to Facebook, get your resume together). From a marketing standpoint, your fans and followers are all connected and right in front of you. WHY would anyone ignore the opportunity to connect directly?

Social Media Marketing

They like you, follow you, read your articles, and you have done a fantastic job staying in touch and responding to your customers. Online Marketers take note, these are your customers, they choose to come to you. Don’t let your Facebook page rot, or your twitter feeds get boring. ENGAGE!

Start discussions, get product reviews, better yet, offer and sell! More and more business owners are taking advantage of the power of social media. Why shouldn’t you?

Look for more actively engaged social media marketing efforts. It will be interesting to see what kind of things Facebook, Twitter, Linked In etc. will do to adapt to the growing number of online marketers utilizing social media platforms into their marketing strategies.

Contests

In 2011, a lot of social media marketers were using contests to get people to like their pages and follow them. Now that they have built their customer base, this year look to see marketers get more active and engage.

Online incentives are great for your customers. Online promotions and contests reduce costs of direct marketing, and reach your current customers directly.

2. Tablet Shopping

Increase in Tablet Sales

Tablet sales were at an all time high in 2011 and are only going to continue to grow in 2012. Although the Apple iPad 2 remains top of the leader board, Samsungs Galaxy tablet is growing in popularity, and who knows what RIM plans on doing about their Playbook product that was not as much of a success as other tablet products.

Retail Mobilization

In one of our past Toronto eCommerce Meet ups, we had a very deep discussion about the impact online and mobile retailer will affect traditional bricks and mortar retailers. We concluded that there will always be a physical store, regardless the growth of eCommerce, traditional retail will always have a strong presence.

However, we can all agree that the physical store is going to have to change. Retail Mobilization is a growing trend that is making its way into business models and strategies. Amazingly, mobile technology has found its way into employees hands as a tool used for efficient customer service.

Mobile Shopping Tools

It does seem like Apple sets these standards. In Apple stores, customers now have the option to checkout items from their IPhones. Don’t be too shocked once you find out more and more retailers are implementing mobile technology into their checkout process.

We’ve already seen in-store mobilization in retail stores like Sears, Home Depot and Urban Outfitters. Employees are now being equipped with tablets to help with product information and customer service.

3. Real Time Connectivity

Customer service (Live chat support)

Customer service is quickly evolving online. When I first starting exploring Microsoft adCenter and was a little confused with the reports and settings (my background is with Google Adwords), I logged on and had a quick chat with a customer service rep who was extremely helpful getting me set up on their platform. Believe me when I say software and development companies will better their customer service efforts by implementing instant live chat in 2012.

Live video chat/sales

If you ever had any doubts about the non tangible aspects of online shopping, maybe this will help. Web stores such as Joyus have implemented video sales to further engage the customer and show off the features of the products they sell online.

Video search is one of the most popular activities on the web. Bloggers, Social Media users, pretty much everyone embeds and uploads their own videos. Over the past few years, product pages have evolved quite a bit including customer reviews, color and size attributes.

While How-To’s have been flooding the web for years now, in 2012 look for merchants to take advantage of online viral marketing. Keep an eye out on your favourite eCommerce sites and watch the number of video sales increase.

Video Ads

Remarketing tools for Pay Per Click advertisements have exploded all over the web over the past few years. This has been a great way for online marketers to get visitors that are interested in their product or service to their site.

Pay per click has evolved across search engines and display networks and continues to be a high source of traffic to small business and corporate website owners. As more and more merchants realize the value of remarketing and video advertisement placements don’t get to upset that your favourite videos are getting bombarded with Pay Per Click Ads.

4. Dynamic Site Experience

On site Marketing - Coupon Codes

Okay nothing new about this topic, but as spending online is increasing, grass roots marketing is evolving online as well. My Christmas shopping has certainly become a lot more easy over the years. Gift Certificates to the mall, movies, restaurants and the LCBO, done!

E-tailers, do not hesitate on the idea of a virtual gift card. Coupon and promotional codes are secure and an effective way for customers to gift online, and get new customers. Think real, act viral.

Ren’s Pets has always been active in direct marketing campaigns with their wholesale catalogs and in store coupons. This is a screenshot of their online gift card.

Visual and Graphic Design

The following is an excerpt from a previous blog post I posted after one of our bi-weekly eCommerce Toronto meet ups

“A balance of both design and user experience needs to be present in order to run an effective eCommerce store. There are eCommerce storefronts that are very design heavy and engage their target markets by providing eye candy websites while others such as Sears focus on product and category pages and easy navigation through the checkout process.”

The quality of product images and visual merchandising online is a trend that marketers will continue to evolve throughout 2012. A product image zoom tool is a cool feature etailers are implementing into their product pages to interact with the customer. Fashion sites implement product zooms because their products are modeled and gives the customer a visual of what a jean jacket or purse looks like on a person.

Product image zooms are very popular in fashion sites.

Multiple Store Views

Websites like Bentley Leathers operates two storefronts, one in English, the other in French. Multiple Store Fronts are very common in search (Google) and social (Facebook) engines, but also websites like Monster who are segmented based on location (Monster Canada, Monster Europe etc.)

Many retail and restaurant chains are owned under a parent company. Merchants are beginning to operate Multiple Store Fronts to maximize efforts on the web and open up more channels of distribution for their products and services.

5. Job Opportunities

The demand for IT and eCommerce positions in 2012 will increase. As a young industry in Canada, certain skills and requirements are not easy to find. Keep an eye out for Help Wanted ads in Workopolis and Monster for online marketing, engineering, analysts and other eCommerce related positions to open up in the near future.

What does this mean for Post Secondary Institutions?

A question I decided to ask myself, and answer as well. Technology and schools of Business Management cannot ignore these trends. It is possible that over the years we will see post secondary institutions implement eCommerce related courses into programs related to technology and marketing. There are certain skills and trades that are still young in the industry such as project/product management and online marketing (changing what seems like every month).

6 Tech Trends to Watch in 2012

Link: http://www.getelastic.com/6-tech-trends-to-watch-in-2012/

It was pretty evident that in 2011, tech trends saw rapid growth from the years before. Advancements and innovation in mobile technology, services, traditional retail were all significant changes that will dictate the tech trends of 2012. From online shopping and eCommerce growth to voice messaging and recognition (Siri), what tech trends will have the most significant impact in 2012?

Tablets and e-readers see Hot and Heavy Sales

Link: http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/Tablets-and-E-Readers-See-Hot-and-Heavy-Holiday-Sales-74249.html

One of the hottest trends in the tech industry that will have a huge impact on eCommerce is the growth of tablets and e-readers. With more than a quarter of U.S adults owning a tablet or e-reader, sales are surely to continue rising. While the future of tablets is certainly very bright, it is still uncertain of what kind of impact they will have on eCommerce, retail and enterprise markets.

Five Optimizations to Keep Customers Coming Back in 2012

Link: http://www.plumbersurplus.com/Blog/post/2012/01/20/Five-Optimizations-to-Keep-Customers-Coming-Back-in-2012.aspx

This list is handy to look over for eCommerce site owners who are at a stand still and wanting to know what to do next. If your site conversions are improving you are on the right track, but still need to optimize your marketing strategy to retain customers and acquire new ones. This post gives a little advice as to what improvements and additions you can make to your site in order to keep customers coming back.

eCommerce 2012: Expand, Integrate, Refine

Link: http://www.zippycart.com/ecommerce-news/18019-ecommerce-2012-expand-integrate-refine.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+zippycart%2FGWfN+%28Ecommerce+News%29

2012 is set up to be a very productive year in eCommerce. I go on about the growth of eCommerce and the different trends to look out for, but this article breaks down things to consider when business planning and developing marketing strategies. Combining trends and technology into your planning will help expand, integrate and refine your eCommerce solutions. Looking at the big picture, how will consumer behavior impact eCommerce in 2012?

In this particular case we started getting complaints from the catalog merchandising team about the speed on the backend, specifically the saving time once a product was created or updated.  On average it was taking 2 to 3 min to save each product.  We all know the backend of Magento can sometimes be a bit sluggish (lots of ways around this though), but 2-3 minutes is a little crazy to save a single product.

Our team decided to dig in and see if we could fix this before escalating to Magento.  Our first approach was to check the usual bottlenecks on a Magento site:

- Memory Usage
- Database bottlenecks
- Cpu usage

After a quick look at all of the usual suspects, everything looked normal.  We suspected it was something non-server / configuration related since the site was actually performing very well in both frontend and backend with the exception of saving products.

One thing was called to our attention was the fact that the price indexes where running each time a product was saved; a quick test confirmed it and incredible enough each index refresh was taking between 2 and 3 minutes; so each time a product is saved, the price indexes for 10,000 products get refreshed.  It’s also important to note that for performance reasons we only refresh the indexes on set intervals when the traffic is slow, so all indexes are set to manual update (no automated index refreshes here).

So our next step was to check if maybe one of the third party modules or our own extensions might be the cause of triggering the reindex event.  A quick look at the code and configuration looking for observers attached to the product save event or maybe an override to a controller or a model returned nothing suspicious.  Could this be a core Magento problem?

After poking around the core code I found a suspicious line of code inside the saveAction fucntion in the file:

app/code/core/Mage/Adminhtml/Catalog/ProductController.php around line 707:

Mage::getModel(‘catalogrule/rule’)->applyAllRulesToProduct($productId);

And one google search later, my suspicions were confirmed.  There are a couple of bug reports regarding this issue, notably http://www.magentocommerce.com/bug-tracking/issue/?issue=11036.  Interestingly this bug appeared on Magento CE 1.5.0.1 and it’s still open; so I decided to try one of the suggest solutions and comment out this line of code. To properly to do it:

1) Copy the ProductController.php from app/code/core/Mage/Adminhtml/Catalog/ProductController.php to app/code/local/Mage/Adminhtml/Catalog/ProductController.php

2) Look for
Mage::getModel(‘catalogrule/rule’)->applyAllRulesToProduct($productId);

and replace it with

//Mage::getModel(‘catalogrule/rule’)->applyAllRulesToProduct($productId);

That solved the issue and product updates went from taking 2-3 mins to only a few seconds. The only possible downside is that catalog rules are not being applied when the product save and full price reindex its still needed, in our case this works because we are already reindexing on a schedule and we don’t any reindexing to occur during the top traffic hours.

Customer Returns

• Biggest time of the year for returns
• Apparel is big for returns – Women’s fashion – 10-20%
• Buying, wearing, returning – Canadian mentality
• Online vs In-Store Returns
• Packaging up returns and sending it back to merchant for a refund

Returns

• Customer is always right
• Put up a big enough stink, they’ll take it
• Difference between physical and online returns, face to face
• How many accepted returns go back to the store? Distribution centre

Different stores and businesses have different return policies. In most cases, the physical retailer gives returns to customers who put up a big enough stink. In order to retain customers, many retailers will accept returns out of “good faith” , even if the product being returned is completely dismantled.

Exchanges

• Buy online, return in store
• Some stores sell an item in one location and are useless in others. Therefore when a return is made from a store in one location to the next, it is pretty much a write off.

Inventory

• Allocating inventory for online purchases
• Buying an item from one store and returning it to the other, they add it to their inventory
• Buy and distribute product to all stores (in most cases for physical retail, especially mall outlets)
• Big Box stores keep their own inventory in a back warehouse. Dealers may not accept

Size of Physical Stores

• Mall stores, pay for retail space
• Flagship stores typically have a warehouse that they can distribute to other stores (Ren’s Pets)

Web returns

• Zappos set the bar with customer service model
• Sub set of items that are easy to ship therefore offering free shipping

Canadian Merchant

• Deal driven
• American customers shop at normal price point
• Canadians shop in the States because of lower prices to get the better “deals”
• High shipping costs – 50+ Shipping Zones in Canada compared to 4 in the U.S
• Regional shipping costs differ nearly 20 km’s

Shipping

• High rates
• Can Par (low), Canada Post (High), Purolator, UPS
• Can Par Return Slips – Built in technology

At Demac, we’re committed to being at the core of eCommerce in Canada.  Working with SHOP.CA and our great Canadian based merchants is bringing us one significant step closer to giving the Canadian consumer the great shopping experience they deserve.

For the Shop.ca launch we are supporting integrations to SHOP.CA from Magento using our proprietary Demac Media Integration Framework (aptly named the Data Donkey).  Moving forward we’ll build integrations to Shop.ca from other major eCommerce platforms based on demand.

In short, we’re pretty excited about our new Certified Integration Partnership with SHOP.CA.  We’ve been working closely with them for a few months and it’s been a barrel of fun!

View the full press release.

View our SHOP.CA Certified Partner program page.

Running this report in Magento is a bit of a pain, but luckily a simple mysql query can solve your problems.   The following mysql query gives you a list of customer emails, names, and total purchase amount over the life of the customer (since the dawn of time!).

The Query:

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SELECT DISTINCT customer_email, customer_firstname, customer_lastname,
SUM(subtotal_invoiced) AS Total
FROM `sales_flat_order` AS a
GROUP BY customer_email
ORDER BY SUM(subtotal_invoiced) DESC

And the resulting output…

General Numbers

Monthly Sales Growth Over Same Period Last Year: 160.89%

Average Conversion Rate: 1.56%

Converstion Rate Lowest & Highest Range (so you know where above average comes from): 0.96% – 2.22%

Average Order Value: $131.65

Average Time On Site: 4:32

New vs. Returning Visitors: 55.15% (New) vs. 44.85% (Old)

Traffic Sources

% of Traffic – Search (Organic): 54.39%

% of Traffic – Search (PPC): 6.9%

% of Traffic – Search (Google): 50.84%

% of Traffic  – Search (Bing): 2.13%

% of Traffic – Search (Yahoo): 1.05%

% of Traffic – Direct: 11.89%

% of Traffic – Facebook: 1.9%

% of Traffic – Twitter: 0.026%

% of Traffic – Wishabi / Canada Post: 0.51%

Sales Data

% of Sales – Search (Organic): 48.76%

% of Sales – Search (PPC): 6.26%

% of Sales – Search (Google): 44.04%

% of Sales – Search (Bing): 3.04%

% of Sales – Search (Yahoo): 1.65%

% of Sales – Direct: 13.8%

% of Sales – Wishabi / Canada Post: 1.01%