Practical eCommerce Podcasts

The process of testing different variations on a website can greatly enhance its conversions and performance. A leading A/B split testing platform is Optimizely. Its co-founder and CEO, Dan Siroker, spoke with Practical eCommerce's Kerry Murdock.

Ecommerce site search — including Google's announcement that it is dropping its Commerce Search platform — is our topic today. Dr. Shaun Ryan, CEO of SLI Systems, a leading site search provider, is our guest. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce's Kerry Murdock.

An ecommerce merchant deals with lots of data. There's revenue, profit, customers, traffic, order values, Likes, followers . . . lots of data. One company that helps merchants sort through this data and make decisions is SumAll. Its CEO and co-founder, Dane Atkinson, speaks with Practical Ecommerce's Kerry Murdock.

Retailers increasingly use data to personalize an online shopping experience. Geo location, shopping and browsing history, weather — all can impact how products are presented to online shoppers. Among the leaders in personalization technology is Monetate. Its co-founder and CEO, David Brussin, speaks with Practical eCommerce's Kerry Murdock.

Consistent publishing takes discipline and time. One way to address time is to remain at least one post ahead. If you publish weekly, make sure next week’s post is written before you publish this week’s. This is more difficult if your posts draw on current news, but this is a good reason to have a variety of post types.

Most markets have industry specific media sites that publish relevant articles. Invest in targeted banner or content ads on those sites to reach your target market without guessing at keywords. Your prospects are reading those sites. Make sure you have a presence.

Transactional emails enjoy better open rates than other emails, in part, because customers are anticipating them and want to ensure that the order is moving along as expected. The email’s subject should clearly state what action a customer took to receive this email and who the email is from.

When you upload your data feed to Google, you can tag items with labels that enable you to fine-tune your campaigns within AdWords. A simple use of labels would be marking your high-margin products, so that you can bid more aggressively on those items.

To help affiliates with contextual links and product-focused sites, provide them with a product data feed. Characteristics can include product name, landing page, price, image and source URL. If you use shopping comparison sites, you likely have a data feed that you could adapt to affiliate network needs.

A good marketing plan should assume that some tactics will change during the course of execution and accommodate those likely changes. This does not mean that the planner should seek to figure out possible changes in advance or be unwilling to commit to some tactics. It suggests, instead, having some margin or room in the plan for change.

Post quality content and promote your posts to engage with fans. Send the latest news, exclusive content, and promotions to fans at least twice a week, or more often if possible. However, don't burn your fans out by posting too often, such as multiple times per day. "Less is more" is a good principle to follow when posting to Facebook.

If you want your fans to influence a broader set of their friends, you should provide them with high-quality content — videos and photos work well for this — which can be appreciated by most users. This will considerably increase the share of your fan's friends who will view and engage with your content.

It is not a good practice to offer discounts or rewards to encourage customers to write product reviews, but you can reward reviewers with prestige. People like knowing that their opinions matter. People also like being recognized by peers. Appeal to both of these “likes” by giving reviewers expert status and notoriety on site, in social media, and in email campaigns.

If five pages on your site are optimized for a juicy keyword phrase, each page is competing with the others for dominance for that phrase. In a well-designed site each page has a unique purpose. Because each page has a unique purpose it will also have a unique ability to rank for specific keyword phrases.

Making reviews an important part of every product category page and every product detail page on a retail site lets shoppers read honest peer opinions about the products available for sale and are the first step toward encouraging additional reviews. Shoppers who are persuaded to buy an item because of reading a review may be more likely to review that item themselves.