E-Commerce

A recent survey by BIGresearch shows that more and more consumers are doing their own product/shopping research online prior to making purchases. The survey revealed that 89.4 percent of consumers regularly or occasionally research products online prior to buying them in a store. Among the findings by individual product category are the following: 41.1 percent said they’re most likely to research electronic items; 19.8 percent appliances; 19.7 percent medicines/vitamins; and 16.1 percent home improvement items. For more information, go to www.bigresearch.com .

For this edition, I perused several catalog Web sites to see how good a job catalogers do in explaining who they are. Naturally, many consumers want to get a good idea of who they’re doing business with. If your company comes off in something of a faceless manner, some might be put off. On the other hand, consumers take heart in knowing where you’re located, what you’re all about, where you’re coming from and in some cases, who founded you. It’s a fairly easy thing to do, especially on the Web. By in large, I found that most handle their “about this company”

If you operate a dedicated catalog/multichannel business nowhere near the size of Staples, you may think you have little in common with the office products giant. But in catalogs and on the Web, the playing field gets leveled and best practices can be common among many players. During a session at the recent NEMOA conference in Cambridge, Mass., Staples Director of Usability Colin Hynes laid out several ways in which Staples brings customer centricity to its catalog, store and Web initiatives. 1. Research user goals by doing in-store studies, seeing if customers use their catalogs in stores. 2. Design those goals through content maps and page

It’s getting tougher for marketers to achieve acceptable conversion rates and ROI, according to the e-tailing group’s annual merchant benchmarking survey, released April 3. The survey of 167 merchants shows that current conversion rates average in the 2 percent to 3 percent range, but vary from 1 percent to 5 percent depending on category and site evolution. Among the responses garnering the most tallies among those surveyed are the following. *23 percent of respondents employ three to five full-time employees on their e-commerce programs, although the fourth-leading vote-getter was 41 or more employees, cited by 12 percent of respondents *48 percent of respondents have staff spend

Test the following: 1. the title tag 2. the headline (H1) tag 3. the placement of the body copy in the HTML 4. the words in the body copy 5. your keyword prominence 6. the keyword density 7. your anchor text or internal links to that page 8. your anchor text or inbound links to that page from sites that you have influence over 9. the URL structure, including occurrences of keywords in the URL, number of directories om the URL and complexity of the URL (i.e., number of parameters in the query string) Then measure the following: 1. traffic to the page being tested 2. traffic to the site overall 3. backlinks to the page being

Catalogers and other search advertisers are justly concerned about click fraud. Click fraud is when a person (or computer) imitates a legitimate user clicking on a pay-per-click ad, without actual interest in the ad’s target. Like Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography — “I know it when I see it” — click fraud escapes precise definition. To know when a click is fraudulent, one needs to know the clicker’s internal motivation for clicking or be able to prove the clicker was an automated ’bot. Most experts agree that few individual clicks are “good” or “bad.” Instead, investigators assign quality scores that indicate the probability

Before you work out an upsell pitch, resolve the original reason for the customer’s call. If possible, use this original impetus or the specifics of your resolution to craft your customized approach. Find out if customers would rather place their orders online. Then the rep will need to get them to clickthrough to the right links. (Or, would customers rather the rep take care of that for them?) Also decide which screens you want customers to see while reps are handling the processing end. Your reps should have experience viewing different browsers’ characteristics and should know what the different browser screens and screen sizes

* This article is very image-heavy. For optimized Web viewing and readability, the images do not appear here. To see the print version, plus images, click on “Refine Your Multichannel Message” PDF under Related Content in the upper-right corner of this page. You must have Adobe Reader 6.0 or above to view this document. As the online channel has settled into the mainstream in recent years, multichannel integration has become more crucial for catalogers. Still, there are plenty of marketers out there who neglect, or simply fail, to maintain one voice and a cohesive visual treatment across the three key channels: catalog, Web

Multichannel Brand Management: Refine Your Message

As you can see, the contents in this month’s issue are quite operations-heavy. We’re always trying to balance our coverage, and with a more general focus for our big double-issue next month, as well as a broadly focused June issue, we’ll turn to technology-related issues in July. Perhaps the most interesting thing we found in putting this month’s issue together was that, although there typically aren’t a lot of drastic changes in the whole area of catalog/multichannel operations, fulfillment and management, there are nevertheless noteworthy changes taking place. For instance, take a look at consultant Liz Kislik’s feature on necessary changes in catalog order takers’ approach