It’s about this time of year that e-commerce retailers email me asking how to prepare for the upcoming holiday season. For many retailers, holiday seasonality is critical. If you’re an online retailer, getting your conversion funnels optimized early and strategically will determine whether your year ends on a high note or a flat one.

Here are two trends that will affect online shopping as we enter the shopping season…

If you are reading, you already know that improving your conversion rate is the only way to increase leads and sales profitably, without having to spend more money to drive yet more traffic to your site. Now Citrix Online is sponsoring a terrific webinar so you can learn how to do it from the pros!

If your business depends on capturing email addresses, you must read this just-posted case study. FaveCrafts, a free content website aimed at crafters and part of Prime Publishing Group (a leading Internet media company that operates community and e-commerce web sites in the crafting, home décor, wellness, diet and cooking categories) worked with WiderFunnel to [...]

Chris in Disneyland How does an organization like Disney create such a remarkable reputation? What can we learn from it? On a recent family visit to Disneyland, I aimed to gather clues to their success. As with each visit (this being the fourth in as many years) I was again impressed by the organization’s quality [...]

I have been a fan of Anne Holland since 1999 when I found myself working in a high-tech start-up, part of a team developing a web analytics application (ah, those heady dot com boom days…) and wondering ‘What on earth am I doing here; what do I know about the internet, really, other than its [...]

Rudder is a Web 2.0 service that reduces the effort required to manage personal finances. This free online system simplifies complex financial information and delivers emailed account snapshots and graphs to help users make better financial decisions. Rudder management worked with us because the conversion rate on their website was below their expectations and, in [...]

obama online marketing article Today, the local business publication, Business in Vancouver (BIV), picked up on my blog posts about Obama’s use of conversion optimization testing, which you can find below: Obama Used Conversion Rate Optimization to Win Obama’s Home Page Image Test If you have a BIV subscription, you can read the article here. [...]

News of a drop in holiday sales comes as no surprise this year. Overall holiday retail sales were down 5.5% in the month of November, and 8% in December up to the day before Christmas, compared to the same periods in 2007, according to MasterCard Advisors, a subsidiary of MasterCard Worldwide. But wait! eCommerce sales [...]

There are brave eCommerce retailers, truly working both hard and smart at making sure the avalanche of bad economic news does not sweep them over. This morning, AdAge reports a ComScore finding that consumer web spending dropped 4% so far in November versus the same period last year — the first time e-commerce figures have [...]

Everyone in the Online Marketing world seems to be talking about ‘Optimization’ lately, but you may not always know what they’re talking about. Search Engine Optimization (i.e. improving your search engine ranking) is a very different practice than Conversion Rate Optimization (i.e. improving your website conversion rate), which is also different from Web Performance Optimization [...]