E-Commerce

Despite the fact that most online retailers today understand that video increases the stickiness of their websites, improves their search engine rankings and helps close more deals, only a small number employ the best practices necessary to take full advantage of video's search engine optimization promise. 

Preholiday data from CFI Group indicates that 2010 marked the sixth straight year of internet retail sales growth in the United States. CFI Group uses the methodology of the American Customer Satisfaction Index to help retailers improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. It recently conducted a major survey of holiday shoppers, finding that 27 percent of consumers planned to spend 50 percent or more of their holiday shopping budgets online.

The top retail websites broke a traffic record in November with 179.5 million unique visitors, according to comScore's monthly Media Metrix report on top U.S. web properties. Amazon took the top spot in the retail category with 83.9 million unique visitors in November (up 4 percent from October).

comScore reported holiday season retail e-commerce spending for the first 49 days of the November — December 2010 holiday season. For the holiday season to date, $28.36 billion has been spent online, marking a 12 percent increase versus the corresponding days last year.

Monday, Dec. 13, known as “Green Monday” (the second Monday in December when online spending has historically tended to peak), reached $954 million in spending, representing a 12 percent increase versus last year, according to comScore.

Many of the gift guides we see each holiday season recommend fairly straightforward and practical gifts: exotic scarves for lady friends, kegerators for frat brothers and a designer paperweight for your workaholic parents.

For the holiday season-to-date, more than $17.5 billion has been spent online, marking a 12 percent increase versus the corresponding days last year. The most recent week saw four individual days eclipse $800 million in spending.

ForeSee Results' weekly benchmark of shopper satisfaction with online retailers during the holidays suggests that holiday shoppers are more satisfied with online prices this year than they were at the same time last year.

Members-only flash sales, structured around limited time and availability of merchandise, grew out of the recession and have continued to flourish over the past three years.

Francisco Bustos, president and CEO of international flower delivery company daFlores.com, discusses how he was able to improve his company's website performance around the world.