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Rare Bird Blog
Free shipping could make (or break) your holiday sales
Friday, November 6, 2009
According to Shop.org's annual eHoliday Study conducted by Big Research, retailers are increasing looking to the Internet to boost lagging sales. Among the efforts getting the most attention: increasing or enhancing their presence on social networks, improving site functionality, and creating enticing discounts.Some nugget-sized statistics:
- 60% have updated their Facebook pages
- 58% are using Twitter
- 65% are blogging and using RSS feeds
- 45% have improved shopping cart functionality
- 44% improved site search
- 42% added or improved cross- and up-selling
- 40% added or improved ratings and reviews
- 37% featured sale pages
Consumers expect to shop online 30% more
Free shipping will be a key strategy: nearly 80% will offer some sort of free shipping and almost 60% will offer free shipping with no attached conditions.It's clear that online retailers are considering every tool in the arsenal to help drive sales. We're seeing similar efforts with our clients. My favorite item might surprise many of you: almost eighty percent of online retailers expect sales to be at least 14% above 2008 levels. But maybe not all that surprising, as almost 30% of consumers plan to devote more of their holiday budgets to online purchasing this year. The motivation? Compare prices, get free shipping, eliminate hassle and avoid the crowds.
Labels: e-commerce, marketing, retail
Sneak Peek: Harvard Health
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
For the past few months, we've been working on a very cool project for Harvard Health, a joint venture between Harvard Medical School and StayWell Consumer Health Publishing. In a nutshell, we're completely overhauling their entire e-commerce system, including overall site design, merchandising, administration and functionality.
Additionally, we're working with their Texas-based fulfillment company, Strategic Fulfillment Group, to provide a direct connection between our custom e-commerce platform and their fulfillment functions. This will allow seamless integration for customer access, order history, order & payment processing and insertion. All things that weren't possible in the previous iteration (built by another company.)
The image here is a sneak peek at the new site design which should be coming online in about a month. More details to follow...
Labels: api, e-commerce, harvard, integration