For brand marketers, Facebook is a great place to engage directly with consumers, build relationships and drive traffic to their ecommerce sites. But Facebook as a shopping destination? With a few notable exceptions (inherently social businesses such as music, games and entertainment), it just doesn’t make sense to invest in a Facebook storefront. But using Facebook to drive traffic to your ecommerce site is a well proven and very effective method of driving high quality traffic to the site.

A year ago, we stuck our necks out and called the Facebook commerce baby “ugly.” Despite all the hype, we advised steering clear of Facebook storefronts and focusing on ecommerce social integration via plugins (Forget Selling on Facebook (for now) – Think Social Plugins). Since our original post last year, the picture has become more complex since many consumers now have a variety of devices for socializing, researching and shopping. This fascinating infographic from the Internet Advertising Bureau shows how different devices are used for different purposes during the day.

Note how desktops are considered more secure (68%) and great for storing important information (72%).  By comparison, the benefits of smartphones are ‘Keeping in touch on the move’ (95%) and ‘Socializing with others’ (78%).

While consumers will undoubtedly use a variety of devices, their preferred device for shopping is a desktop/laptop and an ecommerce site. And a mobile ecommerce site is preferred over a smartphone app.

This data suggests that brand marketers should focus on optimizing their ecommerce sites for purchases on desktop/notebooks and tablets, and their mobile sites for researching future purchases. It also suggests that mobile shopping apps are a distraction for both merchants and consumers and will fail for many of the same reasons why Facebook stores have failed.

Here’s why consumers don’t want to shop on Facebook:

Purpose

Currently, consumers aren’t going to social networks to shop, but instead to socialize, have fun and share. This shows a disconnect between the way some brand marketers view social networking sites (as a channel to sell more) and the way that consumers view them (as a way of interacting and having fun).

Cannibalizing, not additive

Of the limited number of success stories for Facebook stores, a common theme emerges: promotions. Promotions are effective in driving traffic to the Facebook store and securing a conversion. But our issue with these promotions is that they can be used to drive traffic to the ecommerce store just as effectively, where the buyer will most likely spend more than they would on Facebook. Until evidence emerges that Facebook storefronts are additive and create incremental sales, they are doomed to failure. What we should be thinking more about is how we can make shopping inherently more social, rather than cannibalizing ecommerce sales with promotions just to promote a different storefront.

Trust

Facebook, in particular, has a troubled relationship with its users when it comes to privacy. And several studies have shown that the majority of social network users are unwilling to shop on a social network due to security and privacy fears. What will Facebook do with my information if I do shop there?

Limited range

Facebook stores have a more limited range than the full store, so it’s inevitable that serious shoppers will navigate to the main ecommerce store. Limited ranges also lead to lower average order values.

Another negative impact of a Facebook store is that there is a reduced screen width in which to display merchandise. This leads to a practical limitation of a three or four column grid for displaying products, smaller images, and the right hand column being reserved for advertisements.

This is also a major limitation when considering mobile sites and apps where the screen size limits the images, download speeds limit the quality, and for apps, limited ranges typically apply.

There are, of course, always exceptions where there is an inherently social aspect to the business, and Facebook commerce can thrive. But for the majority of brands and merchandisers, it just doesn’t make sense. In the end, the focus should remain on making ecommerce more social and accessible for different device types.

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Everything is more exaggerated over the holiday period: Retailers offer a dazzling array of new products, coupled with equally dazzling promotions, while trying to manage the constant problem of out-of-stocks. And customers make an abnormal number of purchases in a very short period and abandon their shopping carts in droves as they search for the best deals.

The 2011 holiday season was no exception. It was a bumper year again for ecommerce, with more than $37 billion in online spending in November-December, up 15% from 2010, according to comScore. And more than half of all online orders over the period had free shipping. While the volume was up, the average order value was down, reflecting widespread promotional offers.

Studying the shopping cart abandonment rate reveals interesting patterns in the run up to the holiday season.

As in previous years, many customers anticipated promotional offers and deferred purchases, causing the abandonment rate to shoot up, averaging 85% in the weeks running up to Cyber Monday.

Compare this with the average for 2011 of 72%, up slightly over 2010. The highest abandonment day of 2011 was at 89.2% on November 23, the Wednesday before Black Friday.

Discount Seeking Behavior

An e-tailing group study conducted at the end of 2011 found that 47% of online buyers would only buy discounted products, except under exceptional circumstances. The same study shows that 73% of consumers rate unconditional free shipping as a critical feature when making an online purchase.

What we can conclude from this is that customers are demonstrating ‘deal seeking’ behavior. Given a difficult economic outlook in 2012, it seems likely that this will continue.

Abandonment Rates Keep Rising

The shopping cart abandonment rate rose steadily through 2011, as it has for the last three years.  During this time, online marketers have not stood still: checkout processes have been simplified, security seals added, more payment methods, and a host of other conversion rate optimization tweaks.

To answer why, you have to look at the different characteristics of abandoners and those that have never abandoned a shopping cart. In a consumer survey published at the beginning of last year, Forrester Research showed that 89% of online shoppers have abandoned their shopping carts. Abandoners have more experience online, make more purchases, and spend more time on the internet than those that have never abandoned a shopping cart.

More and more consumers are becoming sophisticated internet shoppers, aware of simple techniques to seek out the best deal and of TV-advertised price comparison websites.

This explains why, despite the significant improvements in conversion techniques on the majority of sites, shopping cart abandonment rates continue to climb.

One thing is clear: Customers are becoming increasingly savvy, looking online for information to make more informed choices, especially around price.

What Will the 2012 Consumer Be Like?

Using this data as a starting point, the SeeWhy Conversion Academy research team considered what this means for online buyer behavior in 2012. We concluded that there are three major consumer trends that ecommerce sites need to take into account in their understanding of the consumer in 2012. We’ll cover these in a future blog, but if you can’t wait, then we’re hosting a webcast titled “Introducing the Online Buyer of 2012,” on Thursday, January 19. You can register for the complimentary webinar at http://ow.ly/8vI6p.

And yes, this is correct.

But this “single track” view of conversion is overly simplistic.

In this column, let’s explore why, and how it’s important to consider all of your available conversion paths.

Why Customers Don’t Buy

Only 3 percent of visitors buy within one session on an e-commerce site. And once they get as far as the shopping cart, 71 percent will abandon. To understand why, Forrester Research asked 3,000 people why they abandon.

Source: Forrester Research, May 2010; “Understanding Shopping Cart Abandonment”
Note: Respondents were able to give multiple answers

As it has been for years, the cost of shipping is still the number one reason why people abandon their online shopping carts. What’s interesting to note is that none of the top reasons have anything to do with the actual checkout process. They’re all behavioral and related to lack of readiness or willingness to pay the final purchase price.

So, making the checkout process easier for the first-time buyer is only part of the answer when addressing cart abandonment. In fact, many have learned that once changes are made, abandonment rates are still high.

Multiple Paths to Conversion

Visitors will make multiple visits to your site before finishing a sale. And on their journey, there are many different purchase paths they may follow.

After analyzing the online buying behavior of over 600,000 consumers across numerous e-commerce sites, I learned that surprisingly 75 percent of shopping cart abandoners would actually return to the site they abandoned within a 28-day period. This defies conventional wisdom: we polled online marketers and 81 percent believed that the majority of abandoners never return.

Additionally, these returning visitors are more likely to finish their purchase, as well as make future purchases. In fact, they are 2.3 times more likely to do so than new visitors making first-time purchases.

So keep in mind that your visitors will not buy immediately, and will require a series of visits and abandoned carts over time whileconsidering their final purchase.

Optimizing the Checkout Process for Repeat Purchases

While an average e-commerce site converts 3 percent of visitors to buyers in each session, this isn’t true for all sites.

The top 10 converting websites are able to convert 23 percent of visitors to buyers each session. These sites convert more because of their business model, the loyalty of their customers, and a focus on driving repeat purchases.

Amazon is a case in point. At number 11 in the top converting sites rankings, Amazon converts 18 percent of all visits into a sale.

Amazon does not offer a guest checkout, but forces new visitors to register on the site. While this creates friction for new visitors, it means that Amazon is able to identify a high proportion of traffic, and, when they don’t buy, engage them using email marketing.

Amazon.com has also revealed that 66 percent of its sales are repeat purchases (compared with my analysis showing an average of 7 percent for the e-commerce industry). Amazon.com does not optimize for the first-time visitor, but rather for the returning customer.

Key Tips for E-Commerce Marketers

1. Understand why your customers don’t buy. Every site is different. While industry studies are insightful, it’s important to collect data on your unique visitors to understand why they’re abandoning. Use survey tools, such as an exit survey. Start with data from industry research to help you design the questions and be sure to set up triggering rules carefully, so that you don’t pester.

2. Understand what it takes to get the sale. Recognize also that customers probably follow their own unique path to purchase – a path that looks something like this:

Browse – Abandon – Consider – Research – Consult Friends – Browse – Purchase

Digging into your analytics will give you a good idea of what this looks like for your site, as well as the length of the cycle. Calculate: the time from first visit to first purchase, the average number of visits, and cart abandons per purchase. This data will help you consider what changes need to be made on your site to accommodate the unique buying patterns of your customers.

3. Reengage visitors who don’t buy on the first visit. If your visitors take multiple paths to conversion, you must think about how you can gently nudge these visitors into returning and becoming buyers. This should span the different stages of the sales funnel with different approaches for browse abandonment, cart abandonment, and new customers, all of which need nurturing.

Understanding more about your customers – why they buy, when, and how – is a journey rich with rewards. The more you can step out of your shoes and become the customer, understanding her needs and concerns, the more you will be able to convert browsers into buyers. Sometimes, surrounded by myriad of tools and analytics, we forget this most basic tenet of marketing.

Online Buyer Behavior 101 and the Many Paths to Conversion was originally featured on ClickZ.

As we have written about before, customers have become trained to wait for holiday offers prior to making purchases. A tighter economy suggests that this holiday season should see good growth for ecommerce sites as consumers look online for the best prices. However, there is evidence that the 2012 consumer is also moving online to save money across a spectrum of goods, including luxury items.

New research by the e-tailing group shows that 73% of consumers rate unconditional free shipping as a

critical feature when making an online purchase.

The October 2011 study, “The Connected Consumer,” also shows that free returns are a critical feature for 70% of consumers, followed by discounts, coupons and rebates.

We shouldn’t be surprised that free shipping is so important. After all, the number one reason why consumers say they abandon shopping carts is the cost of shipping and handling.

Many customers don’t understand why they should pay shipping charges at all. They don’t see the hidden costs for distribution built into the product in-store, and they consider an online purchase to be an alternative to going to the mall when they can afford to wait for delivery. The inconvenience of waiting is offset against the inconvenience of driving to the mall.

The e-tailing group’s research also shows that price is the most critical factor when considering a purchase, whether online or in-store (79%). The convenience of having a home delivery is number two (63%), but this is offset by impatience to get the product quickly (55%) or the ability to purchase from a local store (45%).

Noteworthy, 47% of consumers say that they will never, or hardly ever, buy products at full price.

Research also shows that 40% of consumers do a quarter or more of their online shopping at Amazon. Amazon’s site-wide free shipping, ‘Prime’ next-day free shipping, and hassle-free returns have set the benchmark to beat.

Moreover, an astonishing 60% of consumers surveyed go first to Amazon to establish a target price for the item as part of their shopping process.

What this Means for Ecommerce Merchants

Site-wide free shipping is difficult for many merchants to offer, yet this should be a strategic goal for any brand. This is not from a point of view of competing with Amazon, but price-sensitive consumers are demanding great value, free shipping and easy (preferably free) returns.

If you can’t offer site-wide free shipping, then offer free shipping on select products. You may have some products that are shipped differently, and therefore, you can offer category-based free shipping. It’s also worth doing some analysis to understand which product categories are most frequently abandoned and targeting free shipping for those.

Equally, there are some individual products that are much more likely to be abandoned. Build a spreadsheet ranking your frequently-carted items by an abandon-to-purchase ratio calculation, and you’ll see immediately where there are issues. Some products are abandoned because of their physical size and prompt delivery/damage concerns. With each of these high abandonment products, check the product detail page, and see if there are enhancements that need to be made, either to the photography or to the product description.

Minimum-Order Free Shipping

Another alternative to site-wide free shipping is minimum-order free shipping. This gives those customers that won’t buy without a promotional offer a reason to buy and to add more items to their cart in order to qualify. It often results in an increase in the average order value.

If you haven’t already done so, you should calculate your free shipping breakeven point. You can do this simply on a site-wide basis, or if you sell some categories at very different margins, then at a category level. This will help you determine where to set the minimum order threshold and will give you a basis for a sensible discussion with the chief financial officer.

Most ecommerce sites are offering some element of free shipping this holiday season. What this new research shows is that consumers want it all: great value, free shipping and free returns year round, not just during the holiday season.

Charles Nicholls is hosting an upcoming Conversion Academy webcast,”5 Shipping Promotions Guaranteed to Increase Conversions,” on December 6, 2011 at 9am PT/12pm ET. Register at http://ow.ly/7w4SZ.

For many website visitors, the Online checkout user experience is far from intuitive. I just came across this great viral video from the Google Analytics marketing team on the online buying process. Taking the simple idea of what it would be like to have to go through an online shopping process in a physical store, there are many painful home truths exposed here in an amusing way.

The video follows a man trying to buy a loaf of bread in a British supermarket, but being forced to go through an online checkout process. What fun – it  should resonate well with all ecommerce teams and user experience experts alike. It’ll also make you chuckle and cringe as well. What’s amazing is that it takes him so long before he abandons his shopping cart.
Enjoy!

John Donahoe, president and CEO of eBay, describes X.commerce as ‘the world’s first open commerce ecosystem. It’s a full stack of tools for developers and merchants to make the new commerce a reality.’

The new commerce that Donahoe is referring to is a world where online, mobile, local and offline are merging at blistering pace. ‘We will see more change in the next 3 years in the way consumers shop and pay than we’ve seen in the previous 15 years. Offline retail hasn’t changed that much in the last 15 years. Ecommerce has been fairly distinct from the offline experience. Smartphones are blurring the lines between offline and online faster than anyone could have imagined.’

Donahoe refers to the new world as ‘not ecommerce – just commerce’ referring to the increasing proportion of sales that are web-influenced or online – currently more than 50% of all sales.

While you may still think of eBay as an auction site, their intent to become a leader in ecommerce platforms has been clear for a while. Through a sequence of acquisitions, eBay has assembled a powerful collection of ecommerce tools. Yes, eBay is a software company now, as well as a payments company, and a marketplace.

What Exactly is X.commerce?

X.commerce is an integrated ecommerce platform which combines eBay, PayPal, Magento, Milo, Where, RedLaser and soon GSI into a single set of Application Programming Interfaces (API’s). It’s not one ecommerce platform, but a pre-packaged integration layer that means that all of the components are pre- integrated. So often software acquisitions are not followed through with the required integration to deliver against the promise. Not so here, and hats off to eBay for pulling this off.

What’s really cool about X.commerce is that eBay has integrated these into an environment, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. For example, having Milo as part of the same environment enables developers to easily build a ‘local’ aspect to their sites, which combines stock availability based on proximity to the visitor.

The combined developer communities of eBay, PayPal and Magento exceed 850,000 developers, and there is already a blossoming Magento app store, though some developers were quick to point out that getting found in the app store is a challenge. Despite this, it is clear that there will be a thriving community of third party applications and tools already integrated with the X.commerce environment.

What it Means for Ecommerce Merchants

In practical terms, X.commerce offers significant benefits to software companies developing commerce tools, as well as to the merchants.  Here we’re going to focus only on the benefits for merchants. I’ve broken these down into three groups:

Easy Listing on eBay (and Other Market Places?)

Both Magento and GSI have been leading ecommerce platforms before X.commerce. What this changes, however, is that it makes these platforms significantly more attractive to merchants. Pre-packaged integration with eBay means that if you build your ecommerce store on either of these platforms, then you can list on the eBay marketplace in a matter of a few mouse clicks. Select the categories or individual products, and deploy. You’re now selling on eBay.

The X.commerce team is actively looking for other marketplaces to integrate with X.commerce. However, it remains to be seen whether this will happen in practice. Don’t expect Amazon to be integrated anytime soon.

The eBay team is also at pains to pledge that they will never compete with its merchants, a clear dig at Amazon, indicating that their vision is to provide enabling technologies rather than becoming a merchant.

Third Party, Pre-integrated Solution Marketplace

X.commerce already has a vibrant library of third party solutions (including SeeWhy’s integration with Magento) by virtue of the Magento App store. Given the open nature of what eBay has done, we expect that many more developers will rush to write applications for X.commerce. eBay’s philosophy at the launch event was to nurture its community of developers and encourage them to become entrepreneurs.

This is important for merchants, simply because integrating third party tools into an ecommerce site wastes resources. You don’t get anything per se from the integration effort, and if you change providers, you end up with a second integration cost. Pre-packaged integration is a big deal. It enables merchants to focus resources on projects than can deliver direct ROI and gives great flexibility in switching vendors (though not the platform itself).

Integrated Payments

Later this year, PayPal revenues will probably exceed eBay marketplace revenues for the first time. A significant element in the X.commerce strategy is to make PayPal ubiquitous within the Magento and GSI platform communities. Needless to say, PayPal, in all its flavors is an integral part of the X.commerce environment, making it an easy option (a couple of mouse clicks) for any merchant to deploy in the X.commerce environment.

While X.commerce is strategically important for eBay, it brings significant benefits to both merchants and developers. A vibrant ecommerce ecosystem designed for the new ‘commerce’ that Donahoe refers to, coupled with a refreshing openness, is a clear winning proposition. Support for X.commerce is already strong: Adobe, Omniture, Facebook and others demonstrated slick X.commerce applications as part of the launch. It looks like eBay has a winner on their hands.

If you are technically minded, you can download X.commerce now from x.com. To find out more about SeeWhy Inc.’s Magento integration email info@seewhy.com.

I blogged last week on his keynote to the conference. In the video interview below, I ask Tom specifically how we can apply his thinking to ecommerce and web analytics.

Some key takeouts from this interview:

• If you’re an analyst, it may be easier to move to a different employer than struggle to make analytics relevant to your organization
• Companies that compete on analytics often look to hire-in analytically oriented talent when building teams
• More data in ecommerce means that there’s enormous scope to get competitive advantage from your data
• Many ecommerce companies are still struggling to make web analytics actionable
• The average number of web analysts per company is 0.25 full time equivalents

In the interview I referenced some SeeWhy Research titled “The Lessons Learned From The Top 10 Converting Websites.” You can download a copy of this research here

Do you agree with Tom? Let us know your thoughts below. Please also let me know whether video blogs of this sort are useful. Thanks in advance!

The code to embed this video on your site can be found here. Click on the ‘Share’ tab to  copy the embed code, and the ‘Details’ tab to download a copy.

When Tom Davenport keynoted the Conversion Conference in San Francisco this week, he set out to inspire ecommerce teams to focus on the business, not on the analytics themselves. Quoting Carl Kemp, the chief mathematician at Intel, ‘It’s not about the math… it’s about relationships with the business,’ Tom encouraged web analysts and eMarketers to embrace bigger business challenges and look beyond their current horizons. Rather than focusing on the numbers, he advocated building relationships with business management by offering solutions to business challenges.

For his groupies, Davenport has neared deity status. As President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, he teaches MBAs and executives about decision-making and analytics. But he’s best known for legitimizing and making analytics relevant to business with his breakthrough HBR article and subsequent book, Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning.

In short, he made analytics sexy to business leaders for the first time.

Davenport showed, in Competing on Analytics, how companies including Netflix, Google, Amazon, Harrah’s, and Capital One have focused their organizations on analytics as a critical competence. By making analytics an integral part of the way these companies run, they make better decisions, optimize processes and achieve strategic advantage that enabled them to become leaders in their markets. These companies test, measure and refine on a continuous basis.

But for the majority of companies, analytics are not central to the business, and Davenport found a receptive audience eager to learn new ways of engaging senior management. His recipe was simple: focus on helping the business to achieve ambitious outcomes which would not be possible without analytics.

In listening to his keynote, I was reminded of the Australian mine that told the AkzoNobel chemical company that their explosives were no longer required—the mine had found a cheaper supplier. The AkzoNobel salesman was not deterred, and investigating further, he learned that the big problem for the mine was not the price of the explosives, but rather that all explosives produce unpredictable results. What the mine really needed was explosives that produced rocks of a uniform size.

The salesman worked with his analysts to produce a computer model that calculated precisely how much explosive to use and where to place it in order to produce uniformed sized rocks. Rather than simply present the data, AkzoNobel proposed a new service to deliver the ‘right sized rocks.’ The mine was so impressed that AkzoNobel went on to not only supply explosives to the mine again but also to place and detonate them for the mine in order to deliver rocks of the right size.

This is ‘outcome thinking,’ focusing on the business outcome to solve the business problem. It would have been easy to focus on analytic numbers, reports or the presentation of data in an attempt to win the deal back. But solving a bigger problem is infinitely more powerful and places analytics at the heart of business strategy.

While at the Conversion Conference I was able to interview Davenport and ask him specifically how we can apply his thinking to ecommerce and web analytics. In my next blog, you can see this interview in the form of a video. Make sure you don’t miss it by signing up today using either RSS or by sign up using Feedburner to get this blog delivered to you by email.

In this video blog, SeeWhy Founder Charles Nicholls reviews the CPO Milwaukee power tools ecommerce website, from a remarketing standpoint.

There’s no substitute for testing when it comes to optimizing shopping carts. But once you’ve have tested and tuned, and your conversion rate has improved, what do you do when your shopping cart abandonment is still frustratingly high?

If this is where you’ve got to then it’s time you looked beyond the shopping cart conversion rate, and looked at remarketing. Remarketing takes those visitors that leave the site without buying, and markets to them again using either advertising, email or social media. These are your best prospects – visitors that almost purchased – so it’s no surprise that a sequence of nudges brings customers back in to buy.

The most cost effective way to recover abandoned shopping carts is by using email remarketing. The cost of recovering an abandoned shopping cart by email is 100 times less than by advertising. Of course retargeted advertising has an important role higher up the funnel, where you haven’t captured an email address, and would like to bring them back to the site.

One of the subjects that comes up early in a discussion about email remarketing is how and where to capture email addresses. So in this walkthrough, we suggest simple shopping cart design and email capture tips to maximize both onsite conversions and your recovery rates.

This walk through essentially covers three core subjects:

• Conversion enhancements to the site
• Email address capture; opportunities to capture more email addresses without impacting conversion rates
• What type of remarketing email creative can be built for the site using this kind of information.

Hopefully you’ll find the tips and approach useful. Let me know what you think using the comments below.

Online retailers roll out holiday promotions this week to combat high shopping cart abandonment rates.

Two thirds of online retailers are rolling out holiday promotions this week or have already done so. 61% of holiday promotions this year will be focused around free shipping, and 29% on promotional discounts. Multi-buy and free product offers will account for only 10%.

These are the main findings from a SeeWhy online poll, conducted on October 26th, among 255 ecommerce marketers on their promotional activity in the run up to the holiday season.

When do you plan to roll out your holiday special offers?

At SeeWhy, we continually track abandonment and conversion trends. In 2009, we saw a strong trend of customers stalling purchases in anticipation of holiday offers. From Labor Day through November 15, the number of online sales fell by almost 56 percent compared with the volume for the previous month, and the shopping cart abandonment rate shot up, peaking at 83 percent.

Once holiday promotional offers were rolled out, the transaction volumes rose sharply, and the abandonment rate fell dramatically. This year so far, we’ve seen shopping cart abandonment since Labor Day averaging 79%, which is higher than the same period last year (71%), though it appears to be trending back to more seasonal norms.

With the majority of online retailers rolling out holiday offers this week, we can expect the shopping cart abandonment rate to fall sharply, as it did last year, as customers begin to take advantage of free shipping offers, which have for long been a customer favorite.

The top reasons people abandon shopping carts according to a Forrester Research study can be grouped into two main reasons; price (including the cost of shipping) and the fact that they were not ready to buy. Ecommerce marketers are trying to address the first main issue in a number of ways. Two thirds plan to minimize abandonment due to shipping costs by either offering free shipping to customers who satisfy a minimum order purchase (which is the most popular tactic with 43% of respondents) and a further 18% have calculated that they can offer free shipping on all orders.  Tying in with these findings, Shop.org’s eHoliday Study conducted by BIGresearch, found that 36.7% of retailers had an increased budget, compared to last year, for free shipping.

The second most popular strategy (with 29% of respondents selecting this) is to offer percentage discount offers. Two other tactics, which were less popular, are to offer free product (6%) and multi-buy discounts (4%).

What will be your primary holiday promotion tactic?

A notable difference this year compared to last is that many retailers have offered more discounts throughout the year rather than purely during the conventional sales periods so it will be interesting to see how this impacts on the peaks and troughs of seasonal buying. We at tracking this with interest at SeeWhy and will keep you informed of the trends as they happen.