Website Conversion Blog
July 26th, 2010
Normally, when companies announce a 40%+ increase in costs and miss analyst expectations, their stock takes a hit. Last week, Amazon was no exception with its stock dipping by 15% immediately after the news, but it has subsequently recovered to $118-$120 where it has been for the last month.
The earnings miss was probably more sensitive this quarter because of the launch of Apple’s iPad. Ever since the iPad launch, Amazon’s stock has been trading 20% lower than its high this year at around the $150 mark—assuming that Amazon’s Kindle reader would be negatively impacted. Amazon did not disclose its Kindle sales but is seeing strong growth for Kindle and Kindle-based ebook purchases. Kindle is becoming to Amazon what iTunes is to Apple. Read the rest of this entry »
July 23rd, 2010
Website visitors follow many different paths before, eventually, a frustratingly small percentage will go on to become customers. These paths are hard to visualize, because they rarely represent linear journeys. Many visitors will visit a website several times before making a purchase, probably looping back and forth between pages in what seems, to the website designer at least, a totally illogical pattern.
When shopping, like many activities in life, people are not logical; they are complex bundles of emotions wrapped up in an outer veneer of calm. For many, shopping is an exquisite pleasure to be relished, drawing perhaps from our primeval hunter-gatherer roots as we savor the chase and secure our purchases, returning triumphant. Read the rest of this entry »
July 19th, 2010
The news that Ben & Jerry’s ice cream will stop sending email to their 1.3M customers is, frankly, remarkable.
What were they thinking? Are they nuts?
Their plan, announced in an email to their subscribers last week, said that they will be discontinuing email—in favor of social media. While there has been some idle speculation about whether social media will replace email, this is frankly nonsense. They are complementary channels, and understanding how to use the two together in a mutually supportive way is the key. Read the rest of this entry »
July 14th, 2010
The advent of some high profile ecommerce sites on Facebook, such as 1-800-Flowers and Disney’s Toy Story 3 ticket application, have sparked a debate about whether to build duplicate ecommerce sites (or subsets) on Facebook itself. Read the rest of this entry »
July 7th, 2010
Some eight weeks ago, Facebook announced its Open Graph and social plugins. By almost any measure, this can be considered one of the most successful launches in history. Within 24 hours Facebook had served 1 billion ‘Likes.’ Within one week, Facebook Like had been implemented on 50,000 websites. After only six weeks, more than 100,000 sites had implemented Facebook Like. Wow. Read the rest of this entry »
