eCommerce/eretail

SUMMARY: Shipping has become reliable enough to pinpoint the exact day when an order will arrive at a customer’s door. Letting customers take advantage of this feature might make your fulfillment a little more complicated, but it can also make your customers happier while reducing costs.

See how an online gourmet food retailer cut its call center and re-shipping costs by letting customers pick the exact day they wanted orders to arrive at their house. Now, 70% of orders are shipped through the new system. read the complete case study

SUMMARY: Adding a new tool to your ecommerce site or refining your homepage design can boost conversions. But sometimes you need so many small tweaks that full site overhaul is in order. How can you target the most important elements during a redesign?

Read how Office Depot developed a new site design that used updated tools and navigation to lift conversions 10% and reduced cart abandonment 18%. Includes samples of the data that drove the changes. read the complete article

SUMMARY: "US online retail sales will reach $229 billion in 2013." "The market will grow at a CAGR of 10% over the 5-year forecast period." view the complete research record

SUMMARY: Only seven years ago, revenue at Zappos.com was a paltry $1.6 million. This year, the online shoe retailer will reach $800 million, and they expect to top $1 billion in 2008. Discover the secrets for such phenomenal growth in our interview with their CEO.

Includes answers to why:
-> They offer no-cost return shipping
-> They tested and stopped using discounts and ecoupons
-> They walked away from drop-shipping even though it produced 25% of their revenue read the complete interview

SUMMARY: It’s summertime, when many marketers are taking a well deserved break, but ecommerce folks are hard at work, gearing up for what is projected to be an improved holiday season over 2008 with growth up approximately 9%, and significantly more in some sectors.

Here's a look at our top three tactics to improve website conversions, as rated by nearly 1,500 ecommerce marketers in April to help you prep for shoppers' return to the Internet. read the complete article

While this is just one consumer’s complaint, it’s something to think about. “Rob” recently was quoted in a Consumerist post about how Amazon ruined his wife’s surprise Christmas present by sending email recommendations relevant to the gift he purchased.

His wife saw a subject line referring to the surprise gift (a TomTom GPS) on the couple’s shared Google homepage enabled with an iGoogle email widget showing recent emails.

I suppose one could argue that it’s... read the complete blog post