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Since its release in 2007, the last volume of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, has garnered 3,286 reviews from Amazon.com customers. While response has been overwhelmingly positive for the book, several hundred Amazon customers rated the book as mediocre or worse. Because of a very subtle yet clever feature, Amazon makes the best of both the positive and negative reviews easy to find. And that feature, based on our calculations, is responsible for more than $2,700,000,000 of new revenue for Amazon every year. Not bad for what is essentially a simple question: "Was this review helpful to you?"

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.

MailChimp is full of useful, powerful email marketing features that are easy to use and even a little fun!

A few days ago, I wrote about the power of the word "New" to get our attention - if there's a more potent attractor out there, it's almost certainly "FREE!" For years, advertising gurus have listed "free" on every compilation of powerful headline words. Now, research conducted by Dan Ariely (a Duke behavioral economist, previously at MIT) shows us that "free" is far more effective than "almost free." Indeed, a preference for "free" seems to be another feature hardwired into our brains.

I have been experimenting with some advanced features in Google Analytics over the last couple of days. I was inspired by some very clever insights from Search Laboratory (sphinn it here) that we have found very useful.

To follow up our recent post on customer motivation and optimizing your website for hunters (e.g. moms armed with Christmas lists), I want to show you some examples beyond the search box and navigation menu. I'll use a personal story - I'm in the market for a car GPS. Previously knowing nothing about them (features, brands, prices etc), so I started off a howser. I decided I want to check Crutchfield (great product filters and product descriptions), Amazon (access to more products, the seller marketplace and more customer reviews) and Best Buy Canada (Canadian pricing, option to pick up in store).

Yesterday we looked at examples of image zoom and alternate views, which can help customers experience the product better than one small view. A good photographer plus AJAX or Flash technology like Scene 7 or Magic Zoom can achieve this. But online retailers can go a step further and use photos that show products in use, or "in context." This can reduce a shopper's fears, uncertainties and doubts about a purchase like "how does this look on a person?" or "how large is this in real life?." Images can also "sell" by triggering an emotion, showing the quality or versatility of an item or illustrating a products features and benefits.

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:

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Web credibility resources, articles, tutorials and information. Featured articles have been re-published all over the Internet.

A well-written long salesletter is the ONLY thing that can make up for the lack of face-to-face sales time between you and your online customer.

Digg launched a new images section yesterday with some interesting new features for all areas of the site, not just the images section. As well as a clever duplicate image detector every story in any...

One of the more popular features with customers on many ecommerce Web sites is "customer reviews." They allow insight into products and help consumers feel more comfortable making purchases. There are several ways online customer reviews are implemented on ecommerce Web sites, some better than others. In this post we look at how different retailers implement reviews.

As Avinash Kaushik says: Analyzing data in aggregate is a crime against humanity. … If you want to find actionable insights you need to segment your web analytics data. You need to separate out the various Sources, Behavior and Outcomes.