Ecommerce solutions report - conclusion
2009-2010 will see continuingly challenging times for retailers.
The good news is that whilst sales on the High Street may continue to falter, online retail spending is enjoying sustained and healthy growth.
Recent forecasts* show that UK online retail sales are set to grow by up to 137% or £12.3nb, by the end of 2011.
As retailers and all marketers increase their investment in online and email channels it is essential they maximise their opportunity to deliver ROI.
However, our study shows that even in light of the current economic climate, the country’s major name retailers are not proactively exploiting all the opportunities available to them through the ecommerce solutions they use and email marketing.
To many of the retailers are not following best practices – with the risk of impacting web traffic, conversions and revenue.
But small changes can make a big difference.
One of the great strengths of online selling is the ability to test changes and variations and accurately measure what works best.
This is the way to ensure the homepage of an ecommerce site has the lowest bounce rate; that navigation and product pages have the lowest exit rates;
and that transaction funnels have the lowest abandonment rates.
Retailers should take these minimum steps to ensure their ecommerce sites are performing to their potential:
* Focus on delivering added value content and user generated content to help build an engaged community of loyal returning visitors to the site.
Web 2.0 offers boundless opportunities for retailers to enrich their customer’s online shopping experience and in turn drive conversion rates and revenue
* Make greater use of simple sales promotion techniques and fully exploit all available opportunities to cross-sell or up-sell online visitors
* Get the follow-up right. Retailers need to ensure they effectively build their customer relationship after they’ve left the site, using timely, targeted and personalised email programmes.
It is the retailers who make use of web 2.0 and personalised content to build a customer community, offer flexible delivery options and the ability to shop with ease and confidence, and who nurture their customer relationship with targeted email marketing, who will win the battle for the online customer.
* Experian/Paypal UK Online Retail Report 2009
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