For a while now, Google has been recommending best practices for mobile SEO. Now, the time has come for Google to enforce those recommendations. That is, either adhere to them or be penalized.

One of the biggest pain points being addressed here is misconfigured redirects. For instance, a shopper may search Google on her mobile device and click on a link to go to a product detail page (PDP) on a retailer’s site. The retailer may serve up the desktop version of the PDP, which may not be a great experience for the mobile user, or redirect the shopper to the mobile homepage, which is not the destination the shopper wanted to go to. These “faulty redirects” will now be penalized, decreasing that site’s rankings for mobile searches, even falling out of the results altogether.

Instead of worrying about redirecting to a mobile site, Google recommends creating a Responsive Web Design (RWD) site. That way, you have one version of the code that works for all devices. The site will responsively adhere to the device screen size to create an optimal experience. Interested in making your site responsive? Contact us, we can help.

Another issue that will be penalized deals with smartphone only errors. Sometimes when a site serves content, it will serve it correctly on the desktop yet deliver an error page to the mobile user. Perhaps the site has a mobile friendly URL for the original desktop requested URL. Instead of serving a 404 error, it should automatically redirect the mobile device to the mobile version of that page. If no such smartphone friendly page exists, at least serve the desktop version. Don’t end up serving a 404 page that gets the shopper nowhere.

Lastly, Google will penalize sites that it may perceive to be cloaking the Googlebot. A site may hide content to mobile users to speed up the experience. To help out the Googlebot and to understand that any redirects occurring are due to improving the mobile experience, first set a “vary header” in the HTTP response. This “vary header” will indicate the user agent letting Google know this experience is for mobile devices which varies from the desktop experience. Second, add an alternate tag meta-tag that identifies the mobile version of the desktop page with the mobile URL. lastly, mobile versions of the pages should have a canonical tag identifying the desktop URL, thus completing the loop.

All these are quite important in keeping your site ranked high in Google for mobile searches. Without adhering to them, you will be penalized. So act now!

Source: Google cracks down on mobile laggards

We recently attending the Smarter Commerce Global Summit 2013 in Nashville, TN. During one of the opening sessions, we were shown three videos who were made finalists for a competition IBM created for this conference. It was in collaboration with MOFILM, the leading video and film contest community for aspiring filmmakers, to create short films 60 – 90 seconds long. Of the 50 films that were submitted, these three finalists made it.

The goal of the filmmakers were to show how sales and marketing strategies are only successful when delivered in the right context at the right time. After watching the three films, the audience was then encouraged to vote via social media for who the film they felt delivered this message best.

Check out the videos below. What’s your favorite?

Finalist 1:

Finalist 2:

Finalist 3:

What can IBM Smarter Commerce for a Smarter Planet do for you? Contact us and we can help!

Source: Smarter Commerce Film Festival: Lights, Camera, Action!

• Cookies was the winner.

Usually, when you think of facets, you think about how they are related directly to the products. Generally, categories do not come into account. However, now with FEP5 on WebSphere Commerce 7, you can determine which facets display on a per category basis. Not only that, you can create different facets per category.

For example, perhaps you have a category with various price range facets at high dollar amounts. Then, you might have another category that has lesser dollar amount items that you want different price range facets from the first category. With FEP5, you can now do this. Although there is no UI built into Management Center (CMC), you can do this directly to the database with SQL inserts.

The following example changes price ranges for the sample Meat category in the Aurora store.

1. Introduce a new Price searchable attribute
   insert into srchattr (srchattr_id, indexscope, indextype, identifier) values (1, ’0′, ‘CatalogEntry’, ‘_cat:OfferPrice_USD_meats’);
2. Define the ranges for it
   insert into srchattrprop (srchattr_id, propertyname, propertyvalue) values (1, ‘facet’, ‘price_USD:{* 7} 7;{7 11} 11;{11 15} 15;{15 *}’);
3. Add facet config data in the new FEP5 facet tables
   insert into facet (facet_id, srchattr_id, selection, keyword_search, storeent_id, max_display) values (1, 1, 1, 0, 0, -1); insert into facetdesc (facet_id, language_id, name, description) values (1, -1, ‘Price for the Meat category (USD)’, ‘Price facet for the Meat category’);
4. Disassociate the out of the box Price facet from the ‘Meat’ category
   insert into facetcatgrp (facetcatgrp_id, facet_id, sequence, storeent_id, catgroup_id, displayable) values (10001, -1002, 0.0, 10001, 10036, 0);
5. Assign the new Price facet to the ‘Meat’ category
   insert into facetcatgrp (facetcatgrp_id, facet_id, sequence, storeent_id, catgroup_id, displayable) values (1, 1, 0.0, 10001, 10036, 1);
6. Lastly, you’ll need to disassociate the new price facet to other categories
   insert into facetcatgrp (facetcatgrp_id, facet_id, sequence, storeent_id, catgroup_id, displayable) values (1, 1, 0.0, 10001, 0, 0);
   (The above insert is using catgroup_id=0 to represent the other categories)

Source: WebSphere Commerce Search Cookbook: Creating a New Price Range for a Specific Category

1. Social Media usage is still increasing, and expected to continue to increase through the next decade. Currently, 18% of the time spent on the Internet accounts for usage of social media.
2. It can be a gateway to new customers. There’s a billion people using social media. Think of the potential outreach.
3. Its ability to strengthen your relationships with existing customers. You can utilize social media in many types of communications between your customers, including customer service, acquiring customer feedback, and marketing new products and offerings.
4. SEO. Search engines love to spider Twitter, Facebook, and more. By posting relevant tweets/posts with links to your site offerings, it can increase your page rank and drive more traffic to your site.
5. Customer Service. Not only can you answer customer service issues directly on Twitter or Facebook, which allows you to show how great of service you have to other viewers, but you can monitor discussions about your company across posts. That way, you can address them as you find them and increase customer satisfaction with your company.
6. Search. A lot of users are now searching directly on Social Media sites bypassing Google and Bing. If you want to be relevant, you need to come up in these searches.
7. Targeted Marketing. With access to demographics in Facebook, you can target your advertisements to different groups.
8. Free advertising. It doesn’t cost you to make tweets and posts. Why not take advantage of it?
9. Eventually, e-commerce will seamlessly be integrated into these social sites allowing you to make direct purchases without leaving them. You might as well start building brand awareness until this happens.
10. Social media is becoming so prominent in our culture, you need to be on it and connecting with your customers. Ignoring it can cause devastating consequences to your business.

Source: 10 Reasons Why Social Media is Critical to Commercial Success

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