News yesterday of the long awaited launch of the Zara online fashion store.

The launch follows similar recent moves by the Gap and Banana Republic and signals quite clearly that no serious retailer or brand in today’s market can afford not to be selling online.

The question I’ve heard from a fair few friends who are partial to splashing their hard-earned cash online on high street labels is quite simply – what took them so long?

The online retail revolution has been in unstoppable mode for the last 3 years, with year on year sales growth outstripping that of the high street, regardless of weather or economic conditions. Combine this with the international reach and the lower overheads that an online store can offer, and the business case for entering this channel is bullet proof.

Large high street brands who are late to launch online stores and develop their online brand are at an immediate disadvantage against those brands who were early movers. The latter already enjoy successful ecommerce solutions,  established online customer bases, long established SEO and google rankings, and the trust and loyalty of their online customers.

Though it may be a challenge for online marketers to overcome these late entry disadvantages as fast as possible, the demand for buying high street brands online is strong and the challenge is surmountable – particularly with the power of social media behind them (Zara have in excess of 4m facebook fans) and the flexibility of today’s ecommerce solutions.

So congratulations to Zara for entering the game. And to my friends who are impatient to get online and shop at H&M’s, the good news is that the long awaited H&M store is due to open this month too.

And what of Primark and Benneton, to name just 2 other major brands yet to become e-tailers? With Zara’s online sales predicted to soon surpass those of its average high street store, it seems unlikely we will have to wait too much longer to see the last of the die-hard bricks and mortar retailers going boldly online.

Last month we launched a toned and buff new website design for USN Ultimate Sport Nutrition, one of the UK’s leaders in sports nutrition and supplements.

The back story

The dotCommerce team had already migrated USN’s previous website over to the dotCommerce platform in November 2009.

The priority was to get USN’s ecommerce site onto a stable, flexible platform that could support their business needs and customer demands – exactly what dotCommerce does so well.

Once they had a flexible ecommerce solution they could rely on and grow with their business, the next step for USN was to focus on their search engine optimisation, in order to drive quality traffic.

dotSEO – our sister SEO agency – began working closely with USN to optimise their website in November 2009. By March this year Lee Mcardle, USN’s Marketing Manager, was tracking impressive traffic developments.

“Since we signed up with dotSEO in November 2009” says Lee, “we’ve seen our daily website traffic volume double, with an increase in organic search traffic of over 40% in the first 2 months of 2010 alone, successfully adding 16 keywords to our page 1 rankings and tripling our traffic from social media in a very short time.”

SEO drives website design

There are many components that make up a solid SEO strategy, but one that is often overlooked is the design of the site itself.

Earlier this year, after carrying out a complete audit of the site and its target search keywords, the dotSEO team recommended that USN undertake a revamp of their website design, to maximise the ROI on their effective new search marketing strategy.

dotCommerce won the project and set out to radically redesign key elements of the USN site to increase the site’s ability to attract, engage, convert and re-attract high quality visitors.

In particular, we focused on:

* Radically improving the checkout process and experience
* Completely redesigning the navigation for both SEO and user journey
* Creating a contemporary, fresh, brand enhancing look and feel

The results

Since the new site launched in July last month, the early results have been impressive:

* 7% increase in visits
* 71% increase in pages viewed
* 7% increase in time spent on the site
* 27% reduction in bounce rates

By taking a holistic approach to their online selling, and incorporating highly effective ecommerce site design with professional SEO and targeted email marketing, USN are showing how each element of the digital marketing mix can help to drive and enhance another.

Have you ever wondered what people actually do on your website? Or how to find ways in which you can improve your online conversion rate?

Well using Google analytics is one thing. Understanding how to ask it meaningful questions and knowing how to find the answers in your reports, is another.

That’s why I  have put together this totally practical course of interactive webinars for marketers who want to get more from Google Analytics.

Over 6 weeks starting on the 1^st September I will be providing a weekly webinar which makes it easy to understand how to use Google Analytics effectively – whatever your level of experience.

Each webinar includes clear examples, demonstrations and step by step instructions.

By the end of each webinar you’ll be able to test, measure and make worthwhile changes to your website that will give you immediate results. Maybe your site is getting enough traffic so search engine optimisation is the answer, or maybe your retention rate isn’t very good so email marketing could help, or maybe your site just isn’t converting so improving your website design would turn your online sales around. Attending this course will let you find what your problem is and provide the solutions to fix it.

Together and individually, these totally practical webinars will teach you in clear no-nonsense terms how to use Google Analytics to empower you to:

• Understand what’s really happening on your website
• Increase your website traffic
• Reduce page and webform abandonment
• Improve your onsite conversion rates
• Increase the ROI of your online marketing

The webinars will be held every Wednesday at 11am from 1st September. Each class  lasts 40 minutes followed by 20 mins for questions and answers.

Don’t miss out – book now

There’s a feature in dotMailer which is getting a lot of attention from our sister ecommerce company, dotCommerce. It’s known as External Dynamic Content, and it empowers you to send large chunks of personalised, real time information in your campaigns.

You’re probably used to sending campaigns with small amounts of personalised information. So you might have a customer’s name, and perhaps you even use our nifty dynamic content feature to personalise content for groups of contacts. But what if you want to send a campaign to thousands of people, with a completely customised segment of HTML that changes for each recipient.

And that’s exactly what dotCommerce are doing. Their clients like to send newsletters along with some product ideas; and dotCommerce’s clever recommendation engine knows exactly what each customer might like to purchase next. So while I might get a newsletter along with discount offers on swimming trunks or a snorkel, you might get offered skis or a jacket.

To make it work, just ask your developers to set up a feed on your backend system (whether it’s CRM, eCommerce, etc.) that outputs the relevant personalised HTML. Then, you can put a marker in your campaign as follows:

<!– EXTERNALCONTENTMARKER: http://example.com/examplefeed.php?email=@EMAIL@ –>

When your campaign is sent, we’ll read that URL for each email address you send to, and embed whatever HTML your server returns. Everyone gets their own carefully personalised version of your campaign.

Look like Mr T when drinking tea!

Win this ever so slightly bling sovereign ring mug, just by answering today’s dotFoolery quiz question correctly.

The A Team movie is released this week. None of us here is old enough to remember the original TV show, least of all myself (sic), but today’s question is:

What does A in The A Team stand for?

Tweet your answer to #dotfoolery by 3pm on Monday Aug 2nd.

Yes – we love it when a quiz comes together!

Another week and another exciting website launch for the dotCommerce team.

We’ve been busy working on a new site for FreshMax Shirts and it went live in the first week of August.

FreshMax has a unique technology, which eliminates sweat patches entirely, making its shirts a must have purchase for many people during the unseasonably hot weather we are having this summer!

The new website launch coincided nicely with some great national media coverage for the company in the Metro and on GMTV, following the announcement that it had won the prestigious Venture Candy competition. FreshMax received further hits in both the Sun and the Mirror!

Getting a site ready for media onslaught

All this media attention has not been in vain as the site received a vast number of orders in the first 12 hours of trading!

We anticipated a large volume of traffic following the national TV coverage and so reacted accordingly by moving freshmaxshirts.com onto a new server.

The dotCommerce team worked really hard through the weekend to get the site ready for its Monday morning launch and it’s clearly paid off with great results so far and a very happy client.

As you’ve probably read already, Facebook has announced that it has hit 500 million users!

That’s equivalent to:

• One in every 12 people in the world
• The entire population of the USA, UK, France and Germany combined
• Half the number of people that own computers in the world

So what’s the secret behind this success story?

In 2003, Mark Zuckerberg started thefacebook.com while at Harvard University. The website allowed students to register their details and post information or pictures about their activities across campus with early reports stating the site generated 450 visitors in the first 4 hours of going live and 22,000 photo-views.

While these early numbers pale into insignificance compared to the figures released this week, the future was bright for the new service. Despite thefacebook.com being forced to close briefly over security concerns (sound familiar?), when it reopened it quickly expanded across every University in the US.

By 2004, Facebook received its first investment from the co-founder of Paypal and purchased the domain name facebook.com for $200,000. In 2006 it opened its doors to anyone over the age of 13 with a valid email address and today, only four years later, facebook.com has reached 500 million users and $1.1 billion of revenue.

So the big question is: what’s next for the social giant?

Banner advertising has been the largest source of revenue for Facebook to date and, with a wealth of data about every user, banner advertising has never been so targeted. Users supply their age, interests, location, gender and occupation, which allows advertisers to target an exact demographic.

Facebook cites the example of a company called CM Photographic (PDF link) that specialises in wedding photography. CM invested only $600 dollars on Facebook, targeting 24 to 30 year old women whose relationship statuses on Facebook indicated they were engaged. An amazing 60% of users who clicked on the ad became a qualified lead and generated the company nearly $40,000 of revenue.

Despite this, Facebook’s advertising click through rate is only 0.04%, compared to Google’s 8%. Compare this to open rates than can be achieved other digital areas, such as email. Facebook’s challenge is to leverage their user base and overcome user perceptions of marketing on social channels users ‘see ads as not always relevant to them, but don’t like personalised ads either as these are an invasion of privacy” (source: IAB /ICD research July 2010).

So is there another way for Facebook to make more money in the future?

Social gaming

The answer may come from another favourite pastime of Facebook users: gaming. With games like Farmville bringing in over 61 million Facebook users regularly monitoring their farm growing crops and raising livestock, does online gaming offer a financial opportunity?

Facebook credits have remained fairly low key so far, but we think this could just be the next big thing.

Currently you can buy Facebook credits (one credit is equal to $0.10) using a credit card, Paypal or a mobile device. You can then use these “credits” to purchase premium items in some of Facebook’s top games or applications and send gifts to friends.

We’re not the only ones that think this could be big with RockYou, Facebook’s largest game developer, recently signing a five-year exclusive deal to use Facebook credits as its online payment method. Companies like RockYou will earn 70% for every credit it sells and Facebook takes a healthy 30% too!

Facebook credits

But using credits for games is only the start. What about the ability to convert credits back into money? Would this allow social games like poker/roulette to reward users with credits which they can then convert into money that they can spend? Or how about using the service to pay your friends back money you borrowed? What about earning loyalty points in day-to-day retail stores in the form of Facebook credits?

Only two weeks ago, MOL announced it will allow customers in its stores in Asia and Australia to purchase Facebook credits in-store but also convert “MOLpoints” into Facebook credits.

Take this to its natural conclusion and you could even see brands giving Facebook credits to fans that post products on their wall and encourage their friends to purchase. Could this start a whole new affiliate system?

So is this the next Facebook money making idea? We suggest you watch this space!

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Some of our dotCommerce ecommerce solutions clients have been getting great media attention recently and we felt it was only right to recognise that here on the blog!

Pineapple Dance Studios has been profiled in the Metro with a link to the company’s new ecommerce site, designed by the dotCommerce team.

Pineapple – who you’ll likely know from the hit Sky TV show – previously had two websites: one for the studio and one for their online shop. We combined the two, allowing them to offer valuable content and resources such as a studio timetable, while building in opportunities to cross-sell clothes in the store.

After the site was launched, we analysed how visitors were using the site and made a number of usability enhancements, as well as integrating PayPal. These improvements contributed to an online sales increase of 25%!

If dancing is your thing, then you’ll definitely want to pop over to www.pineapple.uk.com and get shopping!

Rodial has also been in the news recently with the company’s pioneering Glamtox Sticks, that reduce lines on your face by up to 30%, proving a smash hit with the media and consumers alike!

Rodial uses a number of dotDigital Group services including our ecommerce solution, email marketing and SEO. The company’s new website – http://www.rodial.co.uk/ – built by dotCommerce is a hands-down success, with orders and average basket values both doubling since launch.

The site really does have everything you need to get you looking your best, so what are you waiting for?!

We’re always delighted to hear about our customers’ successes, so give us a shout if you’ve got a story to share!

With its recent foray into the world of groceries, ecommerce giant Amazon UK has shown the world that there’s no market it won’t consider getting involved in.  However, unlike books, bicycles and baby clothes, there’s one key difference about groceries; their perishable nature.

If Amazon wants to make a success of this new webstore, it will have to concentrate heavily on the logistics – it’s not simply a case of putting the catalogue online.

Lest we forget, it’s not an easy market to make a success of.  Even Ocado, the much lauded delivery service working with Waitrose, has still never seen a profit.

On top of this, despite millions of pounds invested in a state of the art warehouses, it’s lacking the cutting edge automated robotic systems employed by Zappos and Amazon.  If you don’t believe me, check out the amazing video of this in action below.

At the other end of the market, there is Sainsbury’s that isn’t even really pushing its online shopping function simply because the costs are much higher to fulfil online instead of in store.

This reluctance to cannibalise is understandable, but if it holds back too much, the risk is growing that the likes of Amazon will entrench its brand in the space immovably.

Is the future bright for Amazon?

But to get there, Amazon faces an important question: are people ready to do their weekly shopping online with a brand more associated with books than flour and eggs?

For now, I suspect not, but if it continues to increase the efficiency of its logistics and service, perhaps gimmicks like “same day delivery” would be enough to start swaying people…

What can other retailers and ecommerce solutions providers learn from this Mexican standoff?  For a start, there’s the fact that Amazon’s best asset in the area might not actually just be related to robotic powered warehouses. Alongside these efficiencies, it’s the excellent customer experience records of such brands that may propel their quest for market share.

Indeed, even for brands already operating in the space like Ocado, I suspect the company’s focus on customer experience is the one aspect that is fuelling its high valuation, even if profits are yet to be fully realised.

The online arena is constantly changing, a fact that’s hardly surprising considering the internet has only been a major part of most people’s lives for the last five years or so. With this in mind, I was very interested to read some statistics released by the IMRG today, relating to recent changes in the ecommerce space.

The IMRG – the leading organisation for the UK online retail industry – has been running its IMRG/Hitwise monthly benchmarking report for four years and has taken the opportunity to reveal how things have changed. The results show that while, predictably, Amazon retains the top spot – and has done consistently since the data was first collected – seven of the top ten from May 2006 are still there today. This is perhaps surprising considering the dynamic nature of the digital world.

Of the companies in the list, Amazon.co.uk, Argos, Play.com, Apple, Tesco, Amazon.com and easyJet all retained their place in the top ten. ASOS, HP, ASDA and Screwfix are the fastest climbers in the list, while brands such as MyTravel, Opodo, Packard Bell and Woolworths have disappeared from the list in the last four years entirely, albeit for different reasons!

Increasing number of high street retailers getting it right

Another really interesting point that comes to life through this league table is the number of high street retailers that now seem to be ‘getting it right’ online. Six of the top ten retailers have physical stores, up from four in May 2009. Thirty-three of the top fifty retailers have a high street presence, up from twenty-three in 2006.

What all this tells us is that, despite the struggles and misfortunes, the retail industry has suffered over the last four years, there has still been a lot of growth and development, but also a lot that has stayed the same; there’s been a surprising amount of stability.  I’d argue there is still a lot to do; our Hitting the Checkout report from last year (download it here), for example, found that some of the UK’s top retailers are yet to really take advantage of newer channels like social media to improve results from ecommerce.

The big question now is, what will the next four years bring? Mobile commerce anyone…?

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