By Adam Forrest, Demandware Product Marketing 

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:

• Performance: Our platform, and hence our clients' sites, delivers with better availability and response time than any of the Top 20 Web Sites as reported by Gomez, in fact we have consistently delivered at 99.97% availability over the last 5 years and 100% during the holiday season. If your site is down, your customers can't buy - it is as simple as that.
  
  
• Merchandising: Our platform uses analytic data (i.e. conversion, return rate, sales velocity, rating) to dynamically present items to the right customers at the right time. Merchants can use this data to create new weighted scoring systems, removing the need to manually organize hundreds and hundreds of category pages and freeing up invaluable time to personally merchandise the most critical aspects of the site.
  
  
• Support: We provide our clients with the support they need to be successful. Not just technical support, but also ongoing retail support. We make sure our clients are ready for the holidays and that their site is primed for performance and purchasing.

Congratulations to our clients and best of luck for the remainder of Holiday 2009!

By Adam Forrest, Demandware Product Marketing

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!

By Adam Forrest, Demandware Product Marketing

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?