2011 Cyber Monday – How did the small merchant do?

Posted on November 30, 2011, 8:34 am, by Rob Mangiafico and add to the discussion ».

Last year we took a look at 2010 Holiday Sales including Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We examined at random a sampling of small ecommerce merchants that we host, and looked at average order volume per day.

We drew a few conclusions and saw how the SMB market stacked up against the big retailers.

How did things change in 2011?

2011 – The upward trend

We used the same script and rules as we did back in 2010, so the data is a good way to compare order volume year over year. The data is shown below, showing 2010 vs. 2011 day by day for average number of orders per store:

 

2010 vs. 2011 sales (click image to enlarge)

As you can see, 2011 sales volume (in terms of numbers of orders per day) is higher each day as compared to 2010. I’m not a statistician, but I think I can infer that this is a good thing.  :)

Stats

Cyber Monday sales were up 33% over last year

Black Friday sales were up 23% over last year

Thanksgiving sales were up 17% over last year

How does this compare the overall big box industry? Internet Retailer stated Cyber Monday online sales were up 33% this year. ComScore reported Black Friday online sales were up 26% from last year. For Thanksgiving, ComScore said sales were up 18% online this year.

WOW! Our little 20 line script that randomly looks at order volume for a few hundred small merchants was right on the money!

My ego aside, the bigger conclusion is that online sales for small merchants are tracking with the big box retailers, which means this holiday season is not only a boon for Amazon and Walmart.  The little guys and gals are seeing the same type of increases in online spending this year!

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So there you have it. A look at how small merchants have done so far this holiday shopping season. Are you seeing the same trend in your online store?

ShopSite 11 SP1 r1 Maintenance Release – We’re On It!

Posted on November 15, 2011, 2:59 pm, by Rob Mangiafico and add to the discussion ».

ShopSite has just released the latest maintenance version for v11 SP1 (11 SP1 r1, or 11.1.1 numerically).

This version addresses a number of small bugs and adds a few small enhancements to the 11 sp1 release last month.

Fixes include:

  • Many mobile browsing fixes to make the mobile experience better for customers.
  • Tweaks to the new Amazon payment option
  • Google Feed and XML fixes

A full breakdown of all the changes can be found in the
ShopSite Knowledgebase Article.

Our upgrade procedure

Since this is a maintenance release, we will be automatically applying this set of “patches” to every hosted ShopSite store that is already at version 11 SP1. It does not have to be requested, and it will be automatically applied. The upgrade is seamless and involves no downtime.

If a hosted client is running a version older than 11 SP1, this release will not be automatically applied. It would have to be requested.

We plan to have these updates completed within the next week.

How do you know your store has been upgraded? At the bottom of the main backoffice screen (where the dashboard is), look for the version to be:

11.1.1

If you have any questions about this policy or the maintenance release, don’t hesitate to contact us.  :)

photo credit

ShopSite Tip – The View Cart Link

Posted on November 8, 2011, 7:23 am, by Rich A. and add to the discussion ».

Not long ago we wrote about how you could manually add a My Account Link to your site, and today we’re going to review another useful link, but one that’s very easy to code incorrectly by accident…

The View Cart Link

With most websites pages it’s as simple as copying the URL to share a link with someone or to get the URL when linking to a page, but this doesn’t work with the Shopping Cart page of ShopSite.  The URL can contain extra data so simply copying it will not create the correct link.

For example, if you copy the URL when it has an “sbid” value in it (ex: “sbid=SSMSB1318363318.20917″) you are actually linking to your own shopping cart contents.  If a user follows that link and the cart contents are still stored on the server the user will see what you had in your cart at the time you created the link.

This is why you don’t want to just copy & paste the URL that you see in your browser.  However, it’s very easy to create your own link based on the following URL:

http://XXX.com/cgi-YYY/sb/order.cgi?storeid=ZZZ&function=show

Visit your online store and add a product to the shopping cart, then use what you see in the URL of your browser to fill in the XXX, YYY, and ZZZ values in our sample above.   For example, using our ShopSite Demo store the URL would look like this:

http://shopsite-demo.lexiconn.com/cgi-shopsite-demo/sb/order.cgi?storeid=*2036b3500d02b74177fc09496b178059b1cd&function=show

  • Note: Be sure to fill in all 3 values and don’t forget the * at the beginning of the storeid.

That’s it – now you have a static view cart link which you can add to any of your pages or menus.

 

 

Top Ecommerce Blog Posts and Article for October 2011

Posted on November 3, 2011, 4:22 pm, by Rob Mangiafico and add to the discussion ».

This was the view from my house down the driveway after the freak snowstorm this past weekend. It’s amazing the damage snow can do when the trees still have most of their leaves. I just got power back today, so I’m returning to the digital world full-time.

Here’s what I found to be interesting and useful last month from around the web…

TOP PICK: 10 Key Highlights On Mcommerce from the Internet Retailer Mobile Commerce Forum 2011 – Get Elastic
Mobile is the rage this holiday season. Here’s what’s happening.

Death Spiral: Divergent File Behavior – Mine That Data
A simple spreadsheet to see the health of your business.

20 ways to get reviews from customers – Econsultancy
Hit ‘em from all angles…

5 Holiday Marketing Ideas to Boost Sales – Practical Ecommerce
Make those preparations now.

Five tricks our minds play on us and what marketers need to know – Econsultancy
My most interesting ecommerce read in October.

How To Use Cross-selling And Upselling To Maximize Online Sales – Amex Open Forum
Some good pointers on using this feature effectively.

One Powerful Way to Speed Up Your Site and Sales

Posted on November 1, 2011, 11:43 am, by Rob Mangiafico and received 2 Comments ».

“A faster site is a better site” – me

That’s my quote for the day. But don’t take my word for it.

Google thinks speed is important. So important it’s now a ranking factor.

Customers think speed is important. So important that nearly a third will leave your site if it does not load quickly.

I’ll hazard to guess that [Google + Customers] pretty much encompasses your entire sales funnel.

So now you believe speed is important. That’s the first step. The next step is what to do about it…

Optimize

I wrote a blog post that covers how to speed up your website. It covers things such as enabling compression, using static caching, and combining files for faster page loads. It’s a few easy steps to make your site somewhat faster.

But it’s not going to speed up the bulk of your site’s load time.

Images

The majority of the time it takes for your pages to load is due to your images. They are the largest items in terms of bytes, and are usually the largest in terms of number of items on a page.

Sure, you can optimize the images, shrink them down, compress them for optimal web viewing, but this only gets you so far.

What would really help is if these images were able to load faster to your customers’ computers. So someone browsing in Europe and someone browsing in Idaho would be able to download your images at the same fast speed.

Enter the CDN!

That’s where a Content Delivery Network (CDN) comes into play. a CDN takes your images from your website, and distributes them across the globe to various locations (known as nodes). Using geo-filtering technology, the CDN node closest to your customer delivers the images and content that are on the CDN.

What does this mean?

It means your visitors will be able to download your images / video faster due to the data being much closer to them. Add in the compression and optimization to your web pages we mentioned previously, and everything on your site will be sped up.

CDN with LexiConn is a snap

Are you thinking it might be a lot of work to properly set up and maintain a CDN service? Not sure how to implement it in your ecommerce / ShopSite store? With us, we take all of the work out of it!

It’s as easy as signing up for the LexiConn CDN service. We’ll take care of adjusting your ShopSite software to use the CDN for your images. We’ll make sure proper compression and caching is enabled. And we’ll provide you with a special URL to call any image/video via the CDN.

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A CDN is a great service for any ecommerce store that uses a lot of images or video. I’ve seen it speed up webpages by 3-6 seconds, which is quite a lot! We make it painless to implement and use. We’ll even run tests before and after to show you the speed increase. It’s a simple way to make your customers’ experience better, and to hopefully increase sales. So Sign Up today and see what a difference a CDN can make.

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