Monday, December 10th marked $881 million in online sales, making it the heaviest online spending day on record! This number was up 33 percent versus the previous year’s high of $666.9 million.

For more information on Cyber Monday, Black Friday and overall ecommerce holiday sales, see the updated version of “Holiday Sales: When Will Your Site See its Peak Day?.”

For more information on this year’s record breaker, view ComScore’s press release “Online Holiday Retail Spending Surpasses $22 Billion, Up 18 Percent Versus Year Ago, As Retailers Prepare for Final Week of Pre-Christmas Shopping.”

-Stacie Leonard, Ecommerce Marketing/Copywriting

Technorati Tags: 2007 ecommerce holiday sales, 2007 ecommerce sales, 2007 Holiday Online, 2007 online holiday sales, 2007 online sales

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What are people buying online these days? According to an article in ecommerce-guide.com, more online shoppers purchased apparel than computer hardware and software last year. This was the first time that apparel, footwear and accessories had surpassed the huge market for computer hardware and software, with sales reaching a staggering 18.3 billion dollars.

Who are these customers clamoring for the latest Jimmy Choo shoes and Burberry scarves? The majority are educated, early-adopter females who are liberal in their spending habits. According to a Forresters Study,“On average, online purchasers of apparel, footwear, and clothing accessories have spent $720, $790, and $860, respectively, online during the past three months, distancing themselves from the more conservative spend of $550 for a typical Web buyer.”

How can you capitalize on these spend-happy, tech savvy online shoppers? Read Michelle Megna’s tips for selling apparel online. If you don’t have an online store already, sign up for a trial of Volusion’s award-winning ecommerce software that offers features such as customer reviews, color swatch functionality, and wish lists.

–Michelle Greer, Marketing Specialist
http://www.volusion.com

Technorati Tags: Online Shopping Trends, Online Spending Trends, Retail Trends, Statistics Online Shopping, volusion

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Writing for search engines is evil. After all, Google prides itself in its ability to constantly innovate its algorithms so that those trying to trick the system will not dominate the search engine rankings. You should write the content on your site only for the people who read it, right?

When thousands of dollars can be at stake just by slipping to the second page of Google, can we realistically expect merchants to think about content this way?

Fortunately, Google also gives us access to many pages that explain how search engines work and how you can use them to gain better exposure on the web. Search engine bots see content (=words in text form, not images) linked to pages. If you want to understand how this occurs, check out HowStuffWorks’s explanation of how search engines spider your pages. It’s pretty thorough, and at the very least you will discover this very cool site.

So after understanding how search engines work, how do you know that you are writing effectively enough for them to pick up your content? SEO is one of the most common aspects of marketing covered on the web, and there are many tools on the web that show how your site’s SEO fairs.

Perhaps the site with the highest number of useful tools is seochat.com. Here are just a few notable tools from their site:

Keyword Density Tool:
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density
Although the proper keyword density for each page is disputed, having a strong keyword density will tell search engines exactly what is on that page so it can get picked up.

Link Popularity Tool:
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/link-popularity
Shows all sites linking to particular pages of your site.

Keyword Position Tool:
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/multiple-datacenter-keyword-position
This tool will show you how you rank in search engines for particular keywords.

Spider Simulator:
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/spider-simulator
This tool will simulate how a search engine spider views your page.

There are many other tools on this site that will help you create AdWords campaigns, block certain bots from spidering your site, check PageRank, and more. Be sure to focus on writing good homepage content, as this is the first text search engine spiders will see. When you write this content, the text shouldn’t be so bot-oriented that it drives traffic to your website but doesn’t keep them there.

You have the tools now, so get to writing!

–Michelle Greer, Marketing Specialist
http://www.volusion.com

Technorati Tags: Cool SEO tools, Online SEO tools, SEO Tools, volusion, Writing for Search Engines, volusion

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For consumers, the holidays mean buying all the items our loved ones have wanted all year, and receiving all those great gifts we’ve wanted but would not buy for ourselves. For online store owners, this can mean record sales year after year.

And just one credit card fraudster can ruin the holiday season for both a consumer and an online store owner.

There are quite a few steps you can take to market your store for the holiday season. As the traffic comes in, what are you doing to protect yourself from the wrong people ordering your goods or services? Here are a few precautions you can take to prevent the headaches associated with online credit card fraud:

1.) Manually check your orders. Fraudsters take advantage of different ship to addresses during the holidays as well as the number of orders that change addresses mid-delivery. If you get an order shipping to an address in an odd location or a large order, be sure to call the customer prior to shipping.

2.) Be sure to check the IP address where the order was placed. If you find that it doesn’t match any city on the order, you should be cautious before shipping. This post on protecting yourself from chargebacks includes a screenshot of what the IP address looks like on each order record in a Volusion Admin Area.

3.) Be aware of countries that tend to harbor internet fraud. High problem areas tend to be China, southeast Asia, India, the former Soviet Union, the Eastern block of Europe, and East Africa. If you see an IP address from one of these countries, shipping the order might not be worth it unless you can contact the customer and verify the card.

4.) Prevent credit card fraud in the first place by hosting data securely. A survey by CyberSource speculates that online credit card fraud has gone up in 2007 by 20 percent already. Be sure to protect credit card data by complying with PCI/CISP standards. This will greatly reduce your risk of getting your servers compromised and your customers’ credit card information stolen by hackers. You can see if your hosting company is compliant by checking Visa’s list of CISP certified hosting companies (don’t worry–Volusion is on the list!).

Enjoy your holiday sales this season, but don’t forget to prevent the post-holiday hangover by taking the steps to prevent chargebacks.

–Michelle Greer, Marketing Specialist
http://www.volusion.com

Technorati Tags: Credit Card Fraud, Holiday Fraud Statistics, Internet Fraud Holidays, Preventing Credit Card Fraud, volusion

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Green Monday is:

a.) The second day of every week for Al Gore. It is preceded by Green Sunday and followed by Green Tuesday.
b.) A wretched Green Day cover band.
c.) Historically, the biggest shopping day of the year.
d.) A term coined by eBay as a ploy to outpace Black Friday and Cyber Monday’s sales figures.

Although we do not know if Al Gore does indeed call every Monday “Green Monday”, eBay did coin the term for the biggest shopping day of the year. With exception of last year, online shoppers spend more money on the second Monday of December than any other day of the year. Will this be the case in 2007? It’s hard to say given the huge promotional pushes behind Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales this year.

The term “Green Monday” does not have the promotional backing of retail research company shop.org, which has proven to be Black Friday and Cyber Monday’s biggest cheerleader. What it does have going for it is history. As shop.org studies have shown, shoppers browse for products closer to Thanksgiving but buy later on. Since Green Monday falls just before Christmas shipping cut off dates and right after the weekend when shoppers browse for products, it’s a great day for online retail.

Black Friday saw a 37 percent gain in the number of people shopping online for the first time. Will Green Monday see the same, and will retailers eventually be able to use the term “Green Monday” to push sales the same way they did with Black Friday and Cyber Monday? Get out there and market your products, and we will certainly find out.

Want to get in on the growing online retail market? Sign up for a 14 day trial for Volusion’s award-winning online shopping cart.

–Michelle Greer, Marketing Specialist
www.volusion.com

Technorati Tags: Cyber Monday, Black Friday, Green Monday, Holiday Shopping Statistics, Volusion

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