E-Commerce

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.

Holiday shoppers turned Cyber Monday into the biggest spending day ever with online sales growing 30.3 percent over the same period last year, according to cloud-based analytics findings by IBM. With an increase in online sales across multiple channels, the digital consumer took center stage. Retailers, marketing departments and chief marketing officers delivered a consistent customer experience across multiple channels from mobile devices, to online and to the show floor leading to the record shopping day.

Despite record levels of online spending over the Black Friday weekend, savvy shoppers still have plenty of appetite for one-day-only deals that retailers have lined up for Cyber Monday, as 129.2 million shoppers say they'll head to retailers’ websites on Cyber Monday. According to a survey conducted for Shop.org by BIGinsight, 129.2 million Americans plan to shop on Cyber Monday this year, up from the 122.8 million who shopped last year, and the 106.9 million who shopped on Cyber Monday in 2010. Eager to meet consumers’ demands, 85 percent of retailers will have a special promotion for Cyber Monday.

Some industry insiders believe Cyber Monday may have lost its oomph. According to Forbes, smart retailers this year noticed that the days before Cyber Monday were active shopping days and as a result ran pre-Cyber Monday sales, pre-Black Friday sales and Thanksgiving Day sales. The strategy worked. Black Friday weekend retail sales came in at $59.1 billion. But will these purchases cannibalize Cyber Monday sales? 

According to an IBM Benchmark report, mobile had a significant impact in lifting online sales on Thanksgiving by 17.4 percent over 2011. Here are some more key points from the report: