DMinSite

For successful navigation to lead to higher conversion rates, you must provide shoppers several different ways to shop your site. It's a paradigm shift for merchandisers accustomed to organizing a store or catalog by the type of product, which is the kind of one-dimensional navigation that will hinder your success online.

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.

Picture this: You’re on a sunny beach, stretched out on the sand. A child is sitting next to you with pail and shovel in hand. The child mischievously starts covering your ankles and feet in sand. You smile and continue sipping your refreshing piña colada. Now a dump truck pulls up and pours a mountain of sand all over you. You’re buried, and the sand muffles your scream. The former, pleasant scene represents the amount of data your marketing staff had to deal with about 10 years ago. The dump truck represents today’s daily data deluge.

Tired of reading about what a tough year it’s been for so many businesses across the board? Frustrated with your own results? Scared about the economy? Whether or not you’re struggling as much as others, here’s a little tonic: our annual best-of feature, in which we’ve pulled what we believe to be the 50 best and most implementable tips of the year from Catalog Success magazine as well as our weekly e-newsletter, Tactics & Tips. There’s nothing fancy here. Each paragraph is taken from a particular story that’s referenced, so you can turn or click back to reread the full story or act on

With the advent and development of Internet marketing in the last 10 years, catalogers have been inundated with more data than they know what to do with, courtesy of their Web analytics packages. Catalogers shared their frustrations and success stories regarding their online marketing data at the session “Web Analytics: The Secret to Your Success” at last week’s ACCM. Below are their stories. 1. With the current version of its site active and taking orders since 2002, Classic Designs has been using WebTrends to track online marketing data since that time, said Mark Desrochers, co-owner of the woodworking catalog. But while the software had been

“The goal of any change to an e-commerce platform is to decrease the customer’s cost of time and effort in doing business with you,” said Eric Svenson, vice president of DMinSite, an e-commerce service provider to the catalog industry, in his talk “Advanced Web Selling Techniques for Catalogers” at the New England Mail Order Association conference held in Cambridge, Mass., last week. Customers will respond to a simplified shopping experience with higher average order values (AOV) and higher conversions, noted Svenson. In order to facilitate this goal, Svenson offered the following techniques: * Test, test, test! Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind is