Bob Angus: The Ecommerce Evangelist Blog

Consumers are not waiting until Black Friday or Cyber Monday to take advantage of holiday discounts and deals. A significant number of large online retailers are providing deep discount specials now. As an ecommerce website or internet retailer, you have to jump on this opportunity now.

Your website should already be geared up for the holiday shopping season. Now you need to maximize the opportunity as the Black Friday and Cyber Monday style deals are going to continuing every week until the end of the year.

Here are 3 simple things you can do to further optimize your site and boost sales.

Get Holiday Search Trends from Google ThinkHoliday

According to Google, 73% of consumers have already started researching their holiday purchases. Of those, almost 90% have already started their online shopping! Track what consumers are searching on and find out key trends on Google's new ThinkHoliday site. Take that intelligence to tweak your ads, email blasts, and of course your search marketing.

See What Amazon Deals Are Live Today

Amazon Gold Box is their daily deal page. It is full of great deals. You don't necessarily have to match their price, but you can understand key merchandising trends. Or you can spin up your daily search engine advertising to catch the wave of traffic.

Offer Free Shipping on Your Black Friday Deals

Free shipping deals will be heavily used by internet retailers again this holiday season. Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals are all about winning the customer and the sale at that very moment. We know that free shipping can be an effective sales promotion and that consumers are looking for it. So make sure to attach free shipping to your deals.

I am not saying that free shipping is right for everything or as an ongoing policy (read more here). I am saying that it is a must to attract first time shoppers to your website in the shopping frenzy of Cyber Monday and Black Friday.

It is only 49 days to Christmas, but your competition is already advertising great deals. You can too!

Posted by Bob Angus at 9:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

VeriSign (now a part of Symantec) is running an incredible promotion this Wednesday, November 3rd. You can buy the most recognized trust mark on the Internet, the VeriSign Trust Seal, for just $1!

This promotion is an amazing deal considering that the regular price is an already highly valuable $299. Now there is no reason for you to not add the VeriSign Trust Seal to your website. Simply enter the promo code: ONELUCKYBIZ

This is the perfect last minute update to your website before the holiday season gets into full swing. After all, the VeriSign Trust Seal helps you:

• Drive more traffic to your website, with the VeriSign Seal-in-Search
• Boost conversions (A/B split tests results show an 24% average increase)
• Instant credibility - VeriSign is trust online!

Posted by Bob Angus at 7:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Father's Day and graduations are right around the corner; it's time to start looking for those special gifts to express your gratitude. Golfballs.com and HumidorVault.com build customer loyalty and trust by displaying the VeriSign Trust Seal.

As the nation honors 67.8 million fathers and more than 6.5 million high school, college and professional school graduates, loved ones from coast to coast will go online to find and purchase gifts for the dads and grads in their lives. In fact, online sales for Father's Day look very solid. Check out the stats being reported in Shop.org and the National Retail Federation's BIGresearch research study:

• 25% of online Father's Day shoppers plan to spend more in 2010 than they did in 2009
• Online Father's Day shoppers plan to spend a combined average of $153... or 62% more than the average Father's Day shopper of $94.32.
• Total Father's Day spending is expected to reach $9.8 billion.

By displaying the VeriSign Trust Seal on their web sites, businesses provide these gift shoppers assurances that their web sites have passed VeriSign's daily website malware scans and vigorous authentication processes. The VeriSign Trust Seal helps promote a safer Internet by identifying web sites that value and support consumer safety.

"Our customers have trusted us to deliver Father's Day gifts for over 15 years," said Tom Cox chief executive officer of Golfballs.com. "And we trust VeriSign to provide our customers with a safe and trusted online experience."

"HumidorVault.com trusts the VeriSign brand, this is why we selected the VeriSign Trust Seal to help us build consumer confidence and trust with our customers," said Stephen Malan, owner of HumidorVault.com.

These businesses also benefit from the VeriSign Seal-in-Search feature of the VeriSign Trust Seal. Seal-in-Search allows online merchants to drive more traffic to their site by displaying the VeriSign seal next to the search results. As a result, online ecommerce site have more prospects coming to their site and converting them to customers at a higher rate.

For more info, here is a quick tour of the VeriSign Trust Seal:

Posted by Bob Angus at 8:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chicago was hopping last week. Congratulations to the Chicago Blackhawks for winning the 2010 Stanley Cup. And huge congratulations to Internet Retailer and Yahoo! for putting on fantastic events for online retailers!!!!

Pictures are worth a thousand words...

Check out my Flickr photostream from both IRCE 2010 and the Yahoo! Merchant Summit. Here are some of my favorites:

Mike Roebuck of All Web Promotion wins the VeriSign Kindle at Yahoo! Merchant Summit.

Yes. We juggled knives, pitched VeriSign Trust Seal... on 6 ft. unicycles.

Green means GO! We love our EV SSL.

Posted by Bob Angus at 9:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cart 32 now offers the VeriSign Trust Seal to the thousands of merchants who use their comprehensive e-commerce solution. So now online retailers can go to one place for shopping cart software, store management tools, merchant services and now the trust-building solutions from VeriSign.

This partnership is special for online stores that outsource their shopping cart or merchant services. For the first time, these merchants can show the VeriSign seal before their customers start the transaction. That is important because consumers want to feel a site is trustworthy before they click from a search engine or immediately when they land on the site. Too many merchants are losing customers before they even get all the way to the purchase.

We are talking to a lot of online retailers here at Internet Retailer that face this challenge. It is exciting that VeriSign now offers a solution as a one-stop shop through Cart32.

Posted by Bob Angus at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thank you all for participating in the VeriSign Trust Seal Twitter Haiku contest. We received

some very creative haiku submissions!

The VeriSign Social Media team has selected the winner of the contest:

Razur LLC. @razur_agency

@TrustSeal My identity/Protected by VeriSign/I feel safe online

Congratulations Razur!!!

Posted by Bob Angus at 1:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am really excited about the Internet Retailer Conference & Expo (IRCE 2010) next week in Chicago. Chicago is a great city and there will be a record show attendance of over 6,000 online retailers. Plus, I will be live blogging the event, tweeting - Follow me @bobangus and @VeriSignPartner - and dodging flying knives at the VeriSign booth. But I am thrilled the most about the massive presence of VeriSign partners who are exhibiting at IRCE.

Here are 10 partners that you need to visit when you are at the Internet Retailer.

TheFind - Booth #333

One of the largest shopping comparison sites. They display the VeriSign seal in their listings and search results for merchants that use VeriSign. They measured that those online retailers get 18.5% more clicks than those who do not display the seal.

Rackspace- Booth #165

The ecommerce hosting gurus. I recently did an ecommerce security webinar with the Rackspace team. If you want fanatical support, Rackspace is the place to go.

Yahoo! - Booth #417

Yahoo! makes our SSL products available to SMB and ecommerce hosting customers. We will also be showing off the VeriSign Trust Seal at the Yahoo Merchant Summit on Friday June 11th in Chicago.

Alibaba - Booth #133

Alibaba was the original VeriSign Trust Seal partner, before the product had its official name. Chinese merchants can display the VeriSign seal to stand out and to build confidence with potential customers.

GSI Commerce - Booth #601

GSI Commerce offers merchants everything. From end-to-end retail solutions to multi-channel retailing to core technology to customer care... and more.

Merchant e-solutions - Booth #306

Need PCI-compliant payment processing? Merchant e-Solutions provides solutions tailored specifically for online merchants where the physical credit card is "not present".

Coremetrics - Booth #624

With over 2100 online brands trusting them, Coremetrics is the leader analyzing and optimizing ecommerce sites. They make sure that you are optimized to show the best offer, every time, anywhere... automatically.

Savvis - Booth #383

Savvis provides managed hosting and cloud service to multi-channel retailers. They excel at reliability, scalability, and of course security.

buySAFE - Booth #519

buySAFE delivers a unique solution for online retailers who want to turn visitors into buyers. They offer buySAFE bonded services to guarantee that your customers get what they purchased.

Ratepoint - Booth #129

Online reputation management has big buzz these days. Ratepoint is a leading provider of customer reviews, testimonials and an entire, easy-to-use reputation management service.

Visit these partners. They will help your online business be more successful.

See you next week in Chicago!

Posted by Bob Angus at 5:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Attendees to next week's Internet Retailer Conference & Expo (IRCE 2010) in Chicago are in for a treat - FlipVideo MinoHD giveaways, a chance to win a Corvette, and death-defying knife throwing. VeriSign (Booth #363) is doing more than your standard product demo at our booth. Drop by if you dare.

Posted by Bob Angus at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I had the good fortunate to present at BrightTALK's SMB Marketing Summit on Wednesday this week. The day was chocked full of great webcasts that provide actionable tips for small and local businesses to help their online presence. This week's edition of Prime Angus Cuts links you to all the tips, best practices, trends, action items, and success factors presented.

Here is my presentation. It's a Matter of Trust: Driving Traffic and Increasing Sales.

Best Practices for Your Social Media Campaigns

Two other presentations that I highly recommend focus on maximizing your results through social media.

Jennifer Laycock, Editor at Search Engine Guide

Jennifer provides great advice - bring everything you are doing in social media back to a single point... your blog. Why center on your blog? No other place on your website gives you multiple methods of presenting content, multiple ways of sharing/community, multiple ways of driving/tracking action, and multiple ways of control of the entire experience with your business. Ultimately, your blog is the best online asset to create the fastest path to your desired action.

Building and Managing Your Business' Online Reputation

Kira Wampler, Principal at Ant's Eye View

She outlines and gives 6 S.I.M.P.L.E. steps to understand, build and manage your online reputation - Search, Initiate, Manage, Promote, Listen, Educate. These steps really help small businesses amplify their online presence.

The other webcasts are excellent as well. Topics include event marketing, sales team alignment, brand strategy, and PR. I highly recommend viewing them. The entire library of webcasts is available here at the SMB Marketing Summit website on BrightTALK.

Posted by Bob Angus at 7:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The current economy is not the only issue impacting consumer confidence. Identity theft, malware, and other online threats have made consumers reluctant to do business with Web sites they do not know. SMBs, local businesses, and small ecommerce sites have just seconds to establish trust... or your hard earned visitors and customers will buy somewhere else.

Tomorrow Wednesday May 26 at 12pm noon PDT, I am presenting It's a Matter of Trust: Driving Traffic and Increasing Sales as a part of BrightTALK's SMB Marketing Summit.

I will explore the key strategies and tactics that are proven to work, including:

• What innovations are helping consumers feel safe online
• How trust indicators can increase traffic from search engines
• When and where to use trust marks effectively to boost confidence... and sales
  

Register Here

BrightTALK SMB Marketing Summit

At the SMB Marketing Summit, you will learn how to carve out a holistic brand strategy and support it in this world of digital media. Leading industry experts and SMB veterans will also provide insights into how to best generate new business opportunities and optimize your current marketing efforts to compete more effectively.

Check out the SMB Marketing Summit website and agenda.

Posted by Bob Angus at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today VeriSign announced a new partnership with MerchantCircle that helps small businesses drive more happy customers to their doorstep (or home page). MerchantCircle is the nation's largest social network of local business owners. Now its 1.3 million members can standout from the competition in local search results and build increased confidence with consumers by displaying the VeriSign Trust Seal.

Local and small businesses need a high-impact online presence to succeed. They have built their reputation in their neighborhoods, but often have difficulty establishing trust on the vast online world. The VeriSign Trust Seal helps bring that same level of trust to these local businesses' online presence.

Small businesses can establish consumer confidence and credibility by leveraging the highly recognized and trusted VeriSign seal. As a result, they get more of what all local businesses need:

• more customers coming in (in person or online)
• differentiation from the competition
• ... and ultimately more sales

When a business in MerchantCircle's network purchases the VeriSign Trust Seal as a part of its membership, VeriSign independently authenticates the company using a multi-step verification process. Then members automatically have the seal displayed in their profile and can post the seal on their website.

To find out more about how MerchantCircle members can take advantage of this offer, read our press release or visit the MerchantCicle website. For more information on the VeriSign Trust Seal, click here.

Posted by Bob Angus at 8:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This week's edition focuses on trust and includes 3 articles relevant to online retail.

Extended Validation EV SSL Certificates - Should Your Website Have One?

Rob Mangiafico of LexiConn Internet Services did extensive research of SSL installation of the Internet Retailer 100 and found some very compelling reasons why ecommerce sites need EV SSL.

The PeC Review: VeriSign Badge and EV SSL Instill Trust

Armando Roggio from Practical eCommerce posted a 4.5 star review for EV SSL. Read the article and view the excellent video.

Trust Symbols and Shopping Carts

Web hosting provider Hostway has a library of fundamental articles for ecommerce sites. A recent addition to the list is an article related to shopping cart abandonment and how to prevent it with effective trust marks like the VeriSign seal. They quote a National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) study that found when consumers abandon their online shopping process 63 percent of the time due to concerns about security.

Picture of the Week

Source: Life as a Swiss Cow by Small

Posted by Bob Angus at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)