E-Commerce Blog

Target.com is well known in the world of web accessibility. It was sued in 2006 by the National Federation of the Blind, Bruce F. Sexton, Jr., and the National Federation of the Blind of California because its website was not accessible to visually impaired shoppers. The lawsuit was ultimately settled in 2009, and Target Corporation was required to make its website accessible to the blind.

How Target.com Fares Today

In February 2010, the National Federation of the Blind granted Target.com “Nonvisual Accessibility Web Certification,” asserting that the website is now equally usable by blind and sighted users, making Target.com one of the first major retail websites to implement web accessibility.

Since implementing the required rev…

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Accessibility Review: Target.com

Many online stores have begun to include product videos aimed at boosting sales conversions, reducing shopping cart abandonment, and lowering product return rates. But not all product-related videos are the same, and merchants will need some metrics for measuring which videos are, in fact, helping the bottom line.

The video trend makes good sense for ecommerce in general. For example, there is plenty of evidence that potential Internet shoppers are comfortable with online video. Late last year, comScore found that nearly 85 percent of U.S. Internet users had watched online video. But marketers should be careful. Product videos that do nothing more than show still images set to music could be off-putting.

What’s more, Forrester Researc…

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The Metrics for Video Success

How we shop is going to change. Digital interactivity at brick-and-mortar stores, mobile commerce, and rich Internet applications are going to have a significant effect on shopper experience in the next few years.

But most of the changes to the shopper experience will not come overnight. Shoppers won’t wake up one morning to find that the local Walmart has added intelligent shopping carts that track purchases and offer extended warranties or find augmented reality-capable kiosks (a technology that Intel CEO Paul Otelli demonstrated at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month) located throughout the store.

Rather, the change to the shopper experience, both in physical stores and online, will be evolutionary in nature as retailer…

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Four Strategies to Improve Shopper Experience

Practical eCommerce will continue its ongoing webinar series today with “How to Improve the Online Customer Experience.” The webinar will last an hour. It’s free, and it starts at 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time, Noon Pacific Time. Attendees must register in advance, but the registration process is brief and easy. Practical eCommerce’s Armando Roggio will moderate the webinar.

Stategies for Customer Reviews

There are many ways for merchants to make the shopping process easier and more enjoyable for their customers. One of those ways is with the use of customer reviews. We’ll address the right and wrong methods for using customer reviews, and to help with that we’ll be joined by Joshua Greenough with PowerReviews.

Includes On-site Search, Im…

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Webinar to Focus on Customer Reviews, Social Media

Split testing is a conversion-tracking method that separates your message into two or more variations to see which gets the best response. Different visitors see different versions of the message and the results are tracked to determine the best return.

We wanted to learn more about conducting split tests (also known as A/B tests), and so we corresponded with Paras Chopra, founder of Wingify, a company that produces Visual Website Optimizer, a split-testing tool for ecommerce merchants and other web operators.

Chopra cited the example of a holiday A/B test conducted recently by MedaliaArt, an online art gallery specializing in Caribbean and Latin America art. “MedaliaArt put up a holiday sale where they offered 5 to 55 percent discou…

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Split Testing Can Increase Conversion Rates