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Amazon.com: “video delivers a richer shopping experience”

Why is video important? Amazon.com VP Colin Bodell shares his opinion:
When you can actually see the item in action all the writing in the world can’t compare. We want to deliver a richer shopping experience and give the shopper as much information as possible so it will lead to a more satisfying shopping experience.
Colin [...]

Luxury brands are luring male shoppers with new stores and product lines

Here’s an interesting tidbit: luxury brands are targeting men (reports the Wall Street Journal).  Men’s apparel sales are growing 37% faster than women’s, and retailers are eager to push that growth even higher.
The labels say it makes business sense to target men now. In the 12 months ended Oct. 31, U.S. sales of men’s apparel [...]

“video here, there and everywhere”

In an article about YouTube’s continuing growth, the New York times reports:
Interestingly, the top 10 video sites accounted for less than half of all videos viewed online. That means people are watching video here, there and everywhere on the Web. And they’re doing so more every day.
During November, 138 million people, or about three-quarters of [...]

The Internet is a giant game of Jenga

2007 was a bad year for “100% uptime”, and it looks like 2008 is off to a rocky start. Anyone offering web services knows Rackspace for their “fanatical support” and “100% uptime” promises. They’re well known for being the cream of the crop in managed server vendors (thanks partially to their ubiquitous [...]

MasterCard: “Online Sales surged 32% in December”

MasterCard SpendingPulse reports that online sales surged 32% in December. (Reported by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan in the Wall Street Journal today).
While these numbers aren’t directly comparable to the more widely-reported Comscore stats about holiday season shopping, they reflect greater strength than other reports we’ve seen. Two facts stand out:

MasterCard’s numbers include gift card [...]

Coming soon: Best Practices whitepaper on Video for Online Retail

The team here at SilverDock is working up a really neat whitepaper. In 2006 and 2007, we learned a lot about what works (and what doesn’t work) in video for Internet retailers. Our new whitepaper will reveal some of the most important “Best Practices” to consider.
More info coming very soon…

Online holiday sales up 19%

ComScore reports that online holiday sales were 19% higher in 2007 than the prior year. (The season started off slow but accelerated to a 21% growth pace in the month before Christmas).
Other interesting tidbits: CyberMonday was not the biggest shopping day of the season. That was December 10th. Internet Retailer reports:
The heaviest [...]

User behavior — don’t trust your gut, trust the data

Here’s a surprise… online user behavior is hard to predict!
Google recently started adding big, bright “Google Checkout” buttons to selected AdWords text ads. SEO and SEM experts expected this to make more users notice these ads. Apparently they were wrong. Internet Retailer reports that adding a bright “Google Checkout” button to AdWords [...]