The shopping frenzy in brick and mortar retail stores, better known as Black Friday, is also rapidly becoming one of the landmark days in the E-commerce world. This holiday shopping season (defined as November and December), E-commerce spending will rise 14.3 percent to $38.5 billion as more shoppers stay home on Black Friday and make their purchases online. Shopping online during the holiday season is a convenient way for people who cannot get to the stores, do not want to fight the crowds (or the cold) or simply look forward to sleeping in the day after their Turkey Day feast – to get limited holidays deal from the convenience of their own living room.

Last year, E-commerce sales on Black Friday alone, hit a whopping $595 million, an 11 percent increase from 2008. According to eMarketer, 2010′s  anticipated acceleration in spending over holiday season, may also reflect the creative promotions and discounts of businesses that now encompass the use of social media networks (such as Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter) and other Internet marketing outlets. Many retailers are hitting the ground running with social media this year to promote upcoming Black Friday deals. Some are even posting deals that are exclusive to those who engage with their brand via their social media channels.

“The rules for Black Friday have changed significantly,” NRF CEO Matthew Shay said in a statement. “Instead of waiting until Thanksgiving Day to announce their promotions, many retailers are getting shoppers excited about Black Friday by offering sneak peeks of deals in advance, using social media to create buzz, or teasing upcoming deals on their websites.”

Recent results from the National Retail Federation Shop.org eHoliday survey found that more than half of the retailers polled will send out special emails to customers announcing Black Friday deals, while around 31 percent will use their company’s website to promote those deals, 39 percent will hit shoppers through their Facebook pages, and 21 percent will tap into their Twitter feeds.

This year, perhaps more than ever before, retailers are trying to attract customers through their mobile devices.They are creating Apps, teaming up with leading companies such as Facebook and Google, and using location-based services (such as Foursquare or Facebook Places) to serve up deals. Shoppers using smart phones will account for more than a quarter of the $447 billion that U.S. retailers expect to reap this holiday season. Retailers with superior mobile and social media strategies are likely to have an advantage in winning the business of the savvy mobile shoppers who are predicted to spend more than $127 billion, or 28 percent of overall sales, during this holiday season.

An excellent example of a strong retail marketing campaign leveraging web 2.0 this holiday season is the $500 gift card that is being given away by Sports Authority this coming Friday. The only way of getting a chance to win one of the 20 cards, is for shoppers to check in via Foursquare and tweet their check in through Twitter. However, they must do this while shopping in store during certain times.

“It’s a way of engaging with our customers, as well as a way of reaching out to a younger, more mobile-savvy customer base,” said Clay Cowen – Sports Authority’s Vice President of E-commerce.

With the explosion of Web 2.0 – retailers have an opportunity to boost revenues by taking advantage of online activities and social media outlets, which have changed the way consumers will shop, search and share this holiday season. Have you found any great Black Friday deals on social media sites? Will you look to the web to do your holiday shopping? We welcome your feedback!

Check out The Net Impact’s November Newsletter to learn more about preparing your E-commerce Holiday Marketing Strategy!

Artistic Sensations Quality Kids and Teen Room Decor

Every once in while it’s good to review the basics for conversion like, “What is working on my Home Page?” For this conversation, I selected a small but mighty retailer of teen and kids furniture, Artistic Sensations.  The Net Impact is currently running several Google Optimizer tests on this site including several to improve conversion.  Yes, you always want to improve conversion. Many of the elements on the current home page for Artistic Sensations are the results of previous tests.  What did we learn and how does it relate to this Home Page Pointers post?  Here are a few quick and easy take-aways:

Finally, keep testing and making changes.  All we know is that this version of your site is what the customer likes today.  As for tomorrow?

The Shopping Cart Alternatives

There are plenty of monthly services that you can use for your shopping cart that may also give you a headstart instead of building the cart yourself.  Among those options are Ebay Stores, Yahoo Stores, MonsterCommerce, and ProStores.  These services are just the tip of the iceberg. 

While each of these services is different, as a whole they do have general advantages over creating your own shopping cart.  Those advantages include:

1. Ease of Design

For the most part, the previously mentioned store applications offer template designs.  Template designs offer an effective, easy way for you to design a nice looking web site and get the web site launched quickly.  There are often templates that can be purchased for other shopping cart interfaces such as Zen Cart, but they still require some adjustments on the part of the store owner.

2. Customization

On one hand, complete shopping cart customization is only provided through creating your own shopping cart.  However, if you don’t have that type of ability or budget, using one of the preceding pre-packaged shopping carts offers plenty of flexibility in design and layout in most cases.

3. All-in-One Solutions

Most of the monthly store shopping carts have one other advantage that can save you time: Credit card processing.  While you may need to install modules or simply configure your account information with shopping carts like Zen Cart, many of the pre-packaged stores listed above do the credit card processing for you and make this process easier.

4. Non-Technical Advantages

Don’t know HTML or some other technologies necessary to design a web site or edit components?  The overriding purpose of these previously mentioned online stores, in most cases, is to give you the ability to design a store without using any code.

5. Safety

In general, using one of these pre-packaged stores is safer than coming up with a design yourself.  The designs provided by these store services have often been tested, so you know whether or not they make effective stores that will lead to conversions.  Also, you can get technical support from the store services if you ever run into problems.

Affiliate Stores

Somewhat closely related to shopping cart stores is the ever-growing affiliate store.  CafePress.com and Zazzle are two very popular affiliate stores that you can use to design your own apparel and sell it to customers.  CafePress seems to be the market leader, but Zazzle is catching up.  Both affiliate stores allow you to customize clothing, cups, and all sorts of other apparel with your logo and other designs.  CafePress lets you setup your own press, while you get a percentage of the sale with Zazzle.  Like the shopping cart stores listed above, these two affiliate stores are easy to setup, design and customize your apparel.

Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager for The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.

The creation of the media kit can be a complicated and daunting task if you have never done it before.  Where do you even start?

The following steps will help you get started, and from there it will be a piece of cake.

1. Take an Inventory

Do you have existing advertising?  Do you know how many ads you will be putting on your web site?  Before setting up a media kit, it is a good idea to nail down the foundation of your advertising availability so that you know exactly what you will be offering to potential advertisers.

2. Evaluate Competitors

How are your competitors doing their advertising?  Your competitors can tell you a lot about not only where to put the advertising but also the advertising landscape.  If bigger competitors are struggling to find advertisers, it could be an indication that the advertising dollars in your web site’s industry are not available.  If this is the case, you may want to hold off on creating a media kit or adjust your plan to attract advertisers that are cautious about advertising in your industry.

3. Find Samples

There are media kit samples all over the internet, and evaluating what you like and don’t like is a good starting point for creating your media kit.  Simply type in “web site media kit” into your favorite search engine, and you should get thousands of results.  This is also a good idea to take an inventory on the format of the media kit – PDF or webpage.

4. Develop an Outline

Writing a media kit seems like a big process, but it really comes down to what you learned when writing a paper in school.  Plan ahead with an outline.  Outlining the media kit will make the process much faster, rather than adding and subtracting sections in a disorganized fashion without an outline.

5. Create the Media Kit

Once the media kit is mapped out, it is time to start putting it together.  Since your media kit is an important tool in your advertising sales, it is important to make it look neat and provide traditional calls to action.  Creating the media kit can take some time, but the difference between a good and a bad media kit can easily be reflected in sales.

Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager for The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.

If you are selling a few individual products and don’t offer package savings or other special deals, shopping carts could be a waste of resources.   If the vast majority of your customers only buy one product or service, why implement a more complicated shopping cart that could actually frustrate your customers and eventually lead them away from your product?

There are several options if you don’t use a shopping cart.  Among them are the use of a “Buy Now” or “Add Product” button on each individual product, a contact us prompt for potential leads to inquire about services, and simply setting up a 1-800 number to take phone inquiries.

For the purpose of an e-commerce store’s shopping cart replacement, the “Buy Now” or “Add Product” buttons are probably your best option.  Possible payment processing solutions for this arrangement include Paypal, Google Checkout, Versign, and 2Checkout.com.

Examples of types of e-commerce stores that can possibly do without a full shopping cart include book authors, bands, companies with individual, customizable solutions, expensive products and other random items that are sold individually such as cell phones and server hosting plans.

Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager for The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.

“Affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.” -Wikipedia

Affiliate programs can expand the value of your web site for your visitors, becoming a one-stop shop for the services that they use. However, the wrong affiliate programs can annoy your users and lead them away from your web site. When considering whether to add particular affiliate programs, a careful evaluation of the programs available is important. The following are four ways to help you choose the right affiliate program for your web site.

1. Reputation

Is the affiliate program reputable? This is by far the most important criteria when choosing affiliate programs. Not only do you need to know whether the program is reputable for payment purposes, but also whether the program will deliver on its promises when you send your own visitors elsewhere. If a visitor is not happy with a product that they received from your referral, that reflects poorly on your web site. Be sure to ask the right questions and get all the information before committing to an affiliate program. For every industry, there are several reputable affiliate programs. If you have doubts about one affiliate program, don’t hesitate to try others.

2. Compensation

Most web sites make compensation their first priority when considering affiliate programs. Certainly, your compensation is important, but you also must consider the type of products that you are selling in the affiliate programs and how likely your users are to buy these products. Even if your return for a computer-related affiliate program is great, you probably are not going to get much return on the affiliate program if your web site is about pets.

3. Service

How responsive is the affiliate program to problems and issues? How quickly do you get paid? Are your payments on time? Some of these issues are learned the hard way through trial and error, but once again, you can learn a lot by asking the right questions of your affiliate. Service may not seem like a huge issue before choosing an affiliate program, but it is definitely an important consideration as you start to generate revenue from the program.

4. Attractiveness

More than likely, your affiliate program has banners. These banners are meant to sell the products from the affiliate programs and drive traffic to the vendors. Like any other advertising, if the banners or messages are attractive, they are more likely to bring traffic. If your marketing message or advertising banners posted on your web site are unattractive, you could simply be wasting space. The same can be said for the landing pages and overall web site design of the seller.

May 2008 TNI Test: Theaudiobookstore.com 

May 2008 TNI Test: GoodCheapWineGuide.com 

Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager for The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.

Artistic Sensations, an e-commerce toy and gift store, is an excellent existing example of this strategy.  They are driving traffic and interest with their Holiday Loft Bed Giveaway.  In the process, Artistic Sensations is generating interest in their products, learning what their customers like most, and drawing attention through the contest

Giving away free products can be an investment, but if implemented properly, the return on investment in new customers, attention, PR and additional customer information collected has the ability to generate value many times over. 

The key is to develop a well thought out, extensive plan.  In the right industries, this strategy has limitless potential.

Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager at The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.

If you don’t have any visitors already, how do you attract visitors to your giveaways?

This question would lead one to believe that giveaways are a poor strategy for upstart E-Commerce web sites.  Actually, that is not necessarily the case.  In fact, giving away free items can still act as your web site’s launching pad, as it gives visitors a reason to check back, stick around and browse your other items.

Even so, we still have the problem of getting people to find your free stuff.   The following are three strategies you can use to spread the word about your free stuff quickly and without requiring you to stand on a street corner and beg people to take your items.

1. Message Boards

In the world of internet marketing, message boards are one of the most underrated and effective tools available.  Popular message boards allow a quicker and easier way than even blogs for you to get your voice heard and become an authority on a subject.  Message board contributors tend to stick together once they find a message board that they like, and some of the internet’s most popular message boards have thousands of regular contributors.  In addition to these contributors, many message boards have “lurkers” who simply read message boards to learn and develop opinions.  While overtly advertising your products is against the service agreements of many message boards, most message boards do allow you to put a link and information in the “signature” of each post.  At worst, you should be able to attract a few message board readers to your website to sneak a peak.  At best, one of those readers will spread the word to their friends and the rest of the message board about your free stuff.

2. Blogs

Not only can you develop visitors and authority through the use of your own blog, but you can also develop traffic by using other blogs.  By no means am I suggesting that you should spam other blogs.  There is an appropriate way of indirectly pushing your products on the comments portion of blog posts without spamming.  Personally, I can’t even count the number of times that I have found cool, new products or leads on services during specific internet searches as a result of blog discussions.  The vast majority of blog comments are indexed in the search engines, and if your product or service contributes positively to the discussion, blogs provide you another chance to get the word out about your free service or product.  Just remember, there is a big difference between spamming the message boards to market your product and mentioning your web site or giveaway in context to help readers.  Be sure that you are doing the latter! 

3. Social Networking

With the number of Web 2.0 web sites growing with each passing day, there are new opportunities for you to spread the word about your web site and products.  Social networking web sites include everything from Facebook and MySpace to Digg and del.icio.us.  Social networking web sites that show what is popular in a public forum, in particular web sites similar to Digg and del.icio.us, give you an especially great way to attract visitors quickly if your free stuff is useful.  In particular, if your product is of a technical nature, it is likely that many of your users are utilizing social networking web sites.  If you have the time and resources to promote to social web sites, you might as well promote to every social bookmarking web site that you can find in order to attract the most possible visits to your web site and freebies.

Conclusion

Hopefully, the strategies mentioned above will be nice starting points to promote your free stuff.  Having giveaways on your web site can be a nice marketing move to get your web site going.  Just think of how many stores drop their prices on the day after Thanksgiving, a.k.a. Black Friday, in order to get people into the store.  This way of thinking, if developed properly, is an effective E-Commerce strategy that can spread the word about your product even more quickly through the World Wide Web. 

Good luck in all of your online free giveaway endeavors!

Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager for The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.

The following is a description of how they square off: 

Price: Google Checkout Wins 

Google Checkout wins this battle, and it’s really not close.  They charge 2 percent of the sale price plus 20 cents per transaction, while Paypal charges 1.9-2.9 percent based on sales volume plus 30 cents per transaction.  However, Google checkout processing is free if you spend equal or less than 10 times your Adwords spend.  So if you spend $1,000 in Adwords, your first $10,000 of merchandise processing is free.  For most online e-commerce stores, it becomes almost impossible for Paypal to be cheaper than Google Checkout. 

Customer Trust: Tie 

At this point, the vast majority of online customers know about Paypal.  It has been around for a long time, and most online merchants accept it.   On the other hand, Google has plenty of name recognition as the largest search engine.  If your customers have used just one of the payment methods, it is more likely that they have used Paypal.  Still, Google Checkout is likely a trusted method of payment by your customers because of the name. 

Payment Flexibility: Paypal Wins 

Paypal allows customers to use their bank account for payment, while Google Checkout does not.  As most Paypal users know, Paypal also allows for peer-to-peer payments, which is a bonus for using the service. Both payment services now offer international currency and shipping. 

Miscellaneous: Paypal Wins

As already mentioned, the peer-to-peer payment feature in Paypal can be very convenient.  Paypal’s fraudulent return policy is also good for big purchases, as there is not a time limit on refunds, whereas Google fraudulent purchases need to be reported within 60 days.  Otherwise, the comparison seems rather similar for implementation. 

The Verdict 

Paypal seems to have a few more advantages, but Google Checkout beats Paypal on probably the most important factor: Price.  Google takes out less money in nearly all circumstances, and that is probably the most important factor when choosing a payment service.  Paypal’s advantages are probably not enough to make the two services rank equally. Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager for The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.
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