Sellers Gear up for Cyber Monday

I found this interesting article on Yahoo! News, and thought you'd enjoy it.

Thanksgiving weekend may mark the traditional beginning of the retail
shopping season, but Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving, is fast
becoming one of the biggest online shopping days in the year.

In fact,
51.7 million, of the consumers who participated in the survey said they will use
Internet access at work to browse or buy gifts online this holiday season,
according to a Shop.org survey conducted by BIGresearch released on
Monday.

"On Cyber Monday, consumers set their sights on surfing for holiday gifts
and shopping online," Scott Silverman, executive director of Shop.org, said in
the report. "This year, online retailers will be capitalizing on the increased
traffic by offering special promotions and discounts."
The survey found that
51 percent of young adults 18 to 24 years old, and 49 percent those 25 to 34
years old will shop online during work hours. The survey also found that more
men, 42 percent, are more likely than women, 32 percent, to shop online while at
the office.

Retailers are preparing for higher sales the Monday after the Thanksgiving
weekend by offering extra incentives to encourage people to shop online. Forty
three percent of online retailers that participated in the survey plan to offer
special promotions and discounts on Monday. Deals will range from free shipping
to gifts with purchase to percentages off, according to the eHoliday Mood
Study.

Meanwhile, 89 percent of Web retailers that sell jewelry and luxury items
experienced "substantial" increases in sales, compared with consumer electronics
at 86 percent; food and gourmet items at 83 percent, and furniture and home dcor
at 80 percent.
The Shop.org/BizRate Research Holiday Online Mood Study,
conducted by BizRate Research, a division of Shopzilla was designed to gauge
consumer behavior and online retailers' success during the winter holiday
season. The poll of 1,891 online buyers who has made an online purchase within
the last twelve months, and 119 online retailers, all members of Shop.org, was
conducted between Sept. 23 and 26. The survey on consumers shopping at work was
conducted for Shop.org by BIGresearch from Nov. 2 and 9.

Tracking Online Store Success with Google Analytics

I am so excited! Google has just rebranded and released it's Urchin on Demand service as Google Analytics, for free! I've always been amazed by the level of detail that Urchin provides to a hard core statistics/ROI/SEO junkie, but many of my clients didn't want to spend the few hundred of dollars per month to have access to that kind of information. Now that it's free, I've been going through sites that I do SEO/SEM work for, and have started to collect data.

This couldn't have come at a better time. We're rapidly gearing up all of our sales/marketing efforts to take advantage of the selling season, and now I can tweak the results and delve deeply into the results to maximize conversion rates.

Every online stores job is to get people to the site, get people to add items tot he cart and get people to the cart. This typically looks like visitors>shoppers>customers, and the idea is to minimize the drop off at each stage. Google Analytics is one tool that will help us achieve this. I love this stuff!

Are you taking full advantage of your ecommerce initiatives? Is your online store performing as well as it should be? If not contact me today, there's not much time left to have phenomenal success this holiday season.

Selling Season is Upon Us.

You may have noticed that postings to Everything eCommerce have become pretty sporadic. The reason is simple, as I work to support our customers' sales efforts during this busy selling season, I have less time to update the website. Here's the good news though, I've been working on some pretty amazing sites, and making changes that have dramatically boosted their search engine rankings and conversion rates. I'll be ready to share all of these tips with you in January.

Until then, you can still take advantage of some of these techniques on your own site, by becoming one of my many customers. :D

Oh one final note, I've had to enable verification on comments because now that my site is ranked higher and higher for ecommerce, it's getting blasted by comment spam. Eventually I'll remove the spammy comments, but that's a task for another day.

Keep Improving your Site, and check back often for more on everything ecommerce.