For those of you that missed our recent Webinar with SLI Systems on this topic, we wanted to share a few things you can do now using your site search and/or content management tools to help you to optimize your site’s performance now. While we are already in the thick of the season, by dedicating a few resources to these tips, you can finish out peak season strongly!

Tip #1 – Optimize your holiday search terms

Terms customers use to search on your site change during the holidays! Review your peak search terms from 2010 (and even from 2009) – and make sure you have these terms well merchandised. And don’t forget the misspellings and top “no results” terms. Also, give your customers reasons to buy right inside of the search results with messages embedded in the images. Below is a great example from Harry & David’s website.

Tip #2 – Use site search as your “ears to the floor”

Use your site search as a way to listen to your customers in real time – watch what they are searching for and adjust your home page and category landing page featured items. Highlight top searched and top sellers right within your merchandising feature zones. In the example below from Beauty Bridge, note how the retailer uses “Best Sellers Yesterday” as a way to feature holiday favorites..

Tip #3 – Use site search to easily and quickly create gift finders on the fly

Creating holiday gift finders using your on-site search tool provides several advantages. It gives you a means to create landing pages without involving your IT department; it enables built-in dynamic navigation to let your customers narrow their selection quickly and find that right holiday product; and it keeps your inventory up-to-date on your landing pages without the need to manually manage and update the pages. In the example below from BedBathStore.com, the retailer created an entire Christmas shopping experience using their site search tool (SLI). The products within each sub-category are populated by search when clicked on – which ensures products are in stock and presented in order by top sellers. Also note the persistent link to this page from the top navigation (’Holiday’) and the SEO-friendly text on the left to help search engines to index the page.

Tip #4 – Bring holiday themes into search and navigation

Giving your customers obvious navigational elements to help them find holiday-themed products, such as gifts and items for the home, will accommodate shoppers’ needs to find what they are looking for quickly – and help keep your bounce rates low and conversion rates high. See the example below from FTD.com, where the retailer creates holiday drill downs to enable sorting by holiday gift-types, featured promotions, and holiday top sellers.

Tip #5 – Incorporate Social and Mobile into your holiday promotions – to the greatest extent you can.

This is a breakout year for mobile – more than 40% of consumers now own smart phones, and 53% of them will shop with them this holiday season (NRF). If you have a mobile-optimized web site, incorporating your holiday optimizations into mobile search and optimizing for mobile use will pay dividends this holiday. Remember to include large navigation links, a prominent and well-placed search box, and a link to your holiday specials. Check out what Target.com has done on its mobile site in the example below – a good example of a clean and easy way to navigate this holiday mobile site.

Incorporate social media content right into your search results and give your customers an additional reason to buy by highlighting top Facebook likes.  In the FTD.com example below, the retailer is using site search from SLI to rank products by the number of Facebook likes right within search results.

Conclusion

There are a number of things you can do to quickly optimize your site for the peak.  Some of these tips might seem like common sense, but these basics can sometimes get missed in all the peak frenzy.  Use these tips to help your customer find your products quickly and include a good reason for them to buy, particularly in these days of waning consumer attention spans.  Good luck this holiday season!

And why? Here are some useful (and even surprising) stats:

How do you keep your customers connected to you through social media on your website? Based on a survey of the Top 100 eRetailers (IR100), almost three quarters of the top websites employ social media icons on their home
page.

Already have the basics up and running? Then consider these more advanced ways of integrating social media.

Social strategies are going beyond building a nice Facebook page and sprinkling Like buttons throughout the site. Here are three innovative advanced social media implementations. In the first example, FTD allows consumers to sort by Facebook likes, where the number of likes appears next to each product.

In another example presented at Shop.org’s Annual Summit, Handbags.com was created with consumer habits at the forefront. Handbag shoppers care what their friends think about their bags so integrating social media onto the site in a smart way was a must. Consumers can register on the site with their Facebook login which connects with a Facebook toolbar to keep the shopper on their website and encourages sharing. The search results page below is visually clean and the social media icons appear when the consumer interacts onscreen with the product. Once the icons
appear, the consumer is encouraged to “Like” or “Share,” or “Comment” on the site and post to their news feed.

Through both of these examples, as well as many others from Ticketmaster, Buy.com, Blue Nile, Yarn.com and more, the brands took care to choose the right social media mix that fits their target audience and brand.

If you really want to be cutting edge (cutting edge for now, that is), look what Ticketmaster is doing. 80% of their users share their ticket information via Facebook with everyone – not just friends. The RSVP feature “Tell your friends you’re attending” drives 33% more visits. Each “like” is $5.00 in ticket sales!

To find other ways – from basic to advanced – to make your website more “friendly”, download our presentation, ON-SITE SOCIAL MEDIA: Today and Tomorrow. There’sno time to waste!

Some points we covered with him were:

• Retailers need to understand the “mobile moments” – where your shopper is and what he’s trying to accomplish at various points in time
• Mobile commerce will depend, to a large extent, on what mobile phones and carriers allow: bandwidth, battery-life, pricing plans
• Conversion of mobile sales is far better than typical online commerce; shoppers are primed and ready to buy
• Mobile real estate is tiny, so retailers must reduce their product selection
• The US is significantly behind Asia, where cell phones are their “wallets”
• Apparel is the most advanced vertical, but luxury apparel lags behind
• Shopping surge is 6-9pm; people interact while watching TV (particularly shows on the Food Network, Bravo and Shop.NBC)
• Mobile retail is poised to get to 5% of retail sales in half the time that it took online shopping.

Stay tuned for our Mobile Commerce Benchmark and Guide.

To read the NYT article, click here.

Happy Happy!

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!
We at FitForCommerce want to share our happiness with you!

We’re happy you all made it through 2010 – whether relatively unscathed or really successful. Congratulations! We know it wasn’t easy. It’s a testimony to your hard work and smart decisions. There was no “wave” to ride this year!

We’re happy we were able to work with so many of you and we’re happy we helped you make it through. Let us count (some of) the ways!

1.	Understanding where you are in the market place. We’ve done comparisons of your store’s numbers (including online sales, conversion rates, online AOV, number of skus) against your competition’s, giving you a better sense of how you stack up and where you have opportunities to improve.
2.	Analyzing your P+L. We’ve helped you run your numbers and defined multiple options over multiple years, so you can project the investment needed to take you to your profit goals.
3.	Providing benchmarking and best practices. We’ve done detailed, feature-by-feature analyses to show how you compare against your competition and against industry best practices,helping you prioritize changes needed and differentiate the low-hanging fruit from the more substantive work.
4.	Understanding the components of your ecommerce business. We’ve walked you through your entire ecommerce “ecosystem”, defining the key components of each and clarifying how they all are (or should be) integrated into a complete ecommerce operation.
5.	Navigating through the Ecommerce Galaxy and filling in the “gaps”. We’ve helped you understand who the players are, which companies are thriving and which might not be around, down the road. And we’ve guided your selections of those providers and their solutions – for ecommerce platforms, mobile technology, OMS and various point solutions.

8.	Prioritizing your next steps. We’ve helped you come up with your “to-do” list. And we’ve helped you prioritize the list – by evaluating the benefits, the size of the effort and the dependencies.
9.	Budgeting – what to spend on and how much. We’ve helped you come up with your annual budget by breaking the areas down, providing reasonable costs and percentages and relating those to your revenue and business goals.
10.	Being a trusted resource for all your business challenges. We are ecommerce experts whose business it is to understand the marketplace, ecommerce technologies and providers, trends and strategies. We do this all day, every day, and we leverage this knowledge to help you succeed.

We were surprised by some of the responses, and others just confirmed what we suspected.  To see the complete results of our survey, click here.

We wanted to know who was doing something with mobile, who wasn’t and why not.

• 58% of the companies responding do not have any mobile capabilities – neither mobile marketing nor m-commerce.   34% have m-commerce.
• Why not more? A small percentage (less than 24%) said that they had executives who were not interested in mobile.  That was still a larger percentage than we would have thought, given all the buzz out there.
• A third thought the investment was too much and a third thought it was incompatible with their ecommerce system. That thinking seems to ignore the less expensive ways to dip your toe into the mobile pool – marketing, store locator, promotions, etc.
• Only 17% of those not yet mobile have no mobile plans.  The mobile train is leaving the station!

We wanted to know who was driving mobile development, what their goals were, and were those goals being met.

• Not surprisingly, mobile development is championed by the marketing and/or the ecommerce departments.   Only 6% say that the IT department is driving their mobile efforts.
• More than half have a fully-functioning mobile site. The two other most prevalent uses are showcasing products and providing store locator functionality.  Efforts to leverage coupons/marketing and social media are just beginning.

• The good news is that, while determining mobile ROI is a new science, over 40% have seen a positive ROI from their mobile efforts.  The bad news is that 20% have not.  And the ugly news is that over 30% either haven’t measured it or don’t know how to measure it.

To see all the other interesting tidbits, click here.  And stay tuned for the forthcoming FFC M-Commerce Benchmark & Buyer’s Guide.

About FitForCommerce’s mCommerce services

Attendees at WBR’s Mobile Shopping Summit were treated to interesting and knowledgeable speakers, substantive and timely content, and “words of wisdom” from those who are getting mobile commerce right. Here are some of our key takeaways from the summit:

• App or Mobile Optimized Site? The burning question – how do you know what to do first? For branded retailers the answer is clear, according to Tom Davis, VP of eCommerce at Kenneth Cole – he recommends going with a mobile optimized site first; why would a retailer want to limit their mobile audience right off the bat by building an app that only works on one platform?
• Expect mobile commerce to grow (a lot) Jeff Pandolfo, Business Development Manager at Amazon Payments projects that mobile commerce sales will increase almost ten-fold in the next five years – from $2.4 billion in 2010 up to $23.4 billion by 2015
• Data, data, data! One of the most common themes throughout the summit was the importance of data; collecting, analyzing, and acting upon it. Your data will tell you what devices your customers are using and what they are trying to do on your site, which in turn will direct your mobile next-steps (and budget).
• Mobile phones are everywhere! Brandom McGee from Dell provided some interesting stats – 85% of people have mobile phones at home, but only 73% of kids have a book at home.
• Remember the rest of the World – In North America we tend to focus on Apple, Droid, and Blackberry. Don’t forget that half of the global mobile population uses a Symbian mobile device. This is particularly critical for retailers who ship internationally.
• Apps can still win big – Pizza Hut has had over 2 million downloads of their app on the iPhone alone. Adding fun and ease to the pizza ordering process gives them a step up in the app space.
• Get your foot in the door – You don’t have to solve for every platform or scenario, but many retailers agreed that it’s best to get something live in the mobile space as soon as possible. Getting a basic mobile site live can be done relatively cheaply and at the very least can serve as a good way to collect data. Most retailers who started with iPhone apps or mobile sites are now launching into droid apps.
• Page load time on mobile is important – Just like with the standard web, the longer a page takes to load, the more likely a user will leave. This problem can be magnified in the mobile space as users are more ‘on the go’ and may not have as much time to wait.
• Get on the HTML5 bandwagon – In what will soon become the new web standard, HTML5 is already making its presence felt. Providing features like innately embedded videos (without the need for plugins) and more streamlined code, HTML5 will have a drastic impact on web site & app flexibility, particularly in the mobile space.

For more expert advice on mobile strategy, check out the FitForCommerce Mobile Commerce Benchmark 2010 Precursor: 15 Sound Bites

In Dallas, FitForCommerce partnered with Shop.org to provide the most value to retailers and exhibitors, so they can maximize their time at the Summit.  We had our goals and, dang it, we met them!  We can always improve and we’ve already had a meeting to figure out how to do better next year.  But this year was a Texas-sized success!

Goal 1:  Learn about the exhibitors.   

Providers have been diligent about going to www.ecommerceknowhow.com and updating their profiles.   And the FFC team has been diligent about being sure they are up-to-date on what the exhibitors have to offer.

Goal 2:  Give informative, unbiased, category-specific exhibitor “tours” to retailers. 

The retailers loved having a “guide” to take them around the Hall, ask the right questions, hear from the exhibitors about what differentiates them.  Once they had their tour, they often went back to exhibitors to learn more.   CEOs from enterprises doing +$200million online walked along side SMB presidents, all eager to get info on eCommerce solutions.   We were very pleased to get feedback from “tourists” saying that they were “very valuable”, “the only way to walk the floor”, and “all content, all meat, no potatoes”.    http://www.twitvid.com/H0Z0C

Goal 3:  Provide 1-on-1 “White Glove Tours” to retailers. For those who needed a longer, in-depth conversation, we discussed their areas of interest and then took them around to exhibitors who met their needs.   Dedicated time with an expert was a clear “win” for retailers.  Some have signed up for this 3 years in a row!

Goal 4:  Hear the buzz; participate in the conversation.    Lots of retailers talking about and asking for help with replatforming, upgrading, where to invest, in which technology.  Multichannnel and mobile eCommerce were getting the attention of C-levels at major retailers.  How to determine the best way to participate in social commerce and how to assess the ROI were hot topics.  There was a lot of emphasis on growing the channel, being competitive, staying ahead of the competition, innovating.

Goal 5:  Help retailers – in so many ways. At the booth, at dinners, walking the floor, we talked to eCommerce merchants of all verticals and sizes … about everything!   Strategy, organization, marketing, merchandising, replatforming, point solutions, mobile, social.  You name it, we talked about it.   And made suggestions on what to do next, what to think about, and how FFC can help.

Goal 6:  Connect and Reconnect.     We were able to visit with exhibitors and expand our knowledge of their offerings.   We were able to spend time with FitForCommerce clients and prospects to talk about the industry and next steps.

As for what happened “after hours”, well, that’s a blog of a different color.

A few themes I heard were:

• Everyone is up this year versus last year (not a terribly hard thing to do) and cautiously optimistic about upcoming peak.
• General agreement that there won’t be a second dip or recession and that we’re past the conventional thought that there would be major bankruptcies and closures of large retailers.
• Many companies have been through transformations (if only I had a dollar for every time I heard that word…) many of which included management changes and financial restructuring.
• Key focus for many was improving customer service and, for some like Home Depot and Nordstrom, it was going back to what made them great retailers before.
• Major focus on better management and allocation of inventory – right stuff in the right place at the right time, with no storage room to spare. By re-engineering inventory flows, retailers are looking to keep store inventories lower, but replenishment flexibility and speed high.
• Leveraging technology across the enterprise, especially around merchandising and inventory systems that improve operational efficiencies.
• Shifting marketing focus and dollars. In Saks’s case, they’ve taken a chunk of national marketing and redistributed it to local marketing, especially at the store level.
• For Walmart, they see their job as serving the many Americans who are struggling to make ends meet, so they focus on being the one-stop shop and meeting their ‘every day low prices’ promise to shoppers who are concious even about saving gas and making only 1 trip to the store.
• Remaining focused on core value prop. For True Religion, that means being a great denim company and not trying to spread too far into a full fashion apparel brand.
• And last but not least, a focus on growing the online channel – a few expect to double their online revenue over the next year

I left feeling optimistic about the coming months. I wish them all good fortune!

The “dog days of summer” is the time that retailers start preparing for the peak holiday shopping season.  Analyzing last year’s metrics is a reliable and specific method to help you reach this year’s goals.

Your metrics cover all disciplines you use to run your ecommerce business.  They are business “gold”.  Why capture data if you’re not going to learn from it?

Don’t miss the opportunity to use this data to have a great 2010 holiday season.

Here are tips for where to start, what to look at and how to use it.

• Study last year’s traffic, page loads, visits and hits.
• Analyze what worked and did not work, promotionally.
• Look at order flows and staff your distribution centers accordingly.
• Study customer service metrics so you can staff and train your Call Center correctly.
• Prepare for load testing on your servers.  Down time = lost customers.
• Tweak your marketing plan based on last year’s results and this year’s promotions and merchandise.
• Engage in A/B testing now. Engage in multi-variant testing of new site design concepts, features and functionality to get real data before locking down your holiday marketing calendar.
• Segment your customer base. Holiday shoppers are buying for others (mostly!).  Change the look-and-feel, products and promotions for the type of audience that is going to be buying during the holidays.
• Look at who shopped last year, how and when. This will help you determine how often to change the creative during your peak season.
• Finalize your holiday marketing plan and have back-up plans ready to implement if there are surprises in the numbers.

Bottom Line:  This season’s answers are in last season’s numbers. The key to increasing revenue and profit is understanding what happened in the past and adjusting accordingly to prepare for the future.

As margins tighten for online retailers, getting consumers to re-engage with abandoned shopping carts could be the difference between profits and losses.

According to a 2010 Experian CheetahMail benchmark study, online shopping carts are abandoned at a rate of 56.2 percent. Furthermore, 61.2 percent of all items placed in carts are left behind without purchase.

“If you’re running a multimillion or multibillion dollar company, that’s a lot of money to leave on the table,” says Bernardine Wu, CEO of e-commerce consultancy firm FitForCommerce. That’s why the likes of Walmart, Overstock.com and Nordstrom send their registered customers e-mail reminders about the items they left in their shopping carts.

Wu says flatly that any retailer not sending abandoned cart e-mails is behind the times. “This is no longer a nice to have — it’s becoming a must have,” she says.