Ecommercepartners.net

Ecommerce Expected to Grow Tremendously in Next 5 Years

According to the UK’s Global Freight Solutions (GFS), delivery companies expect to handle as many personal packages as they do business packages. Ecommerce has fundamentally transformed the role of delivery companies, and this has resulted in an increasingly complex distribution network, as many Ecommerce shoppers request that their packages be delivered to their homes instead of to businesses for pick up. The director of GFS, Simon Veale, said, “We believe the more frequent use of smartphones and tablets to buy Christmas presents online will fuel further parcel growth, and that, in turn, means home deliveries may well catch up with those destined for business customers by 2016.”

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Ecommerce Hits New Record High of $161.5 Billion in 2011 Sales

After 9 consecutive quarters of growth and 5 quarters of double-digit growth, Ecommerce sales have reached an all-time high in the fourth quarter of 2011. Retail Ecommerce stores were resoundingly successful over the holiday season, and according to a new study by comScore, these results are indicative of a larger trend for Ecommerce in 2011. Total spending in online retail stores soared to $161.5 billion in 2011, a 13% increase in growth from the year before. Q4 2011 spending also increased by 14%, suggesting that 2011 has been a very profitable year for Ecommerce vendors.

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Google Update: Changes in the Algorithm Reveal Focus on Fresher Results

Google released a new update at the tail end of January. The update, according to the Official Google Search Blog, will focus on delivering fresher results by categorizing pages based on the date they were published. Other updates include an upgraded new feature that is more sophisticated in blending news articles with organic search results on relevant topics and automated spelling corrections on commonly misspelled key phrases. They have also made several other improvements: a better related search category, improved search quality for images, and cross language refinements among them.

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Gil Levy, co-founder of Ecommerce Partners and head of sales, recently spoke at the Professional eBay & Ecommerce Sellers (PESA) Conference in Queensland, Australia. In front of a crowd of over 500 people, Gil presented, “Why is it Worth Spending $100,000 on a Website?”

Whether online or brick and mortar, the focus of a business is on conversion – making sure your customer reaches your product or services and follows through with a purchase.  It sounds simple, right?  Nevertheless, many companies approach their online business as a secondary to their traditional stores.  As a result, companies do not put the required attention and science toward a holistic approach needed to achieve success online.

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Many of our clients come to us after spending a significant amount of time and resources designing or redesigning their website, and are still getting poor conversion results.  We see it all the time.  What many clients might not have been aware of is that their new design could have been doomed from the start. More and more research about user interaction is shedding light on the ways that people read and respond to the information they see online.

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For some companies, hitting the one-billion-per-day visitor mark would be enough to sit back and watch the profits roll in. At Google however there’s one thing you can always count on: constant updates aimed at providing users with the best search results possible.

In 2011, Google experimented with thousands of tests to optimize their search and social media platforms. This year has already seen multiple releases including the Panda algorithm update, a Google +1 button similar to Facebook’s Like button and beta forms of their new social networking platform, Google +. Looking back on Google’s updates in 2011, each one brings a new dimension to the way webpages are ranked and the way users interact with Google in a social setting, going far beyond the traditional search box.

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Ask anyone who has been in business for a considerable amount of time, and they’ll tell you that there are a thousand different ways to be successful. However, there are common habits that persist among those who excel. One commonality is being an effective networker who is able to prepare for an event, work a room and follow up on leads.

It’s easy to see why. Life is about building and maintaining relationships, and it could take only a few influential introductions to get your business moving in a better direction. Just like any marketing activity, networking has a bigger effect over time: The more people you know, the more business opportunities will arise.

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In the early days of the web, trying to navigate to a page that wasn’t there caused your web browser to have something of a minor stroke; it just stopped working, and you weren’t going anywhere.

Before long, web designers got smarter, and we started using the infamous “404 Page” to announce that the page you were looking for wasn’t there anymore, or maybe never was in the first place. So what do you do with yours? Well, the first thing you have to decide is whether to even 404 or not in the first place.

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You work hard to bring traffic to your website. You invest money in online marketing strategies such as search engine optimization, pay per click marketing, social media and more. However, many basic issues will drive people away from your website and lower conversion. Luckily, many of these problems can be corrected with a bit of work.  Take a look at our top 10 list of reasons people leave, and some simple solutions:

1. Your site takes too long to load. Look, we’re all busy people; if a customer has to wait longer than a few seconds for a page to load, they’ll most likely leave. A good first place to check is Webmaster Tools – it takes just a few minutes to enable it for your website. You’ll be able to discover issues such as missing pages and broken links as Google crawls your site. Google also has some great tools to find issues associated with page speed – you can find a list of rules under “documentation” on this page. These include minifying CSS (i.e. compressing the files), combining external files, enabling browser caching and webpage compression. Yahoo also has a list of best practices to improve site speed. These include using high-quality web hosting, removing or updating any missing pages and links, and incorporating style sheets that load more efficiently.

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At the end of February, the engineers at Google made some major changes to the company’s search algorithm – the “secret formula” that controls what results you see for any search query, and the order of which it appears. Google keeps the exact algorithm confidential, but major factors have become apparent now that the dust has settled.

The update, popularly known as the “Farmer” update (AKA the “Panda” update), took relevance away from sites like EzineArticles.com and suite101.com, and instead placed greater emphasis on websites with only fresh, original content.  The update had long been anticipated, since Google had already started to crack down on websites like JC Penney and Overstock.com for low quality links and spammy links on collegiate websites (i.e. .edu websites).

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