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:
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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Kinset is one start-up that’s trying to bring leisure shopping to the ‘Net by replicating the real-life browsing experience with 3D virtual technology.
CEO John Butler explains that his product is different than Second Life as Second Life attracts hobbyists who invest time to learn how to move around in SL, how to dress themselves and creating their avatars, and from then on use the site for socializing. Kinset is meant to be a “no-learning” high fidelity retail space for actual shopping rather than fantasy.
The following is a quick 6 minute clip of Butler’s interview with Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe.
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Kinset Review: Im Not Sold on Virtual Shopping »
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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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Last weekend I decided to take advantage of the strong Canadian dollar and head cyber-South to Victoria’s Secret’s online store to spoil myself with some stylin’ sweaters. I spent over 2 hours comparing items, and shortlisted about 12.
Even though VS has a wish list feature, I admit that I used the shopping bag as a holding tank for products I like. I had two good reasons for this. I had an intent to buy, not dream, and I wanted to save the hassle of transferring wish list items to the bag.
After 2 hours, I needed a break and closed all my open tabs. I’ve been conditioned (or spoiled) by other online shopping experiences and I expected VS to remember my items when I came back. But alas, when I returned to Victoria’s Secret my shopping bag was empty! I fully had intention to buy multiple items (I had given myself a $350 budget), but my visit will ever be recorded by web analytics as an “Abandoned Shopping Bag.” Because the thought of starting over again is daunting, I just gave up.
How could my sale have been saved?
Comments(8) Here’s a cute little promo for the soon-to-launch Dutch online store Hema.
This innovative marketing effort is a pinball-machine styled product page where animated products tumble and spill and drop and pop. Good, clean viral fun to kick off your weekend.
I’m also pleased to see that the term “ghettoblaster” transcends linguistic boundaries.
Via Ecommerce Cache
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I discovered an interesting UK Shopping 2.0 site called the Imagini Gift Finder. It’s kind of like social wishlisting meets Myers-Briggs — you work through a series of “questions” and you get results based on your answers. But the twist is, you choose from a set of images what appeals to you most. The system uses your choices to determine your “Visual DNA” and present you with relevant gifts.
You can get suggestions for your own gifts and build a wishlist that you can send to your friends *hint.* Or, you can invite a “Valentine” to take the quiz and build a wishlist for you so you don’t have to obsess over whether your honey likes a burger with or without a bun.
Here are just a few of the questions and images. If you don’t like any of the pictures, you can click on a gray box to skip.
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Imagini Helps You Find Gifts Using Visual DNA »
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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 »
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