Until recently, selecting the optimum e-commerce platform for a multichannel business was a race to keep up with evolving technologies. The applications morphed at such blinding speed that the needs and requirements you defined when selecting your system easily could be obsolete by the time that system was up and running. Today's technology isn't evolving any slower — if anything, the pace of e-commerce change continues to accelerate. But the main differentiators among systems these days are less in the features and functions they support than the services they offer, flexibility, scalability, technical support, and the vendors' approach to charging for licenses or services. In short, your biggest challenge in selecting a platform may be determining which provider will be your best business partner going forward.
E-Commerce
Coolibar, an e-retailer that sells items such as sunscreen and sun-protective swimwear, used a service to help it see how customers were navigating and experiencing its retail site. It quickly realized it needed to speed up its site response time. Read More...
Traditional load-testing methodologies can measure the strength of an enterprise's internal infrastructure. However, if external, third-party components aren't delivering snappy Web application performance, customers likely won't care whose fault it is - they'll just go away. Load testing 2.0 is a way to assess your Web app's performance from the customer's point of view.
Having come a long way from its modest beginning as a chain of floral shops in metropolitan New York, 1-800-Flowers.com usually has set trends, not followed them.
Savvy shoppers don’t waste time clicking through multilevel navigational menus. Studies show they head right to the internal site search box and type item numbers, brand names or keywords to find specific items. If they don’t know what they want, then they may browse your navigation. But when they know exactly what to look for (or at least think they know), that box is your salesman.
The Internet provides marketers with the ability and responsibility to know their customers in much greater depth than does the retail model. The Web model also enables marketers to exploit that knowledge far more effectively.
That headline seems dated, doesn’t it? Like it’s 1999 or something? Actually, I very much have 2009 in mind. Through the eyes of merchandise sellers of all kinds — retail, catalog, dot-com, B-to-B, brand marketers, all of the above — using the Internet for e-commerce continues to be a work in progress even a dozen-plus years after it hit the mainstream.
Problem: SeaBear, a direct seller of smoked salmon and other specialty seafood, sought to upgrade its outdated e-commerce site to jump-start online sales. Solution: Completely redesigned its site. Results: Web-placed sales have nearly doubled compared to the old site, representing 40 percent of the company’s overall sales.
This year's economic retreat actually stands to help Gaiam, a product and information services company with a heavy emphasis on sustainability, position itself for greater growth in the near future.
Think you can't make any real money marketing on social networks? Think they're really only branding tools? Think again.
