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Salesmanship is about transferring confidence, and you can't inspire confidence without first establishing your credibility. So when it comes to Landing Page copy, credibility is truly Job #1.Here are five must-haves for building that credibility where it often counts the most:

creative announcement of a new website version

Editor's Note: This is part four in our special report on "Video for Ecommerce," where we describe real stories of online merchants creatively using video to drive sales and grow their brands. Previous installments are linked in below. What's next once you've added product videos to your site? Get the word out. "We know that [consumers] are looking for videos online," said David Burch at video analytics company TubeMogul.com. "That's why our goal, and the goal of our merchants, is to be everywhere where video content is consumed."

Barry Schwartz is a sociology professor at Swarthmore College and author of The Paradox of Choice. In this talk, he persuasively explains how and why the abundance of choice in modern society is actually making us miserable

SEOmoz cheat sheet for SEO

The Power of Niche Social Network Sites

If you've added an item to Amazon's cart without purchasing in the same session, Amazon remembers. For a long time. On my last trip to the Amazon, I added a couple new items to buy. Not realizing I had left some products in my cart, I was greeted with this notice on the cart review page:

Classic Closeouts is the best example of supporting a value proposition that I have come across in my travels around the Internet.

This is a recap of our webinar Multi-Store Retailing: Perks and Pitfalls with Elastic Path's own VP of Innovation, Jason Billingsley. (The replay should be available by the end of the week.) You can also catch up on all of our audio/visual webinar replays at ElasticPath.com/Events/ and blog summaries here. Though our webinars are not product-specific - we put these out there for all online retailers to access and enjoy whether you use our ecommerce software or not, this topic is near and dear to use as our most recent version of Elastic Path is really honed for multi-store retailing. If you're interested in a product-specific webinar on our product you can view the replay of Technical Introduction to Elastic Path Commerce 6.1. Multi-Store Retailing: Perks and Pitfalls covered: * Why Multi-Store is gaining momentum * Types of stores to consider launching * When to launch additional stores * How to avoid critical mistakes

"The problem with free is that every time you double the size of your database the cost of maintaining the site grows 6 fold," says Markus Frind, the founder and CEO of Plentyoffish.com, a wildly successful dating site that makes a lot money by giving away for free what other sites charge for. But even for users who ultimately charge for their product there can be a downside to giving something away for free.

Bernardo Huberman, Hewlett-Packard's director of the HP Social Computing lab, and fellow researcher Gabor Szabo have published a highly detailed report (PDF) on "predicting the popularity of online content." Focusing on content submitted and popularized on popular social sites Digg.com and Google's YouTube, the two concocted not one but three ways to predict how much traffic and overall user interaction a story or submitted video will receive well after it hits its initial popularity.

BTBuckets is a free web-segmentation tool that allows sites to create user clusters based on their behavior. These clusters can then be integrated with your adserver, CMS, web analytics or any other site tool to create a richer user experience

As email users, we expect and value emails that are timely, meaningful and relevant from people that we know and trust. Anything that doesn't meet this criteria is considered SPAM. Your goal is to create "Love Opportunities" where recipients WANT to open, click and buy from you.

The internet plays an important role in how people conduct research for purchases, but it is just one among a variety of sources people use and usually not the key factor in final purchasing decisions. PDF report

While most of Radically Transparent is about managing and monitoring your online reputation, we spend a lot of time explaining that customers are discussing your brand and would love to have you join the conversation. New research from ExpoTV.com shows just how badly your customers want to hear from you.

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.

Online, pictures are worth more than words, they're worth dollars. But how many dollars depends on how effectively product images *speak* to customers. We're talkin' details. Just like textual product descriptions describe a product in detail, enlarged images and alternate views better describe your products. And many products cannot be fully described with words.

Savvy online retailers can attract thrifty customers this holiday season with a sound comparison shopping strategy, but those merchants must be careful not to create a lot of extra work, damage their reputation, or waste money.