E-Commerce

The time is here for the online shopping onslaught — Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the whole run up to Christmas. The promotions have been prepared, the email campaigns set up, so just one questions remains: Is your website ready to handle the volume? The issues around website performance have never been as prominent in the news. So let's review the top tips for making sure your websites — and remember this is now across desktop, tablet and smartphone devices — are ready for showtime.

Ralph Lauren is making a bold statement on its homepage, but it's backing it up. In golden letters, the site reads "Legendary Customer Service." And, given its performance in Stella Monthly Benchmarks, that may be the case. The retailer topped the rankings for the first time, unseating J.Crew, which led all retailers for the past three months. J.Crew was still strong, ranking third, while L.L.Bean ranked second overall. Ralph Lauren was particularly strong in phone support, with an average total time to live agent under 30 seconds and 100 percent issue resolution. 

Cyber Monday is the event of the season for e-commerce brands. Coming off of the Black Friday rush, IBM's Smarter Commerce division reported that 2012 Cyber Monday was the largest online shopping day in history. With sales steadily increasing, the National Retail Federation has cited potential for this season, forecasting higher than the 10-year average holiday sales. Retailers should have their own checklist: All that's needed to meet the festive customer demand. Below find five tips to mastering the impending Cyber Monday chaos:

According to eMarketer, online retail holiday sales will increase 15 percent this holiday season, seeing a rise from $53.7 billion in 2012 to $61.8 billion in 2013. With statistics like this, it's easy to understand the immense pressure that retailers feel to drive increased revenues during this time of year. However, building and getting more marketing campaigns out the door isn't the answer. Instead, marketers need to take a customer-centric approach to their holiday strategy, leveraging the data they have about their customers to individualize the customer journey.

Overstock.com now offers 24-hour flash sales starting at 10 a.m. MST, seven days a week. To power these flash sales, Overstock.com is searching its website for the most popular products in such categories as furniture, area rugs, bedding and electronics, then discounting them for a limited time up to 50 percent. The Daily Deals page shows a running countdown so that consumers know how long the flash sale will last (unless the product sells out first), and provides a sneak peek of upcoming deals. 

Amazon.com has the best price on products in its assortment about 80 percent of the time. However, the new "Amazon Holiday Pricing Insights" analysis from pricing technology provider 360pi shows that Amazon does have weak spots, and that retailers can compete with the online giant, especially if they can beat Amazon on other nonprice purchase factors. For example, once Home Depot decided to be price competitive on Oct. 26, it was instantly and dynamically able to beat Amazon prices on power drills. 

With the holiday shopping season approaching, you can expect many shoppers to do last-minute online gift buying, require immediate deliveries, and, of course, there are all those pesky post-holiday returns and exchanges. Will your website be able to deal with this annual shopping frenzy? By putting a little effort in planning ahead of the frenzy and by following a few e-commerce pre-holiday tips highlighted below, you can ensure that your customer's experience is both positive and cheerful for the holiday buying season.

Like death and taxes, annual rate hikes from shipping carriers are a certainty. The only positive thing about them is that they occur after the holiday shopping season. This week, the other shoe dropped from the U.S. Postal Service as it announced rate hikes for Priority Mail and other shipping services. In September, the USPS asked for permission to raise market-dominant prices above the limit allowed (called an exigent request) as part of an emergency measure which it called necessary unless it received relief from Congress. On Wednesday, the Postal Service submitted rates for competitive products, which has no such limitation.

Shareable content, enhanced product images, live chat and improved search capabilities are among the key changes introduced Tuesday morning to the Toysrus.com and Babiesrus.com websites. The sites are said to have a fresh design and layout, revamped navigation, and new features to help everyone from deal seekers to last-minute shoppers easily discover savings and information about the company's offerings. In addition, the sites have introduced social shopping functionality, which allows visitors to organize their most-wanted items in shareable toy and baby boards, while also viewing the most popular and trending products on the sites.

Alibaba, China's largest e-commerce company, broke its one-day sales record by more than 80 percent as it heads toward an initial public offering that may be valued higher than Facebook. Taobao and Tmall, Alibaba's two main platforms, topped 35 billion yuan ($5.75 billion) in the 24-hour period, surpassing last year's sales of 19.1 billion yuan, the company said on its official Twitter account. Yesterday was China's Singles' Day, a local twist on Valentine's Day, and e-commerce firms marked the occasion by flooding the internet with promotions, fueling demand on China's biggest online shopping day.