Who is in control of your brand?

Optimising your eCommerce is simple math; if you increase performance it directly improves the bottom line.

Online Shopping in Australia is at an all-time high, with 37.6% of us spending a total of $23B. Yet so many big brands are so late to the game. We’ve reviewed a range of studies that will help you either enter the eCommerce game or improve your current platform.

There are many important areas that impact sales, today we focus on some critical components that fall under User Experience & Shopping Experience. Applying just one of these learnings has proven to increase sales by 257%.

I’ve summarised the most important & impactful findings on the VJ Blog in the following categories.

1. User Experience
   1. The checkout process
   2. Checkout load time
   3. Make it easy to fill out forms
2. Shopping Experience
   1. Shipping & Handling costs
   2. Price & Product comparisons
   3. Free & easy returns policy
   4. Choice of delivery time
   5. Ratings & reviews

See my full post on the Visual Jazz Blog: http://blog.visualjazz.com.au/strategy/getting-the-most-out-of-ecommerce/

This post on marketingcharts.com discusses the difference between under 30′s and over 40 yr old women. And in summary 40+ yr old women are online for one main reason – to shop! And they’re sophisticated too…

In contrast, women over forty have higher incomes overall and say shopping is their #1 online activity. They also research products online more than their younger counterparts and are more likely to post product reviews on shopping websites (62% vs. 53%) and to purchase products based on e-mails from companies selling things (50% vs. 45%).

Younger women are more likely to be online for social networking:

• Shopping online is less of a priority to younger women (51% vs. 59% overall) and they research products less online (37% vs. 42% overall).
• Younger women are more likely to post photos online (78%) than product reviews (53%), while older women are more likely to post product reviews.
• Younger women are less responsive than average to emails from companies, and have less disposable income.
• Younger women are more likely to have social networking profiles: 86% of those 30 years or younger have profiles.
• Young women are relatively more likely than older women to respond to someone else’s blog post (63% vs. 50% overall), post photos online (78% vs. 50% overall) write their own blog entries (46% vs. 27% overall).
• Facebook (65%) and MySpace (63%) are the most popular social networking websites for women, though 40-somethings are more active on Classmates.com (42% vs. 19% for those under 30).
• LinkedIn is more popular among high earners (41% for those with a household income of $120K+ vs. 17% overall).
• Among all women, connecting with others is the top activity on social networks, while beauty products are the top category discussed on social networks (69%). Food/restaurants and movies/entertainment are also popular, especially for younger women.

• The highest proportion of younger women have between 20 and 49 contacts on social networks, but some have hundreds of contacts, driving the average up.
• Younger women have more contacts than middle-aged women (25% of those <30 and 4% of 40-somethings have 200+ contacts.
• Women over age 40 are more likely to be connected to people they’ve met on a social network (20%) vs. women under 30 (14%).