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Are you selling your white papers short with poor merchandising? Many sites offering "free" white papers, case studies, or resources in exchange for some visitor information utterly fail to merchandise their downloads. Yet if your website doesn't treat your white paper as containing valuable information, your visitors won't either.

Here are some holiday data feed management tips courtesy of the team at online retail merchandising technology provider, Mercent. This post is the fruit of a Twitter connection with Rick Galan, Strategic Marketing Manager of Mercent and ecommerce blogger. You can follow Rick on Twitter @rickgalan, or follow Jason Billingsley and me at @jbillingsley and @roxyyo respectively.

Many retailers allow site customers to sort site search, category and sub-category results by price, average customer review, top sellers, new arrivals to name a few. While this is great for usability, it's also an opportunity to glean information about your customer which you can apply to merchandising and personalization on home pages, product pages, promotional banners and even email campaigns.

Cross-selling and upselling is a popular tactic among online retailers in hopes of increasing average order value, items per sale and improving customer service with relevant suggestions. Amazon shared that cross-sells were responsible for 35% of its sales in 2006! According to the e-tailing group's 8th Annual Merchant Survey Report (of 190 ecommerce executives), 55% of retailers will include cross-selling and upselling in their merchandising activities this year. But cross-selling and upselling is one of the most difficult activities to do well and effectively measure, as evidenced in the e-tailing group's findings:

he final variable in the Marketing Experiments conversion sequence is "a" for anxiety about following through with a purchase. Some of this anxiety is about the product, some is about you as a retailer. You must address both. And unlike friction (resistance) which must be minimized and balanced with an attractive incentive, anxiety needs aggressive overcorrection on your website. Ecommerce anxiety comes in a number of flavors, including fears about: * Quality of the product * Quality and reliability of your customer service * Will the item arrive on time? * Will the product be as described or as appears on screen? Is it the right color or size? * Will it fit? Is this item true to size? * What if the product needs to be returned? * Is this site secure (privacy, credit card information)? * Is this really the best price? Today's post will focus on anxiety on the product page specifically.