This ecommerce blog is lovingly brought to you by Linda Bustos and Jason Billingsley of Elastic Path Software: The ecommerce software that helps retailers sell more and work less.
Comments(8) A collection of ecommerce web designs, logos, and holiday gift card designs from some of the most popular online retailers:
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SEO Digger is a free SEO tool that instantly shows you keyword rankings in Google for yours or any other website URL along with Wordtracker keyword counts. This makes it so easy to hone in on the most popular keywords (or products) that you’re ranking for so that you can optimize those pages even better.
Make sure you register so that you are able to see results for your deep pages, not just your home page. Registered users also don’t have a limit on the number of searches you can do in one hour.
SEO Digger keeps a database of the top 20 results in Google for over 57 million keywords and keyphrases updated every 2 weeks. When you type in yours or any other URL, you’ll get a chart like this:
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Ecommerce SEO Hack: Free Tool to Hone Your SEO Strategy »
Comments(0) Well up here in Canadia we’re working hard, but to all our friends South of the Border, we wish you a very happy Turkey Day. Here are some funny e-commerce / social media videos in lieu of serious content. Gobble, gobble and chuckle, chuckle.
A Few Good Creative Men
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A Few Good Youtube Videos For Ecommerce and Advertising Buffs »
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SEO guru Stephan Spencer contributed a great overview on tagging and its virtues for usability and SEO to Search Engine Land last week. Do check out Stephan’s entire article if you’re new to the concept of tagging, tag clouds and folksonomy.
Tags help describe various content. Basically, you can tag a blog post, product or photo with relevant keywords. When you want to check out all the posts, photos or products related to a certain keyword, you can click on the “tag” and voila! Usability-wise, visitors can navigate visually through a “tag cloud” (see the bottom of our page for an example) and even discover tags, whereas in a traditional dropdown menu or even faceted navigation this could get out of hand. Tags are great for SEO too, because your tags generate their own URLs, and each tag is a keyword-rich internal link to that page, reinforced by the tagged items themselves and the sitewide tag cloud, if you have one.
I took a peek at blogs from our list of 75+ blogs from top online retailers to “look who’s tagging” and as I expected, I can easily count them all on one hand. What’s worse, the ones that do are doing it WRONG!
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Effective Tagging Strategies for Ecommerce Blogs »
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Every year, Internet Retailer releases its list of stand out retailers. Last year there were 50, this year 100.
Rather than highlighting who’s doing the most volume, the Internet Retailer Hot 100 list focuses on innovators and includes smaller retailers like Bestkiteboarding.com, chains, catalogers, online-only and brands like M&M’s.
Matt over at Ecommerce Optimization categorized the list and added some nifty graphs.
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Gift cards are the perfect solution to many shopping problems — your giftee is tough to shop for, lives miles away or it’s 11pm Christmas Eve and the only store still open is the Safeway (with a nice variety of gift cards hanging in the checkout aisle).
Whatever the reason, $26.3 Billion worth of gift cards will be given this holiday. Between 56% and 69% of shoppers will give at least one (NRF Gift Card Survey, Consumer Reports and Deloitte), with an average of 5 gift cards per consumer and 16% giving 10 or more (Deloitte).
Not only do people love giving gift cards, they love getting them. Gift cards top the wish lists of consumers polled by BIGResearch and the National Retail Foundation with 53.8% of adults 18 and older indicating they would like to receive them for Christmas this year (62% of women and 45% of men).
But 27% won’t end up using their gift cards according to the NRF survey (up from 19% last year). The most common reasons reported by respondents were “not enough time to shop” or “couldn’t find anything.” Other reasons include forgetting about them, losing them or not using them in time. This equates to around $8 Billion in unredeemed cards based on last years’ sales of $24.8 Billion.
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$8 Billion in Unredeemed Gift Cards a Win-Win for Retailers? »
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Internet research firm Hitwise launched its US Retail Datacenter which offers a variety of data and trends for ecommerce from over 20,000 online stores across 21 categories:
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Hitwise Releases Competitive Intelligence for Online Retailers »
Comments(4) Lee Lefever over at Common Craft has blessed the ‘Net with the Paperworks Series, a collection of educational videos geared at anyone who wants to know the lowdown on how social bookmarking, RSS, Wikis and social networking works.
Social Bookmarking In Plain English
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We’ve been talking much about social media marketing here at Get Elastic, blogging, podcasts, viral videos and so on. But what about Facebook applications? What kind of things can you build for this platform that relate to ecommerce? Is it worth it? Who’s doing what and are they successful? Today I’m reviewing 29 ecommerce Facebook applications by shopping engines, deals sites, social shopping sites and online retailers.
User stats are as of October 10 and are subject to change. A note about active users, when products appear on a Facebook profile, just because it’s not updated daily doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a branding impact or fulfill a place for users to express their style/product tastes. Metrics we unfortunately can’t measure are how many invited users add the application (conversion rate) and how many users have added and later removed them (attrition rate).
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Facebook + Ecommerce = 29 Applications Reviewed »
Comments(7) While preparing their upcoming report Customer Focus Study, 2007, Future Now observed “nearly half of the top online retailers still require people to register before they checkout.
The issue is not whether site registration itself is a bad idea, there are clearly benefits to both customer and seller which I will mention in a moment. The question is: Why are ecommerce websites still making registration a requirement, and asking for registration before the checkout process — especially when most of the user’s information will be entered in a standard checkout process anyhow?
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Required Registration: Top Etailers’ Favorite Usability Mistake »
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