Bryan Brown, RMM Online Advertising

ATLANTA – Ecommerce continues to expand this year following a huge online holiday shopping season in 2010. Bryan Brown, vice president of business development and creative director at RMM outlined five trends and five tactics at TechMedia’s Digital Summit in Atlanta this week.

Five Trends in ecommerce:

• eCommerce platforms. Technology is making it cheaper to get started, everything from a few lines of codes to systems such as Magento(sp) that offers a total solution that offers free setup and a free month to try.
• Analytics. Instead of paying someone to track the data, it’s more important to have someone analyzing it. You have to analyze user behavior while they’re on your site. How many clicks and how long did it take to conversion.
• Customer service. You need to engage with customers away from your Website using social media such as Twitter, FaceBook, etc.
• User incentive. Offer incentives such as hassle-free, free shipping, one-page checkout, and make it obvious.
• Product focus. Dig deeper into the search funnel to get a better handle on exactly what the customer wants. For example, instead of presenting a landing page for running shoes, you might find you need to have pages for a not only a particular brand but also a certain size shoe.

Tactics to Do It Better

• Focus on usability. Is all the information there to help the customer make a decision? How can the product be used, how does it fit if you wear it a certain way? What are your customers saying they like or don’t like about a product?
• Analyze. Examine what’s happening when the customer is on your site.
• Engage users away from your site. Use social tools to learn more about the customer and their needs. A Facebook Like Page is a great way to do this.
• Modify policies. Your policies should be user-centric by doing things such as offering free shipping and not requiring passwords.
• Pay attention to products. Landing page optimization is key and works better when you pay more attention to precisely what people are looking for. What size and brand do they search for and can they find yours over the competition?

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