E-Commerce

Problem: Woodland Hills Wine Co., a multichannel seller of vintage wines and spirits, lacked a sophisticated e-commerce site to complement its retail store. Solution: Redesigned and relaunched its "antique" website. Results: In the first six months of business following the site's relaunch, online transactions increased 11.4 percent. In the first half of 2009, online visits were up 39.8 percent, with conversion rates 1.5 percent greater than the same time last year.

There are two things that almost every marketer doing business online is obsessed with these days: social media and conversion. And that's not in reference to social media's conversion/return on investment, because really, why be obsessed with something that's typically negative or flat in terms of contribution? So in reality, the obsession should be all about website conversion, compensation and measuring what matters. Here are six surefire tips to help you measure site conversion:

Today's teens have been inundated from their earliest recollections with advertising, be it on TV, online, in their favorite video games and movies, and the list goes on. To effectively sell to this generation of consumers, Under Armour studies what makes it tick. What are teens thinking about? How do they behave? What motivates them to purchase?

Pure-play websites crush classic direct marketers when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). Most produce 50 percent or more of their total sales this way, garnering millions in revenue. Many direct marketers view their sites as cash registers where shoppers go to check out. They've either ignored or only paid lip service to SEO.

Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group, Inc. is a Fortune 1000 company headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Driven by the mission “Value Every Time”, the company, through its brands Dollar Rent A Car and Thrifty Car Rental, serves value-conscious travelers in over 70 countries.

Dollar and Thrifty have over 700 corporate and franchised locations in the United States and Canada, and operate in virtually all of the top U.S. and Canadian airport markets. The Company’s 6,800 employees are located mainly in North America, but global service capabilities exist through an expanding international franchise network.

According to a report by the Aberdeen Group entitled “The Performance of Web Applications — Customers Are Won or Lost in One Second,” one second delays in response time significantly impact top business goals.

One second delays can reduce:

• page views by 11%
• conversions by 7%
• customer satisfaction by 16%
Aberdeen Analyst Bojan Simic and Gomez CTO Imad Mouline discuss:
• Top strategic actions companies are taking to advance web application performance.
• Best practices for ensuring your most important web pages and transactions perform properly.

The housing market and employment levels are among the biggest factors economists monitor to get a fix on the state of the economy. Overall retail sales is the other major bellwether, particularly as we head into the fall and holiday seasons. At this point, it's tough to get overly optimistic about an economic recovery for 2009. But amidst the negatives, there are some positive signs on the horizon worth tracking and reacting to.

Problem: DollarDays International, a B-to-B online wholesale distributor and closeout company for small businesses, sought a monitoring service to ensure its web store was functioning 24/7. Solution: Hired a website monitoring service to test its site. Results: Averaging 1,000 new visitors to its website each day, DollarDays estimates it saves thousands in potentially lost revenue by being "open" 24/7.

In part 1 of this two-part series from our August issue, we classified e-commerce systems into four essential groups: bundled suites, enterprise leaders, niche players and experienced multichannel partners.

Ensuring great experiences for today’s rich and complex web applications requires a new approach to performance testing. Application owners, e-business and marketing managers, QA & IT operations all need to ensure mission & business critical transactions perform flawlessly.