E-Commerce

comScore, a leader in measuring the digital world, reported holiday season retail e-commerce spending for the first 30 days of the November-December 2012 holiday season. For the holiday season to date, $20.4 billion has been spent online, a 15 percent increase versus the corresponding days last year. The most recent week saw three individual days eclipse $1 billion in spending, led by Cyber Monday, which became the biggest online spending day on record at $1.46 billion.

Selling high-end items online can be challenging, as consumers want to get up close and personal with these products before shelling out a large amount of money. There aren't many purchases that a consumer will make that are bigger than a diamond engagement ring, exactly what Whiteflash specializes in. So the online retailer wisely decided it needs every tool at its disposal to help sell its high-priced merchandise. One tool that's made a dramatic difference in its business is live chat.

As we're in the throes of the holiday shopping season, chances are you've stumbled upon a pop-up shop while out and about looking for the perfect gift. From Toys"R"Us to PB Teen (an offshoot of Williams-Sonoma) to GameStop, merchants are increasingly turning to the temporary retail spaces as a means to extend their store footprint without the burden of long-term lease commitments. Not quite here today, gone tomorrow, but you get the idea.

If you have any sort of search engine optimization or pay-per-click program, chances are you've heard about the "new" Google Shopping. "New" is in quotes because it's not really new — it's just different. To improve the shopping experience on Google (translation: to help Google make more money), Google Product Search recently transitioned into a comparison shopping engine (think PriceGrabber or NexTag) based on product listing ads (PLAs) and will now be known as Google Shopping. Here are 14 things you should know about Google Shopping and how you can use it to improve your customer acquisition program:

The Sportsman's Guide has announced the launch of a new specialty website, TruckMonkey.com, featuring thousands of custom truck accessories and parts, all at discount prices. TruckMonkey.com is designed to allow consumers to shop by make, model and year and easily browse product that specifically fits their vehicle.

What's on the The Wall Street Journal's wish list this holiday season? A real e-commerce business. As a start, the Journal this week opened a shoppable holiday gift guide in the WSJ Select section of its site, where it plans to center future commerce initiatives from the paper. "The release of the gift guide is really the new beginning of a more concerted effort to develop additional revenue streams around commerce," said Alisa Bowen, the chief product officer at Wall Street Journal parent company Dow Jones.

The days of dial-up are long gone. Most modern internet users expect websites to load lickety-split. For online retailers, having a fast website could be the difference between success and failure. Research shows that most consumers expect a website to load in about three seconds. If a site takes much longer, it will begin to lose its audience. In fact, a one-second delay in load time would cost Amazon.com an estimated $1.6 billion annually. Check out the following infographic, created by SmartBear, for all the info on how a slow site could seriously affect a retailer's bottom line.

Millions of shoppers are going online this holiday season, hitting e-commerce sites harder than ever before. Merchants who want to live through the onslaught — and make a profit — should check their "to do" list twice for these six tips for surviving the holiday shopping season:

In-site search can significantly reduce site abandonment and turn visitors into paying customers. To truly stem the tide of consumers leaving their sites, online retailers need to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the role search can play in improving customer engagement and deincentivizing visitors from abandoning online shopping experiences. Here are four examples:

While most ecommerce sites advertised Cyber Monday deals on their homepages yesterday, including marketplace giants eBay and Amazon, Etsy's homepage was free of any holiday banners, much to the chagrin of its sellers who were counting on holiday shoppers to boost sales. Etsy had encouraged its sellers to tag items that offer promotions (items that included discounts or extra bonuses) with the tags "Black Friday Etsy" and "Cyber Monday Etsy." However, sellers felt Etsy did not do enough to promote those items over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, and an Etsy administrator said it would do better in the future.