Web Design

Wal-Mart, in its latest bid to compete with nemesis Amazon.com, is rebuilding its website to further personalize the online shopping experience of each customer. Wal-Mart is rolling out a feature that will enable its website to show shoppers more products that they may like, based on previous purchase data. It will also customize Wal-Mart's homepage for each shopper based on the customer's location, local weather, and their search and purchase history. So if a new mom just bought a stroller or crib on Walmart.com, the revamped website might recommend diapers and car seats, too. 

When informed shortly before the all-important holiday season that its web optimization service was no longer being offered, Clarks founds itself in a position where it needed to quickly find a replacement to continue to maintain service levels and get it through its busiest time of the year. Already having an existing relationship with Yottaa, a mobile and web performance optimization company, Clarks opted to implement its Engagement Cloud solution.

Perhaps you've seen images with a special "Shop Now" button on some of the blogs and websites you visit. Affiliate marketing is alive and well, and Amazon.com has launched a new feature to make it easier for its affiliate publishers to advertise its products to their readers and visitors. With Amazon Publisher Studio, affiliate publishers insert a small piece of code on their website. Once they've added the code, they can easily create links to any product on Amazon in seconds — without having to visit and log into Amazon Associates Central to get the link.

Imagine letting your customers see how your clothing items fit before they make a purchase, possibly boosting conversion rates while lowering returns due to poor fit. That's the idea behind PhiSix, a computer graphics company just acquired by eBay. The technology behind eBay's latest acquisition creates 3-D models of clothing from photos and "simulates the behavior of the garments." It can be used online and offline to let shoppers to see how clothes fit, look and move in different environments. The technology is also able to recommend a size for the user's body based on basic measurement inputs. 

With online sales expected to grow 15 percent this holiday season, consumers will be making purchases from a variety of devices and places — including work. While some employers have taken a liberal stance toward online shopping and personal internet use, the holiday shopping season threatens to strain bandwidth capacities to a point that would frustrate even the most lenient of employers. In some organizations, free-for-all bandwidth consumption might lead to an office network crash, hindering not only deal shoppers, but others in the office attempting to — shockingly enough — conduct actual company business. 

With the holiday shopping season approaching, you can expect many shoppers to do last-minute online gift buying, require immediate deliveries, and, of course, there are all those pesky post-holiday returns and exchanges. Will your website be able to deal with this annual shopping frenzy? By putting a little effort in planning ahead of the frenzy and by following a few e-commerce pre-holiday tips highlighted below, you can ensure that your customer's experience is both positive and cheerful for the holiday buying season.

The Company Store hasn't sent many flash-sale emails. In fact, among the 133 emails captured by Who's Mailing What! this year, only one recent email used the flash-sale strategy. However, The Company Store clearly did its homework.

Global online retailer Modnique launched a responsive web design (RWD) version of its website this past September in an effort to optimize the experience of visitors using screen sizes as small as the iPhone and as large as 36-inch monitors. Here's a look at the brand's experience with RWD. 

Tiffany & Co. is relaunching its e-commerce site. The site includes enhanced zoom capabilities and several expanded sections. Blue Book, the company's collection of couture jewels, is showcased with scenes from the Tiffany workshop where they are created, as well as an expanded engagement section with a gemologist's video and review of Tiffany's quality standards.

Shoppers searching eBay on Sunday were shown search results with photos missing from some listings. The problem occurred on what's typically the busiest day of the week on eBay. Sellers busy loading new listings on eBay Sunday afternoon had difficulty uploading photos, leaving their listings with an ugly plain box showing in search results. A reader posted the problem on Ecommerce EKG, but eBay had no announcement about the problem on its Systems Announcement board.