A good ecommerce site sets itself apart from the rest. It’s memorable. It has something special about it. For example, woot.com, the hugely popular online retailer, has a very clever gimmick of selling only one product per day, at an incredible price, and selling that product until midnight or until it runs out of stock, […]

When someone clicks on the “Add to Cart” button on a product page on your ecommerce site, where should that visitor be directed to? The shopping cart page (the first page of the checkout)? Back to that product page? Somewhere else? If you send customers back to the product page, you’re wasting their time IMHO. […]

I never quite understood the reason for posting a sticker in plain view on your home page saying that your site is “hacker safe” (like this site does). Why would you remind your visitor that there are hackers out there chomping at the bit to get at their credit card numbers? I only see this […]

I was interviewed for a piece that just came out in Multichannel Merchant magazine called Defending yourself against the blogs. I contributed some tips for multichannel retailers who are considering blogging. Here’s the full version of my tips (In the published article, my comments were edited down for space): Create a “safe haven” to experiment […]

Of the many Web 2.0 startups, Edgeio is my new favorite. With their site having just launched to the public last week, I was able to have a closer look, and I really think these guys (including the brilliant Mike Arrington of TechCrunch fame) are on to something big. It’s a distributed version of eBay […]

January 23 was a momentous day in history. What was said and by whom will have significant, long-term beneficial impact on online advertising. It happened in Atlanta, although not all participants could make it on time due to bad weather at the airport. Representatives from search engines (Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Become, Shop.com), retailers (Sierra Trading […]

Is your website littered with abandoned shopping carts? According to a recent study by ScanAlert, an abandoned shopping cart doesn’t necessarily lead to shoppers abandoning your site. ScanAlert’s report “A New Era of Digital Window Shopping: From Shopping Cart Abandonment to Purchase” covers a nine-month analysis of the shopping behavior of more than 8 million […]

Become.com is a pretty cool little new shopping search engine, specializing in product reviews and other info for the research-oriented consumer. Its index is now up to 2.2 billion pages in size, all of it taken from shopping-related web sites in the US. It’s in public beta now, so give it a whirl. You’ll need […]