This is one of the most commonly asked questions by various brands and retailers in the North America market since 4th quarter of 2007, which was a beginning of Financial and Mortgage industry turmoil in the North America market.

If you are a seasonal ecommerce player and been in the industry for a while, you know there is nothing alarming in this question. Both brands and retailers have always been sceptical about the value of insight and cost of acting on those insights for a long time. There is a big misconception in the ecommerce industry that, every Insight provided by an analyst results in a development project which means, additional cost for the ecommerce team but, this is not true. There have always been low hanging fruits which are intentionally or un-intentionally ignored by the ecommerce team. We are going to share with you some of the tools that you or your ecommerce service provider uses on a daily basis, and by using these tools, you can make significant changes on your website without involving your IT department.

• First and foremost is your “Catalog Management Tool” through which, you set up your Online Store Taxonomy, Product and Category Information including Product Title, Description, Cross-Sells, Pricing, SKUs, Freight, Images, Availability, Weights etc.
• Second is your “Content Management System” through which, you create & test content, publish content and optimize different sections of the website to create better engagement opportunities for the online visitor, and drive them towards the conversion path. Companies like Interwoven, have done an amazing job over the last 2-3 years, and have added some advanced capabilities to their base product such as, A/B and Multivariate Testing along with, smart Targeting rules to reduce the bounce rate on the key landing pages of the website, and increase the avg. time spent per page so that, the overall site conversion can be improved.
• Third is your “Promotion Engine”, which allows you to setup different type of promotions such as % Off, $$ Off, BOGO, Free Shipping, Tag Based, Service Based, Hidden Gifts, Auto PIDs etc. These types of tools provide you with an opportunity to strategize, execute, and measure your promotions performance.
• Fourth is your “Recommendation or Personalization Engine” that your merchandiser uses to serve “top selling”, “customer favourites”, “best buy” and “top rated” merchandise across different key sections of the website such as, Home, Category, Shop, Search, Product, Shopping Cart and Checkout Pages. These types of tools have a tendency to reduce the bounce rate on the key landing pages of the website, and increase the overall site conversion by protecting your category margins.
• Fifth is your various “Marketing Tools” that you or your Agency uses on a regular basis to manage your marketing campaigns across different marketing channels such as, Affiliates, Search Engines, Comparison Shopping Engines, Email, Social Media and Mobile etc.

So; the bottom-line is, before you act on the recommendations provided by your web analyst team, discuss these recommendations with your entire ecommerce team including, Online Merchandisers, Marketers, Content Specialists and Key Development Personnel from your ecommerce service provider including Architects and Development Leads. Once the recommendations are validated and analyzed, create an ROI focused action plan against them.

With this, we conclude this post and as usual, we are looking forward for your valuable feedback and criticism.