Among the slew of analysts looking back to the 2008 holiday season, comScore has estimated that online sales from November 1 through December 23 were actually down 3% from the year before. Apparel was one of the bright spots, with an online increase of 4%, compared to a 19-21% decrease in the category overall sales. [...]

At first I thought ElasticPath’s post “Should Your Use Large Images on Category Pages?” would shed light on the size of thumbnails, but the discussion is about the importance of testing big-footprint lifestyle imagery. Does a large banner above the thumbnails add a sense of place to the page, similar to display banners in the [...]

The initial numbers for the holiday season are already coming in. Comscore reports a 19% increase in online revenue for the 2007 holiday season (November 1-December 27), to $28 billion. Spending for the peak holiday season (Black Friday – Christmas Eve) increased by 21% over the same period, although an extra day between Thanksgiving and [...]

In a recent Omniture presentation entitled Integrated Marketing: Making Data Work For Your Customers, Forrester Research VP and Research Director Elena Anderson provides some eye opening numbers that help to clarify the state of marketing on- and off-line. First, a recap of way consumers today view the role of advertising Consumers who agree with the [...]

Forrester Research and Shop.org released their new state of the industry report this week. The big news in The State of Retailing Online 2007: last year’s online sales leader was the apparel category. Sales of clothing, accessories and footwear totaled $18.3 billion, up 61% over 2005 — a strong contributor to the 29% overall growth [...]

Bloggers and ecommerce sites alike are working hard to deal with the unintended consequences of their content management systems. For all their wondrous flexibility, blogging software can create duplicate content at just about every turn — archives, categories, tags, stubs — each can potentially create, as Google puts it, “substantive blocks of content within or [...]