Upshot Commerce 2014 – Year In Review

Posted on January 8, 2015 by Vlad Zachary

2014 has been another landmark year for Upshot Commerce and the brands we work with. In addition to onboarding a host of new clients, we helped the majority of our clients achieve record breaking results. Here are some of these results:

Upshot commerce Year in review 2014

Posted in Apparel Ecommerce, Channel Sales and Comparison Shopping, Checkout Management, Cloud, CDN and Scalability, Customer Management, E-commerce Trends, Finance, Tax and ERP Tools, Fraud & Chargeback Prevention, Inventory Management, Merchandising Manager, Mobile eCommerce, Reports and Analytics, SEO and Marketing, Wholesale Management | Tagged | Comments Off on Upshot Commerce 2014 – Year In Review

The 6 Silliest Sales Tax Rules in the US

Posted on December 23, 2014 by Vlad Zachary

With the online holiday shopping mostly over we are sharing guest content from our partner Avalara.

If you’ve ever dealt with sales tax rules, then you know there are some crazy laws about how to tax products. But do you know exactly how crazy it gets?

In this episode of Will’s Whiteboard, Will humorously points out six of the craziest U.S. tax laws, including tax rules for items like planes-with-no-pilots, sparkly capes, and hairy chests/indoor swimming pools. Enjoy, and let us know your favorite one.

Want more information? Click Here

Posted in Checkout Management, Customer Management, E-commerce Trends, Finance, Tax and ERP Tools, Fraud & Chargeback Prevention, Inventory Management, Merchandising Manager, Mobile eCommerce, Order Management, Reports and Analytics, SEO and Marketing, Shipping and Fulfillment | Tagged | Comments Off on The 6 Silliest Sales Tax Rules in the US

Strategies for Increasing Your Average Order Value

Posted on December 15, 2014 by Vlad Zachary

Encouraging your customers to buy more items and spend more money each time they shop is a proven method to boost revenue and profitability. Brick-and-mortar retailers have perfected the practice over the years, based on the marketing concept of the ‘halo effect’. The halo effect is the bias shown by customers towards certain products because of a favorable experience with other products made by the same brand, or sold in the same store, where the favorite item was originally purchased. For years retailers have used the halo effect to measure, quantify and profit from brand equity.

 

Halo Effect In The Digital Commerce Ecosystem

 

E-commerce professionals are constantly looking for proven merchandising and other methods to take advantage of the halo effect online. The best measure of success for these efforts is Average Order Value (AOV). The simplest way to calculate AOV is:

AOV1

Some of the ways AOV can help your marketing efforts include:

  • giving you a measure for ROI on your marketing budget
  • helping you identify customer buying habits
  • providing you with another performance indicator for your online marketing and
  • allowing you to improve segmentation and targeting

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Another important reason to focus on increasing AOV is the customer acquisition costs. In many e-commerce segments ‘demand-generation’ costs are rising due to higher costs for SEO, ad-words marketing and more competition in general. On the other hand programs to increase AOV often bring more revenue at a lower cost.

Besides the obvious techniques like cross-selling and up-selling, here are some actionable strategies we have found to increase your AOV.

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Product Bundles

Product bundling makes buying multiple items at once easy. Often these are groups of products around a primary product and its accessories, or groups of products used for a similar purpose.

Fashion and apparel retailers can take it a step further and offer “Shop This Look” pages that offer a lot of flexibility and ideas.

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Tea Collection uses Upshot Commerce promotion tools to create successful “Shop This Look” product bundle pages.

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This is a great technique to increase AOV and also helps personalize the shopping experience. While bundles can be discounted to encourage customers to buy, they don’t always have to be. The convenience to have the items pre-packaged together is often sufficient to entice shoppers to buy.

In order to increase the effect of bundling, make sure you test different bundling/pricing strategies against a control group. Another best practice would be to target different bundles at different customer segments. Your goal is to determine which options will give you the best conversion and revenue results.

2.

Active User Segmentation

Active Segmentation of the visitors of your online store is a powerful way to provide personalized experience, which in turn has direct impact on AOV. Depending on the platform capabilities, an e-commerce manager can build and modify segments of site visitors and direct them to the appropriate categories, landing pages, promotions, or personalized recommendations.

Using the powerful Upshot Commerce segmentation tool merchandisers can build a number of active segments based on amount of money spent previously, referral source (search referrer, social media, marketing referrer, etc.), actions like – visit certain category or product page, add item to shopping cart, share item on social, etc.

AOV5

3.

Customer Rewards

When the goal is to make customers spend more, a proven method is to use loyalty programs and incentives.

Here is how Freshtrends leverages the Upshot Commerce toolkit to offer a comprehensive rewards program with loyalty points, incentives and discounts for registered shoppers.

AOV10

4. 

Personalization and Recommendations

Shoppers usually respond well when presented with products that meet their needs. The more relevant the product offers, the more likely they will buy more thus increasing the AOV.

Personalization – this is about marketing 1-on-1. Merchants can take the Active Segmentation from #2 above and use the information to further create an online experience tailored to the individual shopper. Even just a simple, personalized welcome message with your customer’s name can go a long way. More sophisticated, personalized promotions with customer-specific landing pages that feature a specially selected product catalog can be very effective.

Recommendations – online shoppers often take advantage when offered help selecting products. As a merchant you can use information you’ve collected about your customers to help recommend products for them.

Ergobaby helps parent choose the right carrier for their newborns.

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5.

Easy and/or Free Returns

One of the biggest barriers to buying online remains the concern customers have about whether or not they can return the items they purchase if something is not right.

When customers think that returning an item will be costly or difficult, they will buy fewer items. However, research has demonstrated that if returns are free – the more items customers buy, the more they actually keep. Customers don’t return more items when the process is easy or free, they just want to know that easy returns are available, before they buy.

AOV8

6.

Tier-Based Free Shipping, Coupons and BOGO Promotions

Another relatively easy way to encourage higher AOV is to set up tier-based free shipping as in “Free shipping on orders over $100”. The effect can be even more powerful when you combine this offering with coupons and BOGO (Buy-one-get-one-free) promotions.

The National Gallery of Art offers 20% off orders $100+ with a coupon code Gallery20:

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The Bottom Line: Simplify and Personalize Wherever Possible

Customers want to buy more, and will buy more—if you make the shopping experience easy, relevant and personal to them. To achieve that – improve and refine the use of product bundles and active user segmentation, deploy a full customer rewards and loyalty program and focus the recommendations to help your customers’ anticipated needs. Also – implement easy and free returns where possible; leverage tiered free shipping and maximize BOGO type campaigns. All of these will help you increase your AOV numbers.

 

Posted in Apparel Ecommerce, Channel Sales and Comparison Shopping, Checkout Management, E-commerce Trends, Finance, Tax and ERP Tools, Inventory Management, Merchandising Manager, Mobile eCommerce, Order Management, Reports and Analytics, SEO and Marketing, Shipping and Fulfillment | Tagged | Comments Off on Strategies for Increasing Your Average Order Value

Christmas 1.0 – or the E-commerce Playbook for the Holidays

Posted on November 7, 2014 by Vlad Zachary

Part 4 of 4 – Fulfillment

In the first three parts of the E-commerce Playbook for the Holidays we discussed how to use Data Analysis to create an effective Holiday Sales plan, how to focus your Marketing in order to achieve the best ROI and what the top Site Optimizations are for maximum impact during the holidays. With this final post we will discuss how to work with your partners to ensure smooth and friction-free fulfillment during the 2014 holidays.

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With all the previous stages we were dealing with processes and elements you as a merchant can control directly. When we talk about fulfillment though – the focus is on how to work well with your partners to ensure your customers get all their gifts on time and as ordered.

Top Goal: Have Your Product In Your Customers Hands On Time

There isn’t any other period of the year when timing is that important. This is why while you may be focusing on advertising, or marketing, or site optimizations – you need to have someone on your team, who keeps track of the pipeline of orders. This person should be on top of all your different partners, drop-shippers and suppliers and he or she should be able and ready with back-up options if things change late in the season. The top priority as with marketing is attention to the big three:

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The first thing about fulfillment is to think through what it means to support these three days. Even the best marketing or a super-optimized site will have failed if the order doesn’t reach your customer before Christmas, or before that airplane flight, or road-trip. And this will not only impact your sales, but will most likely have a longer term impact on your brand and on your relationship with that customer.

So the key is – long before the holidays you need to talk to your suppliers and partners to forecast demand and to iron out details. Nobody can be surprised by the volume and these conversations need to ensure that your customers receive quality gifts on time.

Leverage All Tools In Your Platform

Even when you have someone, who stays on top of your pipeline of orders you will have better results and peace of mind if you use technology to automate data flows and processes. When orders accelerate come black Friday what you really need is a system that does the monitoring for you, with the ability to automatically sync shipping and tracking numbers, drop-shipments, etc. and do this across different warehouses and shipping locations, using API integrations, automated FTP uploads etc. The point is – you still need to keep on top of this, but you need a system that does most of the work for you, so you don’t need to check every single order.

An added benefit of a platform that allows you this kind of automation is that you can now give your customers continuous fulfillment updates on your site.  Leading up to Christmas, customers can proactively chose shipping options for themselves to get their products when they need it. We have all seen notifications like “To get it by Dec 21st – choose 2 day shipping”.

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A screenshot from the Upshot Commerce Order Management tool.

Fulfillment and The Black Swan

It’s often critical to plan for the best-case, not just for worst-case and most-likely scenario. What will happen if your top products sell like crazy and on top of this your marketing amplifies the trend and you end up with 3 or 4 times the number of orders you had planned for? Will you supplier network be able to satisfy the demand, take on the additional load without a hiccup? Maybe they need a heads-up if your volume is about to exceed a certain level – so they can hire extra hands, or ramp up production or shipping. What about the seasonal “it” products? If your supplier offers that one item on every customer’s wishlist (and every merchant’s buy list) will you have any guarantee of priority with your supplier? Will you still be their priority when they suddenly are overwhelmed?

All these questions refer to situations that have the potential to grow into black swans events – highly unlikely, but with the potential to do a lot of damage to your brand. The main idea is not to try and predict this type of event, but to work with your fulfillment network to build ability for robust response to negative developments and also – be prepared to exploit the positive ones.

Keep It Simple (If At All Possible)

Often the highly nuanced product lines, with tons of customizable options have the tendency to increase complexity exponentially. Every time there is an additional option, it increases the amount of complexity to shipping, manufacturing and virtually every part of your fulfillment process. So try to keep it simple and as few SKUs as possible, or at least without a ton of new ones.

Set Customer Expectations: Under-promise and Over-deliver

If in your experience most orders reach destination in two days, tell your customers it will be three or four days. When they get the product earlier they will be happy and if the order is a bit late – nobody will notice, because they expected that extra day or two. If your customers are very patient on the front end and take their time choosing when they’re ordering, they certainly will not be patient when they feel like something is wrong and they might not get their product on time. As a brand you want to avoid that.

USPS, UPS, Or FedEx

According to The Blueprint – there is a broad rule of thumb in regards to your shiopping choices: If your total package shipment is under five pounds, then USPS is often the better choice. If the shipment is over five pounds, you are usually better off with UPS, and FedEx is best for same-day deliveries and other express options. In your specific business you may have noticed different trends. Do you see any difference in profitability, or customer satisfaction, or anything else – based on the chosen shipping carrier? These differences are likely to be amplified during the holidays, so think ahead of time through the different scenarios to help push the trends in a desired direction.

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Bottom Line For Fulfillment Stage:

Fulfillment is all about working well with your partners and suppliers, so coordinate with them ahead of time and let them know your plans for the top three most important days – Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Free Shipping day. Have a designated person to stay on top of the order pipeline and make it easier for them by leveraging technology to automate the process. Plan for the best case scenarios as well as for black swan events. Keep it simple if possible, under-promise and over-deliver and figure out best shipping options.

Posted in Checkout Management, Cloud, CDN and Scalability, E-commerce Trends, Inventory Management, Order Management, Reports and Analytics, Shipping and Fulfillment, Wholesale Management | Tagged | Comments Off on Christmas 1.0 – or the E-commerce Playbook for the Holidays

Christmas 1.0 – or the E-commerce Playbook for the Holidays

Posted on October 20, 2014 by Vlad Zachary

Part 3 of 4 – Website Optimization

In our first two parts of the E-commerce Playbook for the Holidays we discussed how to use Data Analysis to create an effective Holiday Sales plan and how to focus your Marketing in order to achieve the best ROI. Today we will focus on Website optimization for superior holiday performance in 2014.

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Because of the large number of different changes that an e-commerce retailer can initiate – at this stage we will talk more about focus. You want to determine what those web-store tweaks and changes are that will have the biggest impact on your sales. The overall goal is to remove every single obstacle preventing a site-visitor from finding the perfect gift quickly and checking out.

Make Search More Prominent

“Search” is the single feature of your web-store that can increase both conversion rate and order value and this is especially true during the holidays. According to a National Retail Federation study, your site visitors who use “search” make purchases on average 11% more that the rest during the year. This number increases over the holidays. Not only that – statistics show that these visitors also come back more often and their order size is typically larger.

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There are multiple reasons why search works and they are centered around purchase intent and demographics. The holidays are the time when men shop more than any other time of the year. Research conducted by MineWhat shows that using “search” is one of those typically male behaviors. So if you could only afford to focus on just one site improvement this season – make it “Search”.

Focus On Site Speed

Another critical site optimization for the holidays is speed. Site load-times are important in general and especially so around critical shopping dates like Black Friday or Cyber Monday. A couple of years ago Walmart calculated that even one additional second of friction on their digital store was costing them around $22 million in sales. Cyber-shoppers have gotten used to fast sites and frictionless commerce and when there are time-pressures around the holidays – they can be even more intolerant of any delays.

Here is a quick sample list of steps you can take to decrease your site’s load time:

Use GZIP compression.

Compression of your HTML and CSS files with gzip typically saves around fifty to seventy percent of the file size. This means less time to load your pages, and less bandwidth overall. Enabling compression is pretty much a standard practice and if you are not using it for some reason, your webpages are slower than your competitors.

Improve your JavaScript and Style sheets.

Let’s get a bit technical- here is what the Google developers blog advises: Many JavaScript libraries, such as JQuery, are used to enhance the page to add additional interactivity, animations, and other effects. However, many of these behaviors can be safely added after the ATF content is rendered. Investigate moving the execution and loading of such JavaScript until after the page is loaded. If the content of the page is constructed by client-side JavaScript, then you should investigate inlining the relevant JavaScript modules to avoid extra network roundtrips. Similarly, leveraging server-side rendering can significantly improve first page load performance: render JS templates on the server, inline the results into HTML, and then use client-side templating once the application is loaded.

Optimize your images.

Only a few image formats work well on the web and it is important to know there are two kinds of image compression, lossy and lossless. Lossy compression means once you decompress – you will not get the exact image as the original. This, however, will only be visible at a closer look. Lossy compression is excellent for the web, because images use small amount of memory, but can be sufficiently like the original image. When you decompress a lossless image, you get exactly the same result as the original. This compression however uses more memory, so it will slow your page down.

Cache it if you can.

This will not only improve site-speed, but also may impact positively your rankings. Engines like Google, Yahoo, etc. also see not only your content, but also on how quick it responds.

Call your platform provider ahead of time and work out a comprehensive plan to address all possible options for speeding up your site.

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Site speed may vary for a variety of reasons. Spikes in traffic shouldn’t be one of them.

Simplify Choice and Eliminate Information Overload

Information overload is a universal problem and it is one that is accelerating in our daily lives. We have more and more messages and information struggling for our attention. To be effective, we have learned to make quick decisions about whether a site is worth exploring, or not.

In his best selling book “The Paradox of Choice – Why More Is Less”, Barry Schwartz details how eliminating consumer choices can greatly reduce anxiety for shoppers. What is the meaning of this in the context of site optimization for holiday shopping? Certainly I am not advocating to limit the number of products you offer for sale – just to optimize the user experience on all category and landing pages with the goal to make it easier for shoppers to make a choice.

Here is how one of our clients has optimized the retail experience:

http://www.teacollection.com/

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The redesigned Tea Collection store features a clean design with a number of choices that are clear and easy to review. It is currently achieving a 5% conversion rate and enjoys many repeat shoppers and increased customer satisfaction.

Other sites with similar simplified user experience:

http://www.zutano.com/

http://www.orbitbaby.com/

 

Remember Mobile Commerce

We pointed out in earlier posts that the most striking change to consumer buying behavior in the last 5 years has without a doubt been the rise of mobile. This is why optimizing the mobile experience is critical.

This is what market analysts were projecting just 3 years ago …

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… and this is what reality looked like last year and the projection for this year:

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So whether you are running a dedicated mobile site, or relying on responsive web-design – your focus on the mobile user experience should be stronger than ever. More often than not the sales and the conversion rate on mobile are not going to match up to the main site, or up to expectations. Yet mobile is still very important as this is typically where the majority of shoppers  start their product research. So if your main, desktop site is converting better than ever – this could be driven to a large extent by mobile.

 

Bottom Line For Site Optimization Stage:

Make “Search” more prominent and clearly visible on the home page and throughout your store. Ensure site speed is in line with your shoppers’ expectations. Simplify choice to eliminate information overload and remember the increasing influence of Mobile.

Please check back for our next post, or sign up for our blog updates. The next topic is Fulfillment Optimization for Christmas 2014.

Posted in Channel Sales and Comparison Shopping, Checkout Management, Inventory Management, Merchandising Manager, Mobile eCommerce, Order Management, SEO and Marketing | Tagged | Comments Off on Christmas 1.0 – or the E-commerce Playbook for the Holidays

Are we ready yet?

Posted on September 24, 2014 by Vlad Zachary

The National Retail Federation estimates that what a retailer sells during the holidays can be as much as 20 – 40% of the annual sales. The expectation is that 2014 will build upon the success of 2013. During last year’s shopping season there was an unprecedented increase in eCommerce conversion rates and order volume – 12 and 15% respectively.

At the same time the increased complexity in eCommerce operations leads to the need for precise planning. Last year the shopping season – between Thanksgiving and Christmas had the fewest number of days – 27. This helped highlight the convenience of the online shopping and is one of the reasons for the record 2013. This year consumers and merchants have one more day for shopping.

Here is a chart of the top performing days during the 2013 shopping season – based on data from ComScore and ChannelAdvisor:

Chart

If we look at the data – the opportunity seems even more slim. Add to this the fact that the majority of shoppers are increasingly shopping across multiple devices, channels and platforms and it becomes obvious that a good plan is more than necessary – it is a must. Are we ready yet?

 

To learn more about how to maximize your sales during the 2014 holiday season – join us on September 30 – 

Posted in E-commerce Trends, Inventory Management, Merchandising Manager, Mobile eCommerce | Tagged | Comments Off on Are we ready yet?

Christmas 1.0 – or the E-commerce Playbook for the Holidays

Posted on September 11, 2014 by Vlad Zachary

Part 2 of 4 – Marketing

In our first part of the E-commerce Playbook for the Holidays we discussed how to use Data Analysis to create an effective Holiday Sales plan. Today we will focus on Marketing.

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This stage is based on the same strategy used for the Data Analysis phase. You want to determine what worked from a marketing stand-point last year, what is working this year, and what you want the message to be going into next year. While the primary focus is sales, using marketing to position your business for after the holidays should be a close second. It is also important to consider what you want to learn for 2015. There will be a lot of activity and the holidays can be the perfect opportunity to test new strategies, innovative promotions or messaging.

Most Orders vs. Highest Order Value

When analyzing what worked last year you will see a lot of short visits in response to your promotions. This is a clear sign of comparison-shopping – a visitor came and then left and most likely searched for the same product at cheaper prices. Together with this you will also notice another sign of comparison-shopping – conversions happening after multiple visits.

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Certainly price promotions drive sales and there will always be one item that brings in the highest number of orders. This success should be considered together with the promotion that brought the highest profit-per-item overall.  To craft a winning strategy for 2014, you need to look at a combination of these two and determine what is your best chance to maximize business. Let’s say for example that one coupon campaign for product X results in $20,000 in sales, with $10,000 profit, while another campaign for product Y results in $10,000 in sales with $7,000 profit. Which one of these two would you rather focus on? Despite the obviously higher profitability of product Y – there isn’t one right answer. Perhaps there is a solid reason why product Y will not exceed last year’s sales by too much, but product X could easily double or triple its performance. You need to determine which is more likely and plan accordingly.

The Third Dimension

Once you have determined what marketing brought in the most orders and the most profits, you need to add to the equation the 2014 year-to-date. What worked and keeps working? What is different from the last holiday season and is this difference expected to hold for the rest of the year? These are some of the questions you need to answer.

For instance – consider the buying behavior of your returning customers! How did they perform in 2014? Were there repeat purchases, other changes in buyer behavior?

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Ideally what you want to be able to calculate is the ROI of your marketing efforts and not just for the holiday season, but over time as well. If you acquired new shoppers last Christmas – how many became regular and loyal customers? What was the financial contribution of these new customers?

In addition to ROI and margin standpoint – you need to evaluate your marketing from a creative standpoint, from a traffic-generating standpoint, from the overall contribution to your brand and the brand image you are building. Your goal is to identify and take into account how attitudes and buying behaviors change over the course of the year and to adjust your marketing accordingly.

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The Mobile Factor

The most striking change to consumer buying behavior in the last 5 years has without a doubt been the rise of mobile.  It is important to consider how the mobile experience is affecting your business. Are your campaigns optimized for the mobile user? Will your email marketing or AdWords campaign be as effective on mobile as it is on the desktop? Mobile presents difficulties and new requirements for mobile optimized and responsive sites, product and landing pages. Mobile could also present exciting new opportunities for marketing and retail. If the majority of your organic visitors are on a mobile device, then perhaps you have unique advantages over your competition. Perhaps instead of a more traditional marketing you can invest into mobile marketing campaigns and see how the ROI compares to your other marketing efforts.

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Consistency Rules

Because of the information overload during the holidays one of the first and most important best practice is to match your promotion message across channels. If your promotion offers “35% off winter jackets”, then when the potential customer clicks the link – they need to see the same message, with the same offer and the same graphics. A lot of retailers fail to follow that and instead point their campaigns to the main store, or to the product category page, which often doesn’t even display the same graphics for the promotion. Also – when the customer goes to the physical store – they should be able to see the same offer, messaging and graphics. This is an excellent way to maximize the ROI of your marketing and it has the added benefit of creating in your customers’ mind a feeling of consistency and a clear path to what they are looking for.

Timing Is Everything

Next you need to look at your projections and figure out when the best-case scenarios happen – will you have enough products. Also if your campaigns perform better than expected – have you adjusted the spending widgets on the advertising platform you are using so budget is not exhausted just when your campaign is converting at its best? Also you need to figure out if you will have the marketing budget for the entire holiday season if everything goes full-steam. You don’t want to be in the position to run out of marketing dollars for your AdWords campaign just before some of the most important dates on your timeline.

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Bottom Line For The Marketing Stage:

Determine your marketing strategy for 2014 based on ROI analysis of both last year’s holiday season and the current year-to-date trends. Adjust tactics based on expected buyer behaviors and consider the increasing influence of Mobile. Make sure your messaging and promotions are consistent across channels.

 

Please check back for our next post, or sign up for our blog updates. The next topic is Website Setup for Christmas 2014.

Posted in Checkout Management, Customer Management, E-commerce Trends, Inventory Management, Merchandising Manager, Mobile eCommerce, Order Management, Reports and Analytics | Tagged | Comments Off on Christmas 1.0 – or the E-commerce Playbook for the Holidays

Christmas 1.0 – or the E-commerce Playbook for the Holidays

Posted on August 21, 2014 by Vlad Zachary

Part 1 of 4 – Data Analysis

As soon as the Back-to-school shopping is over, retailers and e-commerce providers will turn their almost undivided attention to Christmas. Some retailers have already started preparing for the season. In the next few posts on this blog, we will offer advice on the best approach to maximize the Christmas sales.

There are four major areas for planning and preparation and today we will focus on the first one: Data Analysis

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This stage is all about determining what items to promote this year and how much you will need. This first step is often the most crucial one and our post today will focus on how to approach it.

Best Sellers

So what kind of data will you need? The first and most obvious place to start looking for this year’s best-sellers, is of course last year’s best-sellers. So identify your top-performing products from last year and then look at every one of them to determine if they have a good chance to repeat their success. Some of the old top performers for instance might be linked to a calendar event, like the Winter Olympics.

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Your goal is to make a list of products that people will want to buy and this means that you want to consider your top-performing products throughout 2014 as well. As you are going through this analysis a secondary criteria would be – which one of these products were ordered as gifts. You can determine this by a relatively easy look at the shipping addresses – when they were different from the billing ones, or the names on the shipping destinations, when different from the billing. If you are on a platform like Upshot you can use the data from the Gift-wrap extension and this will make it even easier and more accurate.

The next step in your analysis will be trends. You want to try and determine, which products are gaining popularity and which ones are perhaps declining. When a top seller last Christmas is losing momentum by mid-August, you might want to consider betting on something else. This is the kind of analysis of your data that will help you make even more precise determination what will sell best this year.

The Non-Sellers

Looking at the best selling products is only the first step. Next you want to analyze what items didn’t sell. If you had a high bounce rate, at what point in the shopping process did the site visitors abandon their purchase? The data might offer you ideas as to when this occurs, and steps to fix potential issues causing customers to leave your site too soon.

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This slide from RJMetrics and SLI Systems shows how your data may offer clues.  For instance – searches that yielded no results. Can you determine if this was because you didn’t have the right products, or perhaps because your search function can be set up better? Or was there some demand there that you couldn’t fulfill, because you weren’t expecting it? These are the right questions to find answers to – before you make your top list for this year. 

Unmet Demand

Next you want to look at orders that you weren’t able to fulfill. We all know the rush to get shipping and delivery on time for these key holiday dates. Was it late orders or depleted inventory that caused the non-fulfillment? Is there any lesson in the data for this year? The continuous growth in e-commerce will probably test us in 2014 too and to better manage inventory you need to carefully analyze your last-year’s data.

Adjust Forecast Based on Current Traffic and Conversions

As a final step in your analysis you need to take into consideration any changes in your traffic or conversion rates. Has your traffic changed? Are you getting more organic hits, targeted advertising visitors? Has your conversion rate jumped from 1.5% to 2.1%? This alone may mean you potentially need more than 25% more product this season if your conversion rate keeps improving.

Here is how the analysis is done at Keepsakes Etc.

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Bottom Line For The Data Analysis Stage:

You want to identify your top-performing products and then create an accurate forecast of how much you will need this year. This is the basis for all the subsequent plans – marketing, web-site optimization, vendor orders and fulfillment.

Make sure you check back for our next post on Marketing for Christmas 2014.

Posted in Apparel Ecommerce, Checkout Management, Customer Management, E-commerce Trends, Inventory Management, Merchandising Manager, Mobile eCommerce, Order Management, Reports and Analytics, SEO and Marketing, Shipping and Fulfillment | Tagged | Comments Off on Christmas 1.0 – or the E-commerce Playbook for the Holidays

Christmas 2.0

Posted on August 5, 2014 by Vlad Zachary

Back-to-school – the three words that will make middle school kids cry and the retailers sweat. That’s right – the second biggest shopping season of the year is right now and it is heating up. Every year more than $70 billion of merchandise is sold as part of back-to-school drive and around one third of it is online. This is a sizable amount of revenues.

The one major difference between Back-to-school and Christmas is that shoppers are way more price sensitive and not willing to open their wallets as much as during “the holidays”. According to a National Retail Foundation survey – more than 45% of shoppers indicated that coupons influenced where they planned to shop for back-to-school. Another survey by Thomson Reuters and Ipsos discovered that as much as 54% of all parents are influenced by sales and special offers and the second biggest influencer at 48% was teachers’ recommendations.

Screen_Shot_2014-07-28_at_4.02.27_PMSo how can a retailer take advantage of this opportunity with e-commerce tools? First and foremost – there needs to be a plan that takes into consideration the opportunity, addresses the customer needs and delivers the products they are looking for in an easy-to-find, easy-to-buy format. Here are some helpful tips on what should be part of this plan.

Develop Omni-channel Promotions

As many parents will tell you – despite the many advantages of online shopping – sometimes for back-to-school it’s just more convenient to go and get it done in the brick-and-mortar store. There are checklists, size changes and the mentality to “just pick a day and get it done.”

So as a retailer – create promotions that work across channels. If the customer prefers to go to the physical store – give them an incentive. Check that the store locator on your site is up-to-date and make sure that your map can dynamically update to display the store closest to the customer. If your platform makes it easy to offer features like Buy Online – Return In Store – this is a great time of the year to promote it.

Build Traffic With Campaigns and Convert With Campaign Landing Pages

Let’s say as a retailer you are using paid search to educate shoppers about the category deals you are offering. One option would be to just point the search results to your category page. Or you could take advantage of this opportunity and try to learn as much as possible about your customers. Build a Campaign Landing page that collects data about the visitors. If you offered a reward for repeat or returning visitors – the numbers of those who are willing to give their personal details will jump. Then using the segmentation tools of your e-commerce platform you should collect data about your shoppers and use this segmentation to drive more traffic, repeat business and conversions.

Screenshot 2014-08-04 16.07.12Image Source: http://blog.stamps.com/

 Get Social

Kids have three priorities during back-to-school shopping and they are clothes, clothes and clothes. As many parents know – looking good in the classroom is very important.

As we all know “Looking good” is a fluid concept and in that regard kids influence each other a lot. How do they do that? Social networks of course. After Facebook, the most popular networks that have the potential to affect sales are Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat each with their specific rules for marketing and advertising. Which means there are many ways to spread the word and reach wider audiences.

Last But Not Least – What’s Important to All Online Shoppers

Screenshot 2014-08-04 16.07.46Image Source: http://blog.stamps.com/

This post is first in a series of strategies, tips and techniques we will discuss and share in order to better prepare the online merchant for the upcoming shopping seasons. Please make sure to check back soon.

Posted in Apparel Ecommerce, Channel Sales and Comparison Shopping, Cloud, CDN and Scalability, Customer Management, E-commerce Trends, Merchandising Manager, Reports and Analytics, SEO and Marketing | Tagged | Comments Off on Christmas 2.0

Where Do We Spend Our Money Online

Posted on July 21, 2014 by Vlad Zachary

With $13.6 billion Clothing is the leading e-commerce category. The e-commerce business brokers at Digital Exits have put together this infographic with more interesting numbers and a breakdown that looks at in-store vs online. The anticipated increase in total online sales between 2011-2016 is 162%. What is more interesting is where customers spend their money. After clothing come books, music, furniture, electronics and food. For more on the future of how we shop – checkout our previous post.

what-to-sell-online-edit_02

Posted in Apparel Ecommerce, Channel Sales and Comparison Shopping, E-commerce Trends, Mobile eCommerce, Reports and Analytics | Tagged | Comments Off on Where Do We Spend Our Money Online