E-Commerce

At a movie theater concession stand you'll hear, "Want to make that a jumbo for just a quarter more?" In an airport bar, you can get a bigger beer for just a dollar extra. Car rental companies will upgrade you to a nicer ride for just $7 more per day. You can add 32 gig of extra storage to your iPod for just $80. All these merchants know that getting you to spend just a little bit more will supersize their profits. The same is true on your website.

A POPULAR new reality series on CBS, “Undercover Boss,” shows senior managers working incognito as everyday employees. As for employees who are not secretly C.E.O.’s, they have champions, too, in marketers that are devoting ad campaigns to workers.

As someone who has been working in retail direct marketing for more than three decades – quite possibly longer than anyone else in the room at today’s Retail Innovation & Marketing Conference – Williams-Sonoma CMO Pat Connolly has a tremendous amount of insight on retail, traditional marketing, and how the internet can help retailers save money and increase their brand.

Economic crisis accelerates changes in the basic underlying business models of multichannel marketers, who have had to adapt in order to survive as consumers shut their wallets. Here are some of the ways business models have been radically and permanently altered.

If you're wondering, "How am I going to increase my online sales and profits in 2010?" here's an easy answer: TEST! An e-commerce site should run at least one test a month with the potential to increase sales by 10 percent. These are seven keys to a successful online testing program. Plus: Download the Chi-Square Test spreadsheet to prove your tests are statisically valid.

PROBLEM: Room & Board, a multichannel furniture retailer, needed an image-serving platform for its website that could provide dynamic images and deploy images of its latest merchandise. SOLUTION: Partnered with an image server software provider. RESULTS: In the year-plus since the image-serving platform was launched, online revenues are up 251 percent, overall company revenues are up 98 percent and it's realized an annual return on investment of 1,340 percent across all channels.

The jury will be out for some time on just how much money can be made directly from social media. But retailers rooted in stores, catalogs and the web have worked diligently to explore ways they can squeeze incremental revenue from this emerging channel.

In late November, we surveyed the All About ROI editorial board members and other marketing insiders to gauge their views on the year ahead. At press time on the eve of the 2009 holiday homestretch, with their hopes for a better sales outcome than 2008 looking modest at best, few saw an especially bright light shining by December. Instead, many settled in to make the appropriate adjustments for reduced demand.

Q: I hired a company to recast my existing website into an e-commerce site. I've spent the last six months begging, pleading and nagging them to finish. Now they won't even return my calls. Any suggestions about avoid it next time?

Most retailers use the wrong metrics to measure the success of search programs. They focus on tactical measures, such as return on advertising spend or keywords moving up and down in rankings. These measures are like sports statistics — they explain the final score but don't decide success or failure. The final score does that. In business, profits are the final score and sales tell you how good or bad the blowout can be.