Breadcrumb navigation is wonderful for usability and for search engine optimization (SEO). Breadcrumb navigation, if you’re not familiar with the term, is text-based navigation that shows where in the site hierarchy the currently viewed web page is located. Not only does it give a sense of your location within the site, it provides shortcuts to […]

Shopping cart abandonment is of primary concern to online retailers, and for good reason. If real-world stores were like their virtual equivalents, there’d be so many shopping carts littering the aisles the shoppers would have to literally climb over them! The best kind of ecommerce site is one where the shopping experience is smooth and […]

In the past I’ve made the case for using wikis for online marketing. Perusing Amazon.com recently I saw that there were already over 7500 product wikis contributed by Amazon customers. Cool! (Unfortunately not a single one of their wikis is indexed in Google because of the search engine unfriendly way they’ve implemented wikis on their […]

Discussion forums encourage customer participation, getting customers and prospects to stay longer which means more interaction with your brand. They drive repeat visits too. Some customers become “regulars” on your forums — which should, hopefully, lead to you being top-of-mind more often when they are in the market for products that you sell. In other […]

RSS feeds are your tether — your lifeline — to your prospects after they’ve left your site. Unless they’ve ordered from you, how else can you reach out to that nameless, faceless hoard? It used to be that your email newsletter served that purpose, but consumers are bombarded with so much email now that they […]

Those of us in New Zealand will probably remember the Amazon.com wanna-be that flamed out, FlyingPig.co.nz. The marketing fanfare that announced FlyingPig’s launch was undermined by the fact that the site was down within minutes of going live. Yes of course they should have done the usual load testing, and implemented server load balancing to […]

Is your ecommerce site a breeze to use? Is it fast to download? Does it render (paint) quickly on the screen? If not, is the HTML at least built to display the most important parts of the page first? You can trim precious seconds off the download time by removing superfluous HTML code, optimizing your […]

DoubleClick’s second quarter 2004 E-commerce Site Trend Report is out. And according to it, shopping cart abandonment is at an all-time high: 57% of all carts, up from 45.9% a year ago. Furthermore, those who return to their abandoned carts are doing so with less frequency: 26.5% of sales were attributable to those returning to […]

According to Nielsen//NetRatings, the top five most popular shopping search terms for April were: “home depot” “walmart” “target” “sears” “best buy” Interesting data. But I don’t agree with the conclusion posited on the SearchEngineWatch Blog: These are people who likely have done their research and are now looking for physical/local stores to buy what it […]

So far, retailers have been slow to take up blogging but I do think they will come around. Because so few are doing it, it gives a huge PR advantage to those retailers who are blogging. For example, ehobbies.com has been mentioned in the New York Times and USA Today, even though they’re off to […]