As the shopping masses head for the strip malls and big box stores this Friday, it’s important for marketers to remember how all these people ended up there together in the first place: we told them to go!

Black Friday got its name because traditionally most retailers operate in the red for nearly 11 months of the year and only begin to see a profit (the lucky ones at least) once they swing open their doors the day after Thanksgiving to kick off four weeks of delirious, and mostly gratuitous, shopping. Somewhere along the the way some savvy marketing professionals started piecing together shopping habits after Thanksgiving and gave name to the great shopping migration making it even more popular.

In fact, retailers in the United States make approximately one-fifth of their total sales during the holiday season; ringing up nearly half a trillion dollars. That’s a lot of Legos and sweaters.

In recent years the migration to online shopping has seen marketers push forward an alternative to the often chaotic shopping experience that occurs on Black Friday through the creation Cyber Monday. The idea, so the thinking goes, is to persuade people to stay at home and shop online.

As a marketer it is smart to determine the best ad planning path for both Black Friday and Cyber Monday and proceed from that point. Of course. some measurable statistics will help.

A quick scan of this chart reveals that Black Friday is five times more popular than Cyber Monday, according to data (above ) from Google Trends. Obviously millions of Americans are ready to part with their money the day after Thanksgiving to lavish gifts on friends and family, so you should be planning your holiday promotions and campaigns accordingly.

From PPC to Display Advertising

Black Friday should be a big focus for pay-per-click campaigns, email newsletters, display ads, blog articles and other marketing channels.

In the past month interest for Black Friday has risen dramatically while Cyber Monday remained rather flat. Pay-per-click and display ads targeting Black Friday are expected to receive substantially more impressions than those for Cyber Monday. If your budget only allows for you to focus on one of these days, your efforts will be most effective targeting Black Friday.

We have already seen spikes in organic search engine traffic for related phrases on internal and client websites so it’s not too early or too late to start your promotions.

Social Media Makes an Entrance

This year marks the first time social media is going to play a major role in both Black Friday and Cyber Monday. LivingSocial announced  it will offer discounts from national businesses such as Verizon Wireless, Electronic Arts Inc. and Sketchers USA Inc.,  which is a  move away from the more local fare they’ve so far concentrated on such as restaurants and weekend getaways.

Instead, the company will provide national brands access to social media-savvy customers who might otherwise choose to remain at home instead of braving the crowds.  This is also the type of marketing brands love because it can be shared and spread across Facebook and Twitter for a nominal cost.

Chicago-based Groupon, LivingSocial’s largest competitor, says they will skip Black Friday promotions this year; so picking an online deal firm to allocate your marketing spend just got a little easier.

Perhaps one of the greatest opportunities online marketing offers us is the ability to accurately measure results. Once we’ve measured these results there is a tendency to organize and rank each in order of importance from top to bottom. Maybe this is why the online marketing industry produces so many “Best of Lists” each year. We heart rankings.

So in that spirit we’ve put together a list of the 50 “Best Of” lists covering the online marketing space. Note: Rankings are divided by categories and numbers are only used to prove that we got to 50.

Online Marketing

1. The marketing nerds over at, well at Marketing Nerds, rank the 50 Best Mobile Marketing Blogs You Aren’t Reading Yet. My personal favorite: Flash Widgets blog. Nice stuff geeks!

2. I’ve got 99 problems but finding a blog ain’t one. At least not when I’m viewing Wikio’s list of the 99 Top Online Marketing Blogs. Sorry Jay-Z.

3. Gyutae Park’s Winning the Web website uses Alexa, PageRank, Technorati and Feedburner among other metrics to measure its Internet Marketing Top Blogs. Total number: 370.

4 . The ad industry’s publication of record, AdvertisingAge, has compiled its Power 150 - a daily ranking of the Web’s top marketing blogs.

5. Kaiser The Sage’s (AKA marketing consultant Jason Acidre) has produced his  Top 90 Online Marketing Blogs. He’s obviously been busy.

6. Nicholas Einstein has put together a genius (I know, lame) guide to practical online marketing blogs. It is called Top 10 Practical Online Marketing Blogs.

7. Yvette Pistorio, senior supervisor of Media Research and Beth Blanchard, supervisor of Media Research at Cision teamed to unleash a list of the Top 100 Social Media and Internet Marketing Blogs.

8. The little guys need some love too. That’s why DIYSEO has given us the Best SMB Marketing Blogs: The Definitive List of Small Business Marketing Blogs. Check it out.

9. The team at Blogstorm say a good deal of  blog ranking tables created recently use the hugely inaccurate and outdated Google PageRank as a method of measuring success. Their solution? A table that uses Alexa Rank and Technorati Rank to calculate the popularity of each site. The result is Top 100 SEO & Internet Marketing Blogs.

10. HubSpot created the Hot 100 Marketing Blogs list in order to make it easy for people to discover these top Internet marketing blogs. “We’re continually collecting 3rd party data for several thousand blogs that cover Internet marketing topics.”

11. The Top 20 Digital Marketing Blogs from Sparxoo. The first five below:

• Seth Godin - Of course we had to add one of the most famous marketing gurus of all time.
• Hard Knox Life – Dave Knox brings fresh perspective to digital marketing trends and overall marketing strategy.
• Guy Kawasaki – Guy Kawasaki shares his incredible insights from years of experience at Apple and other leading companies.
• Chris Brogan – Chris Brogan, a social marketing guru, posts the latest insights for marketers.
• AdRants - Steve Hall takes no prisoners in his reviews of the latest ad campaigns.
• Ads of the World – Want inspiration? Check out creative minds from around the world.

12. The 100 Best Marketing Blogs from Cool Marketing Stuff. Direct and to the point, the list from Cool Marketing Stuff is as comprehensive as it is complete.

13. The Big List of Search Engine Marketing & Optimization Blog from Top Rank has it all from blogs that cover SEO and PPC to blog marketing, marketing with social media, content marketing and online public relations. The collection of over 400 SEO and Online Marketing related blogs is assembled by the staff at TopRank Online Marketing.

Search Engine Optimization

14. Daily Blog Tips The Top 25 SEO Blogs list ranks the blogs according to their Google PageRank, Alexi rank, number of Bloglines subscribers and Technorati authority. Somewhere the team at Blogstorm (#9) are shaking their heads.

15. Usually “can’t misses” are reserved for baseball prospects and political candidates, but when 43blogtips put together 18 SEO Posts That You Must Read they obviously had done some serious scouting. Informative and  entertaining these articles are among the best on the Web. Nice job guys.

16. This SEO Linking Building Guide to the best SEO linking building articles (wait, didn’t i just say that?) has it all. Case studies, organic link building tips directly from Google and a great piece by Search Engine Watch about backward link building. My favorite: The 30-minute-a-day link Building Plan from iMedia Connection. Now if only someone could come up with the 29-minute-a-day link Building Plan.

17. It wouldn’t be a 50 Best of List without a Top 10 offering. So here goes: The team at top-10lists.com has offered their opinions on the 10 Best Learning SEO Learning Websites. I think they got it right.

18. Mashable. I’ve heard of these guys. Mollie Vandor just this month weighed in with her excellent 20+ Essential Resources for Improving Your SEO Skills. From beginner (SEO for Dummies) to advance placement degree (Matt Cutts) she’s got it all covered and that’s why Mollie finds herself among the Best of the Best.

Social Media

19. Even a newbie marketer can appreciate a good social media campaign. Nearly everyone has seen one and many of us have been party to one whether we realized it or not. Forbes.com pulls together a great pictorial of the Best-Ever! Social Media Campaigns. Spoiler alert: The Blair Witch Project comes in at #1. Pretty impressive considering it was among the first social media efforts way back in the day (1999).

20. Not to be outdone, social marketing and media blog The Wall decided to go the distance with 40 more and release the Top 50 Social Media Campaigns. Oddly enough, The Blair Witch Project doesn’t even crack the top 50. Guess these lists are a bit subjective. Plus, with these guys being British and all they may have missed that buzz way back when. Still enjoyed their list.

21. Of course, you can’t even say social media these days without wondering what Marc Zuckerburg is doing for lunch. Social Media Examiner apparently also has the Zuck-bug and decided to create a 10 Top Facebook Pages post. Number 1? Red Bull. Apparently they are in tune with their audience.

22. In the case of Smart Blog, the best means the worst: as in Jesse Stanchack of SmartBlog on Social Media put together the best Worst of list this year about The Suxorz Picks the Worst Social Media Moves. Among the gems: Dell’s “Dr. Ashley” campaign, Volkswagen’s “Sluggy Patterson” character, Cisco’s “Ted from Accounting” videos and Smirnoff Ice’s handling of the “Bros Icing Bros” phenomenon.

23. Stephanie Klein of Blogs.com offered up the Top 10 Undervalued Social Media Marketing Blogs while providing several links to each blog’s recent articles. Nice work, Stephanie.

24. Using eCairn Conversation(tm), software technology company eCairn generated the Top 150 Blog Posts. The top five?  Chris Brogan, Jeremiah Owyang, Brian Solis, Seth’s Blog and Social Media Explorer.  There must be something to the eCairn Conversation chart. I think these guys are on to something.

25. Alright, so maybe Social Media Explorer’s 19 Best Social Media Practices is a little outside our purview, but I liked it so its here.

26. And a bonus from those same guys at unlucky number 13. The Top 10 Social Media Blogs of 2011 (and it’s not even over yet!).

Going Viral

27. According to the crew at ProspectMX,  a  viral campaign is a marketing blitz that essentially creates a pitch which is cool and interesting enough that consumers will spread it on its own. Well said. And with that in mind their 15 Best Viral Marketing Campaigns put together an interesting list mixing the old (there’s that Blair Witch again) and new (Old Spice guy).

28. Fall is officially here and the team at Social Times decided to celebrate fall’s arrival with 30 of The Best Viral Videos of Summer 2011. All 30 on this list have resulted in over 1 million views and have resulted in tons of conversions, accoridng to Social Times. Check them out.

Email Marketing

30. And Tamara Gielen at Blogs.com was nice enough to drop her Top 10 Email Marketing Blogs post on us earlier this year. Living is learning.

Pay-Per-Click Blogs

31. Pay-per-click success takes a good deal of focus. Tom Demers at BoostCTR keeps his eye on the ball with his list: The Best PPC Blog – The Definitive List of Pay-Per Click Blogs. Among my favorites: The Certified Knowledge Blog (Formerly bgTheory), Bryan Eisenberg and PPC Blog & PPC Training Community.

32. Want to succeed in a big way? Of course you do and Kronik Media was kind enough to provide a list of Top 15 Blogs You Should Follow to Succeed on The Internet. Read it here and succeed there (wherever there may be for you).

Conversions

33. It’s all about the conversions these days and Kristi Hines at Kikolani put together the most comprehensive 50+ Awesome Posts on Conversions for Unboucne. According to Kristi, there’s something for everyone, from blogging to social media, landing pages to squeeze pages, increasing conversions vs. conversion killers, design, and more!

Web Design

34. The team at InstantShift believes one of the best ways to survey the evolution of Web design over a number of years is to compare different versions of websites. So they decided on taking a look at 15+ Inspirational Examples of Website Redesign.  The results: an interesting comparison of redesigned websites to their earlier incarnations.

35. 9 Best Modern Web Design Tutorials and Articles from Skyje.com identifies the distinctive features that make a modern Web design interesting, appealing and easy to use.

36. Once again Daily Blog Tips served up a top 25 list based based on the analysis on Google’s Pagerank, Alexa rank, Bloglines subscribers and Technorati authority. This time its Top 25 Web Design Blogs.

37. What’s better than a Top 25 Web Design Blogs? How about a Top 30 Web Design Blogs? Well the creative online journal for design Web enthusiasts, Web Design Dev, has given us just that. And the extra five go a long way.

38. 50 Best Web Design Blogs You Aren’t Reading Yet from WWWdesigns Blog. What are you waiting for?

39. We’ve covered the Best, the Top and even the Worst and now we a finally have a Must: 29 Web Design Blogs You Must Follow from [Re]Encoded. Here is a list of the 29 best Web design blogs to subscribe to. “The web design industry is always changing, so as a web designer, it is important to always be ahead of the curve.” Totally.

40. WordPress is a great CMS and the guys at Web Design Fan have provided us with the 20 Best WordPress Tutorial Blogs. Enjoy!

Guerrilla Marketing

41. A firm with the name Creative Guerilla Marketing should know a thing or two about Guerilla Marketing. And they do. Check out The 15 Best Guerrilla Marketing Campaign Example Videos.

42. Ryan Lum, founder and editor of Creative Guerrilla Marketing, delivers again with 10 of the Best Guerrilla Marketing Blogs the Web has to offer.

43. Designer Daily’s 20 Creative Guerrilla Marketing Campaigns proves that it is still possible for creative agencies to make ads that stand out. These 20 certainly do.

Content Marketing blogs

44. The Junta42 Top 42 Content Marketing Blogs list highlights the best bloggers on the Web discussing content marketing. Each blog on the list has been rated by the  staff in terms of content strength, depth, regularity and, to a very small extent, popularity.

Affiliate marketing

45. Hey Geno Prussakov: Nice work.  Want to know something about affiliate marketing? Check out Geno’s Afilliate Marketing Blog’s Top 25 Affiliate Marketing Blog Posts.

46. From Affiliate Top 50: The Top 50 Affiliate Marketing And Make Money Online Blogs In The World. More money, more money,  more money.

The Best Songs

47. One of my personal favorites 7 Awesome SEO and Social Media Songs. Sorry, had to do it.

48. Hey, these guys had a song on my Top SEO song list. Now they’ve landed on my Best of the Best list. This British SEO throws down  with its TOP 5 SEO songs. And unlike me, they don’t put themselves on their own list.

Landing pages

49. Marketers are becoming more and more interested in measuring the ROI of social media.  According to eMarketer, four out of five US businesses with at least 100 employees will be using social media for their marketing efforts this year.  This makes measuring the effects of these marketing efforts even more important. That is why HubSpot Blogs created 20 Examples of Great Facebook Fan Pages.

50. If beauty is truely in the eye of the beholder this list is arbitrary. But we are talking design here people and KISSmetrics’ 5 Beautiful Landing Pages That Prove Great Design Still Sells demonstrates that beauty can indeed be judged.

After temporarily setting aside their differences, the Web’s three leading search companies – Google, Microsoft Bing and Yahoo! – have launched a standardized markup vocabulary (Schema.org) billed as a major step forward in the evolution of search.

As a result of the collaboration businesses operating online can expect changes in the way websites are designed, and the manner in which the search marketing game is played. The new shared standardized coding approach detailed at Schema.org now shows Rich Snippets on search engines, and that not only means enhanced search options but an opportunity for marketers to produce more dynamic results.

At the very least it is going to make things a bit more interesting for anyone tasked with handling search engine optimization and visibility for web properties.

The basic breakdown.

Because most websites are generated from structured data that is often stored in databases, it becomes difficult to recover the original when formatted into HTML. This means there is plenty of information on the Web that “The Big Three” aren’t going to be able to track down. Some of that information might even be yours.

Schema.org takes aim at gaining direct access to this structured data in order to improve search results and helping provide richer results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the Web.

“Rather than rely solely on machine learning and other AI techniques, we asked, ‘What if we could enable publishers to have a single schema they could use to describe their sites that all search engines could understand?” Bing’s Steve Macbeth wrote in a Microsoft blog post.

“We want to enable publishers to give us hints about what things they are describing on their sites.”

A more tailored approach for SEO.

The standardized list of schemas developed by the group are essentially a collection of HTML tags designed to help search engines more accurately index relevant content within Web pages. The use of common schemas to structure the data embedded in websites should lead to better search results and, more importantly for marketers, a way to focus on what matters to you most.

It would seem that understanding subtleties is a harder problem than indexing. If you are interested in improving your website search results you can get started immediately at Shema.org. The website provides lists and examples of 100 schemas, and gives detailed documentation on how to use them.

Here are four steps to get you started.

1.Learning the ropes. There are now more than 100 Schemas and the website does a good job in breaking down each into sections be most relevant to you. If in the past, you’ve tried to add rich snippets markup before was almost potluck. There weren’t a lot of options.

Here are a few popular types:

Creative works: CreativeWork, Book, Movie, MusicRecording, Recipe, TVSeries
Embedded non-text objects: AudioObject, ImageObject, VideoObject
Event
Organization
Person
Place, LocalBusiness, Restaurant
Product, Offer, AggregateOffer
Review, AggregateRating

2. Learning the language. The Schema vocabulary is extensive but it’s also applicable to every web page on the Internet. If you are planning on developing a comprehensive SEO plan, you’ll have to know how to navigate the vocabulary pages. It may seem obvious but the best place to begin is the Getting Started document. Here you will learn how information within your web page can be structured through “types” and “properties” and ultimately reach a wider, more targeted audience.

3. Plan your plan. A simple audit of your website can easily help you determine which Schema types fit based on each individual Web page. The most complicated part of your plan will be organizing the data. The amount of data you collect depends on the amount of detail on its page and how tailored you want your results to be for each specific audience.

4. Testing, testing 1, 2, 3. It’s very useful to test your Web pages with markup to make sure search engines are able to parse the data correctly. As with previous rich snippets markup formats, you should use the rich snippets testing tool for this purpose. Note that while the testing tool will show the marked up information that was parsed from the page, rich snippets previews are not yet shown for schema.org markup. We’ll be adding this functionality soon.

In fact, shrinking costs and rising benefits of video has spurred many smaller businesses into action, with  73 percent of online retailers using video on product pages this year, an impressive jump from 55 percent in 2010, according to eMarketer.

However, plunking a clunky, homemade video onto your website isn’t necessarily going to improve your ROI, but with a little effort you can clearly measure success with four basic metrics:  conversion rate,  shopping cart abandonment rate,  site traffic, and view-through rate.

Measuring conversion rates

Ice.com found that consumers  who viewed videos on their site converted at a 400 percent increase over those who did not. Ice.com also credits video with decreasing returns by 25 percent, according to an internal study.

Adding video to your product page is a proven way to increase the percentage of shoppers that end their visit with a purchase, but measuring success can be tricky for newcomers lacking historical data.

If you’re now gearing up your ecommerce efforts, consider measuring conversion rate data with A/B testing. Create a product page that  includes video half of the time the page is served. Then compare the conversion rate for customers who had a video option with conversion rates for those that did not have that option. This sort of test could also be used to compare the success different videos.

You can take the analysis one step further by comparing the conversion rate of shoppers who watched at least a portion of the video to the conversion rate for shoppers that did not watch the video at all.

No carts left behind

According to an eMarketer report benefits of adding video include:  “lower number of abandoned shopping carts, reduced return rates, and higher sales.”

The primary reasons online retailers are forcefully fighting shopping cart abandonment is widely thought to be due to customer uncertainty: they don’t trust the merchant; suddenly the are unsure of the product’s value; or worse don’t understand the product.

The addition of a well-thought out product video can go a long way in shaping shoppers’ opinions. Much like measuring conversions, you can measure the affects product videos have on shopping cart abandonment by comparing historical data, using A/B tests, and monitoring differences in abandonment rates for shoppers that watched and didn’t watch a video.

Pump up the volume

According to recent study conducted by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, 42 percent of marketers said bringing traffic to their sites is the main goal of employing an online marketing plan.

Search engines are designed to provide the most relevant content among a seemingly endless stream of interconnected pages on the Web.  By adding a video element to an ecommerce site you will improve SEO performance for the keywords associated with the video, as well as content around the video.

In order to monitor the video’s success, monitor traffic from search engines such as Google and Bing after adding a video and compare to the page’s performance before the video.

View-through rate

Shoppers who view videos at Onlineshoes.com convert at a 45 percent higher rate than other shoppers, and the site has seen a 359 percent year-over-year increase in video views, according to a study by the company. Product pages with video have higher conversion rates than product pages without video.

Don’t underestimate the importance of the video’s view-through rate (VTR). The VTR is the number of videos watched divided by the number of impressions (times a page loaded with a video) and if you can optimize for VTR, you’ll increase your conversion rate as well.

If you monitor the VTR metrics, it will help you determine how effective your video is in terms of  placement, if it influences response to your calls to action, and other elements that ideally will keep viewers watching.

One important part of optimizing an ecommerce site is making sure you are losing as few people as possible during the checkout process. If you have a high abandonment rate, it’s in your best interest to check out the areas of your checkout process that could do with an overhaul. Even if you think your abandonment rate is pretty good, there may be some easily implemented chances to give your conversions an added boost.

Before you think about moving forward with changes to your checkout process however, make sure you have adequate funnel tracking enabled within your analytics software. You’ll want to be able to glean a clear “before and after” picture of performance.

1. Don’t require an account.

Requiring users to sign up for an account just to buy a product on your site is a great way to ensure you’ll lose a lot of customers before they even see a subtotal for their cart.

We live in an age where we have account logins for everything from social networks to doctor’s offices. As a online retailer it’s important to realize that some people simply don’t want to remember another account login. Provide users a “Continue as a Guest” option to avoid losing them before the process has begun in earnest.

2. Be transparent.

Let users know exactly where they are in the checkout process by showing a progress bar on every page. Doing this helps eliminate ambiguity and doesn’t allow a customer to feel “lost” in the checkout process. Clearly call out the last step of the checkout with button text.

3. Kill site navigation.

Amazon kills all site navigation during the checkout process. This might be a bit drastic for your own site, but if you have any side navigation you should definitely eliminate them on checkout pages.However, you may choose to experiment with keeping top and super navs present throughout the process.

4. Show subtotals.

Let users know early on what their estimated totals are. People want to know exactly how much money they are about to spend. Don’t let that number be a surprise at the last step!

5. Make edits simple.

Allow customers to edit their orders without having to backtrack to the cart.

6. Make yourself available.

Prominently display your contact information on every page of your checkout process. If customers need a question answered before they complete the purchase process, they will definitely abandon if they can’t find a way to contact customer service.

7. Answer questions.

Aim to answer a customer’s questions before he or she needs to ask them. Kate Spade’s checkout page answers a lot of potential questions from the very first step of the checkout process:

• How much is shipping? Oh, I see, it’s free!
• Can I call someone? Oh, I see, they have a customer service number!
• What’s my total going to be? Oh, I see, it’s estimated on the bottom right!
• How much info do I have to give? Oh, I see, required fields are marked with a pink asterisk!

8. Always follow up.

Don’t hang the customer out to dry as soon as she’s entered her payment information. Send an email outlining all order details and send another email when the customer’s order has shipped. Doing so reinforces your credibility as a retailer and keeps your customer happy, and hopefully loyal.

New Single-Day E-Commerce Record of $913 million part of $27 Billion In Online Spending for 2009 Holiday Season

Back in early December I noted that holiday sales were off to a good start. Now that the holiday shopping season is over, it’s clearer than ever that having a strong e-Commerce strategy is more important than ever. While brick and mortar stores saw little or even negative growth this holiday season, e-commerce enjoyed a 5% increase in sales over last year.

And all of these numbers only account for sales within the United States!

$634,027 Per Minute

Tuesday, December 15 marked a new single-day spending record as consumers spent an average of over $600,000 per minute. By the end of the day, a staggering $913 million had been spent online, the first such day to surpass the $900 million threshold.

Even more impressive is the fact that nine individual days of the 2009 holiday season saw e-commerce sales exceeding $800 million. As comScore (a company that tracks online spending) chairman Gian Fulgoni put it, “Each day through Thursday December 17, the last day that many online retailers would guarantee free shipping in time for Christmas, saw at least $800 million in spending… savvy consumers may have been waiting for those last-minute deals… ”

It’s clear that e-commerce businesses will continue to be a key source of growth in the retail sector. Blue Fountain Media is an expert in e-commerce. We can build new sites or update existing ones. We also specialize in web marketing–everything from driving new traffic to improving bounce rates and conversions for existing visitors. Call Blue Fountain Media today or request a quote.

What does this mean for you?

Cyber Monday–the first Monday after Thanksgiving–sales grew 5-percent versus a year ago. The growth was driven primarily by an increase in the number of buyers, reflecting consumers’ increasing familiarity and comfort with online buying, while average spending per buyer was down slightly. Specifically, the number of online buyers grew 6 percent to 8.7 million, while the average dollars spent per buyer declined 2 percent to $102.19 (the first decline in the history of Cyber Monday).

As buyers become pickier and more sophisticated about online shopping, their expectations have increased. They are looking for modern, robust sites that make online shopping easy while still maintaining the advantages of in-store shopping. This includes easily browsing large quantities of merchandise, easy search and sorting, easily viewing large and detailed images, and social media tools to share products with friends. It is more important than ever to make sure your e-commerce site is up to par.

Is Black Friday the new Cyber Monday? That’s a question the New York Times asked in a blog post pointing out that while Cyber Monday sales increase 5% this year year, in 2008 they were up 15%. Meanwhile, Black Friday sales on the Web increased 11 percent this year, compared to 1 percent last year. The point is, e-commerce is the future of growth in retail and is cutting into traditional brick-and-mortar territory across the board.

Online shopping still has room to grow as a portion of total retail. This holiday season, people will spend $30 billion online and $438 billion offline, according to eMarketer and the National Retail Federation. But online spending is expected to increase 5.4 percent while offline spending is expected to decline 1 percent. It’s not too late to start or upgrade your e-commerce site.

More people are shopping online than ever before. Sixty-nine percent of adult Internet users plan to make a holiday purchase online this year, compared to 55 percent in 2008 and 49 percent in 2007, according to Shop.org.

“Consumers are still obviously cash-strapped,” notes comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni, yet “every year there are more people that take to e-commerce.” How is your company reacting to the e-commerce revolution? Blue Fountain Media is a full-service e-commerce website design, development, and marketing firm based in New York City. Our core strengths are customization, quick turn-around, and direct communication with our clients. Contact us to find out more.

Data courtesy of comScore Inc.

Question One

Can you limit access to what your employees can see or grant varying administrative privileges? i.e., if I have a copywriter helping out or something and I don’t want them to see my customer date or revenues, can I adjust this?

Answer

Yes, you will have the ability to allocate different user names and passwords which have the ability to change or edit only certain areas of the site.

Question Two

Can copywriters work offline in a spreadsheet format and then upload new products and images? How easy is this?

Answer

Yes, it is very easy to upload an Excel spread sheet as long as you keep the information organized consistently (i.e.: size, color, etc. are in the same location for each item). We include training on how to do this before handing off your live website.

Question Three

Can you add unlimited images with each product, for detail shots, etc.?

Answer

You can add unlimited images or cap it off at a certain number. The best thing about a customized ecommerce website CMS and not an engine or template is that we can customize it however you like.

Question Four

How do you store all the customer data?

Answer

We build a robust CRM (customer relationship manager) into the back-end of your ecommerce web site to track each customer, how many times they have ordered, when they order, how much, etc. You can tell us you want to see all the people who have spend X number of dollars this year so you can export their contact info and send a coupon. Any reporting, filtering or search features can be fully customized however you like them to work.

Question Five

How safe and secure is the website for ecommerce transactions?

Answer

Everything is very user-friendly, safely stored and secured by firewalls. All protection and technicalities are taken care of.

Question Six

Can I transfer the content from my current site? What if I have 5000 or so customers along with their data?

Answer

Yes! We will take care of transferring all your current data to the new website and show you how to update in the future. We want you to see us as your own in-house team and not worry about a thing. We are here to make your life easy, to hold your hand, and help bring your company to the next level. Let us know if you would like us to walk you through examples of our robust and flexible CMS. We can show you exactly how to update products, export client data, set up coupons, etc.

Question Seven

What if I have other questions down the road?

Answer

Not a problem! Everyone wants to make sure all the t’s are crossed and i’s are dotted before getting started. I’m happy to answer any questions or concerns to help make this decision making process as easy as possible for you.