E-Commerce

The young woman in the Zappos.com video wears little makeup with her hair in a ponytail. She's cute, but she's no supermodel. What she is: A Zappos employee chosen for her pep and "real people" look to wear and talk about shoes for sale on the company's website.

Nearly half of consumers believe detailed product information is a critical factor of an e-commerce website in driving them to make a purchase, according to Stibo Systems, the independent market leader in master data management.

Consumers generally go to a website with an agenda. That agenda could be to comparison shop, research, make a purchase, among other things. However, it's quite common for consumers to get frustrated with certain website issues and seek what they want elsewhere. A new whitepaper from Peppers & Rogers Group and iPerceptions titled Ten Tips for Making Websites Stickier offers new insights and 10 ways to help you keep consumers glued to your website.

Facebook will soon begin testing a service that will provide its members local discounts, a move that will put it in direct competition with daily-deals giant Groupon.

eBay said it will allow sellers on its auction site to list up to 50 items for free, a bid designed to draw more business in the wake of slowing growth for the online marketplace.

Many online marketplaces and e-commerce companies have set up pages on their websites to instruct users on how to help victims of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan through direct donations to charitable organizations or by donating a portion of sales.

With a website design that was over nine years old, Cabela's decided it was time for a change. The site had navigation limitations, as well as limited price and promotional price functionality. These limitations were making it difficult for Cabela's to adapt its business needs to its website, negatively influencing the overall customer experience.

Hallmark's website handled five times the normal number of visitors during the most recent holiday season, which includes Valentine's Day. Even with this surge in traffic, visitors experienced a 370 percent improvement in website response times, raising Hallmark.com's customer conversion rate 30 percent over the previous year and helping Hallmark more than double its online sales during this period.

Apparel and accessories brand Kate Spade has launched a new version of its flagship website that underscores just how important content has become to the brand.

In part one of this series appearing in yesterday's ROI Report, I discussed best practices around four retail trends heavily discussed at this week's INNOVATE 2011, the Retail Innovation and Marketing Conference sponsored by the National Retail Federation. Here are four more: