Coremetrics

Surveys can be double-edged swords. On the one hand, the tools required come with obvious, glaring setbacks. Many of the tools required to conduct surveys properly don't come cheap. Cost (and cost justification) is just one of your headaches, however. The other ones can be decidedly more fatal. Implemented incorrectly, they can hurt the user experience. Even when they're implemented correctly, the surveys themselves sometimes serve too many masters.

New York City -- E-commerce spending jumped 26% on Black Friday, according to comscore. Black Friday web sales totaled $816 million, up from $648 million last year, comScore reported. “With brick-and-mortar retail also reporting strong gains on Black Friday, it's clear that the heavy promotional activity had a positive impact on both channels," said Gian Fulgoni, chairman, comScore. Fifty million Americans visited online retail sites on Black Friday, up 35% over last year, comScore said. Each of the top five retail sites reported double-digit gains in visitors, in percentage terms, led by top retail site Amazon. Walmart ranked second,

If an online shopper is using an iPad to browse retail sites, that shopper is likely to make more purchases and spend more money than someone using an Android device or a PC to shop online.

IBM’s Coremetrics Benchmark report says that mobile retail traffic will more than double this holiday season. During this year’s November holiday season, an unprecedented 15 percent of people in the U.S. logging onto a retailer’s website are expected to do so through a mobile device, says IBM.

Cross-channel retailers must focus on acquiring more social visitors this holiday season, as their value to brands is undeniable. According to the IBM Coremetrics Fourth Annual Online Retail Holiday Readiness Report, social media users are more than twice as likely than the overall population to convert into customers.

Cart abandonment is a sensitive topic for almost every online retailer. Many companies and universities are conducting research on the data behind abandonment to find what ultimately causes consumers to place an item in their cart and then leave a retailer’s website before executing a purchase. Forrester Research finds that roughly 38 percent of all shopping carts are abandoned, while other data sources put that figure as high as 70 percent.

Data, data everywhere. No wonder retail marketers are overwhelmed with the volume of data available in today's marketplace. But what to do with it all? With this enormous volume of data comes not only opportunity, but also responsibility. No longer can retailers simply get by on marketing what they want. They must now listen to the voice of the consumer, and market how the consumer wants.

Welcome to Retail Online Integration's annual Resource Guide. This special section offers all the crucial details, company information, contact numbers and addresses of product and service providers to the cross-channel retail industry.

Problem: Figleaves.com sought to understand customer behavior online without having to submit an IT request every time information was needed. Solution: It implemented a Web analytics platform. Results: The British onlline marketer garners exact metrics on customer behavior, benchmarked against other merchants in its vertical. Early last year, London-based Figleaves.com implemented a Web analytics solution to more easily track customer behavior on its Web site. Prior to that time, the online intimate apparel merchant relied on an in-house solution that was incomplete, at best. Much of the in-house solution was based on the analysis of complex databases that logged customer actions on individual pages on the Figleaves site.

With the advent and development of Internet marketing in the last 10 years, catalogers have been inundated with more data than they know what to do with, courtesy of their Web analytics packages. Catalogers shared their frustrations and success stories regarding their online marketing data at the session “Web Analytics: The Secret to Your Success” at last week’s ACCM. Below are their stories. 1. With the current version of its site active and taking orders since 2002, Classic Designs has been using WebTrends to track online marketing data since that time, said Mark Desrochers, co-owner of the woodworking catalog. But while the software had been