Ecommerce Links: September 2014

Greetings from the Shop.org Annual Summit, we'll be back to regularly scheduled blogging next week. In the meantime, enjoy Get Elastic's top picks for ecommerce-related wisdom from around the Web this month of September, 2014.

• If you're going to do A/B testing, it's critical that you understand the difference between statistical significance and validity. (Hint: if you don't, you may roll-out "imaginary" winners - with NO conversion lift.)

• What is confidence? How much should you require? How long should you run a test? The Adobe Digital Marketing Blog interviews data scientist John Kucera on how marketers can overcome trust issues statistically.

• Econsultancy peresents its guest checkout best practice guide and tests the checkouts of 25 US retailers and 30 UK retailers.

• Like sticking to "best practices?" KISSmetrics shares 3 risky ecommerce techniques that can actually increase conversion.

• In Google news...Google introduces structured snippets into search results. What does that mean? Click to find out.

• Online discounts vs. free shipping offers. Which is more effective? The answer may be "it depends which customer segment."

• Emarketer discusses Why marketers still haven't mastered personalization.

• Are you making any of these common, costly PPC mistakes.

• Home pages, landing pages and checkout seem to get the most A/B testing love, but what about your all-important navigation? MarketingExperiments shares what you need to know about testing navigation menus.

• When should you use validation messages vs. warnings in online forms (especially checkout)? Baymard Institute walks you through the dos and don'ts from their own user testing labs.