E-Commerce Blog

At brick-and-mortar retailers, shoppers can stroll the isles, handle items, speak to clerks, and receive well placed merchandising messages. It’s not that easy for ecommerce merchants. They must find new and inventive ways to engage and convert customers; using well written and persuasive content, great photographs, related product links, and cross-selling tools. In this ever-advancing cycle of innovation, merchandising with video might be the next bottom-line booster.

“There is a clear trend that a lot more [online] retailers are incorporating video into their user experience…and we know that video works,” said Kevin Ertell, senior vice president of ecommerce at Borders Inc., Ann Arbor, Mich.

With the support of its 1,100 retail store…

Video Boosts Sales for Online Retailers

Ecommerce has been the great equalizer for retailers—a small book store in Iowa can oftentimes compete with Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Amazon for customers in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or the world, but equality isn’t always good. There are times when it’s good to have a competitive edge (inequality), and if you act fast this could be one of those times.

MarketingSherpa, one of the Internet’s most reputable marketing sites, has offered up seven tactics for boosting online banner-ad response rates.
MarketingSherpa’s findings are based on a survey the firm conducted. These findings generally show “how seven design elements have an impact on the effectiveness of online advertising,” especially as compared to response rates for …

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Seven Tactics to Boost Online Banner-ad Response Rates

Website traffic is up. Your pay-per-click (PPC) ads are receiving traffic, and you’re reaching your monthly budget. Sounds like your paid search campaign is working well, right?

Well, not necessarily. If you’re like most Internet advertisers, you’re not investing in a paid search campaign simply to get hits to your website. You want those visitors to convert, or take some desired action. To get your paid search visitors to convert, you must hold their hands, telling them what to click, where to go, and how to proceed. Optimizing your landing pages to boost conversions can be a manageable process, and here are five pointers to help.

Be Clear, Concise, and Precise

Get rid of any page element that distracts from the task at hand. Elimina…

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Landing Pages: Five Pointers to Boost Conversions

This job posting arrived in my email inbox yesterday: “Responsibilities: Create and maintain MySpace, Live Spaces, Facebook, Bebo, MOG, Twitter, Loopt, Wikipedia, and other profiles; gather content for social profiles; and report on the effectiveness of social site placement.” Pay is up to $24 an hour, and it’s a six-month to one-year contract.

This assignment, posted by online music-download retailer WDR Records, represents a new breed of on-demand skills for ecommerce ventures. Marketing through social media isn’t just about promotion anymore. It’s actually turning sales.

“With our WebsiteGrader.com tool, we marketed it through social networks and it brought us 450,000 leads,” says Marketing VP Mike Volpe at HubSpot, maker of a $3,5…

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Employing Social Media

With the U.S. dollar’s decline, buying American-based products online just got a lot cheaper for the rest of the world’s slew of Internet shoppers.

Internet users outside the U.S. now account for 80 percent of the world’s online population, with rapidly developing countries experiencing double-digit growth rates year-over-year, reports comScore Networks Europe. Right now, those international shoppers are getting a virtual 11 to 94 percent off American-bought products, just because their currencies are worth that much more.

Enter the new age of international shopping. In South Korea, 99 percent of those with Internet access have used it to shop, followed by the U.K., Germany and Japan at 97 percent, according to the latest Nielsen Globa…

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Decline In Dollar Creates Opportunities For U. S. Merchants