Ecommerce Links: March 2012

They say March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb, but the tech world just keeps cranking out big news -- from the launches of iPad 3 and Google Play to Twitter's acquisition of Posterous and Facebook's Timeline transition for brand pages. At the end of each month, we like to highlight notable articles from around the Web for ecommerce professionals. To follow shared links throughout the month, please follow us on Twitter @getelastic.

• Everyone's obsessed with the design of their home page, but how much thought have you given to optimizing your home page slider? Rich Page shares 6 best practices for making your home page richer, such as: don't use more than 5 slides, as users don't stay long on your home page.

• "The dirty little secret that plagues most conventional, first-generation enterprise APIs is that they aren’t much cheaper or faster than the old-fashioned methods of low-level integration or hacking away at the platform code." Our own David Chiu explains how commerce APIs are the solution to the headache of traditional APIs at Econsultancy.

• Omniture brings you an important message on the difference between correlation and causation. Critical to understand if you want to interpret test results correctly.

• Econsultancy shares 3 practical examples of sites that handle the EU cookie law well.

• We've seen a lot of new marketplaces arise in the last 5 years - from music and app stores, to self-published ebooks and even 3D printing. But what about genetic data, could it be the next virtual product? Imagine "the creation of an opt-in data marketplace that allows people to license their data to help cure diseases, create drugs, make better products, streamline marketing and advertising budgets." For example, breweries could exclude marketing certain brands to consumers with a genetic trait that makes them averse to bitter taste -- while consumers gets paid for sharing the information.

• Mobile is expected to make up 25% of paid search clicks by the end of the year. (You know what this means? Get your mobile landing pages in order.)

• Facebook brand Pages have changed again -- are you up to date? Smart Insights Marketing explains the new Facebook Timeline pages: what's missing and what's new.

• Often times, the developer of a web tool doesn't anticipate all the features people want, rather they end up developing them in response to user demand (think @replies on Twitter). Other times, clever developers go ahead and forge their own solution, like PinAQuote, which offers the ability to pin text on Pinterest. Could the next "Pin It" button could be for sharing product reviews?

• Some KISS advice from KISSmetrics: 8 Sign Up Form Examples For Easy & Breezy Conversions.

• Just for fun, step into the Twitter time machine and check out what the first 30 tweets looked like. To think the founders and their friends actually used the social network as it was originally intended - to broadcast the inane minutiae of your waking moments.