Web Optimization

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended how people live, work and shop. Traditional retailers were already struggling to adapt to changing consumer behavior. The pandemic caused revenues to soar for some retailers and to plummet for others. Black Friday in a pandemic is shaping up to challenge retailers in new ways. Consider these recent headlines: “Black…

Retailers don’t know if what they’ve seen from shoppers since the onset of the pandemic is a new set of permanent habits or only temporary reactions to a global shopping shakeup. Therefore, how can retailers prepare for the holidays in light of unpredictable store strategies and a mass migration to digital shopping channels? At a…

For many retailers, the coming holiday season will be a make-or-break moment at the end of a challenging year. There's enormous pressure to make the most out of any opportunity to close a sale — especially now that Amazon.com has elongated the season by setting Prime Day for October 13. But first, retailers will need…

As consumers sheltered in place this spring, extended amounts of time at home prompted many to redecorate and take on home improvement projects. Some people tackled projects they couldn’t otherwise get to after a typical in-office work week, while others rushed to visit the websites of online retailers like Room & Board to explore the possibilities of…

Imagine a post-pandemic moment: walking into your favorite café, lining up and scanning the menu, and seeing the price of your latte in a different currency than you’re used to — British pounds or Japanese yen, for example. If you’re in a rush, you might just turn around and go to another café where the…

There’s an old saying popularized by novelist Jim Butcher that you don’t have to run faster than a grizzly bear chasing you — you just have to run faster than the guy next to you. A similar situation exists in e-commerce, except most retailers have had no idea how fast the guy next to them…

During our July installment of the Women in Retail and Total Retail Virtual Exchange, Rodney Hutton, chief marketing officer, Ethan Allen, participated in a discussion with Brendan Witcher, vice president, principal analyst, Forrester. The two discussed a variety of topics, including how Ethan Allen has evolved its marketing strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic, how a traditional…

When you first started to think about your e-commerce site, you envisioned how it would look: the placement of your logo, the color landscape and, of course, the extra touches that would best show off your product. Your goal was to drive traffic to your site, but by now you’ve learned that visitors don’t always…

Conversion rate is one of the primary metrics for evaluating e-commerce success. I've divided this e-commerce conversion optimization guide into two parts. Click here to read part one. In part two, I will focus on the checkout experience, shipping and returns, and website speed and performance optimization ideas. Ideas to Optimize the Checkout Experience The…

One of the key factors for any e-commerce business is conversion rate. It's the benchmark that gives a business an indication of how its digital sales are operating and the means to be incorporated to improve it. Benchmarking conversion rates needs to be done with the denominator in mind: Is it the number of unique…