E-commerce technology

Our notes from the entertaining and statistic-laden Charles Nicholl of SeeWhy at Magento Live on email remarketing to reduce basket abandonment. No purchase journey is the same (Google conducted 000s of studies). Here are some compelling statistics re. abandonment and returning visits: -O.25% is the percentage of first time visitors to buy on first visit. [Read more]

Interesting piece on checkout evolution: “checkout is the lynchpin of e-commerce. It’s how customers buy and retailers get paid. Yet despite years of evolution, only a few changes have significantly impacted checkout conversion online.” While some e-commerce checkout forms vary from a standard sequence, most don’t. In fact, even the order of questions has become [Read more]

Interesting article from Predictive Intent on the effectiveness of carousels (those hero content areas which rotate images). “Last year we carried out an A/B split test with a client using a vertical scroller, displaying 3 products at any one time on the left-hand sidebar, whilst requesting 12 suggestions in total – enough for three “scrolls”. [Read more]

We’ve been asked a lot recently (hardly surprising) on what guidance & solutions we can issue to clients regarding the EU Cookie Law directives. For background reading, there’s an interesting article/discussion on e-consultancy with a man at the ICO which puts the issues in content. There’s also some feedback and views from various analysts, retailers [Read more]

Timely summary Google about how to link your Webmaster tools account to Google Analytics. This means that in one place you can see a summary of your website’s SEO performance directly from your Google Analytics account. The SEO reports in Google Analytics appear under the Traffic Sources section in the My Site tab of Analytics. [Read more]

The average website page is now about 965 kilobytes in size, reveals a study of top sites by the HTTP Archive. The figure is 33% up on the same period in 2010 when the average webpage was a svelte 726 kilobytes.  Big pages generally take longer to load, which can mean visitors quit if a [Read more]

Screen Pages discuss back office integration and fulfillment with Pierre D’Arbost of MNP. Pierre explained decreased time to revenue and how to go about reducing transaction costs.

Tablets still account for only a small percentage of overall e-commerce, but they are punching above their weight. According to the Wall Street Journal and Forrester, while the conversion rate—orders divided by total visits—is 3% for shoppers using a traditional PC, it is 4% or 5% for shoppers using tablets. Many retailers also report that [Read more]

30% of tablet users have used their device to shop online, whilst currently only 25% of smartphone owners have used their phone to do the same. Similarly, almost half (48%) of tablet owners have used their devices to research products in-store, whilst only 29% have done the same via their smartphone, according to latest research [Read more]