If you’re new to Get Elastic, every Friday we round up some great finds from the blogosphere to keep your eyes busy until Monday. Enjoy this week’s picks!

• Justin Palmer captures 3 innovative approaches to site navigation: solution-based, filter-based and image-based.

• James Bunzol shows an example of how Amazon’s Lightning Deals create Jellyfish-like urgency. I’m surprised we don’t see other retailers experimenting with this type of entertainment shopping.

• Aaron Wall goes into painstaking detail on SEO with What is a #1 Google Ranking Worth? This article actually has 9 sections, here’s a preview of what he covered:

* An Example of Applying This Data to a Live Business Scenario
* Google Rankings Can Make or Break a Business
* Appreciating Google’s Market Domination
* Establish a Baseline Keyword Value
* Typical Click Distribution Profiles
* Factors Modifying Click Distribution
* Tapping the Keyword Tail
* Improving Monetization via Scale
* Improve Your SEO Strategy Today

Grab a coffee and a notepad for this one.

• For you legal-eagles or controversy buffs (or PR folks, reputation managers and marketers) Jeremiah Owyang has an interesting commentary on the current brouhaha over a socially-conscious t-shirt designer and Louis Vuitton handbags.

  

  26 year old Nadia Plesner faces legal action by Louis Vuitton for using their product’s likeness in an anti-genocide awareness campaign. The image reflects Plesner’s concern that Paris Hilton’s accessories are more newsworthy than the suffering of our fellow man in Darfur. Since Louis Vuitton doesn’t really have anything to do with the situation, it feels this “brand-jacking” must be countered.

  Owyang outlines four options LV has in dealing with this problem, and has solicited his Twitter followers to weigh in with their opinions. Interesting stuff.

• Are you puzzled on how to convince upper level management to pay attention to social media marketing? Not sure how to approach it? Jeremiah Owyang has a nice roundup of his own tips in How Do I Talk To My Executives About Social Media?

• Forgive my Jeremiah Owyang fangirl-ness this week, but this is also interesting: A roundup of brands that got “punked” by social media.

• All you design-types will appreciate this gallery of Mother’s Day home pages courtesy of Ed Henrich. Oh, and if you haven’t gotten a gift for Mom yet, you might check out these sites for some ideas.

It’s the end of the week, but the beginning of another month. And you know what that means - another free ecommerce webinar is coming up. This month we’re honored to have search marketing expert and Director of Marketing for the Rimm-Kaufman Group, Ryan Gibson sharing his wisdom with us. Save the date - May 15th, 9am PST, 12pm EST. Discover the Key to PPC for Online Retailers.

Email marketers will also want to join Chad White from the Email Experience Council, Compendium Blogware and Habeas for a free webinar on blogging and email. Learn to take advantage of the “cost-effective combination of blogging, email and search to help marketing, operations and sales teams to acquire, engage, transact with and retain customers.”

Alright, link time!

• Jim Bunzol shares an example of a cart recovery email (or remarketing, as he calls it) from Circuit City. Nice find. What I like about CC’s approach is it’s very customer service oriented. These are not the exact words, but the angle is: “We noticed you were interested in some things (added to cart) and then you took off. No problem, we’re saving them in your cart for you if you’d like to come back and buy them later. If you need to consult the experts, here’s a link to our discussion forums where you can get help.” Rather than, “Hey you, get back here and buy now! We’ve been watching you and know where you’re inbox is!”

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Well here we are with another link roundup to keep you glued to your monitors all weekend. You know, I hardly feel like I should ever be linking to these blogs at all from Blogger’s Digest. Because you should be subscribed to it and getting the goods the day they’re published, not waiting for Friday! Nevertheless, I will continue to include them for the benefit of our new subscribers and because I want Google to know how great this content is.

• The toughest part is choosing one or two articles from GrokDotCom to link to. But this week I’ve chosen “How to Increase Your Cart Abandonment Rate.” I’ll spoil the ending for you - tease your customer with low or reasonable prices and save the “sticker shock” for checkout.

• How can personalization improve your ROI on PPC? Get the 411 from Sitebrand with Smart, Not More Keyword Spend Boosts Conversion and the companion case study (warning: link is PDF file).

• Ayat Shukairy caught a whiff of a bad search scent when searching for Dora the Explorer merchandise. Follow your nose to some definite search marketing and landing page don’ts with My Search Smells Fishy. PS, subscribe to the Invesp blog’s feed, you’ll get great content on a regular basis and a freebie you’ll really Digg.

• Attention Wordpressers! Many of us have been hacked recently (Get Elastic has suffered twice) - here are two great articles on how to avoid being hacked and how to recover, from Search Engine People and Daily Blog Tips.

• Justing Palmer interviews Aaron Wall, who literally wrote the book on SEO about what else? Ecommerce SEO.

• The SEOmozzers struck it Digg with Google Search Results Missing from One Box - a hilarious what-if of search results Google should really consider.

Have something to say? If possible, please leave a comment to a blog post - doing so allows us to keep the conversation going and let “the whole class” benefit from your wisdom - and our answer (if applicable).

Otherwise … drop an email to “marketing (at) elasticpath.com” (of course you’ll add in an @ symbol).

You can also contact individual authors by clicking on their name found under the authors section in the right hand navigation bar.

Need to get a hold of us fast?

Try calling our office at 604-408-8078 - ask for Jason Billingsley.

What if offline shopping were as cruel and difficult as buying online? What does that world look like?

Video #1 - If Only Search Engines Could Understand What We Want

Video #2 - Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought…

Video #3 - Premature Redirection

Video #4 - Zero Results Found

Video #5 - Price Checked

Video #6 - Bananarama…rama…rama…rama

Video #7 - Abandoned

If you struggle with any of these online retail challenges, you might need to consider new ecommerce software.

While free shipping is the most desirable for shoppers, it can be an expensive proposition for retailers. 31% of Top 100 retailers have opted to leverage the perk of free shipping with a tactic used to increase average order values – threshold based free shipping: i.e. buy over $75 and get free shipping. Anecdotally, the most common threshold level for free shipping we saw was set at $50.

Sample sizes were too low to evaluate this tactic on a group-by-group basis, but overall those who offered real-time rate lookups had the highest conversion rate at 5.9%, followed by threshold at 5.5%, free at 4.6% and flat rate at 3.2%.

This wasn’t what we expected to see and believe shipping service levels come into play. Most free or threshold offers are for regular ground shipping, but we have no data to show us what mix of shoppers upgrade to premium shipping levels like overnight air.

Overall, almost half of Top 100 retailers handle shipping by doing a rate table lookup.

Note – rate table lookup included both real-time rate lookups from outside shipping vendors, and set rate tables created by the retailer.

Ultimately utilizing this tactic should help retailers increase average order values, especially surrounding seasonal gift giving occasions. But what effect does the additional noise and screen real estate in the checkout process have on conversion rates at Top 100 retailers?

As suspected, over 75% of apparel and low ticket item retailers offered gift wrapping. But in each group, those that did not offer gift wrapping or messages consistently outperformed those who did. We suspect the increased complexity involved with gifting (especially to multiple recipients) may affect conversions negatively, but the increased order value may make up for it.

Overall, 56% of Top 100 retailers offer gift wrapping or messages.

While the clerk rings through items at the supermarket we are often faced with a slew of quick and thoughtless products to add to our order – candy, celebrity magazines, batteries, gift cards, etc. In the online world however, retailers do not offer these thing in the checkout process. In fact the number was so low, we were about to drop this from the research analysis. Because so few retailers employ this method of merchandising, we cannot draw conclusions from this piece of research.

Just 4% of Top 100 retailers show cross-selling during the checkout process.

Thoughts on why this is not used:Screen real estate is a valuable commodity and the risk of confusing a shopper in the checkout process is greater than the opportunity of increasing the order size. A get them in and out mentality leans towards eliminating distractions during the checkout process. Most cross-selling opportunities are taken on product pages, cart screens, and interstitial screens after a product has been added to the cart.

Technically, this is not a checkout related tactic, but it is the cousin to displaying cross-sells within the checkout process, so it’s worth a look.

Conversion rates were consistently higher on sites not cross-selling within the shopping cart, with apparel being the only anomaly. Sites selling low ticket items had a full 2.5% greater conversion rate where cross-selling was not displayed in the cart. This may be attributable to screen congestion and call-to-action overload.

An interesting finding was many of the retailers did display related items and accessories immediately after an item was added to the cart (on an interstitial type page). However, they chose to not cross-sell on the cart page. Because we know many shoppers do not buy on the first visit to a site, and adding items to a cart is akin to dog-earing a catalog page for quick retrieval, are they missing a selling opportunity? Surprisingly, this was most apparent in electronics retailers selling high ticket items (who often have many accessories).

Overall, 54% of Top 100 retailers chose to cross-sell on the shopping cart screen.

Otherwise known as the “are you really sure you want to purchase?” screen, a final confirmation screen allows users check that their order details are all correct and sometimes reconsider their purchase.

As suspected, those employing an order confirmation screen had a lower conversion rate overall, but not as dramatic as we thought. The assumption being, shoppers are not always aware the screen is an order confirmation screen and assume it is a receipt page – no further action is taken and the order is never placed. The numbers are not convincing enough to verify that notion, and the group selling high ticket items had the reverse effect. Those with an order confirmation screen had a 35% higher conversion rate. Conclusions on this tactic are best to be drawn by testing.

Over 70% of Top 100 retailers use an order confirmation screen within the checkout process.