This is a very handy checklist that should keep an e-commerce site manager working on a nice, organized cycle of updates that can help to drive sales. Nice quick read with references to top e-commerce site practices.
Brighthand presents a treasure trove of Smartphone popularity and adoption data that you can use to start building a plan for making your site responsive. For the last two years we’ve watched as mobile device (and Smartphone in particular) adoption rates have way outpaced super smart analysts’ predictions about adoption and browser share. Start by learning more about the most popular devices, make a list of browsers they use and check your Google Analytics to see how the usage on your site is panning out. Next week we will share a progress report on our “device lab” we are building that will allow hands-on testing of sites on devices - a lab you can and should consider building too in 2012.
The IAB mobile marketing center web site has great links and resources for mobile developers - not just ad designers and developers so check it out if you are looking to set some objectives for mobile in 2012.
Ad Age daily came out with these stats today - great infographic - most astonising is the rise of mobile “as a contribution to” retail sales from 3.4% to over 6.5% in the last year
Even if you don’t have $20mm (Gemvara’s venture funding to date) there are a lot of great things about Gemvara’s site to inspire your e-commerce effort. Just a quick warning though and especially with the holiday shopping season upon us you will be hard pressed not to buy something if you’re in the market for jewelry - the UX and the way the products are presented are fabulous….yeah a lot of that $20mm resulted in one of the best e-comemrce websites on the planet. What do we like?
1. Guided Search Interface - the technology is proprietary but the the custom site is built on a LAMP stack with JSP so maybe there’s an implementation of SOLR behind the scenes. Whatever the technology the UX for the guided nav and search makes shopping effortless - and that is how they really stand out in a crowded industry.
(We’re a bit fascinated with great Guided Search solutions in the marketplace now because we have a gargantuan task on our hands now solving a search problem for a State Agency and we are going with guided search and nav as the solution)
2. Product Photography - we suspect no expense was spared here and for good reason - the products are beautiful and the detail of each piece is easy to see. The lesson here is that content is king and even if you are putting together an e-commerce site on a budget don’t gasp
665 Boylston Street, fourth floor
Boston, Massachusetts 02116.
