I presented this at Internet Retailer in 2014. An overview of how and why user generated content for SEO is awesome and shows you what H2O Plus is doing regarding reviews and UGC as a whole.

Amazon is raising their Prime price to $99/year. What else could you buy with that? I decided to find out.

1) Total Source Night Cream ($95). Ok. I am biased, but this stuff is amazing and every customer who tries it can’t stop raving about it. (Yes, men too)

2) 1/6th of a Bitcoin (at the current rate this post was written)

3) 12 Chipotle Burittos

4) 2.5 Months of Gogo inflight Wifi

5) 10,000 pennies (you can come up with creative ways to pay people with them)

6) 5 months of online access to the New York Times

For those that don’t know I am getting married in June. Which means I am in need of a tuxedo to wear during my wedding day. One of the brands I looked at is Hugo Boss.

I found a tuxedo online that I wanted. It was at a reduced price, however, they didn’t have the size I needed. I quickly went to one of the stores available in the local Chicago area and informed the store employee of my request. Namely, I wanted this Tuxedo at the price listed online. To my surprise they wouldn’t honor the price that was shown online. “Oh we are sorry, but that price is only available online.”

Wait. What? Plus, it gets worse. They used a common sales tactic of bait and switch. “We don’t have that tuxedo, but we do have this tuxedo…” (which was 33% higher than the one I wanted.

At this point I was extremely disappointed at the lack of a omni-channel strategy from a large brand like Hugo Boss. How is...

I presented this at eTail West 2014 and gives a variety of tips in different areas of your site. While all 9 eCommerce tips are important the credit card type at checkout is the most pivotal with increasing conversions.

In eCommerce the main goal of the site is for your customer to checkout and purchase a product. However, there are other goals like getting the customer to come back and make more purchases and acquiring customer data. Ideally, we want their credit card number.

Most eCommerce platforms have some sort of saved credit card functionality. Amazon was one of the first to offer this and the Apple store does a nice job of this too.

Enter a new entrant Two Tap. According to Tech Crunch “Two Tap is essentially a mediator between the user and the company’s online ordering system. It doesn’t manage any money itself (though it stores credit card data on its PCI-compliant servers). Instead, it presents the user to the merchant and handles the checkout process for them. This way, you just sign in to your Two Tap account and you are done with the checkout in – you guessed it – two taps”

Why would...

Have you looked at your page not found page lately? Probably not as you have a lot of other projects that are gumming up the works. LinkedIN apparently hasn’t either as I was looking for my public profile on the stumbled across this lovely page…

The links towards the right are all dead which isn’t a good experience. A great lesson for all of us to remember to update other parts of our site that aren’t important to mission critical components but the end user might see.

The user is the most important thing.

Fetchback was a display re-targeting company that was acquired by GSI Commerce in 2010. Then in 2011 eBay purchased GSI. I’ve known about re-targeting technology since its inception and it has been highly effective at “closing the sale” whether that be an actual sale or lead. If you’re reading you most likely are using the digital marketing channel and if you’re not I highly recommend investigating.

Way back in 2005 there were very few companies that offered this sort of technology. At that time Criteo had just started to get into the game and the re-targeting space was heating up including other companies like Dotomi and today we have newer companies like adRoll, Google, BuySight, Steelhouse, Perfect Audience and TellApart.

Fetchback was a smaller company at the time, located in Arizona. I preferred the smaller shop approach because the customer service was so much better than the...

In the hot beauty/clothing industry there has been a trend to offer “mystery deals”. The play works similar to a lotto ticket you scratch, click or open to see the percentage of savings you’ll receive. Once such example is a recent promotion by Philosophy, the pitch is you could receive 10, 15 or 25 percent off.

Looking at the click data though tells an entirely different story. The link after Philosophy’s ESP digests the click data sends us to this landing page:

http://www.philosophy.com/november-mystery-cheer/november-mystery-cheer,en_US,pg.html?cm_mmc=pmd-_-nov13-_-mystery-sale-cheer25-rs2-_-L05

You can ignore their campaign tracking data: ?cm_mmc=pmd--nov13--mystery-sale-cheer25-rs2-_-L05

Lets just look at this page

http://www.philosophy.com/november-mystery-cheer/november-mystery-cheer,en_US,pg.html

Who wants to make a bet that everyone in the campaign receive their max...

Last year, I spent roughly $7,500 with Nordstrom on a mixture of goods for work and play. I signed up for their loyalty program called Nordstrom Fashion Rewards. Because I spent so much I qualified for their Tier III package when entitled me to the following benefits. The benefits weren’t much of a benefit however and I never ended up using them. Giving me access to their sales or allowing me to book a trip to meet a designer of fashion jeans just wasn’t my thing.

Their note program rewards a $20 certificate for every 2,000 in point collection. But what does that really mean? Of the $7,500 I spent with Nordstrom I received about $500 in cold hard cash I could use on purchases. That equates to a 7% “cash back” program. Annoyingly the certificates would expire, so if you didn’t use them you would lose them.

Of course the argument is on special days you can get triple and double points...