The code is good for 15% off any purchase, no minimum! (Excluding Red Mittens, Petro Canada glasses and video games. Ends February 14th.)

For our US readers, use the code EPFRIENDS2010US at the US Olympic Store.

The rest of the world, use EPFRIENDS2010 at the Olympic Store.

Just to clarify, that is the year 2010, not the letter “O” in the code.

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“Solicit advice from your affiliates, many are seasoned online marketers who can offer you valuable insight on what does and does not work.”

Improving your landing page is essential when you have an affiliate program. Not only does it impact your revenue and your affiliate program performance metrics, but it’s crucial to retain high quality affiliates. According to the 2009 MarketingSherpa Ecommerce Benchmark Survey, 74% of respondents cited “finding high quality affiliates” as a significant challenge, and 50% “keeping high quality affiliates.”

High quality affiliates are motivated by the profitability of working with you. Even if you have a higher commission, with a stinking conversion rate the affiliate isn’t making maximal money. They are thinking earnings per visit.

Reaching out to your affiliates to work with them on conversion optimization is not just “a bit of free consulting” for yourself, it lets your affiliates know you are committed to increasing their performance as well as your own. Offer affiliates some flexibility in landing page design, product copy or headlines, soliciting their input and facilitating tests. The higher earnings per visit the affiliate can achieve with your program, the more likely the affiliate will promote your offers above others on their own sites and in their email and online advertising campaigns. And the less likely you’ll be tempted to continually up the ante on commissions to retain top affiliates.

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This post is a continuation of a series of posts related to conversion optimization for the Official Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store. Following checkout process and product details page optimization, in collaboration with Wider Funnel, we looked at the store’s homepage. Following list of hypotheses were made:

• Too many banner spaces create high clutter
• Secondary (left side) navigation doesn’t stand out and is difficult to navigate
• Product photos are too small with no indication on available alternative colors

Control

(Click to enlarge, will open new page)

Variation A

(Click to enlarge, will open new page)

Variation B

(Click to enlarge, will open new page)

As a result, we produced two alternative variations with following changes:

• Reduced banner amount and increased size to improve prominence of each banner
• Increased prominence and clarity of secondary navigation
• Provided color thumbnails to products that have alternative colors
• Increased size of photos and reduced amount of products shown under New Arrivals, Featured Products, and Most Popular tabs

What We Learned

This was a very tough test where even 2053 transactions and 21 days did not provide a statistically significant winner. However, decision had to be made and Variation A was chosen based on following data:

• Variation A converted (GWO) 3.14% better than control variation
• Visits with Variation A resulted in 12.54% less Bounce Rate
• Overall site Conversion Rate was increased by 0.59%
• Average Order Value was increased by 5.16%

As a bonus point in our findings (to put it in perspective), if hypothetically we would be using the winning AOV and Conversion Rate, revenue would be increased by 5.78%.

Finally, a thing we learned which might be already obvious for some: use banner space very strategically. Based on your overall strategy – be that to increase AOV or Conversion Rate – you will need to choose carefully what to advertise and where to send users.

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• A/B Test Case Study: Location of Size and Color Options Mattered

2. Provide instructions, but keep them short.

3. Allow customer to add extra input fields, or give instructions on how to add more items than your default form provides.

4. Allow customer to input quantity.

5. Watch your error handling. Make it clear when the item no longer exists and provide a search tool or customer service number.

Eddie Bauer (above) does this well. 1-800-Flowers unfortunately kicks you out of Catalog Quick Order to the home page if you make a mistake or the product no longer exists.

6. Allow customer to request a catalog.

7. If possible, allow customer to select size/color without having to view product page.

8. Ask for “Source Code” for customer matchback analytics.

9. Use cart button best practices (wording and design).

We know cart buttons that fade into the background won’t convert as high as bright, bold buttons:

And wording is important. “Add to cart” assures the customer that the quick order will fast-track to the cart summary. Generally it is advised not to use button text like “Submit,” which has a negative connotation in people’s minds.

“Submit Request” does not imply you will be taken directly to the cart. Submitting a request usually involves a time lag and a person contacting you by phone or email, which catalog quick order is not.

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• 4 Ways To Send a Customer Back to Last Viewed Product

• Justin Palmer kicks off our list with 5 Anti-Resolutions for Marketing Success in 2010. All the things you shouldn’t rely on this year.

• While we’re talking about things to avoid, Kevin Hillstrom has 5 things to avoid in your annual sales forecast.

• Ever wonder if those “Tweet this” links in emails get used? According to Silverpop research, sadly, the answer is no.

• Essential reading for anyone involved in pay-per-click is the Rimm Kaufman Group blog. Don’t miss George Mitchie’s Broad Match is No Substitute for the Long Tail and Evaluating a Paid Search Program.

• There’s no one who sees more retail email than Chad White, who’s rounded up his favorites for the Email Design Hall of Fame, 2009.

• Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz shares a tutorial for determining your success in the search engine indices with Indexation for SEO: Real Numbers in 5 Easy Steps.

• Mobile data can and should be integrated with information from other channels according to DM News.

• In last week’s webinar Bridging the technology and marketing divide for ecommerce success, someone asked the question about the role of SaaS — some marketing departments look to SaaS as a way to circumvent IT. Todd L. Michaud makes a great point that bypassing IT for SaaS is not a way to eliminate the “bottleneck” that IT is pegged to be:

As more outsourced point packages are implemented within an environment, the more the emphasis is placed on integration management. Integration is tough enough when all the systems are in-house. When you add disparate technologies (because the service providers don’t standardize on a single technology set just for you), separate companies (that now have to be coordinated with when there is any change) and feature overlap (each one of these products offers some functionality that another system already provides), it can really become a problem.

The IT team is now forced to spend more time and money on making sure that its systems all play nice with each other. Integration starts overtaking all of the other aspects of IT, and less time is spent on developing new offerings.

• Some lively discussion happening at YouShouldTestThat.com debating the usefulness of computer generated heatmaps as a conversion optimization tool.

• There’s still time to grab your own copy of our Ecommerce Tips desktop calendar by joining our Research Panel.

• Sally McKenzie brings us home with It’s 2010. Do You Know Where Your E-Commerce Strategy Is? 7 Signs You Need to Find It.

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Click through rate in natural search could be a factor in Google’s secret-sauce ranking algorithm. SEOmoz estimates click through to account for 7% according to its Search Engine Ranking Factors report:

Note that SEOmoz’ research is based on the expert opinions of some of the world’s top SEOs, not of Google itself.

It makes sense that Google would consider click through rate as a sign of a web result being relevant to a search term. (Have you marketed yourself well in meta description tags?) Click through rates by human beings add that personal element to its computerized intelligence.

Another clue to the quality / relevance of a search result is the bounce rate, which is easy for Google to calculate the time elapsed from the click through to the click back.

A campaign such as what Rishi proposes is brilliant. His hypothetical email goes like this:

Subject: Search and win

Email Message:

1. Google gourmet chocolate popcorn.
2. Hunt down kukuruza.com.
3. Instantly take 5% off all our 27 flavors.
4. Promo ends 1/29/10.

Not only does this attract click through, but encourages customers to at least browse the site for something they want (27 flavors of chocolate popcorn — this I gotta see!).

Of course, the promotion could be reinforced through content spaces (banner images) throughout the site and the promo code auto-applied through targeted selling, writing a rule that all referrals from Google for the target keyword qualifies for the promotion in the cart.

Anyone going to give this trick a try?

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• Short URLs Attract 250% Higher Click-Through in Organic Search
• PPC Myth Week Pt 2: Bid Higher to Appear Higher

Agenda

• A Modern Fairy Tale
• Marketing Needs to Step Up
• IT Can Do More
• Good News For Everyone

A Modern Fairy Tale

Once upon a time, marketing lived in a happy place where 50% of its efforts were wasted (but no one knew or cared which 50%). IT only had to work with logical, process driven folks who understood the value of fault tolerant systems. Their two worlds were buffered by a handy layer of finance and operations.

But things changed in a hurry, the arrival of the web created the need for new organizational dynamics. From skunk works operations to…spin-outs to…an integrated sub-department to…a free-standing business unit. Very quickly, relationships between IT and marketing changed, forcing a high degree of collaboration.

Collaboration or When Worlds Collide?

View from “IT”

• Rolling 90 day plan
• Change = Risk
• Enterprise systems rightly get top priority
• IT a cost (and blame) center, any time you draw attention to yourself the budget axes come out
• IT views Marketing as fickle, prone to overpromising, and not held accountable

View from “Marketing”

• Short term focus
• “We’re the guys paying the bills – view themselves as top dogs
• It’s all about being nimble and cutting edge
• “Do it/Fix it”
• Enterprise systems are utilities like plumbing or electricity, they should “just work”
• IT a gate keeper (almost as bad as legal)
• IT is slow, a source of unnecessary complexity

The Challenge for Both Marketing and IT

These two worlds need to work together. Senior management is hearing that IT needs to be nimble and markting needs to be accountable, rather than the status quo of marketing being nimble and IT accountable. Both departments need to wear both hats. This forces the two sides to work together to be successful.

• Web raised expectations of executives and customers to new heights
• Growing source of profits dependent on a whole new set of systems that move at an unprecedented pace
• While legacy systems and channels still need to be supported (increasingly integrated with online)

Marketing Needs to Step Up

Marketing Needs to Sharpen its Game

Marketing needs to recognize the world has changed. In the same way you see customer centricity and ROI based campaigns have become the norm, similarly marketing needs to adapt and change the relationship with IT.

How?

It’s critical to take time to get basic hows and whys around requirements and risk management down.

Just because you now have some projects under your marketing belt, don’t forget projects are a means, not an end. Demand for project time that is not commensurate with value of that demand (features/functionality that don’t have a significant impact on business) should be recognized. Focus on what matters. Treat IT like scarce resource which is what they are, and you’re going to get more help.

• Marketing cannot afford to be ignorant of how development and delivery works
• Building is ceasing to be equated with running a web store
• It is now possible to understand which 50% is wasted – so focus on what matters

Why Are Projects Always Late?

• Andersen study showed that 50% of projects are OVER 50% late and over-budget
• Easy to point fingers at IT
• Two main areas projects get derailed:
• Up-front requirements ill-defined
• Scope change during project

The best way to solve this problem is for marketing to nail down up front what the business goals are – what marketing is trying to DO. This way IT can propose alternative solutions that will work better with existing systems, processes and resources. And, when things change (and they inevitably will), marketing should not say “great, make this change” and walk away, but rather understand the tradeoffs.

Building vs. Running: Shiny Objects

Arms Race Mentality

“Gap’s new sites leapfrog every other retail site out there today,” said Carrie Johnson, a retail analyst with Forrester Research, an online consulting firm. “They’re providing a customer experience that other retailers will quickly try to figure out how to copy.” – NYT 9/12/2005

This quote in the New York Times led many retailers to jump on the “mini-cart” bandwagon after Gap launched its new website. The mistake was these retailers didn’t do their homework. They didn’t ask “how does this apply to my business?” or “how do I know Gap’s research was done with enough rigor?” Many mini-carts got launched and were soon taken down.

Building vs. Running: Missing What Matters

Pixels or Inventory?

Focus on the right things instead of the trivial. An example given was of a leading apparel brand’s web team’s obsessive focus on image pixel counts. While 3-4 people were busy worrying about pixels, no one worked on restocking core sizes of best sellers.

A dirty store can hurt sales, but stock-outs eliminate them. Physical store managers obsess about inventory and merchandising, not about upgrading window glass or installing talking price tags.

The Great Cop-out is Over

• World of budget based marketing ending with marketers increasingly stapled to a bottom line
• Dev efforts increasingly given the level of scrutiny marketing campaigns have started to receive – what is the ROI?
• News used to be just about ecommerce leaders rising – now they are falling too

IT Can Do More

Avoid Us vs. Them

• Marketing not actually the enemy
• If they are, then what does that make the customer?
• Easier for an engineer to become a marketer than vice versa, so meet them more than halfway
• Wear a company hat rather than a silo hat
• Help drive the trade-offs vs. use them as an anchor
• Managing risk still important, but put it onto the scales or risk/reward rather than blindly guard

It’s IT’s job to get out of the corner of coding and look to the rest of the organization to find out how they can meet marketing half way.

Provide alternatives instead of just saying NO. Instead of “that’s really hard” or “I don’t have time,” try to say yest more often with alternatives. Step back and consider how the changes being asked for may have an impact on the business or serve the customer better. Become more customer centric in your thinking.

IT Cannot Simply Be Order Takers

• Doing exactly is what asked (when we know it’s not an optimal solution) gives a passive aggressive thrill…but it’s better to be a thought partner
• What are the goals? Find the root of the requirement
• Force rank priorities

When it comes down to it, it really is hard to build a rocket ship. We can’t build it in Q1 but we might be able to get you a booster and a shell and some other parts. This goes back to the collaborate effort. Find a real solution with marketing and help them understand some things are really hard to do, while working out what’s possible.

Good News For Everyone

Landscape Changes

• ASP phenomena: minimize IT involvement

Lighter weight skill requirements to integrate and manage

Support and upgrades someone else’s responsibility

• “Marketing interfaces”

Technology not just for technologists

Let marketing serve itself

• Fading of the “shiny object?”

Recession may have been at least a partial cure for marketing’s confusion of could with should

Good news is we don’t have to build everything from scratch. We can pull in other solutions, integrate with other service providers (rating and review tools, etc).

Personnel Changes

• Increasingly have people with varied backgrounds in key roles, lessens myopia
• Contact has breed an understanding, with IT understanding marketing and (increasingly) marketing understanding IT
• Elapsed time since Al Gore’s invention (aka the Internet) allows for more specialization, expertise, and lessons learned

How it Works in Practice

Smart Destinations’ experience developing their ecommerce solution:

• Marketing put product reviews on priority list
• Didn’t micro manage beyond requirements definition
• IT able to present recommendation that balance implementation effort and cost with capability
• Reviews successfully launched within 2 weeks

Q&A

Any tips for helping Marketing better understand IT?

If you’re in marketing, raise your hand and ask your IT colleagues to help you understand where IT is coming from. IT folks have their focus on risk management, schedules and plans for good reason. The approach is important, give IT guys the time to respond too and take time to understand what they are saying.

I’m in marketing. Our programming team writes great code, but is about 8 months behind on a key project. Cash incentives haven’t worked. How do we motivate them?

Sometimes IT people will go into the corner and code, and be very guarded. You need to communicate what is at stake — that there is a real business need, not just the carrot of a bonus. Being part of bettering the business can be a great motivator for IT people. Also, make sure you as a marketer think of the tradeoffs, what can you do to reduce scope.

Should we have a liaison role between IT and marketing?

Reminds me of the Office Space movie, the guy who takes faxes to engineers. If you are in a really big organization, and you need someone who needs to liaise, go ahead but the best way is to break down tthe “us vs. them” and create a “we.” When you have spent face time with a colleague it’s harder for them to flame you or come back with “I don’t want to do it” because you have built a personal bond. This approach is much better than relying on an arbitrator.

Many Marketing types bring in SaaS solutions as a way to get around IT. What is the role of SaaS in the IT/Marketing relationship?

The good thing about SaaS point solutions is both IT and marketing can look at the same solution and can talk aout it together. E.g. “here’s this tool called Salesforce and here are the 10 reasons why it will solve our business problems with minimal IT involvement.” It brings it home that technology has become a lot more accessible. Going rogue is possible, but what happens is nobody gets what they want. Even SaaS decisions should be collaborative. Whatever solution that goes over the head of IT will not be the optimal one.

If IT is used to being told what to do by marketing and has become jaded, what are some good exercises in creating more involvement?

I don’t think IT is used to being told what to do (nor will they ever be) as that is a more subservient role, which may bring out more passive aggression and defiance. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes and adopt a collaborative approach. Rather than IT always saying “no,” you’ll get “hey, I think there are some issues here, but here are some possible solutions.”

Next Webinar

Ecommerce for Packaged Software Vendors: Maximizing Your Online Channel

Join Linda Bustos to discuss how both B2C and B2B packaged software companies can improve conversion rates and average order values to maximize the return on investment for their ecommerce projects.

Date: Thursday, February 25th, 2010 Time: 9am Pacific/ 12pm Eastern
Register at www.elasticpath.com/software

You may also like these similar posts:

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Continuing our case study in conversion optimization for the Official Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store (see last week’s post if you missed it), today we’ll share the results of our product detail page testing.

We began with potential issues with the current design:

• Color and size selection were provided in drop-down menus which were difficult to notice and understand. For example, what do the colors “Juniper”, “Pacific” or “Fern” really look like?
• The Add to Cart button and price often fell below the fold and were hard to find if a product had a long description.

Considering above, the following tweaks (Variation A) were introduced:

• Most crucial elements such as Add to Cart button, price, and amount selector were moved to the right in their own column and switch places with Shop With Confidence block
• Drop-downs were replaced with visual selectors
• Product review information was moved under the product title
• Alternative image thumbnails were increased in size

During the initial review of Variation B, we gathered feedback suggesting that visual selectors for color need to be closer to the main product photo. The reason being some on our team felt the color selectors were too distant from the product photo. We wanted to test this as an alternative hypothesis. Thus, location of visual selectors was the only difference between Variation A and Variation B.

Control

Variation A

Variation B

What We Learned

During the experiment, all three variations were equally distributed to 100% of all traffic. 18 days and 2567 conversions later, Google Website Optimizer found a high confidence winner. Consensus was that both new variations would perform better than the control one, but variation B was the ultimate winner:

• Variation B converted (GWO) 19.2% better than the control variation
• Variation A converted (GWO) 11.2% better than the control variation
• Visits with Variation B resulted in 54.4% less Bounce Rate than the control variation
• Overall Conversion Rate increased by 21.17% (Variation B) or 13.26% (Variation A)

After reviewing this test, some suggested that Variation A performed worse because most products had rather long “short” description, pushing those selectors fairly close or below the fold. A good follow-up test by splitting description into short and long would answer this.

Finally, it is difficult to say what change exactly contributed the most – the move of Add to Cart button or the change of drop-downs into visual selectors. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the luxury of time to localize these experiments and provide more detailed report on that. However, we can say with confidence that fairly minor UI changes can result in rather high improvement.

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• A/B Test Case Study: Homepage

We’re looking for:

• E-business professionals from all levels and departments of the organization (IT, Marketing, Finance, Operations, Merchandising etc)
• Minimum annual online revenues of $5 Million
• The willingness to participate in 1 to 4 surveys / interviews per year (maximum once per quarter)

By participating in our online and telephone surveys, you’ll get:

• Exclusive access to research reports only available to Panel members and Elastic Path clients
• The opportunity to voice your opinions on critical ecommerce issues
• Free schwag like the “Year of Ecommerce Tips Desktop Calendar” (Think Dilbert without the Dilbert, and more ecommerce tips)

Topics include:

• Internet marketing strategies and tactics
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• Ecommerce technology and platforms
• Managing an ecommerce team
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• Multichannel marketing and management
• Targeted selling (segmentation and personalization of content)
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• Social media
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• Analytics and reporting

Sign up today!

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None Found

American Eagle Outfitters, Aerie, 77Kids

Avenue, Avenue Body, Cloud Walkers

Sears, Kmart, The Great Outdoors, Land’s End

CSN Stores

The first time I saw the tabbed approach was on Gap stores: Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy, Piperlime (and now Athleta)

Gap’s innovation was to use one universal cart for all brands, for a seamless shopping experience and low flat-rate shipping. Though the tactic drew criticism from those who thought it a branding sin, Gap’s president Toby Lenk explained to us at the Shop.org Summit, 2008 that the decision was customer-driven (yes, focus groups were recruited) and “the best brand strategy is to do things that customers love, not what the brand marketers think customers want.”

Offering new brands like Piperlime, and now Athleta, allow Gap Inc. to use its own navigation menu as an online advertising medium. Not only do the legacy brands introduce customers to the new pureplays, but the new brands also help sell legacy brands.

Something to think about if you operate multiple stores – even if they serve different market segments or sell different types of products.

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The shopping cart abandonment rate is a key metric every ecommerce team should track. When viewed across the ecommerce sector, changes in the abandonment rate give insight into mass changes in behavior which impact every website.

When we examine shopping cart abandonment rates across a large number of U.S. ecommerce sites, viewed in aggregate, the abandonment rate fluctuates wildly, with an expected strong seasonal influence and customer behavioral indications.

Usually it is impossible to correlate your site changes with the changes to conversion. But when viewed in aggregate, it gives you insight into what customers are doing and provides a valuable benchmark when analyzing your ecommerce site’s performance over the same period.

Click to enlarge image (in a new window).

Looking at the data a bit more in depth, the shopping cart abandonment rate averaged 73 percent in the first two weeks of January, some 12 percent higher than the low of 61 percent recorded on December 16. While the abandonment rate usually falls during the Christmas period, these are still huge swings, reflecting the impact of Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals, public holidays, and January sales.

What’s also revealing in this data is that abandonment rates hit a new season high of 87 percent on January 5 and 6!

This is evidence of the link between abandonment rates and bargain seeking behavior, but it could also potentially indicate widespread out-of-stocks for popular lines.

Click to enlarge image (in a new window).

When you compare successful conversion volumes with the abandonment rate, it becomes clear that sales on January 3 reached 98 percent of the peak (on 12/8/09) and have been declining fast ever since. By Thursday, January 14, volumes were down to approximately one third of the peak of December 8.

But notice how the abandonment rate peak on January 5 and 6 came after a sales volume peak.

This suggests that customers were actively shopping for deals after the peak on the 3rd, but not finding what they were looking for, resulting in two days of record abandonment on the 5th and 6th. Despite huge numbers of potential customers researching online, these customers have yet to be converted.

Moreover, since this data is based on items placed in the conversion funnel (typically an item is placed in the shopping cart), it’s unlikely that this pattern is a result of out-of-stocks, indicating that there is untapped demand.

Most retailers expect a very quiet second half of January and accept that holiday promotions have pulled volume forward.

Given this backdrop, what can ecommerce teams do about rapidly falling volumes? The data above suggests that customers came in huge volumes in January, but many didn’t buy, either not finding stock availability or the prices they were looking for. Remarketing in all its guises is now a key tactic to beat the post-holiday blues. Here are five tactics you can use now to convert customers and beat the January blues.

1. Get the basics right. Email the house list with items on promotion which are in stock, and when popular lines that sold out become available again, focus your email campaigns around these items. Be careful not to include items likely to go out of stock quickly if featured prominently in your campaign. Save these items for more targeted campaigns (see 4 below).

2. Remarket to shopping cart abandoners. It should go without saying that triggered one-to-one emails to customers that almost purchased are one of the most profitable types of campaigns that you can run. It’s still astonishing that so few retailers follow up abandoned carts effectively. Retailers who do report that these campaigns are typically 10x more profitable than batch-based customer email campaigns. Ultimately, if widespread optimized follow-up programs were in place already, then we wouldn’t have seen such a sharp drop off in sales since January 3.

3. Extend free shipping. The research above shows that large numbers of customers are out there who almost purchased, but something held them back. We know that there is a very strong correlation between the website conversion rate and promotions. The most popular type of promotion with customers is free shipping. Consider extending free shipping offers through the end of January, potentially in stages, if you have not already done so.

4. Targeted offers. If you have the ability to segment your customers based on browsing behavior, now is the time to do it. Highly targeted, specific promotions—segmented by visitor behavior and product interest—will score well. Focus your best promotions on those who’ve shown great interest in particular products, and if you have limited stock, make it clear that you expect to sell out imminently. Remember that customers don’t want to miss a genuine bargain, and this may be the call to action needed to get the conversion.

5. Social media. While many marketers used Twitter and Facebook to publicize their holiday season offers, most have stopped promoting their offers via social media. For example, promotional Tweets are now at only 11 percent of their post-Christmas peak. Maybe it’s old hat, or you feel that there’s only so many times that you can tweet about your promotions, but there’s always a fresh spin you can put on it with a little creativity. Let’s get those promotion codes and offers out there again.

Web analytics visionary Charles Nicholls is founder and chief strategy officer of SeeWhy and author of “In Search of Insight” which has established a new agenda for the analytics industry. As a veteran of the analytics space, he has worked on strategy and projects for some of the world’s leading ecommerce companies, including Amazon, eBay and many other organizations around the globe. Incorporated in 2003, SeeWhy helps companies improve website conversion rates by bringing back up to 50 percent of visitors that abandon sites prematurely. Check out Charles’ Website Conversion Blog or follow him on Twitter at @seewhyinc.

You may also like these similar posts:

• A Better Way to Measure Conversion Rate
• Cart Abandonment: The Case for Christmas Cookies
• Wishlists May Reduce Cart Abandonment
• Recovering Sales from Abandoned Shopping Carts With Email
• Holiday Season: Are You In the Game or on The Bench?

But comparison matrices are not always designed optimally. The following is a collection of tips for improving the design and usability of your comparison tools.

Category/Search Pages

1. If you’ve built a comparison feature into your category pages, use it in site search results too. You’ll be amazed how many sites don’t do this. A site search results page is essentially a customized category page.

2. Make the maximum number one can compare at one time very clear, rather than camouflaging it.

Clear:

Camouflaged:

3. Have a clear call-to-action to compare next to each checkbox, and make it look like a link (blue text or underlined black). Many sites force you to scroll all the way to the top of a page to hunt for the “Compare” button. Don’t do this to your customers.

Verizon Wireless makes it very clear you can launch the matrix without scrolling up or down:

Radio Shack does a nice job, using the active words “Compare Now”:

Matrix Usability

4. If you load the matrix in a new page rather than a pop up or lightbox, have a clear link back to the category. Consider “Back to [category] or “Compare more [category].”

5. Make the CLOSE link easy to spot.

6. Link to the product detail page (surprisingly, some do not link through).

7. Allow products to be added directly to cart from the comparison.

8. Large thumbnail images are a plus.

9. Allow easy editing (remove or add device). See example above.

10. Allow customers to highlight the differences between phones or plans, like Best Buy:

Another approach is to Hide Similar Features, like Crutchfield:

11. Allow customer to click-to-expand or use a mouseover to expose product attribute details. Make sure, however, it’s very obvious that there is information that can be expanded. In the example below, it’s not intuitive that you can expand the “Technical Specification” for more information.

12. Allow customer to save or print comparison. This is especially helpful when the purchase decision may be made by another person, for example, comparing mobile phone plans and presenting them to a parent.

Offer a call-to-action to call a customer service representative using “Need Help Deciding?” or a similar phrase:

13. Provide a clear link to return to the category/search results at both the top and bottom of the comparison table.

Product Description Content

14. Whenever possible, include product pricing (this may not be possible for some B2B situations where pricing is negotiable or dependent on volume.)

15. When you carry a number of brands and product lines, make sure units of measurement are consistent across manufacturers (example: 3 days standby vs. 72 hrs). Default to the one that’s most easy to understand (easier to figure out 3 days than to mentally convert 72 hours into 3 days).

16. Avoid jargon whenever possible. If you must use it, define it for your customers, as Verizon Wireless does:

17. Include links to reviews and average customer ratings, like AT&T:

Verizon does a nice job with AJAX hover, showing the breakdown of review attributes:

Some of these recommendations require custom programming that may not be feasible with your current ecommerce platform, but hopefully you can take away at least one idea for improving your comparison matrix.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Optimizing Ecommerce Usability – Product Comparison Matrix
• Canadian Comparison Shopping Roundup
• Merchandising Usability: Better Ways to Display Product Recommendations
• Clearing the Air on Product Pitfalls
• Product Selection and Discovery: What You Can Learn From the Telco Industry

A little while back, I wrote on Elastic Path’s Grep Community blog about our decision to change to a two-page checkout process. We piloted this checkout process on the Hockey Canada Store with the main goals being to reduce abandonment and to increase conversion. The results were extremely positive, but we weren’t content to sit on our laurels. So when we started re-working the Official Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store, we challenged ourselves to take it to the next level — and we cut the checkout process down to just single page.

Structurally, the new single-page checkout looks very much like the two-page checkout, with shipping information first, followed by billing and confirmation.

With A/B split testing, 50% of traffic was redirected to the original checkout, while the other 50% was served the new single-page checkout. After only 300 transactions, the winner was clear and we stopped the experiment after 606 transactions. Google Website Optimizer concluded that the single-page checkout outperformed the out-of-the-box checkout by a whopping 21.8%. But what does that 21.8% really mean?

Control: Original, Multi-Step Process

(Click to enlarge, will open new page)

Treatment: Single Page Checkout

The option to create an account after checkout is offered after the order is completed:

The Findings

It’s important to keep in mind that GWO only counts goal conversions and does not link to any ecommerce data in Google Analytics. With a few little hacks, we were able to pass on each test group to Advanced Segments on Analytics for both checkout flows and gather valuable ecommerce data:

• Successful completion rate for the entire checkout process increased by 257.26%.
• Overall site conversion rate increased by 0.54%.
• We also observed some unexpected improvements during this experiment, like an increase of 8.54% in the average order value!

While these kinds of numbers are impressive, they should not be used as the sole indicator of how single-page checkout performs. These are the improvements that we observed when changing from the standard four-page checkout to a single-page checkout process on the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store. Your mileage may vary, depending on your product, target market, et cetera. There’s no silver bullet checkout process that works best for all business models. Doing your own A/B split testing will give you a better idea of what kinds of numbers you can expect.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Checkout Process Split-Testing Tip from Bryan Eisenberg
• PPC Myth Week Pt 1: Organic Search Traffic is More Qualified Than Paid
• Turn Customer Reviews Into Word-Of-Mouth Marketing
• Do Hacker Safe / McAfee Secure Badges Increase Sales?
• 15% Off Olympic Gear for Get Elastic Readers

Sadly, market size data is near impossible to find, as are conversion rate and average order value (AOV) benchmarks. The most recent analyst research that’s available (Statistics Canada, eMarketer, Forrester Research) dates back to 2007. Newer research should come out soon from both Statistics Canada and Forrester — we’ll keep you updated here on Get Elastic.

In 2008, eMarketer estimated Canadian B2C ecommerce as 4-6% of all retail and predicted that we will see $18 Billion in Canadian online spending (including travel) in 2010, and double digit growth in 2011 and 2012.

Regarding conversion and AOV, analysts can tell us conversion rates are slightly lower in Canada than the US. This is consistent with many Canadian retailers I’ve spoken to. Of course, your mileage will vary depending on your industry, brand awareness, loyalty and execution of your web strategy. Jim Okamura of JC Williams Group believes lower conversion rates are a function of segmentation and targeting and the lack of choice available. “What drives conversion is selection — the weakest area for Canadian ecommerce.”

The good news is average order value (AOV) is often higher on Canadian ecommerce sites than the average US site. Perhaps this is cultural, Canadians spend 47% more than the average US consumer (hey we’re nice and extravagant). Or maybe it’s due to the smaller pool of online sellers. You’re more likely to be a one-stop shopper if the site’s “the only game in town.”

But that may soon change, as both Canadian and US retailers start looking seriously at the Canadian online consumer.

For US Retailers

Shipping to Canada opens the gate to over 28 Million Internet users. 50% of Canadians made a purchase online last year according to Forrester Research. Visa Canada found 57% of Canadians shopped online last year, with 48% purchasing from a Canadian site, and 29% from an American business.

“The recession has fueled the trend of Canadian expansion as US retailers looking for new, easy to enter market” says Okamura, who has helped a number of top retailers with their internationalization strategies. The Canadian market is followed by the UK market in attractiveness.

To reach this new market, a US company can easily leverage its existing website with far less up-front costs than the Canadian company entering ecommerce for the first time. However, a .ca domain has advantages — the ability to geo-target the domain to Google.ca, Yahoo.ca and Bing.ca will help with rankings in those engines, and click through from Canadians that look for .ca URLs.

Third parties like FiftyOne and Canada Post’s Borderfree services also make it easier than ever for US retailers to sell to Canadians hassle-free.

Borderfree accepts the US retailer’s product catalog in XML format and determines the duty rates of commodities and whether or not the product can be imported, then sends the updated catalog back to the retailer so the necessary duties, taxes and shipping costs can be collected at time of purchase. Borderfree also handles returns. Canadian shoppers can browse the merchant directory to find Canuck-friendly e-shops like Sephora, Eddie Bauer and Crate and Barrel.

FiftyOne boasts customers like Overstock, Drugstore.com, Saks Fifth Avenue and Nordstrom. It offers multicurrency localization, international payment and fraud management, customs clearance, parcel fulfillment and international returns. Neither shoppers nor retailer need to worry about footing surprise customs and duty.

Roughly half of the e-stores using FiftyOne apply geolocation to identify non-US visitors, showing the visitor’s country and currency with the option to continue shopping in his or her own currency, or to override and proceed as a US customer.

Another option is a “landed” business that operates in Canada with its own warehouse and customer service staff. Examples include Amazon and American Apparel. Though this eliminates any customs, duty and shipping delays, the costs are appreciably higher and the risk greater. For example, it requires careful inventory planning with foresight into what Canadians want to buy and how much of it you think you can sell.

Regardless of which method used, expanding into Canada could account for 10% of your revenues, according to Forrester. I believe with a good Canadian awareness campaign, a Canadian-friendly site and geo-targeting to Canadian search engines, 5% of total revenues is a realistic figure to shoot for.

Leveraging pay per click is one way to get the word out…

For Canadian Retailers

Offering a cross-channel shopping experience can:

• Bolster customer loyalty and satisfaction
• Expand reach beyond urban centers
• Introduce the brand to new customers through search
• Liquidate clearance merchandise leaving more retail space for regular price merchandise
• Provide a way to monetize the corporate website

But many Canadian retailers are not as bullish on the Canadian ecommerce market as their neighbors to the South. The costs of building an ecommerce site can be as much for a Canadian e-tailer as an American, and for a market less than 1/10th the size of the US it’s harder to make the project profitable. Another problem is it’s difficult to make solid business decisions with the lack of Canadian specific data on market size and conversion rates.

The fact that some of the largest Canadian brands have recently backed out of ecommerce only adds to the anxiety, though retailers like Lululemon are realizing ecommerce success. Indigo Books enjoyed 17% growth in 2008, The Shopping Channel 9.5% and Mountain Equipment Co-Op 15% according to Internet Retailer.

However, Canadian retailers must consider that online retail is still growing faster than brick-and-mortar sales. B2C ecommerce will enjoy a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.6% according to eMarketer’s projections, and US retailers are well aware of the opportunity and are moving fast.

“Increased competition is forcing Canadian retailers to give their websites a closer look,” says Okamura.

Bonus: Random Characteristics of Canadian e-Consumers

• The catalog industry was never as big in Canada as it was in the US (13,000+ US catalogers vs. 150 in Canada). Much of ecommerce’s early success in the US was the online channel made available to catalog shoppers. In Canada, it’s tech-savvy 25-34 year olds with the highest propensity to buy online (Visa Canada / Yahoo) vs. the high discretionary income “Boomer” generation that fueled ecommerce adoption in the US.

• Close to half of all Canadians say they are shopping online because they are finding better deals than in stores.

• Compared to their American counterparts, Canadians have been historically quicker to adopt debit cards, high-speed Internet, online banking and online bill-pay. One of the reasons why online banking took off faster than in the US was Canadian banks made online bill payment free (US banks charged up to $5 per month), bundling the functionality into the checking account.

• Canadians trust their financial institutions much more than retailers. According to Forrester Research, the number one reason Canadians avoid online shopping is the fear of sharing personal financial information over the Internet. A June, 2009 PayPal survey found that 51% of Canadians feel anxious about purchasing online. 40% feel anxiety due to a lack of confidence in the merchant’s security, compared to only 27% of American shoppers.

• Alternative payments like PayPal and online debit may attract these wary shoppers. A June, 2009 study by Visa Canada found 59% of Canadians are interested in a debit card that allows them to purchase online directly from their bank account, 74% among the 18-24 set.

• Canadians are most interested in buying books, CDs, DVDs, apparel, software, travel and entertainment/tickets.

And finally, here are some tips for making your site Canadian-friendly:

Subscribers: can’t see video? View this post on the Web.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Attracting Canadian Online Shoppers
• A Sure Fire Way To Lose An International Conversion
• Gift Cards: Still Hot in 2008?
• Canadian Tire Dodges Out of Ecommerce: Will It Bounce Back?
• Cart Abandonment: The Case for Christmas Cookies

Hopefully it’s not that bad in your organization. The majority of eBusinesses do struggle with the IT/marketing relationship to some degree. 71% of eBusiness leaders surveyed by independent firm Forrester Research, Inc. report low to average levels of support for their business coming from IT. Many prefer to outsource key technology needs in part to avoid working with internal IT staff. Only 9% believe they are well supported by IT.

69% of eBusiness and channel strategy professionals report that they outsource their IT, development and infrastructure:

Source: Improving The eBusiness And IT Relationship, Brian K. Walker, Forrester Research, Inc., October 6, 2009. (Email subscribers: please enable images to view the diagrams from Forrester)

Common complaints from eBusiness teams are that IT is too slow, not reliable and doesn’t see things from the customer perspective. IT complains that marketing doesn’t give enough detail on requirements and doesn’t understand the work required to “make it so” in light of existing systems and platforms.

It doesn’t help the situation that Marketing and IT are held to different measures of success. Marketers and online store managers are responsible for growing sales and making customers merry. IT is typically concerned with keeping costs under control and minimizing risk. These competing objectives are the heart of the problem.

How can the Marketing and IT relationship be improved?

Join us on January 26th for our next webinar: Bridging the Technology and Marketing Divide for Ecommerce Success. Our guest speakers will be Smart Destinations’ CMO, Rob Schmults and CTO, Matt Higgins. Learn about how bridging the technology vs. marketing divide has gotten easier as the technology landscape has changed, yet these changes have not been sufficient to completely close the gap. Our speakers will share views on the way changes in enabling technology combined with better organizational collaboration can make your ecommerce business faster, better, and cheaper.

Sign up today.

Webinar Takeaways:

• How web services, WYSIWUG, and GUI’s offer the allure of cutting IT out of the picture entirely
• Why marketers have to understand the importance of articulating solid requirements—and why change orders are beautiful things
• Why technologists cannot be passive order takers despite the safety such a pose offers—and how they can help marketers focus on what matters
• These lessons are applicable to SMB or enterprises with internal or external resources

You may also like these similar posts:

• Persistent Shopping Carts vs. Perpetual Shopping Carts
• When Web Developers Don’t Consider Usability
• Cart Abandonment: The Case for Christmas Cookies
• Why Victorias Secret Lost A $350 Sale
• Convert First Time Visitors With Coupons

Shoeline.com:

And one of the funniest, Vat19 (yes they sell the 5 lb gummy bear):

Vat19 actually added a video gallery category, you can explore only items with videos.

But have you noticed anything about the above examples?

How about the glaring ad overlay that in some cases links to other retail sites? How about the related videos that distract your customer? Don’t underestimate the power of Youtube to activate CADD (Customer Attention Deficit Disorder)!

Though Youtube is quick and cheap way to include video content on your site, you run the risk of irritating customer with annoying ads, distracting suggested videos and performance issues if Youtube goes down for maintenance. All of this cheapens your brand image and may work against your conversion goals.

Ideal Case and Vat 19 appear to have produced their videos themselves (judging by the video titles and product exclusivity), so my question is why they aren’t using the original, clean videos on their site?

Dylan’s Candy Bar uses another user’s video on its product page for its Time Capsule collection.

In this case, the Youtube video adds whimsical charm to a whimsically charming product that stirs up the feeling of nostalgia. I don’t know how they did it, but somehow Dylan’s Candy Bar managed to embed this Archie comic video without ad overlay and related videos.

Lush leverages its biggest fan, “Allthatglitters21,” on its product pages. Though the video drags on a bit (almost 15 minutes!), you can tell this is an authentic Lush evangelist as she reviews her latest haul.

Though this video originally comes from Allthatglitters21’s Youtube channel, Lush has stripped it of its Youtube skin, making it more clean and professional, avoiding the “cheap” look that a straight embed would. Lush may have reached out to her and obtained the original video file in exchange for free product. Some sites like Blip.tv allow you to download video files directly to your computer.

The takeaway

Youtube carries risks – namely making your site look cheap, annoying or distracting customers. You can mitigate those risks by using your original videos on your site, or asking for the Youtube user’s permission to embed their original video on your site.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Youtube Experimenting With Video Ecommerce
• Adventures in Ecommerce Video: 3 Etailers Share Stories from the Trenches
• Hot Ecommerce Trend: Embedded Video in Email
• Click to Buy Video Providers
• Distilled Clothing Has Innovative Use of Video

Jim Halpert gave the office staff a quick update on business performance, mentioning that customers were using coupon codes online, but they were still having a problem differentiating between the letter ‘O’ and the number ‘0′. (Another tricky one is the number ‘1′ and the lower-case letter ‘l’.)

This is a common problem with coupon codes, especially ones that are a long string of random characters:

Customers will have more success with codes that are more intuitive (GAP20 for 20% off at the Gap, for example), but it’s best to just come up with codes that can’t be confused:

Who knew the writers of the Office were so ecommerce savvy?

You may also like these similar posts:

• How to Grow Your Email List from Your Shopping Cart
• How Much is Your Coupon Code Box Costing You?
• M&Ms and Zazzle Team Up for Valentine Viral
• 15% Off Olympic Gear for Get Elastic Readers
• Convert First Time Visitors With Coupons

Home Page and Navigation

Home Page Flash

Barnes and Noble augments its home page flash banner with product details and a cart button when you mouse over a product. Often retailers just hyperlink the images, but this saves me from bouncing back and forth. I can decide whether I’m interested pre-click.

Rich Flyout Menus

Flyout menus allow the visitor to expose categories and subcategories without a click, making it easier to locate products quickly and flattening your site architecture (more pages are 1 click away from the home page). They are quite common, but I’ve spotted a few that you might call “rich flyout menus” as they include promotional information or thumbnail images for products. For example:

American Eagle Outfitters shows featured products and sale messaging (above) and Best Kiteboarding shows the a product image that changes as you roll over menu items (below).

Site Search Rich Autocomplete

As mentioned in a previous Get Elastic post, many consumer software sites offer an autocomplete feature that is “rich” with additional images, text and promotional areas. Below is an example from the Apple Store.

Category Pages

Category Previews

There are several ways retailers are using mouseover effects to improve category pages.

One method is a simple image enlargement to detail previews, like Bidz.com and Neiman Marcus:

Other sites use it to show alternative views, product details or both, as Blue Nile:

Land’s End and Brooks Brothers (below) allow you to switch thumbnail colors.

Product Pages

Product Imagery

Many sites employ the mouseover effect to switch colors, product views or zoom…

…but there are more creative things you can do…

Category Exposure on Product Pages

American Eagle Outfitters allows you to navigate the category from a product page without hitting the back button. As shown below, you can “View All Shorts”.

Stock Availability

The Gap shows whether a size or color is available, making it clear over the product image.

Terms and Policies

Need to define features or industry jargon? Check out how Crutchfield does it.

Similarly, Virgin Mobile explains policies without a pop-up.

Add To Cart Error Handling

It’s easy for customers to forget to select a size, color or other option required before adding to the cart. Often retailers will disable the Buy button until properly selected or refresh the page with an error message. Both of these approaches can confuse customers. The best way to handle errors is to show the error message close to the call-to-action, rather than in red letters at the top of the page where it’s less likely to be noticed.

On Anthropologie, if you’ve missed selecting a size or color, you’ll notice right away as you mouse over the Add to Bag button.

Currency Conversion

This site shows you currency conversion values with a hover. You can eyeball them without having to select a currency and wait for a page load.

Cross-sell Preview

Barnes and Noble lets you preview product recommendation prices, details and even lets you add directly to cart.

See more examples like this in Merchandising Usability: A Better Way to Show Product Recommendations.

Checkout

Policies and Instructions

Office Max explains what MaxPerks ID and Tax Exempt ID mean with a mouseover.

roll over to find out what MaxPerks ID and Tax Exempt ID are.

You could also use this to explain policies or provide instructions for finding a CVV code.

This is only scratching the surface. Potentially, anything on-page feature that requires a click or a pop up window could be handled with a mouseover effect for a smoother customer experience and more modern feel to your website.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Merchandising Usability: Better Ways to Display Product Recommendations
• Customer Feedback Inspires Eddie Bauer Redesign
• Navandising: Merchandising in Navigation
• American Eagle Features Products on the Fly
• Trendspotting: Rich Autocomplete in Site Search

Whether you process returns from in-store or online purchases, pass these reasons on to your Web content team. Just like the presence of negative reviews, sharing reasons for return on your site helps build trust with the consumer (shows you’re open and have nothing to hide, helps the customer make an informed purchase decision). You can work the reasons for return into product description copy or even include a separate section on the product page. One example is Shoeline’s Return-O-Meter, but you can also just list them in text format like customer reviews.

Taking this one step further, you can post reasons for return in a Question and Answer tool, with your store staff commenting on alternative products (with links) or other advice such as “this brand fits snug, so try a size larger.”

Example:

“Reason for return: Brought the desk home and it was not the right white for our daughter’s room. Drawers also a bit too small.”

Staff tip: “This desk is a very creamy white (a bit of a yellow tint) and may not look right if your walls are white-white or the decor has bluish white or grayish white in it. Looks good in rooms with pink, yellow, orange and other warm tones. The drawers are 8×12x6″ which holds items like crayons, CDs, jewelry and small toys but may not be suitable for larger toys or books.”

Using a cross-sell strategy like Amazon’s What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item? feature can direct customers who “pass” on the item to similar products from your store that might better suit their needs:

The more trust you can build with future customers, the better chance they will favor your business and make many happy returns to your site. Being open about the reasons for return saves yourself for accepting returns in the future — customers can make more informed purchase decisions.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Web 2.0 and Ecommerce Marketing – Shop.org Session Highlights
• Reducing Customer Anxiety About Products on Product Pages
• 8 Out-Of-The-Box Ideas to Attract Customer Reviews
• Webinar Recap: What’s Your Website Personality?
• Reducing Size and Color Uncertainty in Product Photos

We’re looking forward to bringing you more ecommerce tips, tricks and trends in 2010 (and we’ll have a big surprise for you very soon).

Get Elastic will be taking the January 1 holiday, and will return January 4th. Until then, we wish you and yours a very happy New Year, and here’s our picks for the Best of Get Elastic for the last 12 months:

January
Thinking positively about negative reviews

February
Tracking Twitter Links: Twitter Analytics Tools & More

March
Personalization: What Sort-By Reveals About a Customer

April
Looks Can Kill Your Design Effectiveness

May
Checkout Inspiration From Top Converting Sites

June
Is Free Shipping More Attractive Than A Dollar Discount?

July
Merchandising Usability: Better Ways to Display Product Recommendations

August
Top 10 Web 2.0 Activities for Ecommerce

September
Reducing Size and Color Uncertainty in Product Photos

October
8 Applications of IP Geolocation

November
Holiday Season: Are You In The Game or On The Bench?

December
8 Tips for Account Registration

You may also like these similar posts:

• Get Elastic – The Year In Review
• Bloggers Digest Resurrected: Ecommerce Links for September 2009
• $95 Landing Page Handbook FREE For Get Elastic Readers
• Bloggers Digest December 2009
• Bloggers Digest – 12/28/2007

First, the bad news

Shipping Rates to Rise 4.9% in Coming Year via DMNews

PayPal to Retire PayLater via Plumber Surplus Blog

The Link Canonical Tag is Breaking Websites via Audette Media (this is the bad news in response to the good news that Google is supporting cross-domain use of the canonical tag – both are important reads)

The E-Commerce SEO Game May Soon Have To Deal With Page Load Speed (but Google Analytics’ new Asynchronous feature and Omniture’s Regional Data Collection may help speed ya up a bit)

Discounts and Promotions: Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction via MineThatData

And the good news: Tips to improve your ecommerce business

How Do You Handle Payment Card Declines? via Econsultancy

Principles of Effective Search in Ecommerce Design via Smashing Magazine

PPC Landing Pages: Choose Wisely via RKG Blog

Bypass Image Blocking By Converting Images Into HTML via StyleCampaign

Seven Sensational SEO Tips for Ecommerce Sites via Econsultancy

30 Topic Ideas for Your Online Store’s Blog via DoublePlus

Tips for Ecommerce Challenged Telcos via Ecommerce Times

You may also like these similar posts:

• Bloggers Digest Resurrected: Ecommerce Links for September 2009
• Bloggers Digest November 2009
• Bloggers Digest – 11/30/07
• Bloggers Digest – 12/14/2007
• Bloggers Digest – 12/21/07

You may also like these similar posts:

• Holiday Marketing 2.007 – Nobody Waits for Black Friday Anymore
• Wrapping Up 2009: The Best of Get Elastic
• Free Holiday Email Marketing Resources
• Dont Miss These Holiday Keywords Next Christmas
• Holiday Shipping Cutoff Usability

The unwitting searcher reads the page title and gets all excited, clicking it in anticipation on landing on
a relevant page for “Toronto ski snowboard shop,” and instead gets this:

The tragedy is this is completely preventable. Both Google and Yahoo allow you to restrict crawling of session IDs through their webmaster tools. Google’s Vanessa Fox has an amazing explanation of the different options you have for handling this duplicate content problem, including the pros and cons of the meta canonical attribute, 301 redirects and the newest tool, “parameter handling.”

Yahoo also explains how to restrict parameters through its Site Explorer tool, although this may be a short-lived solution for the Yahoo search engine if Yahoo eventually returns results powered by Bing.

I suggest you take a look at this before the next holiday rush to avoid flushing your “free” SEO traffic down the drain.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Canonical URL Tag Is Worth A Shot
• Are You Taking Advantage of Webmaster Tools?
• Too Many URLs Spoil the SEO: Fixing a Common Ecommerce Duplicate Content Problem
• Improving Product Descriptions Using Competitor Customer Reviews
• How Much is Your Coupon Code Box Costing You?

Moosejaw Mountaineering

American Eagle Outfitters

GNC

Personally, I think this is a great idea. It allows the site to do a form of targeted selling based on the interest/intent of the customer without complicated tools or rules, and gives you the opportunity to present offers without cluttering up category pages. Like rich autocomplete, the injecting something visual into a text menu may be a trend we see pick up in 2010.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Trendspotting: Rich Autocomplete in Site Search
• 12 Ways To Enhance Your Online Store With Javascript Hover Effects
• American Eagle Features Products on the Fly
• SEO Tips for Special Holidays
• Mobile Commerce Usability: Home Pages and Navigation

I’ve shared my shoe store war stories here before, but that was another trick up my sleeve when selling shoes. I made sure I always had something unique or positive to say about the shoe in the customer’s hand. If I didn’t have anything good to say about it, I would steer her to something that did have a selling feature to “romance.” Did you know that you can throw your canvas Keds in the washing machine?

Most product descriptions do not sell at all. They’re impersonal. They say nothing about why someone should buy something, only what they would be buying. They don’t tell customers why they are going to love this product and wonder how they ever lived without it, how they can use it for so much more than a typical [widget], how this model’s unique features make it the best choice.

But occasionally I come across some very well written descriptions that give me a glimmer of hope for online retail. I’d like to share a few with you.

Typical product description:

Indie Dress

The Indie Dress features a cross-over neckline and empire bodice. Made from 18.5 micron New Zealand merino wool. Side slash pockets. Relaxed Hood. Machine washable. By Ibex.

Yawn.

Product description with personality (by Title Nine):

Indie Dress

Free yourself from fussy when you pull on the Indie. Cross-over neckline and empire bodice move easily from well-dressed to “WOW,” but never compromises on easy care and comfort. Made of the finest blend of merino wool from only the best and happiest New Zealand sheep. 18.5 micron means wool so fine that there’s zero itch. Side slash pockets, relaxed hood. Machine washable. By Ibex.

Typical product description

Iceman Crewneck Sweater

The Iceman crewneck sweater 100% Cashmoore® and great for casual or dressed-up occasions. Includes shark tooth detail at neck, color blocking on raglan sleeves and spandex binding at cuffs.

Hip product description (HornyToad.com)

Iceman Crew

For the guy who cares but doesn’t want to work too hard to look good, the low-key Iceman crew has just enough spice in the sleeve stripes to inspire confidence without distraction. Guaranteed chill defying, the Iceman is comfortable, made from our gift-to-mankind, soft Cashmoore®. Easy-does-it details: shark’s tooth detail at crew neck, color blocking on raglan sleeves and spandex binding at cuffs. For chillin’.

Typical Yawnworthy Product Description

Moosejaw Latika Jacket

100% polyester, 360g fleece makes this jacket much warmer than your typical fleece. Wear it on the hills or on the town. Poly/spandex overlays with knit and woven polyester lining. Machine washable. Standard fit.

Creative and funny product description

Moosejaw Latika Jacket

The Latika was recently named The World’s Best Fleece Jacket Ever by my sister. That’s actually true. Here are some reasons the Latika is so awesome and you should for sure read this before deciding which jacket to get because, forgetting all the dumb stuff I wrote below, the features on the Latika happen to be incredibly compelling. Here we go:

* Super warm thanks to plush 360g fleece and a snug hem cinch cord.
* My guess is that no human person will know how 360g compares to other jackets. So, please just know that it’s way warmer than your typical fleece.
* Luxuriously fully lined with a soft knit body and silky woven arms to make it easy to get on.
* Everyone likes the word Luxuriously. I like the words elegant, nuance and onslaught too but those words have nothing to do with the Latika.
* Two cozy hand pockets which is perfect for everyone looking for two cozy hand pockets, and who isn’t these days?
* Hidden forearm pocket perfect for stashing your stashworthy stuff.
* I don’t like what I wrote in number 5 above. Please don’t reread it.
* Ultra Standard Fit. That means you don’t have to be the most fit climber in the world to wear it. You can still tell people you’re a climber though.
* I thought I made up the phrase Ultra Standard but I just looked it up and I didn’t make it up.
* Machine washable so you can wear it for full-on mud wrestling on Monday and then Ladies Night on Tuesday.
* Made of the highest quality materials – 100% polyester fleece, poly/spandex overlays, knitted and woven polyester lining and YKK zipper.
* If you get a Latika we’re willing to guarantee that either your life or my life will be better.

How to Improve Your Product Descriptions

Check out a few of your product descriptions – do they reflect your brand promise? Are they interesting or vanilla? Would you buy this product based on the description?

If you need some inspiration, check out Title Nine, Horny Toad and Moosejaw’s online stores. They’ve got some good content. Also look at customer reviews from your site and your competitors.

Want to know the conversion impact of improving your product descriptions? Run your new and old descriptions concurrently with an A/B split test.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Optimizing Ecommerce Usability – Product Comparison Matrix
• Product Photography: How To Achieve The Ghost Mannequin Effect
• Reducing Size and Color Uncertainty in Product Photos
• Media Coverage: When You Got It Flaunt It
• How Top Retailers Show Product Images

What pages of an online retail site are most likely to respond to proactive chat (home, product page, customer service, checkout, etc.)?

Our data suggests that the greatest determinant of proactive take-rate is not particular page content, but other factors such as time on site, number of viewed pages, and repeat visitors. For example, visitors invited after 2-3 minutes on site have a 79% greater likelihood to accept than a website visitor who’s been on site for less time. Repeat visitors are 64% more likely to engage in proactive chats than first-time visitors. Canadian electronics retailer The Source only invites inside their shopping cart and they experience an over 20% acceptance rate.

We would posit that this is due, not to the shopping cart itself, but because visitors inside the cart have exhibited other on-site behavior which makes them more likely to engage.

What is “rules-based proactive chat” and what are the best practices around employing these rules?

Rules-based proactive chat is the automated triggering of chat invitations based on a pre-defined set of visitor behavior metrics. An internal software engine is constantly monitoring visitors and checking against the rules. Invitations fire when a rule has been met. Depending on what type of site you have, we have reams of best practices which customers can follow. By far, the most important practice is to treat proactive invitations like a science – to test a wide variety of implementations, make changes, and continue measuring. Here’s one tip: across our customer base, inviting visitors who’ve been on site for between 10 and 30 seconds yields a lower acceptance rate than other time ranges (inviting earlier or later both outperform this time range).

What should retailers look for in their web analytics tools to help them understand site behavior and determine rules for proactive chat?

Website analytics and proactive chat go hand in hand, so the answer to this question changes depending on whether a retailer is just getting started or if they’ve been using proactive for some time. In the former case, one of the first things to look at is average time on site. Because timing is so important for proactive, this metric gives customers a starting place. If you’ve been doing it a while, more detailed path and exit analysis can greatly influence where and when to invite. New York based retailer Gotham City Online experiences a better than average proactive take-rate of 8%, due largely to their vigilant use of website analytics in conjunction with proactive rule sets.

How can retailers integrate chat with personalization tools to show chat only to their most profitable customers? E.g. account information (purchase history) or clickstream (customer is looking at high margin, high ticket item or customer is returning and has over $X sitting in the cart)

There are many ways to accomplish this type of integration from the simplistic to the advanced. iS3, makers of STOPZilla, use URL parameters to send invitations to certain landing pages. Other customers use regular expression matching to build invitations and rules based on product type, cart amounts, and other variables.

Do you have any tips for writing persuasive chat invitation messages?

The number one tip is to split test messaging by serving two invitations for the same rule. Not all rule engines allow this but for the ones that do, this is a powerful feature. A popular best practice is to send specialized invitations to visitors who arrive on-site through pay-per-click ads shown for competitor keywords. Another tip is to include special offer messages in your invitations. Finally, our research shows that invitations which allow visitors to type in a question directly (via a built-in form) are nearly 50% more likely to be accepted. This seems to indicate that one possible persuasive technique would be interrogatory statements.

Any other comments or tips on rules-based, proactive chat you would like to share?

Many retailers are afraid of this technology and think that it will drive visitors away. Anecdotal information from our [retail] customers, our benchmarking studies and research with internet shoppers themselves refute that fear. Proactive chat drives more interactions, high levels of customer satisfaction, and more sales.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Picking Up On Customer Anxiety: When to Trigger Live Chat
• A Better Way to Measure Conversion Rate
• Bloggers Digest – 3/7/2008
• Is Analyzing Time on Site a Waste of Time?
• Targeted Selling: Carrots in the Cart

Glasses Direct wins for its use of augmented reality tool that allows you to “try on” glasses virtually, and I have to say it looks pretty good, check it out: (email and RSS subscribers, if you can’t see the video, click here).

Not only do augmented reality tools help customers make a more confident decision (and improve conversion rates), they also reduce returned merchandise by reducing the risk of ordering something that won’t look good in real life.

Rich Relevance has a similar product for apparel called “Fashionista” which it demonstrated at the Shop.org Summit in Las Vegas. There’s no doubt Fashionista is an amazing technology and many of the younger female set will find this fun. But superimposing a 2-Dimensional outfit is not the same as trying on a garment — I don’t think augmented reality for apparel will have the same impact on conversion and return rates.

Augmented reality tools are one more stop in the never-ending quest to make online shopping more like offline, and offline shopping more like online.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Optimizing Ecommerce Usability – Product Comparison Matrix
• Wishlists May Reduce Cart Abandonment
• Web 2.0 and Ecommerce Marketing – Shop.org Session Highlights
• Reducing Size and Color Uncertainty in Product Photos
• Will Wall of Frame Make Social Commerce Hall of Fame?

You want images of your products on your website? Of course you do. And with digital photography, that should be cheap and simple. Right? Wrong. Product imagery is far from black and white.

There’s a lot to consider before you shoot images for your online store. Do your homework. Learn what the best practices are and ensure that you are following them.

• Label any “call outs” on the image and target them to image details, accordingly.
• Determine the best type of photography for your customer; consider lifestyle, mannequin, model, layout.
• Use real images – not stock photography.
• Have high-resolution, high-quality images that show the details the customer wants to see.
• Ensure that the images displayed accurately depict the product being purchased; describe any differences.

Looking at the Best Practices above (from FitBase), you can immediately see a few things:

• Using images correctly involves your overall site design. You’ll need to understand where to place them, what imaging technology is needed, what browsers work with your imaging technology, download speed, what server capacity is required, etc.
• You need to understand your demographic and your marketing strategy. What images will appeal to your customer? What overall user experience are you looking for?
• It will be expensive (photographer, models, sets, lighting). It is a lot more than sending someone out with a digital camera to do it right.
• You need to pay attention to detail, and that takes time and planning.
• Product images need to accurately reflect your inventory, so your backend must be tightly-coupled with your front end. If you no longer carry that color, don’t show it.

Below are two good examples from two very different types of retailers. Both are high-quality images with a lot of detail and with options to enlarge and/or to view different angles. You can add 360-degree views, zoom, “swatching” and show scale. Of course, all this rich imaging costs you in time and money. The good news is that, if you do it right, you can significantly increase conversions.

Additionally, there is detailed product information available in these examples to give customers further clarity about their purchases. Images and copy need to work hand-in-hand to best display the product and best convey critical information to the customer. The goal is for the customer to feel confident in the purchase and not need to go into the store to physically inspect the product.

The take-away is that this is not a one-day, one-person task. This impacts and is impacted by many different areas of your online business so involve the key people from those different departments. Be sure to select the photographer and the tools that can provide what you need for your website. The copy must be clear and useful and relate to the image. You need to consider your budget, your creative design, your marketing (budget, demographics, strategy) and your inventory.

A picture can be worth a thousand words (and a thousand sales!) so focus on the time, effort, tools and planning needed to do it right.

You may also like these similar posts:

• How Top Retailers Show Product Images
• Product Photography: How To Achieve The Ghost Mannequin Effect
• $95 Landing Page Handbook FREE For Get Elastic Readers
• A Cheeky Way to Put Product Description In Context
• Martin + Osa Launches Shop-By-Outfit + Video

• 59% of consumers use social media to vent their frustrations about customer service experience, and research other companies’ customer service before dealing with them

• 74% choose companies/brands based on others’ customer-care experiences shared online

• 72% research companies’ customer care online prior to purchasing products and services at least sometimes

• 84% consider the quality of customer care at least sometimes in their decision to do business with a company

• 81% say blogs, online rating systems and discussion forums can give consumers a greater voice regarding customer care, but less than 33% say they believe that businesses take customers’ opinions seriously

• Search engines are the most valuable online tools for this research. Those rated of no value include micro-blogging sites like Twitter (39%), YouTube (27%) and social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace (22%)

Before Twitter’s surge in popularity, it was rated of little value for consumers’ online research. Only the geekiest of the geeks were exposed to or cared about Tweets related to your brand. Oh, how times have changed.

The Global Language Monitor studied the Internet and media and reports that “Twitter” is the most used word online of 2009, beating out “Obama” and “H1N1.”

And now Twitter messages are being pushed on search engine users. Google and Bing have both integrated real-time Twitter search results in their engines. Bing has its own vertical search at Bing.com/twitter, while Google boldly places Tweets at the top of results for select searches:

Google’s all about relevance and quality of results — pointing people to information they want, whether it be a web page, image, video, shopping result or 140 character sentiment. Personally, I don’t really care that @neonnn can’t wait to go to the Yesstyle store in SF — to me it’s noise. But what if the live Tweet result included “worst service” or “sucks“? It might make me think twice about visiting a retailer or making a purchase. The retailer would have a real-time social reputation problem, which granted, may only last for a short time, but nevertheless erodes the efforts to build a brand online.

What’s a quick way to “push down” recent Tweets that are negative? Simply tweet a couple things from your own account using the search keyword (if it’s not already your Twitter handle). A good way to stay on top of the current tweets about you is to create a saved search, which you can create and view when you are logged in to your Twitter account:

Another way is to search with Twitter Search and subscribe to the searches you want to follow by RSS (no Twitter account needed, but you’ll want one to respond to tweets):

If you don’t have the time to neurotically check Twitter searches every 5 minutes, you could delegate this to an online reputation manager who can work on a holistic social media strategy including reputation management work. If you’re not schooled on what reputation management is or why you need it, Darrell Long from Search Engine Journal gave a good explanation when we caught up with him at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose last summer.

RSS/email subscribers, can’t see video? Visit this post on the Get Elastic blog.

You won’t find real time Twitter results for every brand name – yet. I couldn’t find results for any of the major airlines or big names like Dell and Walmart, though “Getelastic” did return some results. But as we head into 2010, I expect real-time results to appear for more brands. Twitter is going to be even more influential on consumers next year, so it’s important to stay on top of all the little ways this microblogging service impacts your online business.

By the way, the cartoon above is from Rob Cottingham’s brilliant Noise To Signal series.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Ecommerce Microblogging: More Reasons To Use Twitter
• Reputation Management and SEO [Video + Summary]
• Using Twitter for Retail Marketing [Video + Summary]
• Retailer Reputation: Showing Off Your Street Cred
• Tapping Twitter to Understand Customers and Develop Personas

Our friends at Invesp Consulting are running their second annual list of Top 100 Marketers and are collecting votes until the end of the week. I’m nominated this year (Linda Bustos) and appreciate your vote, but if you see who else is on the list you’ll find it’s a very tough decision to pick just one!

Bonus: Invesp has pulled together the Twitter names of all the nominees, if you’re looking for folks to follow.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Bloggers Digest 12/19/08
• Big List of Ecommerce Gurus Who Twitter
• 8 Google Analytics Sins: Are You Guilty?
• Bloggers Digest 1/23/09
• Using Twitter for Retail Marketing [Video + Summary]

Registration Form Usability Tips

1. Always state benefits of signing up in bullet form

Only 14% of retailers in my study were taking advantage of this.

Williams Sonoma is a good example of doing it right:

Here are some suggested benefits:

* Faster check out
* Save multiple shipping locations
* Save multiple billing options
* Exclusive offers
* Order tracking
* View order history
* Faster customer service (reps can pull up customer info quickly)
* Save items to wishlist
* Save items in cart
* Check reward point balances
* Incentives for referring friends
* Birthday and holiday reminders
* Access across partner stores (e.g. GAP, Banana Republic, Old Navy, Piper Lime, Athleta)

2. Link to your privacy policy

Make your privacy policy link clear near the Create Account call-to-action. None of the tested sites leveraged this point-of-action assurance – but I did spot Gap using it:

3. Use asterisks

Using asterisks (*) beside fields that are required is a web convention. Customers usually don’t want to give away more information or fill in more fields than they need to, so this is a nice visual cue to assure them certain fields are optional.

Place your asterisk near the label, not at the far right side of the input field – much easier to scan.

Not this:

But this:

4. Explain password rules

When asking customers to provide an email and password, clearly state the “rules” of the password up front (minimum number of characters, required numeric value etc).

2 years ago, Neiman Marcus didn’t show password rules, but they’ve since fixed this:

In my study, 100% of retailers asked for passwords, but only 89% used a “repeat password” field. It’s a good idea to have one, since it’s easy to make a typing error when you can’t see the characters of your password as you type.

5. Avoid security questions. Instead send a confirmation email with login details.

Nobody remembers those things and according to user testing studies by Jakob Nielsen, customers really, really detest them. 20% of retailers in the study asked these questions. Be one of the 80% who don’t.

6. Allow customer to copy billing address to shipping address

Just like in the checkout, this can save the customer time.

7. Don’t pre-check email opt-ins and don’t send promotions without gaining permission

Welcome emails are fine, and encouraged. Send your welcome email within 24 hours, if possible. The longer you wait, the less relevant your welcome message.

8. Allow customers to tell you their preferences

Using profile data for targeted selling purposes can be very effective. Improving the relevance of your merchandising, email campaigns and promotions can increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and conversion rates.

Disney Shopping is still one of my favorite examples of this:

Want to see the breakdown of my 2007 registration study? Check out this post, and companion post on welcome emails.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Required Registration: Top Etailers’ Favorite Usability Mistake
• Registration Usability – 87 Registration Forms Tested
• Welcome Email Usability Tips for Online Retailers
• Mobile Commerce Usability: Forms and Checkout
• Checkout Inspiration From Top Converting Sites

With all the changes we see each year in the search landscape, it’s always good to have an up-to-date reference for your ecommerce team. The authors have included the recent updates like Bing, how search engines handle “nofollow” today, your options for canonicalization and how to optimize for mobile search, Flash content and video.

What You’ll Learn

As with most SEO books, The Art of SEO kicks off with a couple “how search engines work” chapters and finishes with some guidance on the in-house vs. outsource decision and thoughts on the future of search. But what’s in the middle is what makes this book unlike the others I’ve reviewed. There is lengthy and meaty sections on long tail keyword targeting (how to identify long tail patterns and how to work them into your copy, how to identify seasonal fluctuations in demand and conduct pre-holiday optimization). There is also very thorough explanation on how content management systems can hinder SEO efforts and how to overcome the challenges, rather than just alluding to the fact that “sometimes your CMS can be a problem.” Ditto for Flash content.

I was impressed with an entire chapter dedicated to moving content after a re-design, domain change or server change including ways to mitigate your risk before the move and troubleshooot after. This is good supplemental material for ecommerce professionals who have more of a marketing background when it comes to SEO than a technical bent.

There’s also a section on how to identify opportunities and measure SEO success using your web analytics. If you can’t name at least 5 metrics off the top of your head that directly relate to SEO, pick up a copy of this book. And testing…there’s great information on how to conduct SEO testing, which is much different than PPC or landing page testing.

SEO and Ecommerce

Early in the pages of The Art of SEO you’ll find a very juicy statistic – 11.86% of search engine queries are retail related, second only to directories/resources at 16%. That means there are more commercial searches than there are for entertainment, news/media, games, business, finance and sports. Unfortunately most SEO books (or blogs) I’ve read have not dug deep into the specific issues of optimizing ecommerce websites, especially for large, complex sites. The Art of SEO is written to appeal to all types of websites and certainly addresses online retail issues throughout the book, but it has no dedicated chapter for online retailers. Nevertheless, all the content in the book is useful for online retail owners and ecommerce marketers, and as a reference, this book should address many of the issues pertaining to an online store.

Topics I would love to see covered in an SEO book for e-tail include link building for commercial sites (it’s tougher than other types of sites, for sure), how to identify and optimize for keywords with commercial intent, how to handle discontinued product pages (do you just delete, redirect or keep on your site?), how to boost your rankings for branded and category pages, where to focus your energy when you have a site with over 100,000 products, etc. Retail specific case studies and SEO checklists would really boost the appeal for such a book. Maybe in the next edition…

The Verdict

Great reference for online retailers. Will bring you up to date on the major SEO issues on both the technical and marketing side.

More Book Reviews for Online Retailers

Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer by Bryan Eisenberg, John Quarto-vonTivadar and Lisa T. Davis
Web Analytics: An Hour A Day by Avinash Kaushik
Website Optimization by Andrew B. King
Web Design for ROI by Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus
Radically Transparent by Andy Beal

You may also like these similar posts:

• Book Review: Website Optimization by Andrew B. King
• Book Review: Always Be Testing
• Reputation Management and SEO [Video + Summary]
• Canonical URL Tag Is Worth A Shot
• Are You Making The Most of Your Ecommerce Blogs SEO Power?

Highlights from the study:

• Cyber Monday sales were 24% higher than Black Friday this year
• Cyber Monday items per order were 10% higher than Black Friday
• Consumers spent 5.8% more on Cyber Monday than Black Friday
• Compared to Cyber Monday 2008, sales were up 13.7% and average order value (AOV) up 38.2%
• Apparel and jewelry sites saw the biggest jump in AOV (26.4% and 14.3%)
• Department stores attracted 33% more new customers, though AOV dipped ~10%

If you download the report and check out the benchmarks, you’ll notice that items per order for all retail sites were 5.92 – not bad. But when you drill down to the industries listed, none are higher than Health and Beauty at 3.31. Even department stores were 3.05 on Cyber Monday.

Curious about which categories brought the average to nearly 6 items per order, I emailed Coremetrics. So here’s a Get Elastic exclusive…

• Office Supply/Electronics – 6.09 items per order
• Niche Retail – 11.57 items per order
• Pets – 16.42 items per order!

Fido’s getting spoiled this year.

While I can only speculate why pet stores averaged so high on items per order (perhaps it’s a combination of low dollar value items and high free shipping thresholds), I was surprised department stores were not moving more items, especially with the opportunity to position themselves as one-stop-shopping destinations.

Improving your items per order and AOV

How do you measure up to your industry and retail as a whole with regards to items per order?

If you’re looking for tips for increasing items per order and average order value, consider offering:

• Holiday bundles
• Free shipping offers above $X
• BillMeLater or PayPal 90 Days Same as Cash
• Gift finder tools in navigation and in cart summaries

And don’t forget to optimize your cross-sells and upsells. Here are some articles on product recommendations if you’ve missed them:

Measuring and Improving Cross Sell and Upsell
Merchandising Usability: Better Ways to Display Cross Sell and Upsell
Effective Merchandising: What Sells?
Cross-Selling Tips for Online Retailers

You may also like these similar posts:

• Holiday Marketing 2.007 – Nobody Waits for Black Friday Anymore
• Measuring and Improving Cross-Sell and Upsell
• Bloggers Digest 12/05/08
• Cross-Sells and Upsells: What is the Diff?
• Bloggers Digest 11/28/08 Black Friday Edition

• Brian Walker shares some tips on surving the holiday season on the front and back ends of your e-business.

• If you don’t have enough reasons to invest in site performance optimization, here’s one more: Google will likely factor in site speed into its algorithm soon. Makes sense – users prefer sites that are fast and Google wants to send searchers to sites they’ll like.

• Brilliant post by VKI Studios on how to identify the 404 errors that send the most traffic away and how to remedy them.

• Econsultancy offers some good suggestions on improving your delivery service in light of a recent survey that found 7% of customers were unhappy with their deliveries.

• If you haven’t been following Kevin Hillstrom’s Glieber’s Dresses saga, you’re missing out. It’s an entertaining “fictional” series of blog posts that illustrate the tough decisions retailers have to make about their multichannel marketing strategies and tactics with a hilarious cast of characters. Check out the Home Page Design and Home Page Desing Part 2 episodes.

• For all you Google Adwords advertisers, a couple important announcements: Adwords is now testing a feature called Product Listing Ads. US advertisers can now take advantage of “product extensions” that will highlight your products directly in your search ads with images, titles and prices.

• And check out Google Adwords comparison ads:

• To wrap things up, how about a couple stories about Amazon? The Google of online retail’s at it again, read about the ‘Zon’s plans to bring PayPhrase to the offline world and its trial of SMS order status alerts.

Happy Cyber Monday!

You may also like these similar posts:

• Bloggers Digest: October 2009
• Bloggers Digest Resurrected: Ecommerce Links for September 2009
• Bloggers Digest – 12/14/2007
• Get Elastic – The Year In Review
• Bloggers Digest – 12/21/07

But if your abandonment rate is 71%, it doesn’t mean you’ve lost 71% for good.

We know that there’s no one reason a cart is abandoned. Forrester Research surveyed men and women who shop online and ranked the following reasons:

1. Sticker shock (tax and shipping charges revealed in cart too high)
2. Customer not ready to purchase
3. Comparison shopping
4. Second thoughts on price
5. Just wanted to save for later

(If you’re an email subscriber with images off, please turn them on to see the survey graph).

Whether the customer is comparison shopping, “sleeping on” the decision or using you cart as a lazy man’s (or woman’s) wish list (and who can blame them when most wish lists require account registration), it pays to hold the cart contents. An abandoned cart does not mean a lost sale. A ScanAlert study found 28% of shoppers took longer than a day to convert, and 14% longer than a week. Granted, the study is 5 years old, but decision making doesn’t necessarily change because ecommerce websites have advanced. The point is many conversions happen after 2 or more days or visits. And to complicate matters, many convert in a subsequent reporting period – a November visit converts in December, but is not accounted for in the November conversion report.

Support multi-session shoppers

Make sure you’re leaving persistent cookies for Santa customers that hold contents in the cart, and you’ll want to set these cookies to hang around for at least 30 days. You’ll have a better chance of converting customers who take longer to make their decision and who expect to find their carts in tact when they return to your site.

Holding a cart’s contents across sessions – sounds like a no-brainer, right? In 2007, the E-tailing Group found that 29% of top online retailers did not use persistent shopping carts. Has that number improved in 2 short years? I did a quick test on 50 of the Internet Retailer Hot 100 and 7 did not hold my cart overnight, or 14%. Still, that’s 14% too many!

One feature that I really appreciated as a customer was seeing the quantity or dollar amount of items in the cart, clearly. When returning to the site, I want to know without digging that my cart was saved.

Track your visits to purchase and days to purchase

Google Analytics’ Avinash Kaushik explains how you can and why you should measure days to purchase and visits to purchase in your Web analytics tool. (Too bad Google Analytics’ Benchmarks feature, which if you opt in can give you benchmarks for sites in your category/industry doesn’t track those metrics though it will show you benchmarks for visits, bounce rates, page views, average time on site, page views per visit and percent new visits). Santa Avinash, benchmarked days and visits to purchase are on our Christmas 2010 Google Analytics wish list.

Measure customer behavior across time periods

Another tip is to measure your customer behavior including repeat visits and conversions across reporting periods. Longer cookie durations help you track that accurately. MineThatData’s Kevin Hillstrom shares his tips on how to measure conversion rates across time on his blog.

The takeaway

To get the best picture of what your true holiday performance is, you need to factor in customer behavior, provide the usability to support multi-session shoppers (persistent cookies) and understand what metrics to track and how to track them.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Persistent Shopping Carts vs. Perpetual Shopping Carts
• A Better Way to Measure Conversion Rate
• Have You Mystery Shopped Your Site Lately?
• Mystery Shop Your Site Before The Holidays
• Bloggers Digest 1/9/09

The most common offer you’ll find on a cart summary page is “you are $X away from free shipping” when a free shipping promotion is offered on purchases above a certain dollar amount. The message is called a “carrot,” to entice customers to add a little more to the cart to qualify for the offer.

A unique application of the “carrot” based on cart contents is used by Maghound. Maghound is a kind of “Netflix for magazines” — Maghound’s subscription service allows customers to build their own subscription bundles for a monthly price, with the ability to change subscriptions at any time during the year.

Maghound has 4 subscription tiers:

Customers begin selecting magazines and after adding a title to the cart, the cart summary box updates with the title, and a message (in the yellow box) reminding the customer how many titles are included at the current tier of membership.

Once you hit your first tier (3 titles), the message changes to “Pick 2 for $3.00 more per month!”

And so it goes after the second tier is met:

The cart summary continues to upsell as the cart contents change. The “carrot” depends on what’s already in the cart:

Once you fill tier 3, each additional magazine is offered for only $1 more (who can resist?)

Maghound is a unique example of guided selling and promotions in the shopping cart. Another industry that typically uses guided selling in the cart is telco. Customers need to be led through the complex process of bundling a handset with a contract, services and accessories. This example is from Telus Mobility.

Telco’s guided selling could incorporate targeted selling if the links in the cart summary were based on what’s in the cart (for example, the link to accessories will land on a page that shows only products compatible with the device in the cart.)

Guided selling / targeted promotion implementation in the cart summary is so custom to a business that you most likely need a custom build to make it work (both of the above are Elastic Path customers). As more retailers across industries incorporate guided selling, product bundles and subscription/loyalty programs, we’ll see more examples of this around the ‘Net in the future.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Could Personalized Cart Promotions Boost Conversion?
• Targeted Selling Webinar Recap
• Prescription for A Targeted Shopping Experience: Drugstore Dot Com
• Walmart Bundles Up for The Holidays
• 10 Ways To Promote Your Promotions

Gift finders can be interactive tools (think of a stepped-survey or wizard) or simply special categories like “Gifts for Him” or “Gifts for Her.”

Toys R Us stepped gift finder

Target.com Gift Categories

Most sites that offer these do a great job showing them off on home pages and in navigation menus, but they fail to carry the message through to the cart summary. Instead of a vanilla “Continue Shopping” link, why not link back to gifting tools? Remind your customer about your one-stop value proposition!

Test

Testing Hypothesis: Including a call-to-action for the gift finder or gift categories in the cart summary will remind customers to keep shopping for other gifts.

I’ve never seen this tactic in practice, so let’s mock up what a test could look like for Target.com:

Control: Target’s actual cart summary page

Treatment A: Continue Shopping link below item details

Treatment B: Continue Shopping links above item details

Treatment C: Link to gift finder (button) with text “Gifts for everyone on your list!”

Images too small? Quick tip: hit CTRL+ to zoom to enlarge the images a bit…

What to measure?

To determine success, don’t just measure conversion rate improvement. Track clicks on the each call-to-action, items per sale, average order value and profit per sale.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Wishlists May Reduce Cart Abandonment
• Cyber Monday 2009 Post Mortem: Items Per Order Benchmarks
• Customer Feedback Inspires Eddie Bauer Redesign
• Continue Shopping Means What?
• Tips For Converting Last Minute Shoppers

One of the questions Shawna asked was What should retailers be doing during the holiday season now that it’s too late to be working on the site or strategy? This post is a recap of what I believe retailers should be doing now to really be “in the game” rather than a benchwarmer this season.

Monitor and Optimize Performance

Even the largest, most famous online stores have gone down on Black Friday and other peak traffic days, or at least slowed down significantly. We know that page load speed affects whether a person is going to stick around on your site. It is the “first impressions” that count, because if your first page loads slow, the customer expects the rest of the experience to be painful. This affects your bounce and abandonment rates and ultimately your conversion rates.

If you’ve seen Forrester Research and Akamai’s latest report, almost half of broadband shoppers expect your pages to load in 2 seconds or less, and top retailers are setting the bar at sub-second loads.

While your site may not crash, other performance problems like slower page loads often fly under the radar because you’re still making more sales than the rest of the year. But when these performance problems happen, you have no way to quantify the sales you could have made if your site was tip-top.

You need to be aware that performance typically suffers most in the checkout. Your payment gateway may be very slow, or your tax and shipping tables live on other servers or on another website. So it’s really important that you know what to monitor. And don’t give yourself a false sense of security by testing only your home page.

Sometimes your performance takes a hit because IT and marketing haven’t been communicating. So marketing deploys a major midnight madness sale by email – and the site isn’t prepared. Did you know our next webinar is on IT-marketing relations in January? (/End shameless plug for upcoming webinar).

There are lots of services that can help you with performance monitoring like Akamai, Gomez and Keynote. Our site performance webinar recap is full of tips you can do to reduce your load.

Use Your Web Analytics

How ridiculous would it be for a football team to only bring in a coach at the end of the season, and all the coach does is drop off a video tape of all the playoff games and says: “Here you go.” That would be insane but it’s how a lot of online retailers are doing web analytics. They wait until the season is over to see what happened, rather than using that data to make better decisions while the games are on. (This is especially sad when the web analyst does nothing but send reports without any analysis or actionable insights).

Perhaps it’s because web analytics tools spit out so much data – ecommerce managers are not sure what to care about. I have 3 suggestions to get you thinking:

1. Use your site overlay reports. These can show you where people are clicking, right now, this season, every day. Which offers and calls to action are working? Which navigation categories are clicked most? Gifts? Sale? Top rated? New arrivals? Brands? These are all clues to what your customers are interested in, and this can give you ideas of what to promote more heavily on your home page.

2. Look for high bounce rate pages. Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors that abandon your site in under 5 or 10 seconds (depending on your analytics tool). Are the top bounce pages different than the rest of the year? Is there a problem you were unaware of? For example, you may discover that a paid search ad for Tickle Me Elmo uses the wrong destination URL and is sending traffic to Tickle Me Cookie Monster and it’s bleeding money ten times faster than it did during the rest of the year.

3. Segment your traffic sources. Your site conversion rate may be 4%, but look under the hood you may discover your pay-per-click campaign converts at 0.5%, your email at 20% and your affiliates at 10%. You may take that money from your PPC campaign and turn off underperforming ad groups, and instead reach out to your top performing affiliates and offer higher commissions to promote you more heavily.

4. Boost your intelligence. Google Analytics has a new feature called Intelligence (rolling out in Beta and not available to all markets yet). Intelligence has a feature that sends you an alert when there’s a sudden statistically significant increase or dropoff in traffic, conversion or any metric you’re tracking. Avinash Kaushik has a nice explanation of Google Analytics’ new intelligent features.

Keep Testing

You may be in a code freeze, but this winter’s no time for a testing freeze. Shopping behavior is different during the holidays. The shopper’s purchase role is geared to others, and there’s more at stake. Customers may be more interested in customer reviews when buying for someone of the opposite gender or a different age group. Or, they might be on tight budgets and are more persuaded by your sales promotions than at other times. You really can’t rely on headline and offer tests you did in May.

You can also take advantage of the high traffic volume which means shorter test durations.

We discussed a lot more in the 35 minute interview, please check it out if you haven’t had the chance. There are a few other ecommerce episodes you can listen to, and watch out for more ecommerce tips from Shawna and her ecommerce expert guests.

You may also like these similar posts:

• The Importance of Site Performance
• Do Hacker Safe / McAfee Secure Badges Increase Sales?
• Take the Load Off Slow Page Loads
• Displaying Search Results: Grid View or List View?
• Last Chance to Win a Copy of Always Be Testing

Key Trends in B2B eCommerce: From Fulfilling Demand To Creating Demand

If you missed it, you can catch the replay at the above link. The replay includes all Brian’s screenshots of real B2B examples (which didn’t look right when resized to fit the blog specs) so I recommend you check it out to get the full effect.

Agenda

• Growth Drivers in B2B eCommerce
• The Range of Models in B2B eCommerce
• The Evolving B2B Site

Growth in B2B eCommerce

Business to business eCommerce has been evolving quickly.

It’s harder to observe B2B trends than it is for B2C because there is no leading site you can explore – most of B2B’s features and functionality lies behind a veil. Much of the user interfaces, features, levels of integration, workflow and business processes are proprietary.

Key Growth Drivers For B2B

• Improve operational efficiency
• Customer self-service and process automation
• Improvement in order capture and processing
• Fueled by the downturn and changes in the workforce
• Build stronger direct relationships
• Make it easier to do business
• Develop the brand
• Improve availability, responsiveness, and service
• Need to develop a direct relationships with customers
• Grow the business
• Acquire new customers in their preferred channel
• Grow through increased channel touch-points
• Retain existing customers switching channels
• Prevent customers leaving with sales rep changes
• Keeping up
• Prevent competitors from capturing market share
• B2B customer expectations are driven by B2C
• Evolving online B2B models are pushing the experiences forward – B2b, B2B2C, B2B2B

Many B2B transactions still take place through fax, phone, inside and field sales reps. The B2B ecommerce site offers the chance to improve quality, timeliness of order capture and efficiency of process. It also allows for a stronger relationship, making it easier to do business 24/7. This is especially useful for a branded manufacturer selling to boutiques, where the order may be placed by the boutique owner at 10pm after the kids have gone to bed, for example. The manufacturer would not find it cost efficient to keep the call center open at all hours, but B2B customers may want to transact on their own schedule.

The website also strengthens the relationship between the company and the end customer, rather than relying on a sales reps who own accounts, and may take business with them if they ever leave the company.

B2C retailers have learned that multichannel customers increase the value of that customer to the business, and it works the same for B2B.

Often, B2B ecommerce projects are inspired by what the competition is doing. Innovation and competitive pressure is driving much of the growth in the ecommerce channel.

What’s Unique About B2B Sites?

What Makes B2B Different than B2C?

• Authentication and initiating orders
• Custom catalogs, prices and offers
• Orders and lists created over time
• Order workflow, incl. quotation, punchout
• Scheduled delivery and fulfillment options
• Off-line sales integration, marketing support
• Multiple product and bulk order entry
• Product configuration and customization
• Complex promotions unique to B2B
• Invoicing, Remittance and Reporting

Business to business eCommerce is not simple.

Authentication – Required registration – When you think about direct-to-consumer, you want to minimize the need for authentication / log in. Many B2C sites have learned they need to offer guest checkout for better conversion. Certainly there are marketing and service advantages to customer login for the B2C, but it’s markedly different in B2B where it’s far more important to show proper content, catalog, pricing etc. as part of your negotiations with them or their user type/role.

Unique promotions in B2B – Promotions can get very complex in B2B, with geography, terms offered, order minimums, book-by and ship-by dates determining who is eligible for what promotion. There may be new promotions daily to move product as quickly as possible. What is typically too complicated for a consumer to evaluate is very common in B2B.

Multiple and Bulk Ordering – For this you must enable businesses to order across all the variants of the product (example given is shoes – choose your assortment of size/width/color). You must also show availability dates in same interface, which may vary as you replenish stock. Typically you wouldn’t see this in B2C.

Quick Order Capability – This is when the client can order entire an “end cap” which is pre-merchandised and ready to go with back stock for a retail store.

Product Configuration – The ability to bundle and configure a product to order may involve custom manufacturing and other processes you wouldn’t find in B2C.

Unique Reporting Needs – A B2C site typically wouldn’t allow a customer to run reports on purchase history, but this is common in B2B. A procurement manager needs to find who in the organization has ordered what, and a retail chain with different geographic divisions wants want to keep tabs on what’s being ordered where.

Customer Self Service – Change and view orders, create inquiries, create quotes, view returns etc. are all important to B2B. Customers may still like to call but there’s a benefit to the customer and organization to offer these capabilities online (convenience, cost savings).

What Is Similar Between B2B and B2C?

• Online Merchandising
• Search
• Categorization
• Cross-Sells / Up-Sells
• Online Marketing
• Segmentation / Targeting
• Recency / Frequency
• Similar management challenges
• Heavy product content burden
• Integrating with large enterprise systems
• Customer Self Service

Product content (images, information, user guides, reviews, videos) is still important, and even more important than it is on B2C sites when the buyer requires technical specs, how the product should be used and education on specific details of the product.

Similarly, site search is important, especially for industry terms that are frequently misspelled (Latin or brand names, think of the pharmaceutical industry). Autosuggestion is helpful.

Cross-sell/upsell, bundling, product configurators, comparison tools etc. are also very important in B2B.

The Range of Models in B2B Ecommerce

A Range of Models At times supported through a single solution

B2C – .com site
B2B – large wholesale account site -> dealer
B2B2b – dealer -> distributor portal -> small parts dealer
B2b2C – product extranet -> distributor portal -> dealer B2C shop -> consumer
B2E – sales support intranet -> support materials
B2C / B2B – call center
B2B2C – B2B2C platform -> .com retailer site

Example: Viking sells professional kitchen products and has a consumer site, distributor extranet, services extranet and culinary extranet.

An Example of B2B2C or “White-Labeling”

Michelin tires runs the Costco tire store, servicing the tire needs online for the Costco customer, even down to the servicing inside the shop. Especially when products are expensive to stock, it may make sense to seek this kind of support from the manufacturer.

The Evolving B2B Site

The Evolving B2B Site

• Extreme Personalization
• May deliver versions based on role, location, contract, buying history
• Customized catalogs, assortments or product exclusivity to different customers or regions
• Personalized alerts and reminders of promos, orders, quotes, etc.
• Searchandising, including guided navigation
• Improved ordering processes
• Robust self-service
• Multichannel integration
• Mobile UI, apps
• Content and offer targeting
• Based on role, segment, ordering history
• Integrated with marketing tools
• Merchandised landing pages
• Promotions and special pricing
• Visualization tools / Product configuration
• Managing & leveraging content across channels
• SEO

Brian showed screenshot examples of:

• Customized content
• Rich product content
• Search results refinement
• Templated order forms
• PO history & account details
• Quick order based on past purchases
• Product configuration
• Automated product recommendations
• Browser search bar for quick navigation
• Custom catalog development
• Product care and use instructions

Key Take-Aways

• Design your site for the customer, who is that end user who needs the product, the information, to self-service?
• Don’t design for the sales manager’s goals and expose your “corporate underpants.”
• Employ familiar UI principles from online retail.
• Focus on marketing and merchandising tactics like cross-sell/upsell, product comparison etc.
• Don’t let internal business processes, systems, and sacred cows drive the online experience.

Contact Brian

Brian K. Walker
bwalker @ forrester.com
twitter.com/bkwalker

Next Webinar

Bridging the technology and marketing divide for ecommerce success
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
9am PST / 12pm EST

Ecommerce has always created its share of internal strains within organizations. The tension between online vs. offline operations and between brand vs. direct marketing are two common examples. Even more persistent is the tension between marketers and technologists, with both groups accusing each other of an inability to “get it” and acting as an obstacle to an efficiently running business.

Learn about how bridging the technology vs. marketing divide has gotten easier as the technology landscape has changed—while such changes are helpful, they are not sufficient to completely close the gap. In this one hour webinar, Rob Schmults, CMO of Smart Destinations, and Matt Higgins, CTO of Smart Destinations, will share views on the way changes in enabling technology combined with better organizational collaboration can make your ecommerce business faster, better, and cheaper.

Webinar Takeaways:

· How web services, WYSIWUG, and GUI’s offer the allure of cutting IT out of the picture entirely
· Why marketers have to understand the importance of articulating solid requirements—and why change orders are beautiful things
· Why technologists cannot be passive order takers despite the safety such a pose offers—and how they can help marketers focus on what matters
· These lessons are applicable to SMB or enterprises with internal or external resources

Sign up today!

You may also like these similar posts:

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• A/B Test Case Study: Single Page vs. Multi-Step Checkout
• Bloggers Digest – 2/22/08

But one concern I always have when reviewing websites that use tabbed boxes is – do they really get noticed by customers? Or are they too subtle?

I recently worked with an online retailer that had very poor attachment rates for cross-sells and upsells. The culprit? Product recommendations were hidden behind a tab that nobody clicked.

Here are some examples of tabbed boxes on e-stores:

Home page / navigation

Category page

Product information

Subtle text link tabs can also be overlooked easily:

Sometimes “tabs” don’t even look like tabs (Eddie Bauer uses orange boxes):

These examples are shown in isolation – so it’s easy to notice the tabs. But when you place these elements on a web page that competes with other design elements, the tabs can “hide.”

Did you notice…?

Did you notice the “video” tab as your eye scanned this page?

Checkout / sign in

How many returning customers suffering from “banner blindness” start the sign up process all over again because the returning customer option is “hiding”?

If your site uses tabbed boxes – make sure you know that the benefits of the box outweighs the risks that content and calls to action may be missed. Make sure you’re testing them against expanded versions of your content, tracking clicks on tabs or conducting user tests where you observe customer interactions.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Should You Use Large Images on Category Pages?
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Can you give Get Elastic readers some background on ecommerce and online marketing for pharmaceutical companies?

In many people’s view, pharma e-marketing and ecommerce are closely linked with a famous “blue pill.” I haven’t found anyone with an email address who hasn’t received spam urging them to buy it in cheap, discrete and generic form.

This has nothing to do with pharma marketing at all. The type of customer acquisition is closer to the one used by the sex industry, which indicates very low “conversion rate” and requires high volume advertising. I am not even going to discuss it here and let us agree that it is absolutely irrelevant to our main topic.

The pharmaceutical industry is amongst the most strictly controlled and regulated industries in the world. For each e-marketing specialist it requires dozens of specialist lawyers and regulatory professionals to check every word or statement made online or offline.

Therefore we would subdivide the e-marketing strategies into following categories:

1. Non-prescription drugs (so called “supermarket pharmacy”) sold online to a consumer. It is a very limited field and includes products like antacids, Aspirin, plasters, etc. Selling this online is pretty hard work, as if someone has a headache he / she will not wait even a day for the delivery but rather pop-in to the local grocery store or pharmacy to get it.

2. Prescription drugs. These can not be sold online to the members of public. And all professionals agree with this. First of all, prescription drugs are called prescription because a medical professional should asses the condition in full, making the decision for the patient.

There is a market that takes advantage of different sets of prescription or non-prescription drug regulations worldwide and different prescribing conditions (think your cheap Canadian pharmacy site). However, this is not considered real pharma e-marketing as it has very limited set on offer — mostly ED drugs, antidepressants, painkillers and sometimes antibiotics.

3. B2B wholesale. Now here when the real ecommerce starts. Not many pharma companies are getting involved in B2B ecommerce, even at this stage, and prefer to work through distributors. Marketing materials are usually provided by the manufacturer with distributors pushing them forward.

4. Governmental level pharma e.g. vaccines, diabetes drugs (insulin), anti-hypertension, etc. Not much e-marketing here, most contracts are long time and established.

5. API market. API (active pharmaceutical ingredients) is actually a base for a drug which is then being post-processed and made into a final product. (Like in an omeprazole tablet weighing 1 gram, only 20 mg is omeprazole API itself. The rest is a “ballast.”) This is the most thriving and dynamic section of pharma Market where the e-marketing development is an absolute must. Strictly B2B.

6. R&D market. Almost the same as the API market, but less volumes involved and deals mostly with new developments.

Can/will pharma sites sell direct to consumer? What kind of “channel conflict” exists?

Non-prescription drugs, yes, no problem. But, as I said, if someone has a headache it’s much easier to find a 24/7 shop and not wait for a delivery.

Prescription drugs – NO. There is a possible exception but it’s not easy to implement. General Practitioners / Family Doctors could be given a “secure key” (like file stored on their computer or other sort of authentication) so they could “authorize” a purchase by a patient. But it still involves extra waiting time, which, sometimes is too precious.

There is no “channel conflict” for legal sites as they mostly get stock using the same distributors. For the “gray area” sites it could be a patent / distributor / exclusivity conflict.

What are the major barriers for pharma in entering ecommerce [both B2B and B2C]? (legal, shipping, security, sales force restrictions etc).

For B2C – legal, non-efficiency (e.g. waiting time).
For B2B – lack of specialists, lack of understanding of e-marketing benefits, general e-marketing strategies not working in pharma, etc.

How do pharmaceutical companies take orders from mom and pop drugstores all the way to the Walmarts and Walgreens’ of the world?

Big stores and chains are not very active in this area and prefer to work through the existing channels on all products. Smaller stores in order to compete are turning to the ‘Net. Some might use classic ecommerce system cart-order-payment-delivery, others looking for supplier and then making direct contact.

Is there a trend for pharma to push B2B orders online? What drives this trend?

There is no other choice. New “generic” manufacturers are the main force behind this trend. Generic companies are actually the most interested parties in the whole pharma e-marketing and ecommerce situation. Without great visibility provided by the Internet they don’t have a chance to push products forward. Lack of pharma e-marketing and ecommerce professionals is probably one of the most serious obstacles in this situation.

What particular ecommerce platform features are necessary for B2B sales? (Price lists, multiple ship-to addresses, etc)

For B2B it should be payment flexibility. B2B is not based on credit card payment and invoicing is preferred. Therefore a dedicated account manager is often the only option. Orders can be placed online (even paid for, if preferred). But the closest thing in this situation is the B2B computer market, where there is always an option to get a contract, shipping schedule, after sale support, etc.

For the API market, it doesn’t work. API is closer to the chemical market where pricing is not usually fixed and the entire system works through the usual enquiry-order-invoice scenario. This requires much effort from sales and technical people to finalize the deal.

What are the best tools for account management?

The best I have ever seen was in-house coded by the IT team. But usually most large pharma companies I worked with use SAP.

What are the differences in online marketing/web design/conversion optimization between pharma and retail/other ecommerce industries?

Still for B2C pharma there is no much difference. It is same type of consumer market with same shopping cart, etc.

B2B – very different. The main difference is how the information is presented and what customer is looking for. In the wholesale situation it is rather straightforward but comes API and things are very much different (words like MSDS, COA, Specs come to mind).

What are the biggest mistakes you have seen, or any other advice would you have for pharma sites who do ecommerce?

The biggest mistake was and is – using “generic” web marketers to handle such a highly specialised area as pharma e-marketing and ecommerce. I have written number of articles on this issue, some of them presented on my website http://www.expertconsultant.co.uk. The closest analogy is: like with doctors – there is no universal professional. If one has a heart problem then his choice should be a cardiologist, not a pulmonologist. E-marketing and eCommerce campaigns in pharma should be driven by a professional that understand both the Marketing and pharma parts, not a general eCommerce only.

Big thanks to Mkrtich for sharing his wisdom. Please check out his website http://www.expertconsultant.co.uk for more information on this topic. You may also be interested in Rohit Bhargava’s series on social media for the pharmaceutical industry at the Ogilvy PR blog.

Don’t forget, we’ve got a B2B webinar with Brian Walker from Forrester Research next week Key Trends in B2B Ecommerce – all attendees will receive a complimentary copy of Brian’s latest report “Market Overview: B2B eCommerce Platforms, A Guide To Selecting Your B2B eCommerce Solution” – a $1749 value.

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• Key Trends in B2B Ecommerce: Complimentary Forrester Research Valued at $1749
• Key Trends in B2B: Webinar Recap
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• How Overstock Kept TCO Low For New Site Launch

So far there have been 3 episodes, SEO for ecommerce, Improving Shopping Experience & Increasing Sales and Increasing Conversion for the Holidays. On Monday I’ll be talking about the holiday shopping season. Please save the date!

Can’t make it? Subscribe to eCom Experts and catch it on-demand.

You may also like these similar posts:

• 3 Quick And Dirty Holiday Hints for Procrastinating Etailers
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• Holiday Shipping Cutoff Usability

Spool explores the hidden secrets that every ecommerce professional should pay attention to about what makes Amazon so successful:

• The simple Yes/No question that increased revenues by more than $1 billion
• The elegant subtlety of Amazon’s security system
• Why Amazon’s business model is more than meets the eye (and why designers need to care)
• The wins and losses that Amazon has had with social media functionality

Though Jared agrees “doing it like Amazon” is often not a smart approach, he does leave us with ways we can learn from Amazon’s successes – and failures.

To start the slide show and hear the audio, make sure you press the little triangle at the bottom, not the big one on the right side of the center of the deck. You can enlarge the presentation to full-screen by clicking the icon at the bottom right. (Email subscribers, click here to see what I’m talking about).

You may also like these similar posts:

• Checkout Inspiration From Top Converting Sites
• Cross-Website Personalization: Will It Happen?
• Amazon.ca Fails at Basic Usability – Amazon.com Passes
• Amazon Checkout: Do You Really Wanna Get In Bed With Amazon?
• Amazon Product Ads: Good Idea? Bad Idea?

Join us November 17th to learn about emerging trends in B2B ecommerce. In this one hour webinar, Brian Walker, senior analyst with Forrester Research will present on the key trends within B2B ecommerce for you to use in evolving your own B2B online experience.

Webinar Takeaways:

• What is behind the growth in B2B ecommerce today?
• How is B2B ecommerce being influenced by B2C ecommerce experiences and features?
• How do different business models manifest in B2B ecommerce sites?

By attending, you will also receive a complimentary copy of Brian’s latest report, “Market Overview: B2B eCommerce Platforms, A Guide To Selecting Your B2B eCommerce Solution,” valued at $1749. (You may recall I had promised a free report with our last webinar, and apologize I had it confused with this one. I have confirmed that all registrants who attend the live session on Tuesday, November 17 will receive a copy of this research).

Title: Key Trends in B2B Ecommerce
Date: Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Time: 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PST

After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

You may also like these similar posts:

• B2B Ecommerce and the Pharmaceutical Industry
• Elastic Path Mentioned in Forrester Wave
• November Webinar Correction and Update
• Key Trends in B2B: Webinar Recap
• The Importance of Site Performance

The key is “perceived” page load.

Is there a way to entertain customers while a page or object loads? How about give them something to read?

Like the musack you hear while on hold with your bank or cable company, a bit of text can distract a customer and make the wait seem less, well, long. Here’s what I spotted online retailers doing…

Tell customers what you’re loading

Diapers.com tells customers an interactive display is loading. “Interactive display” sounds intriguing…perhaps intriguing enough to motivate some to be a bit more patient.

Similarly, Anthropologie explains it’s loading a global checkout. While one might wonder why that should take longer than 2 seconds, at least there’s a promise of something happening rather than a blank page.

Count down your objects

Only the geeky will understand what objects are, but Dell.ca satisfies the “are we there yet?” question as it counts down the objects, 3-2-1.

Make a promise

Pop-ups that show enlarged images and multiple views are used by many top online retailers, but they can take their sweet time to load. DSW promises the load lag is “well worth the wait.”

Make them laugh

“Nothing’s worse than waiting for a page to load. Except getting cheated on, of course” says Moosejaw Mountaineering.

With the exception of DSW and Moosejaw, I don’t think the above retailers’ intentions were to entertain, persuade, inform or simply distract visitors while the page loads. But there is opportunity to use value propositions, pieces of “free knowledge” or humorous content in your loading pages/features to reduce the “perceived” page load time. This idea can be explored with user testing.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Convert First Time Visitors With Coupons
• The Importance of Site Performance
• Is Analyzing Time on Site a Waste of Time?
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Today’s shoppers have high expectations when it comes to buying online. Websites which take too long to load can result in negative brand perception, diminished goodwill and a significant loss in overall sales. In our recent webinar Every Second Counts: How Website Performance Impacts Shopper Behavior, we explored the findings of a new study by Forrester Research on behalf of Akamai which has identified two seconds as the new threshold for acceptable web page response times.

The Impact Of Poor Performing Sites

Slow Rendering Websites Lead To Lost Online Sales

• 79% of dissatisfied shoppers are less likely to buy from an online site again
• This is up 17% from those consumers surveyed in 2006
• 75% would be less likely to return to the website again
• In 2006, only 64% stated they would not return

Consumers Who Make Purchases Are Particularly Concerned About Performance

Those consumers who actually purchase at online stores are more likely to cite site performance as the reason they are unsatisfied with an online experience. Next to pricing and shipping issues, poor site performance is a major cause of dissatisfaction.

A Majority of Consumers Abandon Intended Purchases in the Checkout Process – Directly Impacting Sales

More respondents are willing to, and do, abandon purchases than ever before. The percentage of consumers who intend to make a purchase but leave after the checkout process has begun is up 18% from 2006.

Forrester asked “Thinking of the last time you visited an online store where you intended to buy a product but did not finish the online purchase, at what point did you leave the site?”

• 35% of shoppers abandoned before beginning the checkout
• 65% of shoppers abandoned after initiating the checkout

“The Ripples”

The Ripples of a Bad Experience Go Beyond Web Sales

• Customer loyalty is tied closely to how quickly a website loads (especially true for high-spending shoppers)
• Overall, 52% of online shoppers stated that quick page loading is important to their site loyalty
• 61% of online shoppers who spend more than $1,500 online per year insist on pages loading quickly

The Overall Brand or Image of the Company Will Also Suffer

When faced with a dissatisfying shopping experience:

• 79% are less likely to buy again
• 75% would be less likely to visit the website again
• 64% would purchase from another online store
• 46% of online shoppers are more likely to develop a negative perception of the company
• 44% would actively tell their friends and family about the bad experience

Site performance also impacts cross-channel shopping:

• 70% of consumers research products online they buy offline
• 85% of consumers are buying across channels
• After a poor site experience, 27% are less likely to buy from that retailer off-line

A Poor Performing Site Opens the Doors for Competitors

Not only does an under-performing site lead to customer frustration, but 64% of shoppers state they will simply purchase from another online store. This number is up 16% from the 2006 study.

The Result

Consumer Expectations for Site Performance are Changing

• 47% of consumers expect a Web page to load in 2 seconds or less (perceived load time)
• 40% would abandon if it takes more than 3 seconds

This represents a significant evolution in consumer expectation from the 2006 study, which showed the majority of customer expectations at less than four seconds. A major factor is the increase in broadband access. 3 years ago, only 54% of consumers had broadband access at home. Today it’s 91%, and nearly half have it at work or school.

Conclusions From Forrester / Akamai Study

• Perceived page load times should be no more than two seconds
• Companies direct online sales suffer when not meeting those expectations
• Companies will suffer in-directly across all channels and in the consumers’ perceptions of their brand
• Much of what we found in this survey is in the control of the online retail or travel company directly, including some which are quick wins

Shoppers Demand Even Faster Sites

We know performance is a problem. With half of consumers expecting a page to load in less than 2 seconds, many online retailers are setting the bar even higher at sub-one second response time.

Dynamically Generated Content on the Rise

At the same time as demand for faster page load time increases, so is the demand for more engaging functionality and rich content like RIA’s (rich Internet applications) such as price sliders or search and category results that re-sort on the fly. This creates a challenge for online companies. Adding content increases page weight and impacts response time. Web page size has more than tripled in the last 5 years.

Performance Issues Multiply with Distance

Often people try to fix performance issues by trying to “thin out” their site (decrease page weight). But many problems lie outside of your data center.

The farther visitors are from data center where the site is hosted, the more response times degrade. Your performance may be 2 seconds at your data center in Atlanta, but 3 seconds on the opposite coast, and even longer for international visitors.

Traffic spikes can also slow down your site (holidays, special promotion campaigns etc). Response times can spike as high as 50 seconds during the holiday season.

How Can You Ensure a Fast and Consistent Experience?

Consumers love rich images, dynamic content and personalized information, but the Web is only “fun” when it’s fast. Image caching has been around for a while, but today’s Web 2.0 features need acceleration technologies like the ability to pre-fetch uncacheable content to quickly deliver dynamic components of your site closer to where your consumer is located (intelligent caching). Route optimization finds the best performing route, and connection optimization aims to take the shorter trip less times.

The 80/20 Rule Applied to Page Loads

When optimizing a site for speed, there is an 80/20 rule applied to page loads — only 20% of the time will be spent loading HTML. So, even if you have a super fast dual quad-core, 32GB of RAM application server serving the dynamic HTML content in 200ms, it doesn’t matter, if the rest of your UI takes 5 seconds to download and render on the users browser.

In this example, the redirect and HTML took up 300ms, and the rest of the site took 3 seconds to load:

Designing Web Pages with Performance In Mind

Minimize, Minimize, Minimize! We want to minimize connections and minimize data transfer (file size). We can do this by reducing object counts, compressing images and text, and caching properly.

Minimize HTTP Requests

Reducing connections as much as possible has shown the most performance improvement with the least changes. Combine your JS and CSS files and keep the image count to a minimum. If you need to load a lot of images for style, use a CSS image sprite. Image sprites require a bit extra effort in your style sheets but you can convert 10 images into 1 and take down the number of connections and potentially reduce file size.

Use HTTPS/SSL Only Where Necessary

Creating and tearing down HTTP connections is expensive, and adding SSL (secure sockets layer) to the mix makes it even worse due to the necessary handshaking and encryption/decryption. Restrict SSL to data sensitive areas of your site such as the checkout only.

“Minify” Your JavaScript and Style Sheets

Compilers and browsers don’t care about nicely spaced, human-readable JavaScript and style sheets as long as proper syntax is used. Javascript doesn’t need extra spaces and a lot of the times doesn’t need semi-colons – these can be removed to create smaller JS/CSS files, which will reduce transfer time. Use a tool to compress JS/CSS for production pages — there are a number of simple, open source tools available.

Put JavaScript Includes at the Bottom

The HTTP 1.1 specification claims a “single-user client SHOULD NOT maintain more than 2 connections with any server at one time.” This means you can “download in parallel” (2 connections at once) but, when a browser hits a JavaScript include, it will not begin any other downloads until this script is transferred. If you have scripts at the start of your HTML, you will severely limit the browsers ability to retrieve in parallel.

If the JS is not needed for immediate use, put the include tags at the bottom. Scripts at the end of the HTML allow maximized concurrent downloads and the page to render while the JavaScript finishes. (Of course some JavaScript cannot go at the bottom).

Use Cache Control Headers

Properly caching a page at the browser level can significantly reduce load times. It also helps with subsequent page load times if content is shared (same JS/CSS files). If there is no cache control header within a HTTP request response, the browser does not know how long it can cache the object and therefore won’t cache it at all. It’s best to set static content to “never expires” and dynamic content with appropriate expiration. Ensure your JS and CSS files are externalized for caching.

Other Thoughts on Design Best Practices

HTTP 302 redirects are slow – avoid them if possible.

Use multiple static content servers. Although HTTP 1.1 prevents more than 2 connections at a time from one server, if the servers have different domain names the browser will make addition parallel connections to those servers and download more content concurrently. One good example of this is with Google Maps Street View. There is a lot of heavy image content, so they use multiple image servers and download a lot of data in parallel making the page load time quick.

Use Gzip compression for page responses. Gzip compresses the HTML response at the server and sends it back to the browser, which will then do the decompression. There is more CPU overhead but quicker transfers is typically a better trade-off.

Testing Your HTML

Manual Testing

The problem with manual testing is it’s usually done with clients and servers on the same 1GB per second or hundred megabit network (or sub-network), so you’re not really seeing the impact on page size or HTTP requests. Tools like YSlow and Firebug will show you relative load time comparisons. These Firefox plugins are excellent way to make sure your request response headers are properly setting browser caching and the browser is actually caching the objects.

The Throttle Control Linux tool simulates an Internet connection with varying throughputs and latency levels. Another way to test manually is to route your connection through the Internet to some degree, if possible, or use remote data centers. Even VPNs add a good degree of latency and can be used for testing.

Automated Testing

Testing of HTML efficiency usually doesn’t come up during the load/performance test cycle. Load generators are typically on the sub-network and so page size and UI caching are not of major concern. Automated testing should be done at some point with only HTML and then with all objects being loaded for comparison. Testing can also be done through a Firewall/WAN simulation or with the Throttle Control tool to understand how latency and limited bandwidth affects you.

Load and performance testing typically focuses in on the application itself and is used to work out any slow performing components of the application. For example, if we’re running a Java web application, we’re going to do all the usual JVM tuning so that our application runs quickly and smoothly. We usually don’t focus on the UI very much. Furthermore, load generators are typically on the same sub-network so the tests won’t be affected by latency or bandwidth limitations. This means that large page sizes or invalid caching are not going to be noticed to a large degree.

Questions and Answers

How do companies typically engage with Akamai?

There are different solutions for different sized businesses. It’s a managed service with monthly billing which may be priced based on various metrics such as secure transactions or account page views.

What about minifying HTML?

Minifying JS/CSS is easy, you only do it once. But for HTML, we recommend the Gzip method with your Apache server in front of your application server. HTML will be Gzipped at a smaller size than with regular HTML.

Do you have any data on the impact of conversion rates between 2 seconds and 4 seconds?

In this survey it was apples to apples with the 2006 survey – we only measured how long before consumers would abandon a site. Only customers were surveyed, not retailers.

Where do you typically see designing for page load expertise in the organization? Where should this expertise lie?

It needs to be something that’s considered across all the business areas. We often see problems when the marketing people are not talking to the IT people (especially with outsourcing and platform-as-a-service). We always recommend that the great ideas be delivered in a way that creates a positive customer (site) experience, and design/feature performance should be brought to the table every time these discussions are happening.

What about flaky wifi connections, are people more tolerant than when they are “wired”?

The research did not address connection types specifically in the survey.

Next Webinar

Key Trends in B2B Ecommerce

Join Forrester Research Senior Analyst Brian Walker on November 17th to learn about emerging trends in B2B ecommerce. In this one hour webinar, we will discuss the key trends within B2B ecommerce for you to use in evolving your own B2B online experience.

Presented by Forrester Research Senior Analyst Brian Walker

Date: Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Time: 9am Pacific/ 12pm Eastern
Register at www.elasticpath.com/b2b

Every attendee of the live webinar will receive a copy of the Forrester Report prepared by Brian Walker valued at $1749.

You may also like these similar posts:

• The Importance of Site Performance
• Take the Load Off Slow Page Loads
• Is Analyzing Time on Site a Waste of Time?
• Holiday Season: Are You In the Game or on The Bench?
• Conversion Optimization: When & Where to Address Customer Anxiety

We know from eye-tracking and search engine behavior studies that, when presented with a list of search results, people often click the first result – paying attention to the top 3 or so. Rarely do folks click to the next page (past the 10th result).

Online stores may present search results in list view or grid view (grid view is more common on category result pages). Some e-stores offer both views for visitors to toggle between (like Home Depot, Walmart and QVC).

But which layout performs the best? Which view should you show by default?

There are many questions testing can answer:

Which view should you show by default?
Which view encourages more product exploration?
Which brings more customer satisfaction (is more “usable”?)
Which leads to the customer selecting an appropriate product and ultimately making a purchase?
Are customers conditioned by search engine results to click the top result most often?
Are they more likely to consider all the available products when presented in list view?

Measuring Success of Your Search Page Test

Testing alone does you no good unless you’re clear on what you deem success. Search results are not responsible for closing the sale – they are a step in the selling process. To understand which view “wins,” I suggest you measure the following:

1. Search page abandonment

Understand your “bounce” rates (leaving page in under 5-10 seconds, depending on your analytics configuration) and exit rates (leaving the page, or leaving your site altogether) for list view vs. grid view.

2. Search result click through by position at each view

SLI Systems tested list view against grid view for one of their customers and found that clicks were more evenly distributed among result positions in grid view than list view:

You may use this information to “searchandise” and present your highest profit margin matches first for certain terms, knowing that the customer is most likely to click on the first 1-3 results. You should also pay attention to…

3. Conversion rates

If folks only consider the first few results in list view – are these results relevant enough to encourage purchase? Or does grid view outperform?

4. Revenue per sale and contribution margin per sale

Which view ultimately moves your highest priced and highest margin products?

This is not just something you can test quantitatively (with a Google Website Optimizer or Omniture Test and Target tool), but qualitatively with real users.

Testing Creativity

Moosejaw has another approach to displaying category and search results: the ability to toggle between regular view and “Custy Reviews View”:

Would showing Custy Reviews View by default lead to higher click through to products? Testing can reveal whether folks even notice they have the ability to switch, and whether customer review snippets are more persuasive than the default details.

Given customers’ preference for social content, this may be a very effective tactic for many retailers. Dare to test it out?

You may also like these similar posts:

• Why You Should Turn On Google Analytics Site Search Today
• You Cant Fix What You Dont Think Is Broken
• Trendspotting: Rich Autocomplete in Site Search
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• Shipping Policy Usability – Results Not Found!

In a 2006 study on site abandonment (.pdf) conducted by Jupiter Research on behalf of Akamai, 28% of online shoppers claimed they would not wait longer than 4 seconds for a page to load before leaving a site. This equated to 33% of broadband customers and 19% of dialup. Though broadband customers had higher expectations for page load speed, even 45% of dialup users were unwilling to wait more than 6 seconds for a page to load.

Online power shoppers who spend more than $1500 online are more likely to demand fast loading pages (55% vs. 40% of shoppers who spend under $1500 per year).

Speed’s Impact on Loyalty – Online and Offline

Faster sites attract more repeat visitors and customers. 64% of dissatisfied online shoppers said they were less likely to visit a slow retailer again, and 62% were less likely to purchase from the site again. 48% would purchase from a competitor, 28% would hold a negative perception of the company, 27% would tell a friend about the bad experience and 16% reported they would be less likely to visit a retailer’s offline store after a bad online experience.

For all these reasons, Jupiter and Akamai concluded you should shoot for a 4 second or less page load.

It’s 2009 – What’s Changed?

Akamai teamed up with Forrester Research earlier this year for a follow up study and found online shoppers have even higher expectation for web performance — and poor performance has an even bigger impact on customer loyalty. For example, nearly half of consumers do not want to wait longer than 2 seconds for a page to load.

How Do Online Retailers Currently Stack Up?

In 2008, Internet Retailer conducted a retailer survey and found:

• 68% of retailers’ home pages load in under 3 seconds
• 43% load in less than 2 seconds
• 81.8% load in 30 seconds or less for dialup users, with 50.6% under 15 seconds
• 43.3% say the use of video, animation and AJAX has hurt site performance

Do Online Retailers Monitor Performance?

• 77.3% monitor site responsiveness
• 9.1% engage in load balancing testing and content validity
• 4.5% measure application behavior

What Do Online Retailers Measure?

• 73% measure site performance’s impact in terms of lost revenue
• 59% measure lost traffic
• 43% measure the increase in call center and email traffic
• 27% measure the increase in negative customer reviews
• 21% measure the impact on customer satisfaction ratings
• 40% benchmark their performance against competitors

What Do Retailers Test?

• 37% test home and product pages consistently using real-time reporting tools (26% test daily, 19% test weekly or monthly)
• 84% test various screen resolutions
• 83% test across different browsers and operating systems
• 16% test performance from different geographic locations or different times of day
• 16% record and replay specific user transactions
• 13% test performance of mobile applications
• 53% conduct testing before the holiday season

The Internet Retailer article also suggest retailers retailers should test the performance of new page treatments (including A/B testing) and custom applications they add to their ecommerce platform or web hosting service before full roll out. It reminds us that the features and functions may work fine in the environment in which they were built (design and development firms having top of the line systems), but differently when installed on the retailer’s platform.

How Do You Measure Up and How Can You Improve?

Check out our latest webinar that shares the results of this research along with tips on how to improve performance. You can watch the on-demand replay here.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Every Second Counts: How Website Performance Impacts Shopper Behavior
• Take the Load Off Slow Page Loads
• Holiday Season: Are You In the Game or on The Bench?
• November Webinar Correction and Update
• Product Selection and Discovery: What You Can Learn From the Telco Industry

The second correction is regarding the free copy of the research, which has not been confirmed. So make it up to you I’m going to post one heckuva detailed webinar recap on GetElastic.com, posted on Friday, November 6.

Thanks!

Linda

You may also like these similar posts:

• Key Trends in B2B Ecommerce: Complimentary Forrester Research Valued at $1749
• Reminder – Affiliate Marketing for Online Retailers Webinar Next Week
• Bloggers Digest 11/07/08
• The Best of Get Elastic: 2008
• Heading to the Shop.org Merchandising Workshop?

Miss this month’s webinars? Catch the on-demand replays:

Ecommerce best practices for the Telco industry
Best Ecommerce Tests — Case Studies & Practical Advice to Raise Conversions Before the Holidays

If you’ve just discovered Get Elastic in the last year, check out our Halloween fun posts the Ghoulgle (see the comments for funny captions) and Online Retailers Dressed Up For the Holidays.

• Khalid Saleh shares 6 deadly mistakes of web page testing and tuning over at Search Engine Land.

• Anna Yeaman shares an example of a retailer who achieved a 26% lift in email click through rate using animated GIFs.

• Google’s been busy this month with updates to Google Analytics features, covered by Marketing Pilgrim, VKI Studios and Marketing Experiments.

• WADN (What’s Amazon Doing Now?): Amazon’s New PayPhrase Has Definite Shakeup Potential. Could this be the future of ecommerce checkouts?

• In Do you trust your financial statements? Reconciliation tools for Online Retailers, Maxim Mironov shares how having a reconciliation system helps you make better pricing and marketing decisions.

• If you’ve got the resources, rolling your own affiliate program can have major SEO benefits.

• Will social networking be the biggest retail IT nightmare of 2010? One Gartner analyst thinks so.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Bloggers Digest November 2009
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• Bloggers Digest – 12/14/2007