It's easy to forget that the simplest way for customers to shop your site is for your site to merely be open. That is the beauty of online right, 24/7? Yet over and over again retailers sites go down, sacrificing revenue.

Although my previous post (10 Ways You Know It's Cyber Monday) was aimed at poking fun at the media created "super online holiday," there was a lot of truth to it. And even with a year's worth of preparation for "Cyber Monday," sites still crashed and crashed hard. Cyber Monday's site response times and crashes only underline the major risks of running the entire infrastructure internally.

StorefrontBacktalk.com did an excellent keeping a running dialog on Twitter letting people know which sites were down or experiencing longer than usual load times. They were getting their information from a variety of trusted sources such as Gomez, Keynote and Pingdom. Follow which sites have gone down by visiting http://twitter.com/SFBackTalk.

We all knew that sites would go down on Cyber Monday, it is inevitable with the amount of legacy homegrown systems out there, but the real disappointment of the day came from the error messaging. Take for example the screenshots below, saying they were down for either scheduled maintenance or were in the process of upgrading. Really? You scheduled maintenance on one of the busiest days of the year? Not very likely.

(Click on thumbnail to view larger image.)

But in order to take the bitter lemons of a site outage and make lemonade, why not take this as an opportunity to merchandise? You know Cyber Monday is going to be a high traffic day for you and you know that most likely there are certain products or promotions that are driving these visitors to your site, so why not highlight these from this page? Give visitors product numbers, prices and an alternative to purchasing online and perhaps you've saved a customer.

Don't sacrifice sales or your brand's reputation by trying to do this all on your own. Concentrate on what you do best and then leverage companies that operate site availability, scalability, and security for you. Hopefully the rest of the holiday season will go smoothly...best of luck!

As online retailers assess the outcome from this, shall we say, less-than-stellar holiday shopping season, and plan their budgets for next year, having a solid analytical foundation on which to base decisions will be critical. No doubt, your CEOs and CFOs will be asking difficult questions like:

• Did we get the return from Q4 marketing investment that we expected?
• Which campaigns and tactics provided the better returns?
• Are you still confident about your projections for Q1 and 2009 as a whole?
• Should we still spend as much as we have budgeted? (Or maybe, should we spend more???)

How prepared are you to answer such questions? The recorded webinar, Customer Acquisition and Retention, and accompanying slide presentation are available on Demandware's web site. Have a listen sooner rather than later!

1. The CEO is in the server room chanting "YES WE CAN!"
2. Even physical store locations are offering free shipping to customers
3. Email spam filters bloat faster than the floats at the Macy's Day Parade
4. Sites are going down faster than Tom Brady's 2008 season
5. Kids catch their moms trying to swipe her credit card through the laptop DVD drive
6. IT manager busted for injecting servers with steroids
7. Al Gore surfaces to trademark the term "Web 2.0"
8. Media proclaims: "this Internet thing just might catch on"
9. Work productivity falls faster than the DOW index
10. Clickity clickity click

Hopefully our humorous look at Cyber Monday got some chuckles, but there is a scary truth behind each of those laughs. During the current economic downturn, the Web channel is going to be saving grace for retailers and manufacturers alike, as it's currently the only growth channel. CEOs and board members see the increase in Web sales and profitability as a way to offset the balance sheet bleeding. And while more CEO and board-level coverage is great, it also means that the Web channel's sales needs to continue to increase while in the spotlight.

Until recently, the online channel was growing at such an incredibly fast pace that retailers didn't need to do much more than offer free shipping to ride the online shopping wave. Now, however, we are faced with the unfortunate reality that consumer spending is at record lows and the retail sector is suffering. In order to even compete in this market (let alone succeed in this market), retailers are going to need to raise the bar and increase the efficiencies of their online stores. They will need to differentiate themselves from competitors and be able to turn on a dime with new promotions that will convert customers. What if online merchandisers had the ability to quickly react to economic woes? How powerful would it be to not only acknowledge the falling DOW index, but to create a promotion that discounts the price of all products by the percentage fall of the DOW? Aligning your business with the economy and telling customers you understand their financial situation not only gains points in the short term, but will create a sense of partnership and loyalty in the long term.

The Internet as a selling channel continues to evolve faster than the speed of light.. It only took two years from the time Shop.org coined the term "Cyber Monday" to when "Green Monday" eclipsed the day with more online sales. What is "Green Monday" you may ask? Green Monday is a newly created term for the second Monday during the month of December when all the procrastinating shoppers buy online. "Green Monday" rang in sales of $881 million in 2007 compared to "Cyber Monday" sales of $733 million. If the Internet has evolved that much in two years, is your ecommerce site staying up with the times?

But it's in times like these that leaders emerge, take market share and set themselves up for future success. In Demandware's own client base, we see more than a few companies continuing to post strong growth even up through last week. In a no-growth environment, every site visit is critical, each ad placement a precious investment. So the question for today is, are you prepared to engage in close-quarters, site-to-site combat for consumer market share this holiday season?

Now, more than ever, online retailers need a comprehensive competitive strategy and detailed tactical plan that focuses on retaining existing customers and winning new ones from competitors. The strategy part starts by understanding:

• Who are our target consumers and where/how do they shop?
  
• What is our share of wallet among these customers, in relevant product categories?
  
• Who are our leading competitors? Why would these customers spend their money with these competitors and not with us?

Tactically, retailers need a plan going into the holidays that anticipates and prepares them to respond to the marketing tactics (e.g., campaigns, offers, promotions) of their competitors. Not just planning what campaigns you will launch, but also:

• What will the key competitors do?
  
• How might they respond to our tactics?
  
• How should we respond in turn?

This is all about "war-gaming," thinking through different scenarios and being prepared to launch new campaigns and offers on a daily basis. Pulling this off successfully requires work to be done before the holidays begin, to strategize and develop a tactical plan for key dates in the season. It requires you to have processes and tools in place to monitor what competitors are doing in the marketplace, and to measure how you're faring in comparison.

And, importantly, it requires that you have a flexible technology infrastructure that allows you to prepare different campaigns, offers and promotions ahead of time, and then launch them on a moment's notice when and where needed.

Is your organization prepared to engage in site-to-site combat this year?

If you missed part one of our Countdown to the Holidays series, be sure to check out Part I: Getting the Basics Right.

To adequately answer this conundrum, there are a series of questions that must be answered. When addressing these questions, it's important to be honest with yourself.

On performance...
Is your site delivering pages in sub one second download times and will it scale to meet seasonal peaks in traffic (99.95% uptime)? Does your conversion rate beat the industry average of 3% or can you improve your order size by adding deeper merchandising functionality? Are you having high shopping cart abandonment rates of over 60%? Are you getting a steady level of site traffic from your SEO or is your current platform limiting your customer's ability to find your Web store?

On cost...
What are all the costs associated with running the site? Are your site maintenance processes efficient or do you need a large staff in order to make frequent changes to your Web store? What are your hardware and software upgrade costs and can they be reduced?

On growth strategies...
Have you thought about the strategic nature of your site? Is the current platform limiting your ability to sell internationally? Can you leverage the existing platform to roll out new Web stores quickly? Is there a deeper multi-channel strategy that will make my customer relationships more profitable? Is your site secure? If not, what does it mean to your business if you have a security breach? Does the Website meet the standards set by your competition?

In the age of sizzle it may be fashionable to make incremental improvements to your ecommerce site that simply look good, but eventually, that lipstick will wear off, once again revealing the limitations that have always been there and holding you back. Just remember that you can't sell if the site is down or your new graphical pages take 20 seconds to load and if this is the case, it may need more than a light makeover.

If you decide that a new platform is required, consider your overall business strategy and then decide how ecommerce plays a vital role in the big picture. Take a deep look into the ROI that can be generated with a new site including improved sales, faster time to market, and lower total cost of ownership. Lastly, build a timetable to sell the replatforming project internally, select a platform vendor that has the functionality you need and the expertise to help you grow, and set reasonable targets for launching your new sites.

I've recently written a white paper and a couple of articles (The Ultimate Online Shopping Experience, Part 1: Strategy & Design and Part 2: Features & Functionality) that explore the essentials of designing superior online shopping experiences—the key things that online retailers should and should not do. Have a look at these more detailed articles, but here's also a brief summary:

First, while crafting the customer experience strategy (i.e., deciding what to change), keep in mind the following important steps:

• Articulate your top brand, business and customer experience goals
• Define the customer experience around personas
• Review the shopping experience end to end
• Build the strategy using multiple perspectives
• Keep things simple
• Test your assumptions by observing real customers
• Consider analytics and tracking requirements as part of the design process

Of course, at this time of year most companies don't have time for a detailed site redesign. But even a high-level review of key aspects of the online shopping experience can help identify some easy-to-implement changes that could result in that crucial extra 25 to 50 basis points in conversion. Do some test shops on your site (or better yet, ask a ‘fresh set of eyes' to do this), paying attention to the following:

• Will a customer feel safe shopping on this site?
• Is there anything important "below the fold"?
• How else can we save the customer time and effort?
• Are all the tasks or workflow processes on our site clearly explained and easy to follow?
• Do we offer multiple ways of viewing or sorting information on the site to suit a given customer's personal preferences?
• Are product recommendations presented in a way that motivates browse and purchase?
• Does the site provide explicit feedback in response to customer actions?
• Is the checkout process as efficient and easy-to-use as possible?
• Does the site provide clear, detailed and context-relevant "help" wherever needed?
• Are the toll-free number and/or live chat options prominently displayed throughout the site?

In today's market environment, it's more critical than ever to maximize the return on all the hard work and money spent driving traffic to the site. You must ensure that the online shopping experience on your site is easy, enjoyable and efficient.

For more on delivering superior online shopping experiences, download the "Designing Superior Online Shopping Experiences" best practices guide authored by Julian Chu. 

No, not really, the holidays are still on as scheduled, but with all the doom and gloom reports about the economy; I am starting to think the Grinch may be running The Fed. Yet even with all this noise, retailers are reacting quickly to the economy and the ones who manage to go on offense early will be the most likely to succeed.

Believe it or not the holiday shopping season already began. While many retailers may not label it quite yet as holiday shopping, retailers are making a big push early with major discounts....take a look at an email I got last week from Jos A. Bank.

And rest assured this is not the only email I got today about upcoming sales.

It is not even just an online only phenomenon, even in-store retailers are trying to move customers into the holiday shopping mode quickly. For instance, being the last minute shopper I am, I went to Target one night last week to find a Halloween costume, only to find employees taking down most of the Halloween section and in its place a holiday wonderland appeared. This was 4 full days before Halloween, and I know I am not the only last minute shopper out there!

That said, retailers need to be aggressive this year, and those caught behind the curve may struggle.

Online retailers in particular, need to be able to adjust quickly and need to be in full control of their site. In a tough economy the opportunity cost of waiting a day for a simple change is too high. Merchandisers, marketers, and web developers need to be on their toes not only to react to competitors but more importantly to strike first with great content, product information, and most importantly promotions.

Three of our clients made the headlines this week and I wanted to pass along a brief digest as well as congratulate Jones Apparel Group, Gardener's Supply Company and Compact Appliance on their achievements.

Nine West and Gardener's Supply Company made Internet Retailer's 2009 Hot 100 Retail Websites list. The Nine West site launched on the Demandware eCommerce Platform back in September, one of several Jones Apparel Group sites now running on Demandware. The site includes video commentary from Nine West creative director Fred Allard, Look Book, which guides you through the purchase of a complete outfit, As Seen In, which helps you find the latest styles you may have seen in a magazine, Behind the Scenes videos, and much more.

Gardener's Supply has been running on Demandware for almost three years now and we continue to be impressed at the creativity and innovation that goes into this site. Along with its sister site, Dutch Gardens, they continually lead the pack with sophisticated features such as community building, contextual selling and guided navigation.  

No wonder both Nine West and Gardener's Supply Company made the Hot 100 List.

Compact Appliance was featured in Internet Retailer with an article about how it is able to launch microsites quickly, using just one standard catalog. Compact Appliance now runs 4 sites on Demandware, including the most recent Kegerator.com, the destination site for beer enthusiasts. Compact Appliance expects to finish out the year with web sales up by 25% or higher.

If there's any upside to a commute it's that it provides at least some opportunity for idle thinking. So on the way home last night, breezing North on 93 and beat down by Red Sox doom-and-gloom sports talk, I snapped off the radio and started to idle the old squash. Free form association kicked in and when I blew through the yield sign (nearly T-boning a lime-green hybrid in the process), I thought, "Wow! Now that's a much better model for ecommerce!" Ok, so maybe I should back up and explain that a bit.

Over years of depicting the costs and effort allocation of a typical ecommerce operation, I had evolved into using a tried-and-true pyramid diagram. You know the one. At the bottom was the hardware and infrastructure. It was wide and thick, signifying gobs of energy and cost. Stacked on it were databases, app servers, IT professional support, point applications and other such things-each showing diminishing time and effort. Finally, perched at the very top, with the smallest land mass, was merchandising, marketing and site experience. It always seemed wrong that such important activities would get such a relatively small piece of the pie, but hey that's how things had to be. In fact, analysts point out that up to 80 percent of ecommerce resources (dollars, time and people) are spent simply maintaining the existing infrastructure and processes.

So wrong.

Effectively this means that 80% of an ecommerce operation is going to activities that yield absolutely NO competitive differentiation. For instance, when was the last time a customer went to a site and said, "Kudos. It's up!" or "Hooray! It has secure checkout!"? Likely never and yet that's exactly the type of activities that are getting the most resources.

And that's where the upside down pyramid comes in.

Wouldn't it make more sense if the basic table-stakes portions of the ecommerce operation took up the minority of effort? All the behind-the-scenes work that goes into a professional operation-security, compliance, hardware and database performance, application upgrades etc.-was just there? And instead, retailers could spend more time in the areas that will really drive top line growth. Price management, promotions management, presentation of the assortment, UI innovation... You know the list. This is the stuff that consumers really care about.

So I challenge you commuters out there to make your mindless travel time more productive. Ponder the tough questions and voice your opinions. While no one has the answer, everyone has an opinion-and stringing together enough of these thoughts and opinions can lead to a breakthrough big enough to change the game. Heck, it worked for the Sox, why not us?

What would revenue look like for most operations if these were the areas that received not 20% of the effort, but 80%?

Are there really people out there who would prefer to spend their time worrying about site uptime and secure checkouts rather than marketing, merchandising and selling their products?

What steps are you taking to turn the ecommerce status quo on its head?