I’ve just returned from the Shop.org Annual Summit in

Many continue to ask whether eCommerce growth has peaked. With countless consecutive quarters of double-digit growth, one has to ask these kinds of questions. Well, the data suggests it has not peaked. According to Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru, ecommerce will continue to grow at a rate of 25% annually for the next many years. The reason? Online retailers not tackling the basics.

As the holiday season approaches, and since it’s football season (thankfully), it’s only appropriate that we talk a bit about blocking and tackling fundamentals. Forrester and other pay mention to the following:

1) Completing the Transaction

Amazingly, some leading eCommerce websites are seeing transaction failures as high as 12-14%. For comparison purposes, the airline industry which is hardly the gold-standard in service sees has delayed/cancelled flight rates of about 6%. There are $ millions left on the virtual table as consumers are driven to alternative channels to make their purchase.

2) User Experience

Snazzy front ends that are engaging and interesting may draw some attention, but don’t forget the basics of making it easy to browse, search, add to cart, and purchase. ‘Pretty’ is good, but usable is better.

… and finally…

3) Product Recommendations

The only technology that Forrester recommended were recommendation engines.  Recommendation engines help retailers dynamically up-sell / cross-sell / merchandize their products.   With thousands of products and millions of visitors to an online retailer’s website and automated solution to this is a necessity, but measure the impact so you can truly understand the hard-dollar impact it’s making.

So make sure to do your homework and invest in the basics of selling, merchandizing, and completing transactions.Also, I wanted to give some credit to Jason Billingsly over at Elastic Path. He presented an eye-opening and incredibly engaging session on leveraging social media for eCommerce. If you have a chance, check out his session at Online Market World in

Jack spoke during the conference on the Community Guided Web and illustrated the following points about The Invisible Crowd:

• Website visitors are lonely explorers, even though you might have thousands on a given website at any time
• The invisible crowd knows nothing of past successes or failiures on the site; hence, the community never learns.
• Most sites are developed without regard to your invisible crowd, and instead, reflect a web developers best-estimate of what is important to the crowd.

Thanks to everyone who came by to see a demo on how Baynote taps into this Invisible Crowd to improve website effectiveness. We spoke with as many folks as we could while at the show but we were getting double- and triple-teamed at frequently and may have missed a few of you. We’re flattered but apologize for not being able to spend time with everyone.

- Mike