E-Commerce Blog

This month’s report card is SolsticeSupply.com, an ecommerce site dedicated to closeout winter goods ranging from skis and snowboards to winter apparel. The site is very pleasant to the eye with large, expansive photos of wintry scenes and skiing action. But how does it do in terms of SEO? Well, pictures are nice, good design can convert, but search engines only see words. With that in mind, let’s take a look.

Home Page Content

This is the first spot where SolsticeSupply.com needs to make SEO improvements, especially with regard to textual content. The homepage – and much of the site – is graphically focused rather than textually focused. While graphics are certainly not a problem, for SEO purposes they need to be balanced with perma…

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SEO Report Card: SolsticeSupply.com

For the first time in years, holiday ecommerce sales fell in 2008 as online shoppers, apparently worried about the global economy and their personal finances, cut seasonal spending 3 percent, according to an established Internet tracking firm. But 47.7 percent of Internet store keepers responding to a recent Practical eCommerce study actually had better sales than last year, perhaps indicating that many small online stores outperformed the large multichannel sellers.

A report from comScore, said that total retail ecommerce sales from November 1 to December 23, 2008 were $25.5 billion, down from $26.3 billion for the 2007 holiday shopping season. Separately, an exclusive Practical eCommerce survey did find that approximately 40 percent o…

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Survey: 2008 Holiday Sales Slipped for Many Internet Merchants

Boldchat provides online communication software that allows Internet retailers to actively engage customers and potentially increase both conversions and profits.

The Boldchat software (I tested version 5.20.3240.27126) was a responsive and powerful solution for live chat on any ecommerce website. But I wished for better documentation and was disappointed (very disappointed) to see that the chat button, which I was supposed to embedded on my site, and the chat window were built with HTML tables—a technique that many creditable designers try to avoid. Overall, I am giving Boldchat four out of a possible five stars in this The PeC Review.

For the unfamiliar, live chat is the concept of having operators (real people) actively chatting w…

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The PeC Review: Boldchat is An Easy-to-Use Live Chat Solution That May Improve Sales

Editor’s Note: This is part four in our special report on “Video for Ecommerce,” where we describe real stories of online merchants creatively using video to drive sales and grow their brands. Previous installments are linked in below.

What’s next once you’ve added product videos to your site? Get the word out.

“We know that [consumers] are looking for videos online,” said David Burch at video analytics company TubeMogul.com. “That’s why our goal, and the goal of our merchants, is to be everywhere where video content is consumed.”

In August 2008, Burch surveyed 1,114 users of TubeMogul’s free video distribution system. He found 51.6 percent of merchants drawing revenues from their videos online. “And since we published that study,” B…

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Product Video: Easy Distribution Tools

A relatively simple SEO linking strategy can improve how well and how often your store’s product pages are indexed and displayed in organic search engine results.

This linking technique goes by several names. Bruce Clay Inc., an Internet business consultancy, refers to it as “siloing.” SEOmoz uses the term “PageRank sculpting.” And the Search Engine Roundtable called it “bot herding” in a recent discussion. While these names and practitioners claim subtle differences in meaning and application, the general technique seeks to concentrate PageRank on a site’s most important landing and product pages, improving how those pages perform in search engine results.

Ecommerce Know-How: Bot Herding

Bot herding or siloing can be divided into t…

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Ecommerce Know-How: Bot Herding, An SEO Internal Linking Tactic