Amy Africa

With consumer usage of smartphones continuing to skyrocket, it's past time for your brand to have a mobile presence, be it a mobile-optimized site, app or both. To help your efforts in generating sales from mobile devices, consider the following eight tips:

If you have any sort of search engine optimization or pay-per-click program, chances are you've heard about the "new" Google Shopping. "New" is in quotes because it's not really new — it's just different. To improve the shopping experience on Google (translation: to help Google make more money), Google Product Search recently transitioned into a comparison shopping engine (think PriceGrabber or NexTag) based on product listing ads (PLAs) and will now be known as Google Shopping. Here are 14 things you should know about Google Shopping and how you can use it to improve your customer acquisition program:

Don't make the user confirm. If you do, you'll lose more than 40 percent to 60 percent of your sign-ups on average, sometimes more 
depending on your category and/or your target demographics.

Mobile users will give you a lot of leeway on things like design and user interface. What they don’t have tolerance for? Slower-than-death websites. Users expect your mobile site to load fast — within just a few seconds — which means that you’ll likely need to keep your page weights low.

In the July/August issue of Retail Online Integration, I discussed how important merchandising, strong navigation, instigated chat and customer reviews will be to achieving online selling success this holiday season. Here are five more things you should consider doing with your e-commerce site before it's too late.

Here's a checklist of some of the most important things you should do with your website to get ready for the upcoming holiday season

Recently Google announced the launch of +1 (yes, plus one, a name even more unfortunate than iPad), its version of the Facebook "Like" button. Google says +1 is shorthand for "this is pretty cool" or "you should check this out," and that it's designed to help you "share recommendations with the world — right in Google's search results."

There's been a lot of hype about mobile so far this year. It seems that everyone's talking about it, but very few are doing it. And sadly, the majority of those who are doing it aren't doing a very good job.

Google unveiled its newest search enhancement, Google Instant Previews (GIP), in November. Denoted by a small magnifying glass to the right of a search listing, GIP allows searchers to look at a mini version (also called a snippet) of a specific web page before they commit to clicking on it. Is this a game changer? Not exactly, but it certainly does make things interesting.

Sure, you're entrenched in the holiday season by now, making sure your website is up to date with the most current inventory and that every one of your customers is happy and well served. But that doesn't mean it's time to rest on your laurels. In fact, the holiday season is a great time to test new web attributes and programs that may improve your shoppers' experiences, and ultimately bring you more sales.