Design Toscano was recently featured in a case study entitled “Narrow Niche E-Mails Increase Sales” in the October 2008 issue of Target Marketing. The company traditionally used emails to announce catalog drops, highlight a few items (mostly new inventories), introduce merchandise lines, and announce site-wide sales. To spur sales, Design Toscano experimented on segmented email [...]
Design Toscano: Increasing Sales by Improving Email Response Rates
November 6, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Office Max: Effective Product Presentation
October 30, 2008 By Leave a Comment
If you are offering a wide variety of products, check out how OfficeMax.com presents its products. OfficeMax.com is the 6th largest ecommerce site according to the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide. The company had Web sales of about $3.16 billion in 2007, and a monthly unique visitors of 3.6 million. What is impressive about OfficeMax.com [...]
How to Introduce a New Product: Lessons from Sears
October 20, 2008 By 1 Comment
If you are looking to introduce a new product line (particularly high end or expensive products), study Sears.com’s way of highlighting a product. With a new product, your goal is to educate the consumers about the product, how it is used and should be used, and more importantly, what benefits this new product can give [...]
Lenox: Listening to Your Customers is Key to Success
September 30, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Lenox.com recently redesigned their website to enhance customer experience. But like many retailers, particularly small businesses, they don’t know what users really want from their site. It’s hard to improve customer experience when you don’t know where to start. The home decor, jewelry, and dining and entertaining retailer then conducted an extensive market study of [...]
Crate & Barrel: Email Strategies During Tough Economic Times
September 26, 2008 By 1 Comment
As the financial market falls, retailers are gearing up for a bleak holiday season. With financial woes such as the faltering housing market, rising unemployment and high food and energy costs, consumers may cut back on spending for gifts and holidays. To survive in this market, one way is to emphasize low price gifts that [...]
Kazoo Toys: How a Small Business Can Compete with the Big Boys
September 7, 2008 By 2 Comments
One challenge for small business entrepreneurs is how they can compete — and thrive — against big businesses in their niche. It is hard and scary, particularly if you have limited resources and cannot afford to make mistakes. But there are small businesses who are able to carve a niche for themselves and succeed, despite [...]
Customer Service Tools of Big Online Businesses
August 11, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Internet Retailer magazine conducted a survey on the customer service tools used by top online businesses. It is good to look at the results and incorporate these tools in your website as well. Here are some results from the study: Which self service tools do you have on your website (check all that apply)? Order [...]
12 Customer Service Tools of Big Online Businesses
May 18, 2008 By 2 Comments
“Customer service” encompasses various elements from interaction with customers to provision of a convenient shopping environment. In a store, the quality of customer service can be seen in the way employees greet the customers, listen to what they need and want, handle customer complaints, among others. On the Web, customer service can be gleaned from [...]
Innovative Shopping Cart Implementation
May 13, 2008 By Leave a Comment
An important element of selling online is making it easy for shoppers to buy your products. Success in online retailing hinges in large part to providing a convenient shopping experience for customers — and one of the ways to achieve this is by addressing the problem of shopping cart abandonment. According to Jupiter Research, only [...]
