They say necessity is the mother of invention—we couldn't agree more. First the need for more power and innovation in the hands of online merchandisers led to the birth of Demandware...and now this. We've recognized the need for a resource to help guide you through the often troubling waters of ecommerce and hope that the eCommerce Innovations Blog can lend a hand on your way to the top.
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By Sue Chapman, Demandware Merchandising Practice Leader
Site search optimization is a critical factor in online retail success and an immediate source of competitive advantage for those merchants that do it well. Unfortunately, there is significantly more focus today on improving site navigation and not enough on site search. Addressing the problem requires that online retailers know what their customers are searching for, yet fewer than 15% of online retailers we speak with look at their search results more than once per month.
Shoppers that search know what they want - they convert at a higher rate, buy more products and spend more per order than those that navigate. Improving the online shopping experience should start at the search box because it's the quickest, most efficient way to help shoppers find what they are looking for. The only thing that stops searchers or ‘surgical shoppers' from spending money on your site is getting lost in a "No Result" experience.
As a member of Demandware's Retail Practice team, my goal is to provide actionable recommendations based on best practice analysis and industry assessment. We are in the process of building a "best practices" engine to summarize a lot of what we know and periodically publish it in the form of a whitepaper. This paper details a program and methodology called Turning "No Results" into Sales. It will show you how you can turn your current "No Result" search experience into "shopportunities" for your customers and increase sales and profits for you. It provides a methodology, best practices and tools for translating "No Result" search terms into incremental sales by:
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By Shaun White, Demandware Retail Practice
SEO is a combination of strategy and tactics and art and science. It requires ongoing attention at multiple levels of an online retail business. It's often misunderstood and as a result, frequently under-utilized. But once you understand the fundamental elements that go into optimizing a site for organic search, it's not nearly so perplexing. And when it's managed and implemented correctly, it delivers constant results in return.
As a member of Demandware's Retail Practice team, my goal is to provide actionable recommendations based on best practice analysis and industry assessment. We are in the process of building a "best practices" engine to summarize a lot of what we know and periodically publish it in the form of a whitepaper. Here is my first piece—"Optimizing Your Online Retail Site for Organic Search". This paper highlights the untapped opportunity missed by organizations regarding organic search, the must do and don't do list of SEO, and 5 strategist considerations and organization must focus on regarding its SEO approach. The paper will also focus on the tactics and tools to use to analyze an organization's current site and then create an actionable plan.
By Kristyn Levine, Demandware Retail Practice
In the world of online retail, no place defines the difference between success and failure more than checkout. Recent industry reports put shopping cart abandonment rates at anywhere from 20 to 50%. In too many cases, cart checkout processes take too long, require too many clicks and involve too many requests for non-essential information. Shoppers get distracted, impatient and distressed. They lose interest, leave the site, or simply take a detour to shop and research at another online store. The result is a huge lost revenue opportunity.
Online customers abandon their shopping carts for lots of different reasons. Not all of them are in the merchant's control, but many are. With competition for new and existing customers as intense as ever, online retailers need to optimize their checkout processes to ensure they are doing everything they can to capitalize on existing opportunities by converting shoppers into customers and keeping customers coming back to their sites.
As a member of Demandware's Retail Practice team, my goal is to provide actionable recommendations based on best practice analysis and industry assessment. We are in the process of building a "best practices" engine to summarize a lot of what we know and periodically publish it in the form of a whitepaper. Here is my first piece - "Optimizing Online Checkout: 20 Practical Ways to Reduce Cart Abandonment and Increase Online Profits". This paper highlights some of the most common checkout mistakes today, what online retailers can do to address them and provides examples of best practices in action. It also looks at some of the other factors that influence shopping cart conversion and how they might impact your own performance. I hope you find it valuable - and most importantly actionable.
In a recent Shop.org survey, The State of Retailing Online 2009: Merchandising Report, conducted by Forrester Research, 79% of retailers said they plan to focus heavily on improving customers' checkout experience in 2010. The best practices and recommendations in this paper are a good start. They can be implemented one at a time, or many at once, but they all can help you increase shopper conversion rates and increase profitability. I encourage you to download this paper and evaluate your site against these 20 best practices and get started today!
By Adam Forrest, Demandware Product Marketing
Last week, Demandware hosted an evening of cocktails for NYC ecommerce executives at the Barneys New York Penthouse. High above the hustle and bustle of Madison Avenue, above floors and floors of handbags, shoes, and must-have designers gathered ecommerce executives from the greater NY area. Everyone gathered for some industry chatter, delicious appetizers, thirst quenching cocktails, and of course story time by the one, the only...Simon Doonan, creative director of Barneys New York.
We promised Simon we would not reveal too much of what he shared, but let's just say that we learned what Simon "the First Elf" Doonan was up to all year in helping the Obamas celebrate their first Christmas at the White House. Unfortunately if you missed the event, you will have to wait until Simon's coffee table book about his adventure arrives sometime in the distant future.
Thank you again to all those who attended. It was a night full of great company, stories, and ideas!
Special thank you to Simon, Larry, Jordan, Heather, and the rest of the team at Barneys for helping us with yet another amazing event!
Demandware clients are having a tremendous Holiday season so far. Kicking off with a remarkable 79% increase in YOY revenue on Thanksgiving Day (now if I didn't see it with my own eyes I would have had a hard time believing too - but trust me it is!) Our clients are truly performing above the crowd across the board, check out the table below for the day by day breakdown of the holiday weekend resulting in a 54% increase overall in YOY revenue compared to 2008.
The good news is despite the tough economic year, ecommerce continues to be the growth engine for retailers this holiday. According to ComScore the industry saw an 11% YOY increase in revenue on Black Friday as well as a 5% YOY increase in revenue on Cyber Monday. Coremetrics also provided results on Cyber Monday and reported a nearly 14% increase in YOY revenue. Clearly our metrics are above and beyond.
We strongly believe that our clients are set up for greater success particularly for a couple reasons:
Congratulations to our clients and best of luck for the remainder of Holiday 2009!
Product finders, gift finders and configurators have proven to be very successful—resulting in conversion rates of 20-30% for those who engage. So why doesn't every site have one? The trouble is the time, effort and money that goes into creating the finders—that for the most part are hard coded flash object that don't account for out of stock products or seasonal turnover. You are left with an empty shell that you need to pump more time, effort and money into. That is why we were pumped to see the new completely dynamic and data driven Board Finder on the recently relaunched www.burton.com, built by the folks at Burton!
Using their internal flash skills combined with Demandware out of the box features (i.e. search refinements, price scrollers, customizable attributes) and their intimate knowledge of what makes a board good for certain people, Burton has launched an unbelievable Board Finder. Check it out and get that special someone a new board for the holidays so they can shred it when the powder returns this winter.
For those of you short on time, below are some screen shots of the finder. But if you have an extra moment, check out the real thing.
Demandware client innovations—designed, built and launched all on their own. Now that is what Demandware is all about.
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By Zachary E. Cook, Demandware Interactive Marketing
As a member of the Demandware marketing team, one of the best parts of my job is being able to work with such innovative, high-growth brands every day. And while that interaction typically involves email campaigns, case studies, website content and speaking engagements, sometimes it is a little less conventional. So when a brand new Burton snowboard fully customized for Demandware came across my desk as a giveaway for Shop.org Annual Summit 2009, I had to give it a try. Unfortunately, there is no snow at Demandware headquarters so we had to get a little creative.
You see, I'm a Burton brand loyalist and have been since I purchased my very first snowboard—a 1997 Burton Floater. I now ride an aging 2001 Burton BMC, with Burton Custom bindings and Burton Moto boots and spent six years riding in the shadow of the Burton factory in Burlington, VT. So while it's great to have a brand like this on our roster, you can imagine how hard it was for me to send this off to the winner of our raffle! Congratulations to our winner and we hope to catch a few sightings of this board out on the slopes this season.
For the rest of you, I encourage you to check out the new Burton site and some of the highly stylized, highly innovative techniques it uses to sell products online. Visitors have a wealth of content at their fingertips including images, videos, music, user-generated content and of course the entire Burton catalog.
How manufacturers can tap the awesome potential of ecommerce to drive cross-channel sales.
Another successful webinar, thanks to great content and participation from Sucharita Mulpuru, VP Research and Principle Analyst, Forrester Research and Chris Ladd, VP Global Retail, Crocs. Demandware has a knack for helping branded manufacturers sell online by not only providing a great eCommerce platform, but also providing research and data to accompany the industry. If you missed the webinar be sure to watch the recorded version or download the slides from our resource center.
Sucharita set the stage with staggering figures about the impact of manufacturer's website on the online and offline channels. The image below is one of her slides and I will do my best to walk you through it, but definitely not as eloquently as she did (for that you will have to watch the recorded version here.) Here we go...follow the dotted lines below. Of the entire US Population of 300 million people, 59% have shopped online (far left bar), that 59% or 177 million people spend $150 billion annually online excluding travel as Forrester Research reports. And now it starts to get more interesting, of the $150 billion spent online, 45% or $67.5 billion is spent on manufacturers' direct to consumer ecommerce sites or influenced by manufacturers' websites online. Interestingly enough the percentage of people who actually shop manufacturers' websites (38% or 67.2 million people) does not correlate with the amount of revenue spent - making it very easy to see that these shoppers while fewer are more loyal and spend more on branded goods. And further research has shown that these manufacturer websites influences a total of $200 billion in revenue, and as Sucharita put it that's "no small chump change."
This is just one of a deck of 30 amazing slides Sucharita discussed....spend the time to view the entire webinar, it is worth it.
As if this market data was not enough, we had the luxury of having Chris Ladd, VP Global Retail, Crocs speak next to give some real world advice from one branded manufacturer to another. Chris walked through a list of "10 tips" to help guide others to ecommerce success. Crocs, a Demandware customer, is operating 23 international websites and is actively expanding into the Asia market as we speak. But before they were able to have so much success, Chris and his team at Crocs followed these "Ten Tips."
1. Create a good sales plan and role for the site/store.2. Find an Executive Sponsor.3. Build a robust consumer database; capture at all touch points.4. Educate people on the advantages of growing your eCommerce business.5. Product is King. Treat your website like another store.6. Find ways to partner with your wholesale & distributor partners.7. Consider outsourcing certain components of the eCommerce business.8. Create your own marketing budget.9. Consider going global.10. Establish a pricing & promotions committee.
Each of Chris' points had a plethora of information supporting it and great anecdotes from his experience at Crocs, Titleist, and Reebok. I would highly encourage everyone to listen to the full webinar to here all the details provided.
Thank you again to Sucharita, Chris, and all those who attended yesterday...we look forward to seeing you all again real soon.
By Stephan Schambach, Demandware Founder & Executive Chairman
Are you interested in the state of ecommerce in Europe? One of the best ways to get a first-hand introduction is to attend Mail Order World in Wiesbaden, Germany. It is the largest trade show & congress about ecommerce and the mail order business in Europe, with a 10,000 square meter (107,000 square foot) trade show floor, 5,000 attendees, 370 exhibitors, keynotes, presentations, break-out sessions, awards, parties...you name it.
If you are familiar with the annual Shop.org Annual Summit, then you may think of Mail Order World as Continental Europe's version of that event—with a few differences. While Shop.org focuses on ecommerce only, Mail Order World originally started as an event for the catalog industry and sports a multichannel mix of 2/3 ecommerce and 1/3 catalog. Since it takes place in Germany, most exhibitors and attendees are of Continental European origin—some presentations are in German and others in English.
Demandware is a proud sponsor of the community, not just in the US but also in Europe. Thus, we attended as a premium sponsor, with our own booth which was run by our German marketing and sales team. Many of our European customers and partners visited us during the show—obviously enjoying the networking opportunity. Booth traffic was terrific, there is a lot of interest in on-demand ecommerce.
My general impression is that traditional mail order business models still play a larger role here, but that brands and retailers have recognized the opportunity and invest aggressively in ecommerce. For example, the retailer Goertz Shoes recently relaunched its ecommerce site with Netrada, a Demandware partner, and won the "Best Online Shop of 2009" at the show's award ceremony. This very coveted prize is the equivalent of the "Oscar" for ecommerce sites. The jury was impressed with its outstanding and innovative user experience and excellent multichannel integration with its stores.
Aside from the usual assortment of vendors and services providers, there were quite a number of local, highly innovative on-demand software companies at the show. They provide add-on niche services for ecommerce sites with a "European" flavor, such as payment gateways, fraud detection services, shipping, mobile payment, recommendations, etc.
If you are interested in expanding with your brand into Europe via ecommerce, I highly recommend attending this show. Use the networking opportunities to learn from retailers and service providers alike. It's the cheapest way to get educated on the "European flavor" of ecommerce. Alternative: Shop.org has an event in Amsterdam, which is getting better every year.
We are pleased to welcome the sixth member of the Jones Apparel Group family of brands to launch on the Demandware eCommerce Platform-Rachel Roy. In addition to giving shoppers access to the full range of the brand's collections, www.rachelroy.com utilizes a variety of visual and interactive tools to create a highly engaging social shopping experience. Here is a taste of some of the innovative features you'll find on their site:
Online Shopping Goes Social Not only can you share your thoughts about all of Rachel's styles with all your friends on 175 different social networks, but you can also view her most recent Tweets and Facebook updates. Now you can shop online with your friends-wherever they are.
Everything Rachel From documentaries, to Oprah, to store openings and trips to Africa, the Everything Rachel section offers a 360 degree view of the designer, her clothes and what goes on behind the scenes.
Grab a Hot New Look Take the guess work out of putting together a great outfit with the help of the Rachel Rachel Roy Lookbook. From clothes to shoes and accessories, the lookbook offers a few suggestions straight from the designer for you to look your best.
Congratulations to Rachel Roy and Jones Apparel Group for launching another highly stylized, innovative site.
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