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Ecommerce Subscriptions: How to Turn Visitors Into Subscribers

SEO Sage: Optimization Can Be Cheap but Never Easy

Site Search: Strategies for No Results Found

Supercharging the Next Generation of E-Commerce

Ecommerce Subscriptions: How to Turn Visitors Into Subscribers Thanks to Apple and Google both announcing subscription payment features within days of each other, we’ve seen a resurgence of interest in monetizing digital content using a subscription model. Lost in the ensuing hype, however, is the simple maxim that unless access to your service or content is fundamentally desirable to have on an ongoing basis, visitors aren’t likely to commit to any sort of subscription, no matter how streamlined or frictionless the actual purchase mechanics are.

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SEO Sage: Optimization Can Be Cheap but Never Easy Optimizing a website to be a top result in search engines can be one of the cheapest ways to draw traffic, according to Web Marketing Today Editor-in-Chief Ralph Wilson, who spoke at the SES Conference and Expo. However, several SEO strategies must be implemented correctly -- and there are plenty of ways to get them wrong.Search engine optimization is the least expensive method of getting visitors to a website, Ralph Wilson, founder and editor-in-chief of Web Marketing Today, told the audience at the SES Conference and Expo in San Francisco Tuesday.In a presentation on SEO basics, Wilson outlined tips on how to get the most out of SEO.He also mentioned several mistakes commonly made in website design, even by professionals.

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Site Search: Strategies for No Results Found If you’ve been following us for a while, you know from time to time we review a book that’s relevant to the ecommerce community. In lieu of an eighth grade-esque book review, I share an excerpt of a book with permission from the publisher. This installment is from Greg Nudelman’s latest Designing Search: UX Strategies for Ecommerce Success. It’s rare to find over 300 pages dedicated to one feature of an ecommerce site, but site search optimization is a discipline that warrants such depth! One aspect of site search optimization we do well to obsess over is the ability to keep a user engaged on your site, even when a search attempt fails, for example, when zero matches are returned. This post is based on the section “No Search Results Strategy: Not a Zero-Sum Game.” Nudelman believes that “no simple set of rules exist that guarantees a successful implementation of a no search results page. However, the following four broad design principles provide a useful starting point:” 1. Don’t be afraid to say I did not understand. Clearly indicate there are no search results, so your customer can recover. 2. Focus on a providing a way out. Make sure every control on the search results page does something productive to help resolve the no search results condition. 3. Create a robust partial match strategy. Over-constraining is the most frequent mistake people make when searching ecommerce sites. Having a robust partial match strategy is critical. 4. Employ multiple content strategies. Draw from multiple sources to provide the most relevant content first to aid recovery from the no search results condition, while staying true to your customer’s original intent.

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Supercharging the Next Generation of E-Commerce Consumers expect more and more out of the e-commerce Web sites they shop, and yours must keep apace of changing technologies and techniques. They want the ability to accommodate mobile devices and provide location-based tie-ins, new layout techniques that put the products first, personalization options and more. Does your site deliver?

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