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).

According to a new report by Forrester Research, corporate blogs are the least trusted information source of all. Only 16% of online consumers who read corporate blogs say that they trust them. You can grab a copy of this report for free by filling in a form at Forrester. The full trust scale is below, with 'Email from people you know' the most trusted at 77%.

Chargebacks are frustrating and expensive assaults on a retailer's bottom line. But practical and smart merchants can learn from some chargebacks, improving their stores' performance, customer satisfaction, and operational excellence. When a consumer asks his or her credit card company for a refund, a merchant can suffer a chargeback. That is, the credit card company will reach into a merchant's bank account and take the total amount of the transaction that's being charged back. Then, any one of three or more different types of organizations-issuing banks, merchant banks, and payment gateways-could charge the merchant a fee for its trouble. Throughout this process, no one bothers to inform or ask the merchant.

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

So you have your ecommerce website up and running, and you wonder if you need any specific terms and conditions to govern transactions on your site. The answer is yes. Because if a problem should arise, having terms and conditions may help resolve that problem in your favor. Prior to the customer purchasing anything from you, make sure they check a box agreeing to the terms and conditions. This will bind the customer to any reasonable and legal terms. The purpose isn't to trap or trick a customer but rather to enable both the customer and company to agree in advantage to terms.

We have worked with many demand or lead generation companies over the past 10 years. Most of the time when they come to us, they ask us to help them increase the number of people they convert into a free trial, a free download, or to create an account. Conversion Isn't an Event, it's a Process We always like to focus first on increasing the number of leads towards the top of the sales funnel. However, without the next step, consumption, the companies don't necessarily achieve their better but usually unstated goal of increased revenue. This is the same fuzzy focus that has companies intent on getting more clicks to their PPC ads just so they can show the increased traffic numbers without focusing on converting that visitor into a lead or sale. To tell you the truth it is not as hard to get visitors to take the uncommitted step, as it is getting them to actually use and consume the product. When you optimize for customer experience you really need to take the whole scenario from awareness (clicking your ad) through conversion and ultimately to consumption (and ideally to evangelism) into account.

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.

hat the Buzz? is a keyword research tool with one simple aim: to find out who's talking about a certain keyword. To do that, it does five things: * It displays the Technorati Blog Popularity Chart, showing how popular the keyword has been blogged about in the past 90 days * It displays the Google Trends chart for the keyword * It finds blog posts tagged with the keyword * It finds blog posts containing the keyword (a straight-forward search) * It finds social bookmarks tagged with the keywords

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

See video product reviews by owners. Discover new products, watch product demonstrations, compare prices, and get unbiased shopping advice from people just like you.

The IAB Ad Unit Guidelines are intended for marketers, agencies and media companies for use in the creating, planning, buying and selling of interactive marketing and advertising. The IAB's Ad Sizes Working Group meets on a bi-annual basis to review proposed new ad units and issue updated voluntary guidelines as appropriate. The process whereby these new units are reviewed and considered can be downloaded here.

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

Bounce rate has become one of the most talked about web metrics, and a lot has been written about what this metrics means and how it should be interpreted and used. I also wrote about Bounce Rate in my post called Bounce Rate Demystified.

Jason Billingsley shared with me his positive shopping experience with a multi-store retailer while shopping for a birthday gift for his wife Amy, and we both agreed it would make a great blog post. (Unless you've been following Get Elastic for a while, you may not understand the title of this post, please read on…)

Most ecommerce merchants want consumers from all over, whether that means all 50 U.S. states, Canada, Mexico, Europe, or the world. But e-retailers need to consider local laws when they ask for business in another state or another country. And it is important to understand which jurisdictions might apply to a given online transaction.

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.

With four people dedicated to chat and email responses, Memorysuppliers.com is one of thousands of ecommerce companies adding chat to its marketing and customer service mix. And why not? A February 2008 study from Forrester Research, "The ROI of Interactive Chat", found merchants with click-to-chat options (also known as "reactive" chat) earn a 15 percent return on investment (ROI) on the chat service itself. Merchants with chat invitations and pop-up windows tied to user actions (also known as "proactive" chat), meanwhile, earn a whopping 105 percent ROI.

The surest way to successfully construct a building is to follow a blueprint. A blueprint contains detailed plans and designs that enables skilled personnel to build the structure just from the blueprint. In the same way, a detailed set of plans is the surest way to build a successful search marketing campaign. And just like construction blueprints, while each SEO blueprint may be unique, each will also contain similar details to ensure success. What details should a search marketing blueprint contain?