I've already shared some of the benefits of incorporating discussion forums into your ecommerce site. Now let's delve deeper into the concept of user-generated product review content.

Intuitively it makes sense that your customers would convert better if they could read credible product ratings and reviews from your other customers before buying. Indeed, studies back this up (stats excerpted from bazaarvoice.com):

RoperASW reports the value of word of mouth as the best source of information on products has exploded from 67% in 1977 to 93% in 2001.

BizRate found that 59% of their users considered customer reviews to be more valuable than expert reviews.

Marketing Experiments Journal tested product conversion with and without product ratings by customers. Conversion nearly doubled, going from .44% to 1.04% after the same product displayed its five-star rating.

The Shop.org State of Retailing Online study, conducted by Forrester Research, found only 26% of the 137 top retailers surveyed offered customer ratings and reviews, but 96% of them ranked customer ratings and reviews as an effective or very effective tactic at driving conversion.

So now the question becomes, what's the best way to implement customer reviews? There are hosted third-party services like BazaarVoice and PowerReviews that offer a managed solution and host the content and technology for you. Or you can host and manage the ratings and review technology and content in-house. Both approaches have their merits. Certainly if you have limited IT resources, a hosted solution would appeal.

But you should be aware of the SEO impact of a hosted reviews solution. The review content gets inserted into your web pages using JavaScript, and as such, that content is invisible to the spiders. So if you expecting that content to augment your existing product page content with additional keyword-rich user-generated content, you're going to be disappointed. You'd have to do some pretty clever workarounds, like scraping the product content and inserting the review text into your HTML, if you want to realize fully the SEO benefit of this product review content.

Publicly viewable customer feedback can take other forms besides the standard ratings and reviews. For instance, you could offer a wiki, like some other retail sites have done. Just imagine having buyer's guides written and maintained by your visitors, like ShopWiki has. If you can pull it off, I think that would be pretty cool.

Another non-standard approach to incorporating user-generated content is to get customers to tag your products. I've already made a case for tagging as a SEO tactic for blogs. And I've discussed auto-tagging.

But what about social tagging (user tagging), where you get your visitors to do the work for you? Frankly, I'm dubious. My preference here is to accept tags only from employees and/or a small trusted group of customers. A thousand monkeys randomly pecking away at a thousand typewriters for a thousand years may eventually output Shakespeare. But in the meantime, it'd be a whole lot of useless noise. If you've got the time to weed out the useless noise from the tags contributed by your visitors, then social tagging could be a valuable addition to your ecommerce site.

Amazon.com rolled out social tagging. How's it working for them? Well, according to one contact I have at Amazon.com, the benefits of these user-contributed tags to create a "folksonomy" (i.e. alternative categorization and navigation) has been limited. That's because the tags added to products are often self-serving and relevant only to the person applying the tag (e.g. "birthday gift for betty").

Finally, I want to circle back to the topic of discussion forums. If you have forums on your site, consider more tightly integrating them with your product catalog. For example, link directly from your product page to the relevant section/page of your forums. And highlight the most relevant posts to help influence the buying decision. One of my favorite ecommerce sites, Woot.com, does both of these things to good effect.

An effective way to recapture the potential customer who has abandoned their shopping cart is to send them a reminder email. Don't do it right away. JupiterResearch recommends waiting at least 24 hours. I'd wait a few days. In the email show a photo of each item along with the product name, price, etc. just like you (hopefully) do on your View Cart page. Sweeten the deal, particularly if the person appears to be new-to-file, by offering a discount or incentive to complete their purchase. If you're too predictable about it, customers may figure out what you're doing and purposefully abandon their cart in anticipation of a discount. The last thing you want is this listed as a discount on coupon codes sites like dealnews.com. You may wish to send several more reminder emails spaced out over time after the initial one, continuing to up the ante with more irresistable offers with each successive email until you finally give up on them. PETCO's reminder emails, sent 3 days after the cart is abandoned, included the abandoned product as the main feature along with cross-sells to three other high-margin items; these program-centric emails achieved a 852% increase in clickthrough rate and 171% increase in conversion rate over the company's previous campaign-centric emails (as reported by MediaPost).

Of course it's hard to send a reminder email if you don't have the shopper's email address. If the shopper is not a previous customer or is unidentified, have them identify himself/herself as early on in the ordering process as possible. In other words, have them provide their contact details / create an account / login (as an existing account holder) as one of the first steps of the checkout. Note that user accounts are an important feature for ease of repeat ordering and checking on order status. Through the use of cookies you should be able to also identify many of your returning shoppers without them logging in first.

This kinda goes without saying... If you're going to provide a means for a shopper to be reminded of their cart contents, you'll need to allow shoppers to add items to their "shopping cart" then leave that cart for extended periods of time and still have it remain intact. I'd keep their cart alive for 90 days or more. Sometimes shoppers will purposefully want to save their cart and return later to it. Consider having a "save my cart for later" option and/or "move items to wishlist" type feature to better cater to these people's needs.

Received any shopping cart reminder emails recently? If so, were they any good? Is there a merchant you'd like to highlight who does this "recapturing" exceptionally well? Post a comment and let me know.

In a way, a good ecommerce website is a work of art. Form and function working together. An intersection of intuitive navigation, usable information architecture, an appealing look-and-feel, and attention to detail. An experienced web design company is more likely to have the skills necessary to deliver on that promise. When sites are developed by companies with little experience creating e-commerce sites, it usually shows.

What makes for good ecommerce site design? That's hard to answer, because it's so subjective. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You could survey "the man on the street" and see what he says about your site. We've all seen plenty of sites where the design looks shoddy, amateurish, cluttered, hokey, or otherwise lacking. Here's a random example that I just happened across while searching Google; the site definitely needs some attention.

Sometimes it could be that the design just needs some finessing rather than a total gutting. It's amazing what a bit of detailing work can do. Consider this before and after that I discussed in a recent Practical Ecommerce article. It still looks like the same company, but it's an attractive facelift (IMHO) with SEO and conversion optimization built-in.

Breadcrumb navigation is wonderful for usability and for search engine optimization (SEO). Breadcrumb navigation, if you're not familiar with the term, is text-based navigation that shows where in the site hierarchy the currently viewed web page is located. Not only does it give a sense of your location within the site, it provides shortcuts to instantly jump higher up the site hierarchy. A product page for a table lamp may have the breadcrumb navigation of "Home > Home Furnishings > Lighting > Table Lamps". Below is a screenshot of an actual breadcrumb taken from a page within the website of one of our clients, TriTech:

Notice that the breadcrumb above contains text links with relevant keywords in the anchor text. This provides a significant SEO benefit. Let's take the "Phone Systems" link in the above breadcrumb as an example. The search engines treat that single link as a "vote" for the Phone Systems category page. But more than that, the anchor text ("Phone Systems") provides the search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN Search) with an important contextual clue as to the topic of the linked page. That equates to improved rankings.

Contrast that with the use of throwaway phrases like "click here" or "more info" in the anchor text. Such words provide no clues as to the topic of the linked page, for either the search engines or your users. When you use the phrase "click here," you are telling the engines that the page to which you are linking is all about "click here".

One throwaway phrase that's used almost universally within breadcrumbs is "Home". Try revising that link to something more keyword-rich. Take the "Home" link in TriTech's breadcrumb above as an example. A more search optimal version of the anchor text would include words like "Computing" or "IT" or "Technology" along with perhaps "Store" or "Products".

Now consider the amplifying effect of breadcrumb navigation. A link in the breadcrumb will be "voted for" (through internal links) more times if that linked page is higher up in the site hierarchy and if there are more pages underneath that page in the hierarchy. So, through breadcrumbs, a super-category page will receive more internal links than a sub-category page, and a category page for a category covering hundreds of products will receive more internal links than one with only a dozen products in the category.

Make a breadcrumb for the checkout too, to give shoppers a bird's eye view of the order process and an indication of how much farther they still have to go. Ideally allow them to use the breadcrumb nav to jump around in the order process too, like to change billing or shipping information that they had already supplied in a previous step. Here's Air New Zealand's breadcrumb from their booking engine (shrunk a bit to fit):

Some sites take the visitor's clickpath into account when building the breadcrumb, rather than relying totally on the absolute site hierarchy. For example, RitzCamera.com will display a different breadcrumb on a CompactFlash memory card product page if you navigated to it from the top-level category of "Memory" versus the top-level category of "Digital Cameras & Accessories".

This can have implications on the site's search engine friendliness. How? Well, the user's breadcrumb trail needs to be passed in some way, and it's often put in the URL rather than a cookie. If in the URL, that will create multiple copies of near-duplicate pages for the search engines (where the only difference between the pages is a variation in the breadcrumb). The end result is PageRank dilution.

There are several potential workarounds (besides the obvious one of disregarding the user's clickpath altogether). One is to drop this breadcrumb trail from the URLs of internal links selectively for search engine spiders, through user-agent detection. An alternative workaround is to append the parameter containing the breadcrumb trail to the end of the URL using JavaScript. An example of this technique is REI's Shop by Brand pages, which append a vcat parameter upon clicking on any of the brand links. Either approach will minimize duplication and aggregate PageRank. Neither approach will eliminate the potential for websites deep-linking to you with the breadcrumb trail parameter included (via copy-and-paste of the URL displayed in their browser's Location bar).

This all might seem to hard. In fact, implementing breadcrumb navigation AT ALL may be too hard. If that's the case for you, there's still a potential path forward, where you can still reap some SEO benefit. I call the approach a "poor man's breadcrumb". Basically, you just link to the category that you are in, and that's it. This approach worked well for our client Guild.com. They didn't have time to code in the necessary functionality for breadcrumb navigation, so this served us in a pinch. You'll notice on all pages showing multiple products on a page (example: page 10 of 31 of glass vases) that they all link to their category page, like so:

For this example, that equates to 31 pages voting for the Glass Vases category page with keyword-rich anchor text.

So now you have learned probably more than you ever wanted to learn about breadcrumb navigation! To summarize all of the above: incorporate breadcrumbs into your online catalog and your checkout, try to make the anchor text keyword-rich, and don't incorporate a spider's clickpath into your breadcrumb if you can at all help it.

Shopping cart abandonment is of primary concern to online retailers, and for good reason. If real-world stores were like their virtual equivalents, there'd be so many shopping carts littering the aisles the shoppers would have to literally climb over them!

The best kind of ecommerce site is one where the shopping experience is smooth and easy - slippery in fact. Whether you whip out your credit card or not is a foregone conclusion - you are swept away in the moment. The epitomy of this is Amazon's "1-click ordering". If I stumble upon a product I like on Amazon, I can own it within a single click of the mouse.

Here are some tips to make the shopping experience a slippery one, which will hopefully equate to less abandoned shopping carts in your virtual checkout aisle:

1. Eliminate steps in the checkout process where it makes sense. Just remember that fewer is not always better; it depends on whether the checkout pages remain uncluttered and uncomplicated after consolidating steps.
2. Let shoppers know where they are in the process with a progress indicator on each checkout page.
3. Let shoppers see what they have selected already with thumbnail images inside the shopping cart.
4. Allow shoppers to edit their selections easily. Revising color and size options of items in their cart should be painless.
5. Show them you are real. Assure shoppers by providing your full contact details including physical address. I as a shopper don't trust sites that are completely "virtual" -- i.e. no physical address, no company info, no photos of staff -- and I'm sure I'm not alone in that sentiment.
6. Recommend other items based on what is already in the shopping cart (i.e. cross sell and upsell).
7. If you are competing on price, offer a price guarantee.
8. If, after all that, the customer abandons the shopping cart, find out why. Offer them an incentive to complete an exit survey. It will reveal a lot about the shopping experience you are providing your customers.

Discussion forums encourage customer participation, getting customers and prospects to stay longer which means more interaction with your brand. They drive repeat visits too. Some customers become "regulars" on your forums -- which should, hopefully, lead to you being top-of-mind more often when they are in the market for products that you sell. In other words, discussion forums make your site sticky. Not a bad thing!

Woot.com is a great example of an ecommerce site that encourages participation with forums. They consistently get dozens of comments per day; frequently it's even hundreds. For example, this blog post from a week ago generated 1200 comments in their forums! Their weekly contest is brilliant: they get customers to Photoshop images to a particular theme (which changes week by week) and then post their creations to the forums. Viewing the submissions is a lot of fun.

Online forums also generate wonderful search engine fodder. If the forum is architected correctly, each forum posting will become a separate page that ends up in Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc. And each of those pages will have been engineered to rank well (the HTML, the URLs, the anchor text of the back links, etc.).

We set up a forum for Van Dykes Furniture Restorers for their core customers (furniture restorers) to collaborate, share tips, ask and answer questions, etc. This user-contributed content is written in the language of the customers. For example, if a post is written about "gluing wood to metal" and that's the language that furniture restorers are using, rather than the product-focused industry lingo that the supplier is using, then that's new search engine visibility that hasn't been captured before by the online catalog. Multiply that effect out by the hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of forum posts and you've got the beginnings of a Long Tail search optimization strategy.

RSS feeds are your tether -- your lifeline -- to your prospects after they've left your site. Unless they've ordered from you, how else can you reach out to that nameless, faceless hoard? It used to be that your email newsletter served that purpose, but consumers are bombarded with so much email now that they are reticent to subscribe to many more newsletters. RSS to the rescue!

A-List blogger Robert Scoble from Microsoft has said: "You should be fired if you do a marketing site without an RSS feed." I love that quote!

Don't just offer one single RSS feed. One size does not fit all. I may only be interested in one particular product category and not your entire online catalog. (Here's just a sampling of Amazon's category-specific feeds.) I may be interested in your new product arrivals. Or just your best sellers. Or just your clearance items. Customers may want more than a feed of products; they may also want product reviews, coupons and specials, tips and articles.

Ideally you should allow your shoppers to create custom RSS feeds that are tailored to their interests. For example, an RSS feed comprised of reviews, coupons, and tips, but not tech specs or press releases, and for only 2 of your 10 product categories. See the screenshot below for a nice example of a custom feed subscription form.

RSS feeds offer more than just to a direct-to-consumer channel that bypasses spam filters. It also tends to boost your link gain (PageRank). Bloggers subscribe to RSS feeds, and bloggers link to items of interest found in those RSS feeds. Heck, if you're really lucky you may get entire feeds syndicated (that's the second S in RSS) onto other sites!

Those of us in New Zealand will probably remember the Amazon.com wanna-be that flamed out, FlyingPig.co.nz. The marketing fanfare that announced FlyingPig’s launch was undermined by the fact that the site was down within minutes of going live. Yes of course they should have done the usual load testing, and implemented server load balancing to be better prepared. But in addition, they really needed 24-hour server support to effectively manage their traffic surges. Do you have server support staff on-hand 24x7x365? If not, you should.

Downtime can't be completely avoided, and of course it's better if the downtime occurs in the wee hours of the night when fewer visitors will be affected. But for the customers who are experiencing the outage, it sucks and no amount of marketing B.S. or waffle will ease their pain. Customers don't care whether it's a planned or unplanned outage, so don't bother telling them. They don't care that your site is hugely successful and the virtual isles are brimming over with buyers, so don't tell them that either (see screenshot, above left). Just try to give them a estimated time when the site will be back and offer at least some limited amount of functionality until then (like catalog browsing but not order-taking) or point them to a website that is working (like one of your distributors) so they can get on with their business if their need is urgent.

And what about your online customer service team? Do they punch out by dinnertime? Are they all racing for the door at 5pm like Fred Flintstone when the whistle blows? As a customer, it's a bit of a roller coaster ride if you're having problems: first, the frustration that something about the shopping experience isn't working. Then comes the elation of finding that the etailer offers instant online chat. And then the huge letdown when it turns out that nobody's home -- like at 7:30am at Backcountry.com (see screenshot, right). Shoppers like having real-time support even when they're in their pajamas; if you want their business you might want to offer it to them. ;-) If you've got money to invest in your online customer service, have a look at some of the customer chat solutions like LivePerson or PHP Live Support, and allocate a chunk of that budget on manning the online support 24-hours.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) offers many more benefits beyond that of streamlined web pages with table-less layouts and precise positioning (no more transparent 1-pixel spacer GIFs!), mentioned in my previous post. Indeed, that's just scratching the surface of CSS.

Here are some more clever things you can do with CSS to get your website really humming:

• Reorder your content to sit above your top and left navigation in the HTML. That will boost the keyword prominence on your pages, which is good for SEO. Then use CSS to get the page to still display as you want. CSS Zen Garden is a great example of this in action... for example, notice how the HTML doesn't change between this layout with left-side nav and this one with right-side nav; it's only the CSS that's changing.
• If you must use graphical navigation or headings instead of text-based, then use the CSS "image replacement" technique to substitute in a text link or heading tag, respectively, when the CSS is not loaded (as is the case when the search engine spiders come to visit). For example, northland.edu uses this technique well. Currently, this is much more effective for SEO than ALT tags. Note though that in time, search engines will look at CSS files and disregard text that is off-screen.
• Learn to code in "CSS shorthand." With shorthand, hex codes for colors, margins, box dimensions and borders can all be abbreviated, for instance. More about this here. The efficiency of CSS shorthand translates into not only a speedier download for your customers, but also compact and tidy code that's easier to maintain.
• Make code that "degrades gracefully." Creating a separate "low-bandwidth version" or "printer friendly version" or "mobile version" of your site will sound ludicrous in years to come (heck, I think it sounds ludicrous NOW!), because CSS makes such a thing unnecessary. Check out how gracefully gotomedia.com degrades on a cell phone or PDA, for instance.
• Correct for browser incompatibility snafus with browser-specific CSS. Does something look awry in your page layout when loading your site with the Safari browser, for instance? Internet Explorer doesn't always play nice with the other browsers. Until the days where all the browsers follow all the same standards to the letter, browser-specific stylesheets are a useful crutch.
• Separate the presentation layer from the content layer as much as possible and move it into an external stylesheet (in other words, a separate .CSS file). That way it gets cached by the web browser and doesn't have to reload with each new page.
• Plan for site-wide changes. Things change -- colors, sidebars, ads, copyright dates, etc. Utilize CSS files and/or server-side includes to make future site-wide updates as painless as possible.

• Make use of the cascading nature of CSS. Most of the styles you define will be used site-wide. Some will only be for one particular page. Then there will be occasions where you'll want to "cascade" styles, and have certain sections of your site adopt a particular look/layout/theme that overrides or branches off from the site-wide styles. Clever use of cascading styles can lead to very efficient and elegant code.

  Warning! Geek speek ahead:

Just be careful of overriding previously declared statements. And also be aware that specificity is important in the cascade. Declare all your tag styles first then declare your id and class selectors down the doc. That way the cascade works and can be overwritten with new selectors. (Thanks to our CSS guru Darren for this last bit of advice.)

CSS coders: the Web Developer Firefox extension is an awesome tool for coding, debugging, and tweaking style sheets. You can display the stylesheet and the rendered page simultaneously side-by-side and then interactively edit the CSS, immediately viewing the effect of the change on the rendered page. And it makes identifying errors (be they validation, CSS, or JavaScript) a piece-of-cake. Did I mention the plugin is free? :-)

Is your ecommerce site a breeze to use? Is it fast to download? Does it render (paint) quickly on the screen? If not, is the HTML at least built to display the most important parts of the page first?

You can trim precious seconds off the download time by removing superfluous HTML code, optimizing your images, and converting any tables-based layouts to CSS-based (Cascading Style Sheets) instead. Especially ditch any nested tables. Superfluous code includes such things as programmer comments, commented-out copy/code, redundant font tags, inline JavaScripts and inline CSS. The latter two can, in most cases, be moved to a .JS file and .CSS file, respectively. MS FrontPage is notorious for adding 'code bloat' to your pages. Optimizing your images for fast download includes not just choosing the best compression format and compressing them to the largest extent possible (using Photoshop, Fireworks, or whatever your tool of choice is) without noticeable degradation in the image quality, but also defining height and width attributes on all your images. And if you're still using 1-pixel GIFs as placeholders to align things on your pages, it's time to leave that technique where it belongs... in the '90s! A tool like Dr. Watson or NetMechanic's HTML Toolbox can also help you in your HTML streamlining efforts.