Web Design

How do you get the result you want out of your redesign or upgrade project? Start by avoiding the common mistakes that lead to costly project overruns, long delays and plenty of second-guessing.

Problem: Lead Apparel, a retailer of men’s, women’s, children's and even baby clothing, as well as accessories, totes and luggage, wanted to launch an e-commerce website.

It's Christmas in July! Or it better be if you plan to have your e-commerce website optimized for the first holiday season since the great recession theoretically ended. Here are 12 tactics to implement now if you want to maximize your products' slice of Santa's workshop budget.1. Add More Email Sign-UpsDuring the holidays, the number…

Kim Siefke, e-commerce manager, web design and development at Bealls, spoke at last month's retail Marketing Conference in Orlando, Fla. on how her company has used rich media to grow its online and cross-channel sales. Joining Siefke in presenting a session titled “How Rich Media Can Help Drive Cross-Channel Success” was Wayne Sadlowski, vice president of business development at Adobe Scene7, a provider of image server software.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Problem: Carpet One Floor & Home, a retailer of floor coverings, lacked a web presence for its 1,000-plus individually owned retail locations. Solution: Contracted with an e-commerce technology and services provider to host its website. Results: ROI of $10 for every $1 spent online, cost per sale online is half of tradit-
ional media and the average order generated online is 50 percent greater than retail-
only customers.

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.