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Today's consumers, who increasingly view online shopping as a competitive sport, use many different tools to find the products they want at the best price, including coupon aggregation sites like CouponCabin.com and RetailMeNot.com. Commission Junction recently conducted a study of 1,000 coupon site users to better understand the influence coupon sites have on shoppers. According to a recent eMarketer report, more than half (52 percent) of online shoppers now use digital coupons. Are retailers capitalizing on this trend? How can they benefit from the growing use of coupons and coupon sites? Our study identified four ways coupon sites can help retailers better reach their customers: 

Managing a fully functional e-commerce site as part of your retail operation is a bit like owning a house — you're constantly concerned with what might break next and how to go about fixing it. Much like proper maintenance on your home goes a long way to keeping the handyman at bay, there are several common sense steps you can take to make sure that your omnichannel strategy stays fresh and your online presence relevant. For most retailers, the web is an extremely important — often the most important — channel for profitability.

Product pages get a lot of love. Testing budgets go there, analysts’ reviews focus there and even AdWords campaigns deep link there (sometimes). And why not? You'd be hard-pressed to find a page that ties to return on investment as tightly as the page that directly sells the product. Tiny conversion improvements there add up. If you compare a website to a movie, the product page is the third act. It's where the tension reaches heights and the audience gets the conclusion.

Can a shopper with a specific item in mind find it on your mobile site? In other words, what's the "findability" of your mobile site? Given the increase of mobile traffic and the revenue impact of mobile and mobile-influenced sales, the concept of findability is critical.

Misconfigured mobile redirects can result in errors, irrelevant pages and now, as a result of Google's recent algorithm changes, search ranking downgrades. Many brands may find it difficult to correct mobile redirect issues, but identifying and fixing these issues is important to helping pages stay visible in mobile search results and removing critical obstacles blocking the path to more mobile commerce. The following is a list of suggested tips to help retailers correct faulty mobile redirects:

When the Burberry CEO takes over as Apple's retail chief this spring, she will arrive with a sterling track record and an open, collaborative spirit that's sure to shake things up in the executive ranks. Meet the woman charged with making Apple shine again — and what she could mean for its legacy.

The days of receiving highly valuable organic search keyword data from Google have ended. Google announced this fall that it will be encrypting organic search activity, allowing sites to see only that someone came from Google, but not what keywords they used. With organic search accounting for up to 50 percent of all website traffic, and Google accounting for 60 percent of the search market, the announcement has online retailers scrambling to find new ways to preserve traffic, intelligence and share of voice.

Some e-commerce marketers are having a challenging holiday season, and they blame Google for it. A change to Gmail that relegated retailers’ emails to a separate inbox for promotions has had a big effect during the busiest shopping period of the year, according to three services that manage mass emails. And another change to Gmail, involving the way it shows images in messages, made it harder for retailers to track who opens their emails. Google says it made the changes to improve the service for users, and that the changes could also be advantageous to marketers. 

In a unique holiday move, Best Buy will host a shoppable Google+ hangout on "Last Minute Deals" tonight. For those who don't know, a Google+ hangout is a video chat done through the Google+ social networking website. It enables up to 10 people to interact and share documents, images and videos with each other, and it can be broadcast for others to view. People who RSVP for Best Buy's hangout will be able to watch a group of tech enthusiasts talk about last-minute gift ideas. And they'll even be able to shop for the products as they're being discussed. 

Retail sales don't slow down immediately after Dec. 25. On the contrary, the post-holiday shopping season is one of the busiest times for retailers. Shoppers are returning and exchanging gifts, and looking for good deals. In today's omnichannel retail environment, returns, exchanges and post-holiday sales aren't limited to in-store. Many shoppers are taking advantage of post-holiday sales online, returning through the mail or a combination of those. This can be challenging for retailers, especially from an inventory and warehouse management perspective. Here are five tips to help retailers be successful this post-holiday season: