This Spring fashionistas from all over will be following the rainbow by looking to the crayon box for inspiration. This season’s runways were awash in bright, bold colors, a stark contrast from last season’s macabre obsession with all things dark and Gothic. This season, expect to see fashion mavens donning such cheery hues as deep hibiscus red, vermilion orange, sunflower yellow, tropical green, cobalt blue and vibrant violet.

Another blossoming trend this season is wearing large, graphic floral prints with everything from roses and pansies to retro-style daisies and everything in between. For those who are not feeling the large bold florals, mid-size and more delicate summery patterns are also a hit, as are any soft and delicate feminine accents like sheer ribbons and bows.

Retro styles from the 1970s have also come back full throttle, and this can be seen in everything from bold, geometric patterns to off-the-shoulder tops, bell bottoms, and even groovy platforms and leisure suits. Finding these and other styles can get pricey when shopping through most retailers, but that does not have to be the case.

Most of the trends showcased on last month’s runways can be found at ApparelShowroom.com, your premier source for wholesale women’s and junior miss apparel. They specialize in off price and high quality red tag clothing offering the lowest prices for the best quality on the market. Because their company is located in fashionable Los Angeles, Ca, they are constantly adding new merchandise to their inventory from hundreds of neighboring manufacturers and importers, and it’s always deeply discounted to ensure the greatest profits.

Apparel Showroom has a wide array of wholesale women’s clothing, including tops, dresses, skirts, pants, active wear, and even accessories. My favorite section is the page featuring discount wholesale dresses. This page showcases a wide selection of sultry styles, including some of the retro patterns mentioned before. Whether you’re looking for cool and casual or a style fit for a night on the town, Apparel Showroom will be sure to satisfy. They have a large assortment of the ever popular halter dress, svelte dresses with spaghetti straps, and even off-the-shoulder fashions. Check out Apparel Showroom today to spring into the sexy styles of the season. You won’t regret it.

As you may or may not be aware, Valentine’s Day is a mere calendar month away from today. It’s time to roll out the champagne, laced hearts and velvety chocolate! If you have little ones at home this may mean going out in search of Hannah Montana or High School Musical Valentine’s cards and those candy hearts with corny messages of amor sprawled across them. Or, if you’re like me and other Martha Stewart aficionados, you know that this is a very opportune time to get crafty!

Making your own Valentine’s cards and gifts is a breeze to do. Plus it’s a great creative outlet and has the added benefit of good ‘ole fashioned r & r. Not to mention that you’ll save some green in the process. (Score!) If you have the time (and patience) to make your own creations, my best advice is to purchase wholesale craft supplies from an authorized dealer. Popular Valentine’s materials include fabrics embossed with floral patterns, elegant embellished laces, crimson silks or velvets in various shades of red, and anything that shimmers. Nothing says “I love you” like a whole lot of sparkle! Sequins also work well, and you can never go wrong with pink. Silk flowers—roses and baby breath in particular—are also crowd pleasers. You can easily find wholesalers who will sell these products to you, even if you are purchasing for private use.

You don’t have to be a creative genius to come up with ideas for homemade gifts. I once made my hubby a Valentine’s teddy bear with a little box containing coupons I made for him with tickets for things like “1 free hour-long massage”, “1 candlelit dinner made with love and featuring the food of your choice”, “1 day of hogging the remote for the whole day” and other things that are lovely and free. The best part? These one-time use coupons never expired. My hubby still has a few of them left, and that was nearly six years ago. All it took was a plain, plush bear, some lace & fabric, a little bit of hot glue and a whole lot of imagination. That was the cheapest Valentine’s Day ever, and it had the greatest impact of all of them.

If you’re a little lacking in the art department, fret not. You can still find some great deals for wholesale Valentine’s Day gifts without having to spend the time and energy on artsy, time-consuming projects. Check out TopTenWholesale.com today for a list of wholesalers near you.

As with all things in life, SEO pro’s have to start out somewhere.  No one just wakes up one day and knows everything there is to know about SEO.  Mastery takes a lot of time, so those of you new to SEO shouldn’t fret.  That being said, newbies should still take special care not to make certain mistakes that could potentially undermine their own marketing efforts.  While the following list of SEO mistakes is by no means comprehensive, I still feel that it’s a good start. 

Mistake #1: Optimizing For Obscure, Long-tail Keywords
Ok, so you rank fairly high for “best search engine optimization company in Smalltown, USA”, but so what?  If no one actually takes the time to conduct such a search then your optimization for that particular phrase is pretty useless, isn’t it?  The trick is to take advantage of the many research tools that are currently on the market.  These tools can help you discern which keywords people are actually entering into the engine query boxes and therefore give you a better understanding of which words your site should be targeting.  Once you’ve discovered which keywords are most popular for your particular industry, go ahead and focus on those for your site.  That way you’ll actually get decent traffic from your optimization efforts.    

Mistake #2: Focusing Solely On the Homepage
It’s imperative that you don’t neglect your internal pages because more than likely visitors to your site will arrive there not by the homepage, but by one of these internal pages.  You should think of these pages as being just as important as the homepage itself because they are more often than not the gateways to your main site.  Make sure that each page has its own title, headers and content and that each page can stand alone as a good representation of your company and site.  Also, it’s important that each and every page is easily navigable and provides access to your homepage and other pages.  You don’t want your visitors getting lost because that will only frustrate them and cause your click-through rate to go up.

Mistake #3: Too Much Attention To Meta Tags
Once upon a time, long long ago in the magical world of SEO, meta tags were an integral part of any SEO campaign.  However times have changed and that fairytale has long been over.  Meta tags aren’t that important anymore when it comes to optimization because they were abused to death in the past.  They affect rankings very little, if at all, these days.  The only thing they’re really good for in this day and age is showing what a page will be about in the SERPs.  For this reason they should not be disregarded altogether.  But it’s unwise to give meta tags too much attention when there are other more important things to be focusing on.

Mistake #4: Disregarding Bounce-Rate When Looking at Site Traffic
It’s really easy to get over-excited about high volumes of Internet traffic, but if you’re focusing too much on numbers and not enough on analysis, you could be causing problems for yourself.  You can get tons of traffic all day long, but if your visitors aren’t sticking around and checking out your other pages, then what’s the point?  That’s why it’s very important to consider bounce rate when analyzing traffic rates.  Bounce rate tells you how many people are clicking links to your site but aren’t staying around long enough to convert.  If you see that a very high percentage of your visitors are bailing after visiting only one page then there must be something seriously wrong and you should be looking into it right away.  Experiment with ways to keep visitors wanting more.  It’s a lot easier to make site changes that’ll keep visitors lingering and viewing other pages than it is to optimize a site allover again for brand new visitors. 

Mistake #5: Believing That In-bound Links are the End-All, Be-All
Getting in-bound links is important because it helps search engine spiders find your site so that it can be indexed and ranked, but it’s not the only way to optimize your site and it can certainly be overdone.  If you have too many poor-quality, spammy-looking links pointed to your site, you make rank high for a short time, but you’ll ultimately tank in the SERPs.  Make sure you use legal, white-hat linking strategies and that you look at it as a piece of the SEO pie—not the end all. 
 

Advertisers pay for clicks, and publishers make commission on each click that their traffic source provides.  Yet the very model of pay-per-click advertising opens itself up to fraudulent activity, putting advertisers at risk of paying commissions to publishers with poor quality and/or synthetic traffic.

As a result of click fraud, advertisers suffer decreased ROI, and subsequently the entire industry is placed in jeopardy.  Advertisers may lower their bids or pull their PPC campaigns altogether.  Legitimate publishers are left with reduced commissions, and the result is that both sides of PPC networks deteriorate.  The entire industry is threatened.

Detecting and preventing click fraud is the only solution to this powerful and pervasive force that has tainted the PPC advertising industry to the detriment of advertisers, legitimate publishers and PPC search engines.  This task rests in the hands of PPC engines themselves.

And while no one organization will ever be able to say that they have completely eradicated click fraud from their networks, recently there have been considerable strides taken to combat click fraud, with many second and third-tier PPC search engines dropping significant portions of their syndication networks because of some blatant fraudulent activity.

PPC engines need to have the capacity to understand the value of their traffic and be able to distinguish high-quality traffic from poor-quality sources.  The development of proprietary tools to analyze traffic data for advertisers is the best way to deliver solid ROI consistently.  Nothing speaks louder than hard data that show conversions with traffic sources and the revenue this spend generates.  For example, GenieKnows.com employs a traffic-analysis team and the proprietary technology of the Genie Shield product to deliver conversion tracking, which eliminates automated clicking by detecting and removing paid-to-click traffic.  It also analyzes click patterns based on user activity and micro-manages traffic sources on a per-URL or per-IP basis.

With proactive measures in place, PPC engines are able to strengthen relationships with advertisers, optimizing their campaigns to ensure that their ROI continues to grow.  Naturally, if an advertiser is making a profit on their PPC campaigns, they will certainly want to reinvest.

There is a wealth of potential waiting to be realized in online advertising and within PPC advertising specifically.  While billions of dollars are currently spent annually, billions more are still waiting to be invested, provided that advertisers’ spends are met with profitable conversions.

Much has been written about search engine optimization (SEO) techniques by numerous different search engine experts, so it’s only natural that many of these tenacious myths occur at regular intervals.  Here are 5 misconceptions I have noticed with pretty high frequency:
 
1. Submitting my Website to search engines will bring me visitors.
Submitting your Website to search engines doesn’t automatically bring visitors to your site.  If your Website isn’t optimized for the search engines, chances are that it won’t be listed at all, and if it is, it’s probably somewhere at position 4,379 and beyond. You must make sure that your Website is optimized for your important keywords before submitting it to search engines.  Otherwise, you’re wasting your precious time and money.

2. I must submit my Website to 1,500 search engines.
There are only about 5 important international search engines and the same amount of country specific search engines that will bring you 99% of your search engine visitors.  Therefore, it’s utterly pointless to submit your site to 1,500 “search engines”.  Most of these sites aren’t search engines at all but rather free for all link pages that do nothing more than add your email address to a spam list.  Focus on the major search engines that Web surfers actually frequent.

Apart from that, if your Website has many incoming links, you don’t have to submit it at all.  Search engines are able to find your site automatically through the links and they’ll give it a higher value than a directly submitted page because other people linked to it.

3. META tags will improve my search engine ranking.
Most search engines don’t use the META Keywords tag anymore to determine the ranking of a Website because they’ve been abused too much in the past with the purpose of tricking search engines.  But the META Description tag is still useful because its description will be displayed on the query result page of some search engines.  Adding any other META tags like the META Author tag, the META Copyright tag, or the META Language tag means nothing to the major search engines so it isn’t worth your time.

4. Cloaking or doorway pages will get me a high ranking.
Techniques such as using hidden content, cloaking or doorway pages used to work for some time and some techniques might still work on some engines.  Sooner or later though, all major search engines will recognize these techniques as spam.  As soon as they find out that you’re trying to trick them, your site will likely get in trouble and may possibly be banned for a long, long time.

5. Search engine optimization is not as good as traditional advertising.
Actually, the opposite is true.  People who find your site through search engines are usually active and ready to buy.  Search engine traffic is very qualified because your visitors performed searches with a purpose when they found your site.  Search engine leads can be more targeted and more valuable than traditional media advertising methods. 

If done correctly, optimizing your site for high search engine rankings is perhaps the most cost-effective advertising method for your business.  Therefore it’s essential to make sure that your site is optimized for search engines and that it has many incoming links.
If your Website is good in these two areas, you’ll get many targeted visitors from search engines and other web sites without submitting your site to the search engines even once.

A popular e-commerce trend right now is to put customer reviews directly on the company Website so that potential customers have the opportunity to review one’s products before making any purchase decisions.  A recent Forrester report showed that 36% of consumers have more trust in Websites that offer consumer-generated product reviews.  Many e-retailers have taken this to heart and have put it into action. 

One particularly successful case is that of John Lazarchic, Vice President of e-commerce at Petco.  He recently discussed his company’s decision to hop on the customer-review bandwagon, a practice that numerous retailers have begun to pursue.  Lazarchic explained that his primary motivation in doing so was to “enhance customer trust and the Website experience” saying that “ROI was not the main objective.”  How novel:  Putting customer service before ROI metrics.

This may not work for every type of business, but if you know in your gut that it will probably work for your’s, then just go for it, if only temporarily.  Lazarchic had the insight to recognize the true nature of his business; there are few social phenomena more democratizing than pet ownership.  Lazarchic knows that pet owners talk to each other, and if you can give a home to that dialogue, you have instant access to an insanely varied demographic that comes down to the single common denominator of loving their ball of fur.

Lazarchic’s way of thinking is quite a concept: putting customer service and gut instinct first and figuring out ROI later.  Many CEOs and marketers cringe at the thought of trying something that can’t effectively be measured, but when you have confidence that your brand is one that can genuinely create communities of like-minded individuals, and you know that tools exist that have been shown to do that, then marketers should be permitted to go with their gut, at least for a limited time, to prove that if you build a compelling program ROI is sure to follow. 

Social networking developed partly outside of the commercial realm, but there are now retailers who know that if you can build it into the existing e-commerce model, you’re offering a lot more reasons for consumers to spend time on your site.  I’m not saying that you should try to compete with “old school” social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook.  But if you can provide a one-stop shop for both the emotional (“look at how fat and happy Mr. Biggles is”) and the purely pragmatic (“I need to buy a 25 pound bag of kitty litter”), it’s your brand that’s ultimately going to stick. 

There’s really no big secret about increasing your Internet sales.  You drive traffic by creating more sales leads.  When these newbie shoppers show up, you engage them and convert their interest into a transaction.  Then presto: Better sales.

But all that’s much easier said than done.  Here are some specific ways to build sales momentum and to make your online store crackle and then (hopefully) pop.

1. Seek out strategic partners.

Question: What’s the online retail equivalent of “location, location, location?”  Answer: Links to your site in all the right places.  You want to create awareness of your wares among customers, so the first step is to truly define your target buyer.

Thoroughly research your customer’s profile and preferences.  Next, develop come-hither offerings, teasers, interactive ads and must-read content for as many appropriate sites as you can manage and afford.  “Small businesses can develop relevant content for other sites that drives traffic on a very low-cost basis,” says Andrew Restivo, founder of GourmetFoodMall.com, a New Orleans-based online shopping mall for more than 150 specialty food companies.

 In considering sites as partners or affiliates, don’t forget professional organizations and associations, especially when you market services or business products.  Try trading or paying for links with other small or midsize e-commerce marketers.  But before making any deals, verify that your links add value on those sites.  For instance, links to your boutique hotel might bring in business from local restaurant sites or a car rental agency or even a local chamber of commerce.  But it would make no sense at all on a site selling computers.
 
2. Keep customers clicking toward the checkout page.

Customers won’t wade through faulty, bulky or clunky architecture.  Broken links or haphazard navigation will only squander your hard-earned sales opportunities.  Streamline all site paths and continually check that every click works.  Rely on plain, instant gratification (HTML) text links to all products, services and registration forms.

“Graphics and Flash make your site look cool, but without text to encourage search results, customers may never even make it to your home page,” says Michelle Jackson, a spokesperson for Range Online Media, a search marketing company.

Also, consider easy ways to get to the shopping cart and reliable site-wide product search functionality.  When a shopper arrives with product specifics already in mind, you do’nt want to make that buyer work or wait.
 
3. Cross-promote like crazy.

Don’t make your online store a stand-alone orphan; make it work with other sales channels.  Successful sellers have figured out that the Web is just one sales channel, like mail-order catalogs, phone orders or face-to-face contact.  Everything must work together.  That means customers being able to research one of your products online, buying it by phone, and picking it up at the offline store.

If you only sell online, you must make sure your branded URL is seen far and wide.  That includes using it in every e-mail signature of every employee you have.  Print the store URL on all brochures, catalogs, packing material, shipping boxes, shopping bags, delivery trucks, posters and postcard notices.  If you attend trade shows or conferences, make sure your booth signage and promotional material also have a big, bold printed URL stamped on them.  Don’t miss an opportunity.

Also, it would be wise to register variants and misspellings of your domain name so customers who get it wrong will find you anyway.  For instance, a company named “Baskets R Us” should also register “Baskets Are Us.”  Think about it: For a few hundred dollars in registration fees, you might net one return customer who buys thousands of dollars worth of wares over time.
 
4. Keep it personal. 

Customers will feel more valued and comfortable about buying online if you establish a bond.  The more you’re in touch and display a personal tone, the more your customer will relax.  Some methods that work:

• Create an “About Us” or “Who We Are” page so that customers can learn about your background, the staff, and the history of the company.
 
• Create a blog or other feedback page so that customers can exchange comments.  Or set up an email option.  Just make absolutely sure that you have the capability of responding quickly.  The worst thing to do is set up a channel for contact that gets ignored.
 
• Create a way for customers to log on to track their order as they are packed and shipped.
 
• Create a series of auto-responder e-mail messages, saying thanks for visiting, offering to answer questions or send a reward for buying and then confirmation of shipping.
 
• Create e-mail discount or news blasts to announce products or price deals.  Or create an ongoing newsletter. 
 
 5. Be specific (and honest) about your product offerings.

“The more detail you include, the better.  People like to know the histories of what you’re selling and who you are,” advises Lynne Dralle, an eBay Power Seller who has sold more than 20,000 items at online auctions over the past six years.  “Always describe exactly what the buyer is getting.  Be honest,” she says.  When selling her collectibles, Dralle mentions any chips or flaws, but she also tells stories, like how her Aunt Mary brought an item over from England.

High-quality photographs of products are also a must.  If you don’t have a digital camera, you might consider investing in one; they’ve come down in price and are worthwhile to have.  But also know that, for a very low cost, Staples or Kinko’s or the corner drugstore can scan images onto a disk that can be uploaded to your PC.
 
6. Set delivery policies that work for your business model.

The great debate about whether free shipping boosts online sales is finally fading into individual solutions.  While you still find advocates pro and con, it’s now boiling down to a matter of your product pricing.  “Free shipping costs can kill you if you can’t include them in the price of the product,” says GourmetFoodMall.com’s Restivo, whose company regularly surveys online consumers on such issues.

But if you jack up your price to accommodate free shipping on commodity items that only sell at the lowest price possible, you lose.  In those cases, customers expect to pay a reasonable amount for shipping, Restivo says.  On the other hand, high shipping prices are a big detriment to sales of perishable or premium products, presumably because it’s easy to forgo those items when they don’t feel like a “bargain.”  Restivo’s tip: Rely on second-day-air shipping.  “You can build $3 to $5 into the price.  Costs are much cheaper than overnight and customers are satisfied.”
 
7. Spruce up your site and service.

The goal is to get customers to return and to spread the word among friends and family that your online shop is worth a visit. So do everything you can to make the experience fast, fun and fabulously better than your competitors.

Explain all your policies, up front.  Promise 100% money-back guarantees with no strings attached.  Offer free samples.  Quickly respond to every query or comment.  Invest in a live chat function so that customers can get answers to product questions immediately.  Create reasons to return to your site with a loyalty club or contests or email games and discounts.  Make connections with customers and don’t let go.
 

One last point: Don’t forget that having well-written content and product descriptions are important because you want the search engines to find you.  Learn how to optimize your site for search engines.  Next thing you know, the sales will start rolling in.

I’ve been spending a great deal of time lately reading about landing page optimization. What to do, what not to do, various factors, etc. Based on my research, here are a few factors to keep in mind when working on designing and improving your landing pages:

1) Keep Focused on Your Primary Objective
When writing your copy, laying out your landing page and considering multiple call-to-actions, keep your primary objective in mind at all times. You want to avoid placing strong emphasis on any secondary calls-to-action that draw visitor attention away from the primary objective. In addition, multiple call-to-actions (e.g. offers) can confuse visitors and lead to high drop-off rates.

2) Choose a Clear and High Visibility Headline Placement
Not only is it important to carefully craft your headline, it’s also important to select a highly visible location for your headline on the landing page. Always keep the headline relevant to the primary objective and connect the main text and headline to what visitors are specifically seeking. Don’t make it difficult or too metaphorical. Simple typically beats crafty.

3) Present the Call-to-Action Clearly and Vibrantly Right on the Landing Page
If your primary objective involves filling out a registration form or any other information gathering/search-related call-to-action, place the form clearly on the landing page in a prime real estate location. Draw attention to it via color, images and text. The use of white space is critical because you want visitors to feel at ease with completing the form. Don’t make it feel like a burden with long forms and with information fields that don’t appear relevant to the visitor’s main intent for being on the landing page; You can always get other information later on if you really need it.

4) Reduce Navigational Links
In most cases (e-commerce sites may be the main exception) the less navigational links the better. If you do use navigational links they should be call-to-actions that take the visitors to a second page with a new registration form (or related call-to-action) and some additional detail directly related to the alternative call-to-action link. These links keep the visitor on track with fulfilling your primary objective and help provide some research (e.g. customer insight) about what your main landing page content should focus on.

5) Use Crisp, Eye-attracting Images
Creating highly effective landing pages can be time-consuming to design and develop because of the high-quality images they employ. Landing pages that use crisp images, excellent visual hierarchy and strong relevant photos connect quickly with visitors. Relevant means being directly related to the visitors’ reasons for visiting your website in the first place.

These are just a few landing page optimization factors. Just like designing any new creative, it takes time and knowledge to get it right in a way that produces powerful results. Remember, always be sure to test potential factors to see what works best for your visitors in achieving your primary objectives.

Good luck to you on your landing page optimization!

Successful search engine optimization is very much like a game of tug-of-war; your team will be much better off if you all pull in the same direction. By the same token if you take the time to consider small details in your website’s structure and ensure that all of the details are working together, you will ultimately benefit. I’m going to cover a few of the key elements to successful SEO and show how synergizing your optimization efforts can work for you.

Key Components of SEO
Let’s begin by breaking down some of the key components to search engine optimization, which include the Title Tag, URL, Header Tag, Content, Internal Links, and External Links.

Title Tag
The bar at the top of your browser is probably the single most important component to search engine optimization. Most sites that you find on the Web will say something like “Company Name – Home” in this area. That’s great—if you’re very well branded and only want to be found for your company’s name.

Instead, try putting your most important keywords in this area, and keep it under control. It’s a good idea to try to keep the total character length to less than 68 characters, including spaces. For the purpose of this blog, let’s make up a page. Let’s say this is a website that sells pet supplies, and we’re going to focus specifically on the fish tank page. So, we have www.yoursite.com/fish-tank/. Your title tag is “Fish Tank | Aquarium Rocks | Fish Tanks.” The total character length is 40. That’s pretty short, but it’s concise, and it’s all the keywords I want to focus on for this page. (Please note that this is merely an example. I didn’t research the proper key words at all and so this may not be the best example. It is for the purpose of illustration and nothing more.)

URL
Google seems to be paying more attention to keywords in the URL, so if you don’t already have rankings, if your site is new, or if you are redesigning your site and will be creating new URLs anyway, consider adding some keywords here. Sticking with our previous example, the best choice is www.yoursite.com/fish-tanks/.

Header Tag
The H1 tag is another key element that must be in synergy with the rest. This appears to most Web visitors as the “title” of the page. This header is usually big, bold and describes exactly what’s on the page. Some sites don’t have a headline or title above the copy at all, but having an H1 tag is another key element to proper SEO. Using our example, the H1 of this page is “Fish Tanks.” Are you beginning to notice a pattern?

Content
One of the most obvious components to good SEO is content, and yet many sites are lacking in it. Write 250 words or so of copy that is relevant to that page. Make sure that you’re using the same words/wording as the Title tag, URL, and H1. It’s probably a good idea to use the words “fish tanks” here as well.

Internal Links
If you are going to link from www.yoursite.com to the “fish tank” page, be sure that you use the words “fish tank” in the anchor text on that link.

External Links
Be really careful not to get all “spammy” here. If you can find relevant websites that would link to product/services pages that are relevant for inclusion, that’s fabulous. But do not, I repeat, do not get too focused on one keyword. Get some links to your internal pages from external sites that have “fish tank” in the anchor text and have these sites link to your /fish-tank/ page. Then, go get some other links for the /aquarium-rocks/ page that have the “aquarium rocks” anchor text.

Details, Details!
The point of this is to show that taking a little extra time to create synergy with your title tag, content, headers and linking is the recipe to successful search engine optimization. Of course, this isn’t everything that you need to know for search engine optimization. There are probably around 250 criteria that a search engine might consider to determine which website to rank for a given search phrase.

As always, if you’re unsure of a major change that you’re about to make, please consult with a SEO professional. Reckless changes to a website can have major effects on rankings and ultimately, your bottom line.

On Tuesday July 10th ScanAlert will be releasing its latest research report regarding consumer conversion cycles. I have yet to look over the full report, but from what I’ve gathered thus far it looks like consumers are taking longer these days to convert—80% longer, in fact. According to the report, consumers are now taking an average of 34 hours and 19 minutes to buy products they have found on ecommerce sites, up from 19 hours when the same study was conducted in 2005.

This is surprising news to everyone in the ecommerce industry and should definitely be considered by anyone who is currently measuring their conversion rates according to immediate sales; that kind of instant gratification shopping seems to be a thing of the past and does not give a full picture of one’s sales success. Online shoppers are getting smarter and savvier these days and ecommerce sites need to step it up if they wish to lessen the time gap between first click and sale.

With competition only a few clicks away consumers are now doing a great deal of comparison shopping, and they’re not just looking for the cheapest deal anymore. Studies for the past seven years show that price is rarely the main deciding factor in making the sale. Shoppers are more interested in factors such as shipping speed, guarantees, on-site merchandising, merchant name-brands, and trustworthiness to name but a few.

There are many things you can do help prevent conversion delay. Anne Holland, Content Director of MarketingSherpa.com suggests becoming more human to potential customers. The importance of merchant brand cannot be stressed enough, so it’s wise to place “about us” sections in conspicuous places, and not just on the site’s homepage; with good SEO and SEM, the homepage is often bypassed completely. I suggest placing drop-down menus with the “about us” option on all pages so that it can be accessed from whatever pages are initially clicked from the search engines. Make it personable. Be smart. Be funny. But whatever you do, be memorable.

Really stress the reasons why someone should buy your product or service as opposed to that of your competitor. Do you have any big clients worth noting? Did your company receive some kind of special recognition in the past that might impress potential customers? It’s also wise to include photographs of your company in action because, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Also, pictures provide tangible evidence of a real, thriving business which can be helpful in this day and age of rampant internet fraud. Alleviating consumer fears by creating an environment of trust is key and can ultimately lead to quicker conversions.

In addition to having a decent “about us” section, it is also a good idea to collect consumer email addresses as soon as possible rather than at the typical time of checkout; if the consumer doesn’t make it all the way to that point, chances are you’re too late. You can’t rely on consumer memories to get them back to your site. Even if they try looking at their browser history they can easily confuse you with some of your competitors that research shows they’re definitely looking at. And you certainly don’t want them to re-do the search in some engine and click your sponsored link for a second time when you’ve already paid for them to do it the first time, especially when grabbing their emails in the first place is so easy to do. Perhaps you can entice new users with special discounts via email through a DHTML overlay, that way they’ll have a link to your site in their email inbox along with specials that make you stand out. As Anne put it, “If you wait to ask for email permission until the actual checkout, then you’ll miss the opportunity to promote fleeing shoppers.”

It is also a good idea to have some worthwhile content on each of your pages. While not every shopper reads all of the product information provided on an ecommerce site, it’s still wise to provide it. This is especially true if you’re selling big-ticket items; people don’t want to spend a ton of money on a product they know nothing about. The key is to give more information than your competition gives, and this can be anything from product reviews to shipping/in-stock data and everything in between, but don’t rely solely on data feeds from the manufacturer. This is usually not enough information to create conversions. In this case, more is better—always. Even random trivia can do the trick. You can also provide consumer forums where your potential customers can get real, honest product reviews from your past customers. They’ll probably appreciate the honesty which will contribute to that warm, fuzzy atmosphere of trust I spoke about earlier.

Another way to get a leg up on the competition is to offer unique extras and specials that are exclusive to your company and to your website. For example, you might consider offering free gifts to those who purchase a certain amount of your top-selling product, especially if you’re in the business of selling a product that truly can’t be found elsewhere. According to Anne of MarketingSherpa, the “extras” can be as simple as providing PDF format eBooks that have some kind of practical and/or entertainment value to them. Some examples include how-to guides, simple recipes, or expert advice. The trick is to provide gifts that won’t add to your shipping costs (hence the suggestion of downloadable eBooks.) You can also offer up coupons and discounts for subsequent purchases, or anything else that extends your brand. Get creative for the best results.

These are just a few things to think about. Surely more will come up for you when you get a chance to read the full report by ScanAlert when it is released tomorrow. If you have a better understanding of eConsumer behavior, chances are you’ll be able to win the battle against sluggish conversion rates, if not the war.