Holiday E-commerce: Make online shopping a rewarding experience for customers
Tip #1: Let customers see the value of buying from you
Despite a wealth of available information on how to do things a little “bigger and better” this holiday season, it’s also good to remember that your deals need to cater to the customer, first, foremost and always.
Embrace potential customers by making your e-commerce a positive part of their holiday season, and not a reason they wished the yuletide was over. This can be done by creating a seamless, efficient shopping experience that builds upon your company’s (hopefully positive) year-round reputation, while extending a clear, powerful value proposition.
As always, your value proposition needs to succinctly tell the customer why they should buy from you, rather than your competitors. A throng of sites will be offering the latest dancing Muppet doll, so how do you make your company the one from which customers choose to buy? By delivering value others can’t, or won’t.
Whether this value comes through a wholly unique product offering, or testimonials that speak to the strength and validity of your brand, a value proposition is a key element of holiday marketing success.
Source: sherpablog.marketingsherpa.com
Greying consumers are a gold mine for VCs
Most venture capitalists obsess on the latest shiny object for the 18-34 demographic. That’s remarkably shortsighted. The aging U.S. population is a potential gold mine for entrepreneurs who can build technologies to help this huge demographic remain active and stay in their homes as long as possible.
The cohort of Americans over age 55 is massive. “This is a huge market — $3 trillion in annual disposable income,” said Jody Holtzman, SVP of thought leadership for the AARP.
Source: gigaom.com
Tablet Owners Define New Category of Shoppers [INFOGRAPHIC]
The increasing number of tablet owners in the U.S. is changing the way people shop from in-store to online — 20% of all mobile ecommerce sales now come from tablets and 60% of tablet owners have purchased goods using a tablet.
Tablet users spend an average of one hour and 35 minutes on their devices and typically spend 10-20% more on purchases than shoppers without tablets. By 2016, mobile commerce is expected to increase to $31 billion in the U.S. – a tremendous jump from only $3 billion in 2010.
The Monday after Thanksgiving is one of the busiest online shopping days of the year as everyone returns to work and gets online.
But according to a study conducted by IBM, which analyzed data from more than 500 leading U.S. retailers, mobile is playing a larger role in consumers’ shopping habits, especially around the holidays.
The study found that traffic to retail sites from mobile devices is expected to more than double this month from last season, reaching 15 percent of all visits to retail sites. Last year on Cyber Monday, mobile visits totaled only 3.9 percent.
Source: allthingsd.com
In its first significant blog post since last Friday’s IPO, Groupon announced new deal types and places, which aim to further personalize daily deals. Now when you login to your Groupon profile, you can say which types of deals you like, submit addresses for deals near your home, work or other favorite places, and then say if you’re interested in deals for men, women, or both women and men. New personalization features keep up-ing the ante in the daily deals space. (via Groupon’s Daily Deals Just Got More Personal)
Source: readwriteweb.com
A quarter of Google searches related to holiday shopping have come from mobile devices– at least in Australia. The search giant’s Australia site saw a 220% spike in shopping searches coming from mobile devices this year.
Australia has the second-highest smartphone usage in the world. Singapore is first. Google estimates, by the end of this year, more than 50% of Australian adults will own smartphones. It seems many of those smartphone owners are using their devices to search for this season’s gifts, to contact local businesses and to search for businesses’ locations. (via Google: Mobile Holiday Shopping Searches on the Rise)
Source: Mashable
At Walmart Labs, we’re building a big and fast data group to combine store data with social media data in some meaningful way. For example, a Wal-Mart buyer in Arkansas doesn’t know the optimal time to stock football merchandise in Wisconsin. That buyer can look to the social streams to see when people in that region are tweeting about football or their favorite teams. Monitoring social media can even help Wal-Mart find breakout products. (via Search plus social equals richer shopping experiences — Tech News and Analysis)
Source: gigaom.com
As brands increasingly turn to Facebook to host their online presence and their ads, they’ll seek platforms that handle management of both owned and paid marketing. Today, Facebook ecommerce storefront platform Zibaba is providing such a solution with the launch of an Ads API feature. It allows merchants to automatically generate and buy ads based on their most popular products so they can efficiently promote their storefronts. (via Ecommerce and Facebook Ads Converge Through Zibaba | TechCrunch)
Source: TechCrunch
