Averages often shroud insights, which is why we should always apply segmentation to our data analysis. A fantastic example of this is recent findings by by Seewhy, which analyzed 264,631 abandoned carts and found a very strong relationship between the dollar value of abandoned shopping carts and abandonment rate.

Check out the 2 spikes in the chart below. Surprised by the percentage of low dollar value cart abandonment? This is reasonably explained by the shipping cost to item cost ratio…

What makes a good tweet?

That’s the million-follower question. It’s tough to know exactly what your Twitter audience wants to hear from you, what will make them unfollow, what will make them retweet or @reply, and what will make them buy.

The answer is “it depends,” but you can fill in that blank by testing a variety of tweet-styles and measuring engagement. Here’s 17 to get your creative juices flowing…

Tap is the gesture that replaces the click, but unlike a pointer mouse that has pretty good accuracy, our fingers can often activate the wrong thing. And when things are difficult to activate, a user can give up.

Jakob Nielsen’s research on iPad usability consistently shows that “read-tap assymetry” is a major problem. (English translation: text that is large enough to read but too small to tap)…

A dear friend of mine left the comforts of Canada a few years ago to take up life on African soil, and I enjoy following her adventures and experiences through her blog. One of her posts titled Finally Some Good Customer Service? got me thinking about how the Western customer-is-always-right business culture is not practiced everywhere.

“In Canada (and other developed countries), the salesperson or business owner depends on the customer to bring in their income…

Social commerce is estimated to reach $30 Billion (yes, that’s Billion with a ‘B’) in the next 5 years. How is that possible?

Facebook Commerce is more than just Liking product pages. There are 7 dimensions driving Facebook Commerce that make up the “F-Commerce Ecosphere,” as shared by Janice Diner, founding partner of Horizon Studios, a social media consultancy at the Meshwest conference this week in Vancouver, BC…

In our neverending quest to increase conversion rates and revenue, we often focus on web design and offers, and overlook the power of customer reviews. There are many benefits of reviews, not only to your customers, but also to your merchandising and purchasing team. But attracting reviews is a challenge — even Amazon’s average sales-to-reviews ratio is 1300 to 1. Do you know what percentage of customers ‘convert’ to review contributors? What can you do to attract more reviews?

The benefits of customer reviews

1…

Just a note to our beloved subscribers, we recently refreshed the look of GetElastic.com and with it came a few hiccups including a glitch in our feed that sent out a blank message to email subscribers and a truncated post to our RSS followers. If you missed our Ecommerce Link Digest for November on Friday you can view it here, and while you’re at it, check out the new look!

Thank you for your patience and we will be back to regularly scheduled programming Tuesday…

November was a big month for online retail, with Cyber Monday emerging as the highest day for online shopping, new records set for mobile commerce and the introduction of Google+ pages for businesses and brands. (I’ve also seen more facial hair around Vancouver than during the Stanley Cup playoffs). But here at Get Elastic, the [...]

…

Words matter. It’s proven that your choice of verbiage can dramatically impact your email open rates, paid search click through rates and landing page conversions. Marketers spend thousands of hours and dollars testing and tweaking text to find out what performs the best. It’s easy with the wealth of testing tools available for your campaigns, [...]

…

Inactive email subscribers. The ones that you mail, mail and mail again for months or years, and never an open, never a click. Removing them can help your sender reputation, as too many inactives can be a flag to ISPs and hurt your overall delivery percentage. But cutting them off prematurely could mean lost future revenue. What should you do?

The rules of engagement

ISPs track both positive and negative engagement activities which can impact your deliverability…

Coined in 2005 by the online arm of the National Retail Federation, Shop.org, Cyber Monday is now a household name. The Monday after Thanksgiving is the unofficial kickoff of the online shopping season (though trends http://pulse.chasepaymentech.com./ show shoppers have been spending for the last 3 weeks), and is known for its deals that rival Black Friday’s in-store doorcrashers.

But does Cyber Monday live up to its hyper? What’s the deal with Cyber Monday? We’ve collected over X stats about 2011’s most anticipated online shopping day…

Link building is critical to SEO, but tougher for commercial sites than for blogs and other content sites. Not only is it difficult to attract links directly to product pages, product pages can disappear when products sell out – along with their links. So ecommerce SEOs need to get creative.

Though social link building is hot, hot, hot, traditional forms have not lost their importance…

As discussed on Get Elastic last week, behavioral targeting is the new wave of online advertising. A form of behavioral targeting called “remarketing” is close cousin to paid search and email marketing, with the bonus of only reaching people who have visited your site in recent days.

Also coined “remarketing” (by Google Adwords) or “remessaging” (by Microsoft AdCenter), retargeting gives you an opportunity to re-engage site visitors with targeted messages and offers that appear when site abandoners surf other sites around the Web…

Back links have always been an important part of SEO, but the type of links that influence search engine rankings have changed over the years.

Links from topically relevant and authoritative sites serve as signals of quality for the content they point to. The authority of a web page, or “Page Rank” in Google lingo, flows from one web page to another through (most) links, making link building a staple SEO strategy, but also one that has been abused by spammers…

Your holiday merchandising is set, your developers are in a deep code freeze and all your marketing campaign creative is in. Your sales are already picking up, is it too late to tweak your website for maximum conversions this season? No!

Here are 7 eleventh hour tactics you can use to squeeze the most dollars out of your holiday traffic this year.

1. Optimize for speed

Site performance matters…

Just when you think you’ve seen it all, you stumble across a feature that makes you think “why didn’t I think of that”?

This time, it’s from antique and vintage marketplace Ruby Lane, which alerts shoppers when an item they are viewing is sitting in someone else’s cart or wishlist – suggesting they may miss out if they don’t act soon.

This tactic makes most sense when products exist in limited quantities, such as clearance and “last one” items…

1. Make it Clear, Make it Quick People are more rushed than usual during the holidays. If you don’t already have the most important features/benefits of your products outlined in bullet points, do it now. This will allow your shoppers to make quick work of gift-giving decisions and let you rack up more sales.

2. Remind Shoppers of Gift Potential While you might be tired of writing the phrase “makes a great gift,” shoppers need to be reminded…

For many online retailers, the holiday email season is already underway. But it’s not to late to check if your holiday emails are naughty or nice. Before you hit send, make sure you’re maximizing your opportunity by answering the following questions:

1. Do all your holiday emails have a clear call to action?

“Seasons Greetings” may give customers the warm fuzzies, but unless there’s some action for your recipient to take, you send your email in vain…

What is the biggest missed opportunity in ecommerce optimization? Is it A/B testing? Performance testing?

How about cart recovery?

We put a lot of focus on optimizing the cart, getting the customer through to conversion, yet still it’s not uncommon to have abandonment rates of 50% or higher. We know a good chunk of abandonment does not occur because the button wasn’t big enough or green enough or our web forms are too long…

New month, new name for our monthly link roundup! Introducing the Ecommerce Link Digest (nee Blogger’s Digest). If you’re new, once a month we highlight posts from other blogs that are of value and interest to online retailers and Internet marketers.

• Perhaps the biggest piece of news for Internet marketers in October was Google’s announcement that it would no longer provide organic search query data for logged-in Google Account users…

Pop quiz: what kind of device are more shoppers planning to purchase through this holiday season – a tablet or a smartphone?

Make a guess before reading on!

According to ThreatMetrix survey of 722 active Internet using consumers, 37% intend to make a purchase using their smartphone, nearly three times as many as those who plan to use their tablet. (View the entire infographic on The High Low)…

According to Forrester’s latest State of Retailing Online report, 38% of web merchants report A/B testing of their site design as “effective.” Does that sound low to you?

While this doesn’t necessarily mean 62% don’t consider site testing an effective tactic (it’s likely the survey included retailers who are not doing any testing at all). For example, if only 50% of respondents were site testing, the actual figure would be 76%…

For a little Friday Funny to kick off your weekend, enjoy this funny short on the Online Checkout in Real Life from the Google Analytics team, reminiscent of our own Crazy Messed Up World of Ecommerce clips.

Perhaps the script at the end should read “find out where customers are abandoning your checkout.” But semantics aside, your checkout funnel is your best friend when determining what step to test first in your checkout optimization efforts…

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

In the early 1900′s, department store merchant John Wanamaker didn’t have access to web analytics to be able to calculate an ROI on various marketing activities like we do today. While data-driven decisions are better than none, data can be dangerous.

At an ecommerce conference last week, one of the speakers gave some data analysis advice that I’ve heard over and over from countless sources…

For some this is already old news but in case you haven’t heard, the Google Page Speed performance testing tool is officially out of Google Labs and in your hands!

Just type in any URL and Google will return a report with an Overview (complete with a percentage score) and high, medium and low priority action items:

Clicking on any item in the menu takes you to more detail:

For example, Piperlime’s home page has a bit of Javascript to minify…

If you’re an international ecommerce business you likely have your eye on the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China). What’s happening in ecommerce in India? Check out this infographic for some juicy stats:

Off-topic: Also worth mentioning is the UK Christmas Shopping 2011 infographic I meant to include in our September link list. Did you know that 4pm is the peak time for workplace shopping in the UK? Might be a good time to send those Tweets, Facebook shares and emails…

Looking for help with ecommerce? Contact the Elastic Path consulting team at consulting@elasticpath…

We know there are a lot of psychological factors that influence purchase behavior online and offline. Here are just a handful of funny things that influence customers to behave the way they do:

Bigger Buy Button

It’s 2011, and by now you would think web users would be confident that every ecommerce site has an Add to Cart button, right? Why does color, size and even irregular shape have a proven, measurable impact on products added to cart, checkout initiation and checkout completion?

The most likely answer is that big, bold, funky shaped buttons stand out and put the “call” in call-to-action…

We are all saddened by the loss of Steve Jobs this week, a true visionary and leader of an organization who has impacted the way we shop and sell online today and in the future. Here are just some of the ways Apple products have revolutionized electronic selling:

Itunes

The iTunes application made micropayments popular with the masses. Though other mp3 marketplaces existed, the iTunes player and companion devices worked in tandem to grow the marketplace to 80% market share of (legal) mp3 downloads and a library of over 8 million songs…

“Correlation does not imply causation.”

Heard that phrase lately? Or maybe way back in Stats 101?

The topic is so hot it got it’s own panel at Search Marketing Expo and a math-o-graphic on the SEOMoz blog. It’s worth discussing here on Get Elastic as it’s a key truth that applies to data analysis and A/B or multivariate testing.

I’ll give you a minute to look this over…

Created by SEOmoz (Copyright ©2011)…

Bloggers Digest is our monthly ritual that highlight posts from other blogs that are of value and interest to online retailers and Internet marketers.

• Quite possibly my favorite. post. ever. When CTAs Attack – 10 Real World Call to Action Examples (That’s CTA for call-to-action, I didn’t misspell cat). Mix a bit of LOLcats meets FAIL Blog meets photo montage of downtown Vancouver – all in a conversion optimization context of course…