Today’s the last post of the year and I thought it would be fitting to dig up an interesting item from each of December’s 12 months - from the serious to not-so-serious. If you’re a fairly recent subscriber, you may have missed these posts. If you’re a new visitor - welcome! And thanks for stopping by Get Elastic, we hope it’s your first of many.

Happy New Year and all the best for 2008 from all of us at Elastic Path Software.

January

• We released the Blogging for Retailers white paper. If you missed it, it’s a free download.

February

• At Etail West, Dave O and Jason Billingsley caught up with a real rocket scientist — Chris Anderson of WIRED Magazine and “The Long Tail” fame to chat about…you guessed it, the long tail of search for online retailers. (Podcast)

March

• Our resident globetrotter Jason Billingsley draws some interestingly hilarious similarities between airport usability and ecommerce usability, inlcuding: Airport: the check-in process takes way too many steps and Ecommerce: the check-out process takes way too many steps.

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This will be the last Bloggers Digest of 2007, (although it feels like we just got started). There’s no shortage of “Top [Insert Topic Here] Blog Posts of 2007″ in the blogosphere - and even some roundups of the Top Top Lists! So this week I’m posting my favorite 2007-roundups (wearing my ecommerce marketer hat of course!) and a couple other interesting posts to chew on for the weekend.

My Favorite Top Post Roundups of 2007:

• TwistImage called on some big names to contribute their favorite short videos of the year. Entertaining!

• Lee Odden from TopRankBlog recaps the best of his blog this year.
• Shana Albert from SocialDesire provides a killer list of 51 social media marketing posts from Twitter to Stumbleupon and much in between.
• Techipedia must have one heckuva feed reader to compile this enormous list of social media marketing artilces.
• GrokDotCom provides a month-by-month recap of great content with This Year in Blogs - The Definitive Marketing Posts of 2007 - someone planned ahead!
• Problogger has a month-by-month breakdown too of its own posts. Lots of gems in there.
• Copyblogger has a similar top post roundup.
• For all you design-types, BestWebGallery shares its favorite CSS web design submissions of the year.
• Rohit Bhargava has a unique and forward-thinking roundup Top 10 Most Underappreciated Metrics to Track in 2008.
• Marketing Sherpa recognizes the 39 best email campaigns of 2007 selected from over 250 entries. Covers a range of industries.
• Okay, this was written in July and is technically not a roundup of posts, but Matt from EcommerceOptimization provides a list of ecommerce blogs that we all can enjoy.

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If you’re not sure what an RSS subscription is, this video sums it up nice and simple.

Thanks to Lee Lefever from Common Craft for sharing this tutorial.

Popular services:

Google Reader (you’ve got it already if you have a Gmail account)
Bloglines
Netvibes

Stephan Spencer wrote an excellent article for Search Engine Land last week that explains how you can use the rel=nofollow attribute on your internal links to control the flow of “Page Rank” throughout your site. If this is all Greek-geek to you, I’ll explain in a moment what this means. But you should read this post because this is one white-hat SEO tactic that hasn’t been milked to death by all your online retail competitors. Out of Internet Retailer’s Hot 100 online stores, Stephan found only one using this technique, and even that store could go a bit further with it.

Page Rank (think Larry Page) is Google’s way of assigning authority to a web page. Your home page is likely to have the highest Page Rank because it’s linked to more often by other websites than your other pages. Page Rank flows between pages on your own site, flows in from other sites’ links to you and “leaks” through links to other sites. If you need more information on this, check out SEOMoz’ Whiteboard Friday on the subject.

Sculpting Page Rank is really plugging up leaks that don’t need to be there, and controlling the flow of “link juice” within your site, sending more juice to important pages like product pages and cutting off unnecessary pages (that you don’t need to rank in search engines) like contact, view cart, privacy policy, terms and conditions and so on.

When you selectively add rel=”nofollow” to links like “add to cart,” “buy now,” “submit,” for example, you tell search engines not to follow the link as they crawl your site and not to include the link in the overall (and highly complex) Page Rank calculation.

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Some believe December 24th is the busiest shopping day of the Christmas season, as everyone scrambles for last minute gifts, decor and food - at least in local stores. Holiday shipping deadlines are now behind us, so what do online merchants do? I went to check out the home pages of 100 of the Internet Retailer Top 500 expecting to see a lot of last-minute pitches for electronic gift certificates and in-store pick up. (Homepages were checked late in the evening on December 23).

Everybody loves statistics, so here goes:

Promoting Electronic Gift Cards - 32%

• 25% made e-gift cards very prominent on the home page, sometimes in more than one place (for example, banner and sidebar box).

• The most popular tagline was “It’s Not Too Late!”
• Many included the purchase cutoff dates for guaranteed delivery, as some take up to 12 hours for delivery. Others claimed instant delivery.
• 10% reminded you of in-store gift cards, but did not offer e-mail gift certificates.
• Musician’s Friend provided an added incentive for purchasing an e-gift certificate with a “$20 ComeBack Cash in the New Year” - when you buy a gift certificate of $100 or more, you will receive your own $20 gift card to use before February 15, 2008. A great way to bring the gift-giver back to spend more money during some of the slowest months of the year.

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This year I did almost all my Christmas shopping online. I say almost because there was one item that I intended to purchase online was unable to - a gift for my brother. First I purchased it along with two other items for myself from Amazon.com so I could qualify for Super Saver Shipping. What I failed to notice was that one of the items for me was out of stock. When you choose Super Saver Shipping you must group your items into one order. There was no notice on the checkout page that one item was not in stock so I checked out and was so thrilled I had found the perfect book for my brother, some goodies for me and well before December 24th to boot.

About a week later (December 15) I was checking my credit card balance online and noticed the Amazon transaction was missing. I went into my account at Amazon and there it was, the shipment had not gone out because it’s waiting for that one item to become available. Had I not checked my credit card balance I would have had no clue about this as I had no notification from Amazon via email. Even if I had, I don’t shop using my work email so my free Yahoo account gets checked intermittently.

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We’re moving into the most insane shopping weekend of the year, but that hasn’t stopped the Internet from pushing out great content. Here are a few of the gems from my feed reader this week. Hope you enjoy them and have a great weekend.

Holiday Marketing

• Online retailers are expected to offer last-minute Christmas shoppers free shipping and big discounts right up to the weekend. Via Salt Lake Tribune

• Emarketer reports that coupons are the most influential marketing medium for multichannel merchants, followed by newspaper flyers and word-of-mouth.
• Proof that people are crazy about their pets - many are throwing Christmas parties for their pooches and pussy-cats. If you’re a pet retailer and you missed this holiday opportunity, don’t worry there will be plenty of “Pupperware Parties” and “Bark-mitzvahs” all year long.

A couple weeks ago I saw this (sold out) platter on Drs Foster and Smith. Gaining 5 pounds over the holidays - not just for humans anymore.

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Jakob Nielsen recently wrote an article “Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous…” In it he proposes that many Web 2.0 trends are not only useless for web users but can actually cut into your profits.

He covered a lot of ground (definitely check out the article) and made a lot of good points. But a couple things don’t sit too well with me.

Nielsen Bashes AJAX

Nielsen argues AJAX and rich user interfaces are too complicated for the average user. Even though AJAX makes it easier to get more done on one page without reloading, it’s easy for people to miss the subtle changes on the page and think nothing happened. This could be a problem for “add to cart” and “checkout” processes. He recommends you stick with the old-school, page-by-page way of doing things.

“Users often overlooked modest changes, such as when they added something to the cart and it updated only a small area in a corner of the screen. It’s deadly for e-commerce sites when users can’t operate the shopping cart, so it’s usually best to stick to simple shopping-cart designs that everybody understands.”

Kudos to Howard Kaplan over at GrokDotCom for pointing out the fallacy of Nielsen’s arguments.

“Aren’t websites “more usable” today than they were then? Absolutely. So, a better question for Jakob would be, with so many of the top sites focusing on usability for so many years, why aren’t Conversion Rates any higher? According to the latest Shop.org numbers, they’re not even trending upward.

If he’s right, and the “web is a tool” users, as most usability practitioners would like to call your site’s visitors (can you think of any positive meanings to the word ‘users’?), attempt to accomplish tasks, Conversion Rates (the ratio of actions taken per total visitors) should have risen each-and-every year (until, naturally, the big-bad Web2.0 trend came to bring them crashing down).”

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Last week we held an affiliate marketing webinar with Shawn Collins (recap and replay available). We covered a lot of ground in one short hour, but one area that wasn’t discussed in depth is how affiliate programs can affect your SEO.

Problem: Duplicate Content Knocks Your Pages from Search Engines

Some affiliate networks provide affiliates with direct links to your site with an appended URL including an affiliate ID. An example would be http://www.yoursite.com/?affid=123456.

When search engines visit your affiliates’ websites, unless your affiliate has added a “rel=nofollow” attribute to the link to tell search engines not to follow the link, the search engine will follow the link and index the landing page — a duplicate copy of your home page, category page or product page, wherever the link was pointing. If an affiliate builds up link juice with keyword-rich anchor text to its own copies of your page (for example, buying paid links on blogs), it’s possible that http://www.yoursite.com/?affid=123456 outranks http://www.yoursite.com. What’s worse is that the duplicate content filter might wipe out your page for showing in results for that keyword/s, especially when you have thousands of affiliates and thousands of duplicate pages. This means you pay commissions on sales from organic search that you otherwise could have attracted yourself.

2 Possible Workarounds

A 301 (permanent) eliminates this possibility as you tell the search engine that http://www.yoursite.com/?affid=123456 is forever the same as http://www.yoursite.com. And yes, any Page Rank the affiliate URL has will be passed on to your site. To do this, you likely have to bring your affiliate program in-house and create a proper tracking system so affiliates get their commissions.

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BestBuy.ca (not the .com version) has a little poll on the home page asking “How Have You Done Your Holiday Shopping?” With over 5,000 responses it’s not a bad sample size. I, of course, fall into the “Bought Everything Online” group, but I’m not surprised that 34% have yet to start their Christmas hunt for gifts.

Almost 29% have researched online and bought in-store. It’s a reality that some of your hard earned traffic isn’t interested in buying online but they are looking for ideas. This is fine if you are a multi-channel retailer who can offer in-store pickup convenience. But what if you’re selling purely online? Are you servicing “researchers” only to lose them to a local store? Now is your opportunity to present a compelling case for buying from YOU right NOW.

Tips for Converting Last Minute Shoppers:

1. Communicate the convenience of buying from you rather than a local store by reminding them of the pain of line-ups, parking and crowded stores. How you do this is up to you, get creative.

2. Now that most retailers’ free ground shipping offers have expired,offer a break on overnight shipping, or free overnight shipping (like Ice.com) if possible.

3. Include free gift wrap so the item can be shipped directly to the recipient (or just save the shopper time).

4. Include a link to a gift finder section (if you have one) or other popular categories to encourage the customer to buy something for everyone on their list. “We’ve got something for everyone on your list” is good site-wide messaging (if this makes sense for your product offering).

5. Upsell with gift cards - especially electronic gift cards that can be delivered instantly.

Things to keep in mind for next year (design/strategic):

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