The Future: Controlled by Consumers
Consumers are adopting multi-screen shopping, researching products on their phones, tablets, computers, and TVs, and buying wherever they feel like and whenever they are ready. How can online retailers meet these needs? Watch your consumers closely and make sure they can buy where they want to. The Financial Times notes that it would be easy to overwhelm consumers across all these platforms, and advises monitoring advertising carefully to make sure you aren’t invading their space. A delicate balance, and an interesting opportunity to develop and refine specific content for different platforms.
Read the full article at ft.com (subscription required).
Google: Large and In Charge
Attention Google Shopping merchants: Follow Google’s advice. It’s not that they control your future as an online retailer, it’s just that they control about 80 percent of organic search results, and search engine results account for 18 percent of traffic to online retailers. If these numbers don’t inspire a bit of thought about your SEO strategy, stop reading and scroll down to enjoy the fitting image below. But if they do, here are some tips from Econsultancy for Google Shopping merchants: use the provided extended timeline performance report, do what Google says, pay more attention to data quality errors, remove any robots.txt docs that cause product crawling issues, and my personal favorite, evaluate your titles and product descriptions. Be a good content merchandiser; give those descriptions all the details they need to do their job and convert.
Read more about these tips at econsultancy.com/blog.
