Get Elastic - The Year In Review

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.

April

• Jason points out a Good Example of Bad Cross-Selling that you have to see to believe. It’s probably the worst example of cross-selling and it’s sure to make you chuckle.

May

• 107 Add To Cart Buttons of Top Online Retailers
  baited over 100 links, attracted 80 comments and made the del.icio.us home page. Hoorah! And it still gets hundreds of hits a day. Check out the big wall of cart icons and see how many you can recognize at a glance (just kidding).

June

• My favorite of the Crazy Messed Up World of Ecommerce video series, “Zero Results Found” is funny ‘cuz it’s true. Our very own VP of Sales stars as the cashier.

July

• Some tips on recovering abandoned carts with follow up emails.

August

• This post was the most fun to write, and we got some really hilarious comments on the tongue-in-cheek usability evaluation of possibly the craziest ecommerce website on the Interweb.

September

• A roundup of over 110 ways online retailers are using social media - from Facebook to MySpace, YouTube, Twitter and viral microsites.

October

• Do you send welcome emails when customers create an account with you? Here are some tips for welcome emails based on the behavior of 100 of the top online retailers. Yes I signed up for each one of them personally, and yes it was a really, really long day.

Okay, we’ll call this a 4-way tie, I also like these ones:

• Registration Form Usability Tips

• Top 10 Halloween Costumes of Online Retailers
• Larry and Sergey’s Halloween Costume - Ghoulgle

November

• Holiday Shipping Cutoff Dates Make Good Ecommerce Usability shows some examples of online retailers’ home pages and shipping deadline visibility.

December

• Gee, this wasn’t that long ago but I think it’s an important topic for all online retailers, and a great opportunity for competitive advantage as sculpting Page Rank is an under-used technique that can drive tons of long-tail traffic.

Image Credit: Target.com