According to industry-leading email service provider e-Dialog, more than 30% of emails are opened on a mobile device. Consequently, if your email content is not fully functional on smaller screens, the weekly newsletter you send out to customers about new catalog offerings, popular sold-out products that are back in stock, and store promotions could result in low response rates, and keep you from capitalizing on wide-open conversion opportunities.

As handheld device usage continues to rapidly penetrate the email space, businesses must begin to extend their mobile optimization initiatives beyond website pages. Email optimization is an integral piece of a successful customer acquisition and retention program.

Source: Responsive Email Design: What Are You Waiting For?

One of the big announcements at Google I/O was that YouTube will get a “Buy Now” button. Business users will be able to add the “Buy Now” button to their YouTube channel, directing users to the product featured in the video. It comes in the form of a channel gadget, and will allow users to go from browsing how-to videos or featured products to figure out what retailers carry this product, stock availability, pricing, and make a direct purchase. Since YouTube isn’t used for just entertainment, this will allow e-commerce sites to capitalize on this new important feature when showcasing products in their YouTube channel.

Source: Businesses Should Make Sure They Didn’t Miss These Google Announcements

The following are tips on how to create the perfect checkout process. Some you will feel are quite obvious while others not so much. Of course, the goal is to reduce cart abandonment as much as possible.

• Progress Indicator – put a progress indicator on top of the page letting the customer know how far along they are in the checkout process or how many steps remain.
• Calls to Action – make sure you have calls to action so a customer can easily find what they are looking for. For example, you might highlight the login box.
• Back Links – allow the customer to back up if they desire. You don’t want to trap them making them feel frustrated when they need to go back and review something.
• Dedicated Toll-Free Hotline – feature a way for customers to contact you. If something isn’t working on the web, allow them to call you. Many customers prefer to place orders over the phone, so don’t hinder that order gateway.
• Cross-Selling – be sure to cross sell and up sell items, especially when adding another item to the cart leads to free shipping.
• Save the Cart – allow customers to save their cart for later. Perhaps just set a cookie so that when the customer returns to the site, their cart still exists so they can finish their order at a later time.
• Diversify Payment Options – give the customer choices, you’ll definitely increase conversion and happiness that way. Not all customers want to be restricted by credit cards. But if you do offer credit cards, make sure it’s at least the big four. Offer PayPal, BillMeLater, Gift Cards, perhaps even Google Checkout. The easier it is for a consumer to make a purchase the more sales you can achieve.
• Security – show security badges and make the customer feel like their information is protected with your site.
• Allow Changes – allow customers to edit their cart, whether it’s changing quantity, removing an item, changing defining attributes such as size and color, etc.
• Thumbnails – carry the thumbnails for items throughout the checkout process. Customers love to see what they are buying easily.

The Do’s and Don’ts of the checkout process:

• Don’t force customers to register – allow guest checkout. Some customers don’t want to take the time to create an account for various reasons.
• Don’t hide shipping costs – display shipping costs up front, especially when you are offering free shipping. Being up front with the customer won’t frustrate them and increases the likelihood of them returning to your site to buy again.
• Don’t offer coupon codes unnecessarily – displaying a coupon code box all the time will make customers leave your site to go find a coupon code. You want your customers to feel like winners, and if they leave the site and can’t find a coupon code, well, they might feel like losers and lose the motivation to complete their purchase.
• Do preach it with customer testimonials – customer love reviews, and so do they love testimonials. It helps customers feel good about their decision to make the purchase for that item and on your site.
• Do offer price guarantees – offer price guarantees. If your price changes to a lower price a few days later, honor that if the customer calls to make them happy. If you can, match your competitors so you can get the sale and try to create an advocate for your site.
• Do prevent errors – the most frustrating thing a customer can experience is the inability to make a purchase. Make sure your site is error-free. One amazing tool to do this is IBM Tealeaf. It’s basically a DVR for your website! To learn more, please contact us as you can greatly increase your revenue by capturing what would have been lost sales.
• Do be up front about stock availability – make sure you tell the customer if it’s in stock or not. You don’t want them wondering where my package is. If you don’t display stock status, customers will be hesitant to even make the purchase.
• Do reassure customers – help make sure the customer is making the right decision for their purchase. Display warranty information upfront or anything else that makes this a great sale.
• Do follow up – if an abandon cart happens and you captured that customers’ email address, follow up with them. Send them an email. Perhaps even make them an offer if they make a purchase within such and such time period they can save 10% off their order.
• Do save the cart – again, to reiterate this, allow the cart to be saved. For instance, if a customer is shopping and her browser crashes, you don’t want her to lose everything she had in her cart. You want her to easily return, see all her items where she left off, and complete her purchase.

Source: How the Perfect Checkout Page Can Deter Cart Abandonment

As repeat business is the core to most retailers’ success, it’s the total brand experience that determines whether a shopper will return to your store. And the number one factor in building satisfaction, trust, and loyalty to become a repeat buyer is the post-purchase brand experience.

IBM surveyed 1,200 men and woman between the ages of 13 and 60+, which is a subset of their Institute of Business Value study of 26,000 global consumers, asking what influences a shopper to be or not to be a brand advocate. The answers confirmed it is what happens in the post-purchase phase that has the highest influence. 74% of these respondents said that the retailer’s ability to deliver a positive post-purchase experience determines whether they will recommend this retailer to others. 86% of teens (ages 13 – 19) said this factor is the most important in making them brand advocates. Again, when asked if the pre-purchase, purchase, or post-purchase phase had the greatest impact on brand advocacy, post-purchase was ranked having a 28% higher impact than the pre-purchase phase. Along these lines, the post-purchase phase received 46% of votes as damaging the relationship with the retailer if a poor experience was had vs. only 16% in the pre-purchase phase.

Even if a poor pre-purchase experience was had, if the post-purchase experience was positive, shoppers are 52% likely to overcome the poor pre-purchase experience. 65% to 35% also favor the post-purchase experience over the pre-purchase experience in forming a lasting impression of the retailer. Therefore, what is learned that in order for a retailer to get repeat customers, the retailer needs to ensure that the shopping experience is good consistent seamless experience from start to finish… and it’s what happens at the end of the process that will leave an everlasting impression.

How do retailers achieve this then? Well, that’s what Smarter Commerce for Retail is all about. It allows retailers to seamlessly integrate across all selling channels and inventory sources, back-end order orchestration to execute intelligent sourcing, from fulfillment to tracking, and reporting to address today’s empowered consumer. Smarter Commerce enables the retailers to deliver this consistent brand experience to create brand advocates with their consumers.

Source: IBM Smarter Commerce Blog: Looking For Love in All The Wrong Places

Feature Pack 6

IBM has released Feature Pack 6 (FEP6) for WebSphere Commerce version 7. The new features include dynamic merchandising, starter store enhancements, and enhancements to business user tools, the Data Load utility, WebSphere Commerce Search, and store preview. These will enable merchandisers to deliver improved customer site experience with:

• Improved search rules to ensure the most relevant search results are returned to the shopper.
• A greater ability to better target shoppers with relevant dynamic product recommendations based on their current in-session choices along with historical shopping data.
• An enhanced store preview capability.
• User-defined folder support to simplify management of assets, promotions, and attributes.

Here are the specific enhanced features:

Dynamic Merchandising

• Capability to recommend products that are based on the navigation decisions of a shopper.
• “Use in merchandising” property allows merchandisers to assign attribute dictionary attributes as merchandising attributes. In turn, they can be used in the Marketing tool to create activities that recommend catalog entries that contain these specific attributes.
• Recommendation rules can produce more relevant results with the use of WebSphere Commerce search.
• Attribute dictionary is more utilized with WebSphere Commerce search. E.g. fine tuning search results with rules associated with attributes.

Business User Tools Enhancements

• Create an image map to define multiple click actions for image content.
• Creating and managing folders in Management Center to organize e-Marketing Spots, activities, content, customer segments, and promotions.
• Display an e-Marketing Spot title to customers that view the e-Marketing Spot. This title can be used to identify the advertising or promotion in an e-Marketing Spot to customers.
• Return information to an e-Marketing Spot to change storefront or e-Marketing Spot behavior. By returning information to an e-Marketing Spot, such as a style sheet or JSP, you can change what displays on your storefront, or how this content displays.
• Ability to create and manage folders to organize attributes in the attribute dictionary.
• In an extended site store, you can set store-specific catalog entry descriptions for catalog entries that are inherited by your extended site store. Setting store-specific descriptions overrides the catalog asset store descriptions for these catalog entries.
• Catalog Upload now supports XML.
• Ability to define product-specific swatch images so that shoppers can see the actual patterns and textures of products on the storefront. This overrides generic swatches from images defined in the attribute dictionary.
• Tealeaf is now integrated into the tooling.

Management Center (CMC) Store Preview Enhancements

• When you are previewing your store, you can display Create and Edit links that are embedded in store preview pages for certain business objects. These links open Management Center directly to the properties view for the business object, saving you time.
• Open store preview directly to the page that you are working on in Management Center. You no longer need to navigate to the page from the home page.
• Ability to generate a preview URL to share with those not in CMC and use on different browsers and devices.

Data Load Enhancements

• Ability to run a file difference preprocess for routine data loads to improve the Data Load utility performance for loading these files.
• Supports XML. Previously, it only supported CSV.
• The new attribute folders relationship between attributes are supported in loads.

WebSphere Commerce Search Enhancements

• Search rules can be configured to produce more relevant search results. For
  example, by promoting or demoting products in search results.
• Preview enhancements are supported in WebSphere Commerce search.
• An optional inventory index can be set up and built to refresh independently of other search indexes, such as the product index. Search rules can be created to demote products that are out-of-stock, or conversely, to promote overstock
  products.

Aurora Starter Store Enhancements

• Allows customers to subscribe to e-Marketing Spot feeds for product
  recommendations.
• While in preview mode, certain store pages display embedded Edit links that open business objects for editing in Management Center, saving time for business users.
• Tealeaf User Interface Capture API is embedded.
• Improved performance for the mini shopping cart reducing calls to the server while shoppers browse.
• Dojo upgraded to version 1.8. One large benefit of this is its support for IE9.
• Hebrew translation available.
• Tablet-tolerant making it fully functional on tablet devices supporting such typical tablet features as pinch-to-zoom and orientation switch.

Mobile Store Integration Enhancements

• Aurora starter store is optimized for the mobile web.
• Reference example provided for integration with IBM Worklight.
• Mobile starter store assets are provided to help reduce the time that is required to complete customization projects.

Fix Pack 7

Lastly, Fix Pack 7 (FP7, WCS 7.0.0.7) has been released which supports Rational Application Developer (RAD) version 8.0.4.2 iFix 1 (or a higher version 8.0 fix pack) and support for priority configuration of the refund method.

For additional referencing:
IBM WebSphere Commerce Highlights of Version 7 Feature Pack 6
IBM WebSphere Commerce V7.0 Feature Pack 6.0 increases core competitiveness and differentiation through relevant merchandising and accelerated business operations

Part numbers for download from Passport Advantage:

• IBM WebSphere Commerce V7.0 – Feature Pack 6.0 - part number CIIP9ML
• IBM WebSphere Commerce V7.0 – Feature Pack 6.0 Starter Store Companion Assets – part number CIK45EN
• Fix Pack 7 (7.0.0.7) is available for download from here
• IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software for WebSphere Commerce – V8.0.4 (eAssembly CRM4YML)

Although loyalty programs are primarily associated with the hospitality industry and brick-and-mortar stores, Forbes reports that there has been a sudden uptick of these programs in the online retail space in the past year. Merchants now invest millions to increase online shopper frequency and boost revenue.

What works? What doesn’t?

• Copy-cat commodity-based initiatives rarely leave a lasting impression. Create incentives that are as unique as your brand, to make customers feel special and engaged. Send your top customers on a weekend getaway at a resort, or offer them tickets to a sporting event. Rewards in the form of experiences are personalized, and not easily duplicated by competitors.
• Loyalty membership tiers serve as a consumer psychology tactic that will motivate shoppers to spend their way up to the next tier.
• Convenience services are a customer magnet, particularly when packaged as a VIP offering. If peer businesses offer free ground shipping, offer discount or free expedited shipping to set yourself apart.
• Buy-one-get-one type rewards may sometimes be perceived as cheap production, inferior quality, or excess out-of-season inventory, to the detriment of your brand image. If you choose to offer a free item, make it a customized or exclusive product that your valuable customers will not interpret as dispensable to your business.
• Reward non-purchase interactions that occur on mobile apps, social networks and review sites. When your customers create a buzz around your products, they serve as brand advocates, and most importantly, give you free advertising.
• Points should expire after a period of inactivity to encourage continuity.

A successful implementation ultimately depends on budget, manpower, growth forecast, and customer demographic, and what works for one business may not necessarily translate well for another. Nonetheless, effective programs share one thing in common: loyal customers are rewarded with royal treatment.

Source:  The 10% Strategy: Growing Your Business by Making Small Incremental Changes

It’s not enough to just collect followers. Eventually, they will get bored with you and either ignore your posts or just stop following you altogether. The goal is to keep them engaged and interested in your feed.

1) Follow relevant users. For instance, Zobrist follows a bunch of IBM Twitter accounts as its relevant to our business. However, we are not following random industries unrelated to ours.

2) Tweet content of interest to your followers. We’re in the E-Commerce industry. Therefore, most of our tweets relate to this industry. We are not tweeting unrelated national news.

3) Respond to your follows in a reasonable timeframe. Doing so shows you value your followers. Don’t be afraid to do it publicly as well in an @tweet. It will show other users how you are as a company and the value you place on your customers. But when necessary, feel free to direct message as well.

4) Tweet fun things. Share some fun facts or great ideas you may have. It can help get your followers discuss and retweet your posts.

5) Participate in #FollowFriday. Reward followers that participate with your brand often. This appreciation will gain you more followers and more interaction.

Source: Stop Collecting And Start Engaging With Your Twitter Followers

Original content is what Google loves, well, because users love it too. Google strives to produce relevant search results and does not want to serve up users variations of duplicate content. When duplicate content is detected, page rank will fall and credit will go to the original poster. But how does Google know who is the original author and who to give credit to? Following this, how do you protect your original content?

It is quite difficult for Googlebot to figure out who is the original author of the content its crawling. If Googlebot could crawl every site in the world simultaneously, then yes, this would be easy. But it’s not feasible to do so. Googlebot can only crawl a finite number of pages in a given time period. Therefore, it has to take a staggered approach yet crawl sites with higher PageRank more frequently.

What about those shady sites ripping off your content? Or the shady approach of changing the page’s timestamp to an earlier publish date than yours in order to spoof Googlebot into thinking the copier is the original author? Matt Cutts, head of the Google Webspam team, offers a few suggestions to help Google figure this out.

1) Tweet out your new content immediately. This will allow your followers to engage with it, retweet it, and allow Googlebot to find your content a lot quicker.

2) Integrate PubSubHubbub with your content. This protocol is to provide almost instant notifications of change updates in your content.

3) If you find your content copied, file a complaint with that site sending a DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) notice as well as alerting Google of the issue.

Source: How to Ensure That Google Knows Your Content is Original

Image optimization techniques can gain better site performance and SEO benefits . I am going to discuss several tips here.

• Naming of images

You should name your images differently and in plain english. When you have ecommerce site, its really easy that you have hundreds of images of products and its hard to rename all this images. But one should not keep those auto generated names. Naming images in such a way that it contains keywords and describes product could get you huge SEO benefits. It will help to rank page better on search engines.
Here are examples of good image names – 2013-NISSAN-ALTIMA-WHITE.jpg rather than DCMIMAGE1223.jpg and MEN-CANVAS-AUTHENTIC.jsp rather than ZSADR456.jpg.

• Utilizing Alt tags

Alt tags are text alternative for the browsers when they can’t render images. Putting descriptive text in your Alt tag can get SEO benefit and it will also give useful information to page viewer when image is not loaded.

Here is an example of HTML image tag : <img src=“MEN-CANVAS-AUTHENTIC.jpg” alt=“Men Canvas Authentic” />

You should utilize each and every alt tag of product images. Putting product model no or serial no in Alt tag can help too.

• Using multiple images for product

Providing multiple views of product means providing more information to the shoppers. Going back to our 2013 Nissan Altima example, you want to show multiple features (interior, spoiler, headlights, etc…) of the car if you want to sell it.

As discussed earlier, proper image name and alt tag text is the perfect way to go. Here are some examples :

2013-Nissan-Altima-S-Red-Leather-Interior-Trim.jpg -> using the alt tag of: alt = “2013 Nissan Altima S Red Leather Interior Trim ”
2013-Nissan-Altima-S-Front-View-Light.jpg -> using the alt tag of: alt = “2013 Nissan Altima S Front View Light “

• Reducing file sizes of images

Large image size will increase page load time and its not good for ecommerce sites. Research shows that most consumers wait about 3 seconds to load the page. There are several tools available to achieve this. PicMonkey, Pixlr,FotoFlexer,Adobe photoshop and GIMP are few to name. One should reduce image size as much as possible while keeping image quality good enough. Creating JPEG images helps achieving small file size with quality image. Research shows that general rule of thumb for commerce images size is to be below 70kb.

• Thumbnails

e-commerce sites usually provide thumbnail images under category pages and it helps to quickly scan the products in that category. Too many of thumbnails can kill page performance too. One can use pagination to load only 10 or 20 products at a time or several sites loads more when user scroll the page.
Naming of images and alt text rules apply here. Thumbnail images should be named differently than main product images and shoube be kept small in the size. It might be ok to compromise quality little bit for thumbnails.

• Image sitemaps

Sometimes if images are loaded using javascript galleries or other animated way, google image sitemaps will help. Web crawlers can’t crawl images that are not called out in the webpage source code. So in order to let them know about these images, you must list their location in an image site map. Google has many guidelines for image publishing to help your website rank high on the search engine.    

• Decorative Images

Websites often use decorative images in form of background images, buttons or borders. Although they can help looking page nice, they can also add performance overhead to the page. One should try to get these effects using CSS is possible. If those are really needed, image size should be kept really small.

According to Experian CheetahMail, emails sent between 8 PM and 12 AM had greater conversion rate than any other time of the day.

Source: Experian CheetahMail, Q4 2012 Quarterly Benchmark Study, March 7, 2013

As you can see, 8pm-12am beat the next best performer by a significant margin. The next highest are emails sent between 12am-4am generating 22 cents per email, more than half less than 8pm-12pm. Last place are emails sent between 12pm-4pm, which is during the workday. Although there are peaks in ecommerce traffic during the lunch hour, perhaps consumers are not checking their personal emails at this time.

Personally, I’m more likely to open newsletter emails in the evening because that is where my free time is. In the morning, I will be rushing to get out of the house for work, but will still go through my email beforehand. However, I will skim over newsletters more quickly. During the workday, those newsletters are extremely likely to get a quick delete from me via Outlook or my cellphone.

Now, as you can see, senders are benefitting from sending emails during off hours, but they also benefit sending emails on off days.

Source: Experian CheetahMail, Q4 2012 Quarterly Benchmark Study, March 7, 2013

Saturdays are when people were in the most buying mood followed by Sunday.

Therefore, send your newsletters off hours and off days for the best returns!

Source: Want Better Email Revenue? Send Late at Night