Ecommerce Blog

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Original post by Om Malik

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Original post by Om Malik

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Original post by Katie Fehrenbacher

Online display ads have become increasingly popular as a part of large online marketing campaigns because their flashy eye catching design can attract customer attention. With Google AdWords and AdSense usage on the rise Google created a way to create display ads quickly without any design experience- making display ads more accessible to businesses with […]

Original post by Kate

Magento eCommerce stores are rapidly becoming as valuable as traditional stores. So it’s short disruption that the software that powers them is also seemly more distinguished. Magento is an influentia…

Original post by default@goarticles.com (Rolando Carey)

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Original post by Om Malik

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Original post by Robert Scoble

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Original post by Robert Scoble

Andy King, author of Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets posted Usability Study: Men Need Speed yesterday — citing a study by Southern Illinois University on how men and women use the web. The researchers found that both men’s and women’s top priority is ease of use, with web speed men’s second choice, and easy navigation women’s.

Does this mean that in general, men are “hunters” and women are “browsers” online? If so, this is not unlike the offline world. In ‘Men Buy, Women Shop’: The Sexes Have Different Priorities When Walking Down the Aisles (from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania), men ranked “difficulty in finding parking close to the store’s entrance” as their number one shopping problem (29%). Women’s top beef was “lack of help when needed,” and one woman stated her favorite store’s sales associates “are always great. They always show me different styles. They will show me something new that’s come in.” A man of similar age responded “I haven’t had much interaction with most sales people. I don’t really need them — as long as they’re at the checkout.”

The differences don’t stop there:

• Women Shop Like Santa, Men Shop Like Scrooge. Women start their holiday shopping earlier than men, usually shop for more gift recipients. Men are more likely to become angry and frustrated by holiday shopping. (I also recall a study a couple years back by BIG Research that claimed men are more likely to grab gifts for themselves, mostly electronics).

• Men prefer coupons, women prefer sales. Perhaps this is because a coupon can be applied to something a guy already knows he wants, the coupon is a predictable discount and an extra incentive to reward himself. A sale applies to a number of products, the “fun” for women is browsing the sale to find great deals - it’s recreation. The reward is finding treasure and feeling like you deserve it because you found such a great bargain.

• Guys think about what can benefit them now, while ladies think about what benefits them long term. Perhaps that’s why women browse sales, they keep there eyes open for things they can wear next year or stash away for a future Christmas gift.

• Men and women view images differently and respond differently to humor. This impacts conversion for advertising, website imagery and messaging. They also prefer different colors (but not all women love pink).

• Men and women may buy the same products, but for different reasons. As Future Now’s Holly Buchanan points out, you can use customer reviews to identify which product attributes and benefits men and women rant or rave about.

So what?

Should you build a male site and female site with different colors, copy, imagery, products, navigation and page load speed? Of course not. It’s important to optimize for fast loading pages and logical, usable navigation for everyone. But you should look at your site and ask if your design and content decisions were made with bias. Personal finance site Mint.com’s redesign boosted performance by 20%, and Future Now’s Jeff Sexton suspects it’s because the new design is more female-friendly.

When promoting Kindle, Amazon targeted a men and women differently (recognizing logged-in site members) by showing male or female hands in the promotional banner.

If you use customer surveys like ForeSee Results, you can gather your own site-specific research. Ask for survey participant’s gender - but make it optional. Identify which are men’s biggest complaints about your site, and women’s. Make sure to ask ease-of-use, site speed and navigation oriented questions like “Please rate how well the features on [website] help you find the product(s) you are looking for” and “Please rate how quickly pages load on [website].”

Consider segmenting your email lists by gender (provided you asked in your sign up process) and testing coupon vs. sale headlines, imagery and even timing (start sending holiday emails earlier to females, or send fewer holiday emails to men).

You may also like these similar posts:

• Have You Mystery Shopped Your Site Lately?
• How to Grow Your Email List from Your Shopping Cart
• Holiday Shipping Cutoff Dates Make Good Ecommerce Usability
• Gift Cards: Still Hot in 2008?
• Eleventh Hour Holiday Email Marketing - Great Example From Circuit City

Original post by Linda Bustos

Andy King, author of Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets posted Usability Study: Men Need Speed yesterday — citing a study by Southern Illinois University on how men and women use the web. The researchers found that both men’s and women’s top priority is ease of use, with web speed men’s second choice, and easy navigation women’s.

Does this mean that in general, men are “hunters” and women are “browsers” online? If so, this is not unlike the offline world. In ‘Men Buy, Women Shop’: The Sexes Have Different Priorities When Walking Down the Aisles (from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania), men ranked “difficulty in finding parking close to the store’s entrance” as their number one shopping problem (29%). Women’s top beef was “lack of help when needed,” and one woman stated her favorite store’s sales associates “are always great. They always show me different styles. They will show me something new that’s come in.” A man of similar age responded “I haven’t had much interaction with most sales people. I don’t really need them — as long as they’re at the checkout.”

The differences don’t stop there:

• Women Shop Like Santa, Men Shop Like Scrooge. Women start their holiday shopping earlier than men, usually shop for more gift recipients. Men are more likely to become angry and frustrated by holiday shopping. (I also recall a study a couple years back by BIG Research that claimed men are more likely to grab gifts for themselves, mostly electronics).

• Men prefer coupons, women prefer sales. Perhaps this is because a coupon can be applied to something a guy already knows he wants, the coupon is a predictable discount and an extra incentive to reward himself. A sale applies to a number of products, the “fun” for women is browsing the sale to find great deals - it’s recreation. The reward is finding treasure and feeling like you deserve it because you found such a great bargain.

• Guys think about what can benefit them now, while ladies think about what benefits them long term. Perhaps that’s why women browse sales, they keep there eyes open for things they can wear next year or stash away for a future Christmas gift.

• Men and women view images differently and respond differently to humor. This impacts conversion for advertising, website imagery and messaging. They also prefer different colors (but not all women love pink).

• Men and women may buy the same products, but for different reasons. As Future Now’s Holly Buchanan points out, you can use customer reviews to identify which product attributes and benefits men and women rant or rave about.

So what?

Should you build a male site and female site with different colors, copy, imagery, products, navigation and page load speed? Of course not. It’s important to optimize for fast loading pages and logical, usable navigation for everyone. But you should look at your site and ask if your design and content decisions were made with bias. Personal finance site Mint.com’s redesign boosted performance by 20%, and Holly Buchanan suspects it’s because the new design is more female-friendly.

When promoting Kindle, Amazon targeted a men and women differently (recognizing logged-in site members) by showing male or female hands in the promotional banner.

If you use customer surveys like ForeSee Results, you can gather your own site-specific research. Ask for survey participant’s gender - but make it optional. Identify which are men’s biggest complaints about your site, and women’s. Make sure to ask ease-of-use, site speed and navigation oriented questions like “Please rate how well the features on [website] help you find the product(s) you are looking for” and “Please rate how quickly pages load on [website].”

Consider segmenting your email lists by gender (provided you asked in your sign up process) and testing coupon vs. sale headlines, imagery and even timing (start sending holiday emails earlier to females, or send fewer holiday emails to men).

You may also like these similar posts:

• Have You Mystery Shopped Your Site Lately?
• How to Grow Your Email List from Your Shopping Cart
• Holiday Shipping Cutoff Dates Make Good Ecommerce Usability
• Is Your Website Optimized for Holiday Hunters?
• Gift Cards: Still Hot in 2008?

Original post by Linda Bustos

There’s a lot of talk about green IT, and most of it out there is just a glorified marketing pitch.

Let’s face it, as a business owner most of us would love to have a green IT, but most of us aren’t willing to sacrifice performance or cost, at the expense of being green. Buying a $75 power strip that saves $3.00 per year in energy costs, isn’t a smart buy, no matter how many magazines say it is so.

Forget ROHS, Energy Star, and everything else. Here’s how to green up your IT…

1.) Buy used equipment

When you need to buy computer equipment, try to look for used or refurbished equipment before buying new.

New computers and IT equipment are generally much less power consuming than older equipment. However, buying used equipment reduces the load on landfills and reduces the emissions and waste from manufacturing more equipment.

The best way to reduce waste is to not create more!

You probably won’t find any computer manufacturer recommending this any time soon, because they want you to shell out for new (& more expensive) equipment. Manufacturers have been making efficient equipment for at least five years. You can find plenty of great IT equipment on eBay for a fraction of the cost of new.

If you still have some old mainframe computer using up a megawatt of electricity per month, it may be time to upgrade…

2.) When buying any equipment, buy what you need, not what you want

The thing about those personal super computers with forty processors, quad-graphics cards, and 200 gigabytes of RAM, is that they require a lot of power to run.

Most of the time, you don’t need high-end equipment for running Office and an email program. Get the most minimal computers and equipment that you can get by with, also calculating for future usage so you don’t need to upgrade.

Video cards are one of the most effective places to downgrade. You don’t need a monster graphics card to view 2D text and pictures. A puny 16Mb card can do this fine. Skip the SLI, Crossfire, 512 MB DDR3 cards and get something small and efficient.

3.) Consolidate equipment

A server for email, a server for files, a server for the database, a server for the website, a server for backups, etc…

This is the all-too-common setup that I see businesses use. While there’s a point to segmenting for security and operation, many times these servers can be consolidated into a few. It also costs more to manage and maintain multiple servers and computers, so reducing the total number is appealing on multiple fronts.

One or two very good servers is usually cheaper to maintain and more energy efficient than five mediocre servers. Using virtualization, you can often get all of your servers running securely on a single machine.

For a small business, I personally like to put the web, intranet and email servers all on a single machine, and then the internal file server, domain controller, and internal application server on a separate machine. This provides good segmentation, and is easy to manage and understand.

4.) Buy UPS (uninterruptible power supply / battery backup) devices for your equipment

The best surge protector is rarely as good as a cheap UPS device. These will protect your equipment from surges, and shut them down if there is a loss power. Keeping equipment out of the trash is the best way to stay green.

Power outages kill computer equipment, especially servers, even if there isn’t a surge that goes with it. You can buy UPS devices used, and replace the batteries when they get exhausted. They can save thousands on IT costs and troubleshooting from losing equipment. APC is probably the leader in UPS devices. Just make sure that you can replace the batteries before buying one.

Don’t even consider operating good computer equipment without a decent UPS to go with it. These will truly save money and time in the long run.

5.) Stop the paper

We all have email, and there are hundreds of scanners that can put paper into a usable PDF or text document. At this point, there is very little reason not to stop using paper. Legal documents are one thing, but for everything else, print it to a PDF, and email it.

You can save your business thousands per year in paper and ink costs by converting to electronic documents.

At one point we were using over 60,000 pages per month just in personal printing. After switching to scanning and PDF printing, it was reduced to under 5,000.

You will have some employees fighting this to the death, but in the end there is no doubt that it is worth the time and effort to get everyone using electronic only documents.

Original post by jestep

Networking is a very important tool for all business owners so before you go to that next networking opportunity make sure you are prepared! Here are some tips from a popular blog as well as some that we have complied ourselves:
Before

Bring a LOT of Business Cards
Don’t get caught in the trap of only having one […]

Original post by Kate

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Original post by Om Malik

LONDON - Twitter is continuing its phenomenal surge in popularity, accounting for more UK internet traffic than MSN UK Search.

Original post by Yahoo! News Search Results for Ecommerce

Businesses are neglecting their websites in the downturn, new research suggests. A new survey shows that nearly 50% of companies are finding competing online to be ‘challenging’ in the current economic climate.

Original post by Yahoo! News Search Results for Ecommerce