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A well constructed article by Lauren Freedman in Internet Week highlights the four practices that separate the winners from the losers in online retailing: category-centric merchandising; customer service execution; cross-channel execution and finally, consistency.

20% of all businesses run by women are in retail. Fun article from Seattle (home of Amazon) about women setting up online retailing businesses.

Interview in e-consultancy.com with US online marketing guru Anne Holland: “US spent only $238.5 million on optimization this year. That’s tiny considering that the average Web site gets 73% more total traffic within six months of optimization….budget more for SEO. At rock-bottom base you need $100-$500 per Web page. You may also need in-house training [Read more]

We are often asked: “what can I expect from email marketing? what is the norm?” Of course, email statistics vary widely. Here, though, is a set of stats online retailers can get started with.

Gartner analyst Adam Sarner told the E-Commerce Times that multichannel retailers learned that e-commerce doesn’t necessarily mean a transaction in an online shopping cart. “J. Crew knows that someone going to jcrew.com is 27% more likely to visit a J. Crew store soon afterwards,” Sarner said. “The Web is a powerful influence.”

mktg brainlog – Why SEO matters: Today i encountered a situation which could be the textbook example of why noone, but especially not multimillion $ companies can afford to not care about optimizing their websites for search engines. This is a typical problem most consumers have, and they usually end up blaming the search engine [Read more]

A recent survey from Javelin Group, the retail consultancy, reveals that online retailers’ top priority for 2005 is to improve conversion ratios. 90% of online shops will focus on better conversion from improved search, navigation and merchandising. 70% of online retailers questioned said that this was a strategic shift from new customer acquisition.

PC World reports that More than 8 million U.S. citizens have created a Web-based diary, and one in 10, or around 14 million U.S. Internet users, has contributed thoughts or comments to a blog. Blog readership jumped 58 percent between February and November, and comprised 32 million U.S. citizens in 2004. Screen Pages believes that [Read more]

Useful list of tips regarding the next generation of email marketing methods from ExactTarget. It’s all about segmentation and targeting.