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Despite the convenience of shopping online, many people still use the web only to research products to purchase offline. Multi-channel retailers with both physical stores and online stores have a leg up on pure-plays when it comes to serving and converting these buyers. Circuit City is an example of a retailer that's in tune with what customers want and expect from the cross-channel experience, offering customer service features that leverage its competitive advantage:

With 60% of online shoppers cite free shipping as a reason they are more likely to shop on the web (Harris Interactive, July 2008), if you use free shipping as a marketing vehicle, you want to make sure you communicate your offer at every touch point. In the current issue of eM+C magazine, you'll find my article Get Your Site Into Shipping Shape This Season with ideas on how "get the most mileage" out of your free shipping offer from search engine to shopping cart (this version includes screen shots):

Music futurist Gerd Leonhard has just released an informative video explaining what music 2.0 is and how the music industry should change to adapt to 'web 2.0' principles. The video is embedded below. Some of the themes are that control doesn't work (e.g. DRM and trying to control networking) and that music is meant to be shared. Even iTunes comes into some criticism - iTunes works great, says Leonhard, but it "is a locked community". Ultimately, Leonhard says that "open is king" and that "we have to give up on the idea of control and move to an open ecosystem in music." Check out the video!

Building a viral website is very important now days specially in the web 2.0 space. At one time blogs, forums, and other forms of social networking was not such a big deal on the internet like it is today which granted don't take me the wrong way a lot of people used computers in the early days for networking, but not like today.

Most of marketing is now measurable, directly or indirectly. With digitally produced and distributed marketing - particularly channels such as search engine marketing, online advertising, email marketing, post-click marketing, and web site optimization - it's often practical to test dozens or hundreds of ideas within a short time. So if you have more than one competing suggestion for "what will work best", the solution is "test them and let's find out". The answer is quantifiable, not emotional.

good comparisson between the free website analytics services.

Yes. I noticed the slightest hint of sarcasm in the title of this post. This post covers four commonly used measurement techniques that 9 times out of 10 work against the evolution of Reporting Squirrels into Analysis Ninjas.

The ecommerce business is partly a numbers game. And the object of the game is to increase your sales and profitability. You need to understand how your site's visitors are converted to buying customers. Not that you need to immerse yourself in the minutiae of data that many web statistics programs produce, but to reach your site's sales potential, you need to have an understanding of its key numbers and have a simple method for tracking them over time.

When working in the design industry it's easy to find inspiration everywhere you go, by everything you see, hear and touch and you don't need to be sat at your computer to get inspiration either.

Google Analytics is undoubtedly the most widely used web analytics application. Emerged from and based upon the analytics-package developed by Urchin Software Corporation (which was bought by Google in April 2005), the tool has become publicly available for free under the new flagship of Google Analytics. In May 2007 the application was heavily edited, developed and released; the design was simplified and more advanced featured were added. Over years Google Analytics managed to gain on popularity because of its simplicity and many advanced features for curious site owners and professional marketers.

E-commerce firms should turn to commercial, off-the-shelf, or open source software as a replacement for current custom web development initiatives to save up to 35 per cent of their ongoing maintenance and licence costs, Gartner advised in its report "Cost Cutting in E-Commerce, 2009".

We are proud to launch the new ClickTale Real-Time Monitor, which enables you to see where visitors are coming from, and watch exactly what they are doing in Real-Time! See precisely which pages they are browsing, as well as all their mouse moves, clicks, scrolling and keystrokes. This is an industry first in web analytics, and we are proud to be able to offer it to you today, for FREE!

As we see more and more businesses move their services online, and even more that begin their life on the Web, a greater need arises for websites that are designed and built to sell. A great-looking website may achieve the goal of shaping and delivering a strong brand, but its good looks alone aren't enough to sell the products or services on offer. For that, you need to introduce the element of marketing.

Shayne Tilley is the Marketing Manager for SitePoint and was nice enough to do an interview for JungleJar. We discuss his new book scheduled for release in May of this year, current web browser releases, Twitter, and of course SitePoint.

How your website is a communication tool

Understanding what your visitors actually do on your website is an essential part of usability. Find out how to go about doing this!

Intelligent survey software for primates of all species. SurveyMonkey has a single purpose: to enable anyone to create professional online surveys quickly and easily. Find out what everyone is talking about..

Advertising is the bread and butter of the web, yet most of my friends claim that they never click on ads, typically using a peacock tone that signals their pride in being ad-averse. The geekier amongst them go out of their way to run Mozilla scripts to scrape ads away, bemoaning the presence of consumer culture. Yet, companies increasingly rely on ad revenue to turn a profit and, while clicking on ads ?may? be declining, it certainly hasn't gone away. This raises a critical question: Who are the people that click on ads?