Tag Archive for: e-commerce

Study Suggests TikTok Is Losing Ground In 2023

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Fewer people are using TikTok compared to last year and the social network is losing ground as an e-commerce search engine, according to a new study from CivicScience. 

Meanwhile, Amazon is reconnecting with younger generations and growing as the main starting point for people looking for products online. 

In the study, CivicScience asked U.S. online consumers this question: “When shopping for a product online, where do you typically start for product searches and research?” The survey then compared the responses from this year’s survey against those from 2022. 

TikTok gained some attention last year when analysts noted that it was driving a surprising amount of e-commerce-related search traffic – particularly from younger users. This led the company to announce it intends to develop a $20 billion e-commerce business. It is unclear if recent trends have changed those plans or not. 

It is no surprise that Amazon and Google continue to dominate the e-commerce search market. No other challengers have come close. However, Google did see a slight dip in the number of e-commerce searches being made on its platform. 

The most notable shift from this year’s findings may be the increasing popularity of Amazon among younger age groups who had been previously moving away from the shopping platform. 

Compared to last year, Amazon increased its popularity among younger age groups including 18- to 24-year olds (up 45%) and 25- to 34-year-olds (up 44%). 

For more, read the findings from CivicScience here.

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Black Friday Data Shows Inflation Hasn’t Slowed Holiday Shopping

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Despite the increasing pressure many shoppers are feeling from inflation, the latest data from this year’s Black Friday shopping shows that consumers are still taking the shopping event seriously.

Brick-and-mortar store visits grew by an estimated 2.9% compared to 2021, according to a report from Sensormatic Solutions. Meanwhile, Adobe Analytics found that online sales rose by 2.3% to $9.12 billion.

This increase in in-person shopping likely reflects the easing of Covid-19 restrictions across the country and the increasing comfort shoppers are showing about going to brick-and-mortar locations. Stats from Thanksgiving Day itself back this up, with a whopping 19.7% increase compared to 2021. 

Bloomberg had similar findings, with data showing that increased mall traffic rise by approximately 1.2%, and traffic to other types of shopping locations (such as strip centers or standalone stores) climbed 4.7% compared to the past year. 

Notable Stats from Shopify

Shopify also released its data from this year’s Black Friday Shopping, accounting for a record-setting $3.6 billion across the platform from the start of Black Friday in New Zealand to the end of Black Friday in California. 

At the height of the day’s sales, Shopify saw $3.5 million per minute.

The report also included some other interesting highlights:

  • Top selling countries and cities where shoppers made purchases from: United States, United Kingdom and Canada, with the top-selling cities on Black Friday including London, New York, and Los Angeles
  • Top product categories: Apparel & accessories, followed by health & beauty, and home & garden, with trending products including Snocks GmbH (Boxershorts), rhode (peptide glazing fluid), and Brooklinen (Luxe Core Sheet Set)**
  • Average cart price: $102.31 USD or $105.10 USD on a constant currency basis  
  • 15%: Cross-border orders worldwide on Black Friday as a percentage of total orders 
  • 27%: Growth in POS sales made by Shopify merchants globally over last year’s Black Friday

What We Can Learn From This

Despite challenges, Black Friday and the surrounding weekend remain major events for consumers and retailers. With the end of Covid restrictions, consumers use a renewed sense of flexibility to find the best deals online and in-store.

For retailers, it is more important than ever to ensure your customers can easily find you and compare your prices and products. The online shopping space is increasingly crowded and it is up to you to stand out with great offers, well-crafted sales messages, top-level service, and high-quality products.

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Provide Google-Quality Search Results On Your E-Commerce Site

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Google is offering a new solution for e-commerce brands interested in improving their site’s search capabilities. 

With the release of Retail Search, Google Cloud is making it possible for online retailers to provide Google-quality search results on their own websites. This means it will be faster and easier for customers to find the products they are looking for on your site, making them more likely to complete thor transaction instead of abandoning your site. 

How Poor Search Experiences Hurt Online Retailers

According to a 2021 survey from The Harris Poll and Google Cloud, at least 94% of American consumers have abandoned a shopping session because of poor quality or irrelevant search results and 76% of shoppers said that an unsuccessful search led to a lost sale for a retail website. 

Based on this, the report estimates retailers lose $300 billion each year solely because of this phenomenon known as search abandonment. 

Understanding Intent To Deliver Better Search Results

The biggest hurdle to delivering successful search results has always been understanding search intent. 

Most basic search engines struggle to identify user intent and deliver the most relevant search results quickly. Google’s systems, however, are constantly being updated with the specific goal of better understanding user intent and delivering the best results quickly.

With Retail Search, retailers can now deliver that same quality search experience on their own site. 

Customizable For Your Needs

Retail Search is fully customizable to suit the needs of almost any e-commerce site. 

As the announcement says:

“Our site search solution builds upon decades of Google’s experience and innovation in search indexing, retrieval, and ranking. Retailers can make product discovery even easier for shoppers, while optimizing for their business goals with advanced capabilities.”

These capabilities include:

  • Advanced query understanding that produces better results from even the broadest queries, including non-product searches. 
  • Semantic search to effectively match product attributes with website content for fast, relevant product discovery. 
  • Optimized results that leverage user interaction and ranking models to meet specific business goals.
  • State-of-the-art security and privacy practices that ensure retailer data is isolated with strong access controls and is only used to deliver relevant search results on their own properties.

For more information, read the full announcement here or visit Google’s Discovery Solutions for Retail.

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Cyber Monday Breaks E-Commerce Record For Most Online Sales

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While Black Friday sales are in a slump, a new king of the holiday shopping season is rising. The results Cyber Monday are coming in and estimates suggest this year broke e-commerce sales records for the biggest day of online sales in US history.

According to Adobe, online sales hit over $3 billion dollars on Cyber Monday. Their report says 200 million visits to 4,500 retail websites generated $3.06 billion, rising 16 percent from last year.

Approximately 26 percent of those sales came from mobile devices, accounting for $799 million in sales. The majority of those sales ($575 million) came from Apple iOS devices. In comparison, Android devices drove just $219 million in mobile sales.

ChannelAdvisor and Custora have found similar results in their analysis of Cyber Monday sales.

ChannelAdvisor says Cyber Monday sales leaped 18 percent year over year on a same-store-sales basis. They found mobile devices accounted for 43 percent of traffic, however their results also found consumers are still relying on desktops to make the final purchase. Their analysis says 24 percent of sales came from smartphones.

Custora’s findings estimate e-commerce revenue climbed 16.2 percent from last year, with tablets and phones driving 26.9 percent of all Cyber Monday sales.

The notable increase in Cyber Monday sales may be due to bigger discounts than expected, with an average discount of 21.5 percent.

Another notable report from HookLogic says the average order value among advertisers on its platform hit $134 on Cyber Monday, just below the $137 AOV seen on Black Friday. Interestingly, carts had fewer items on Cyber Monday, which suggests consumers waited for the online sales to make their purchase.

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US E-Commerce Sales Jump While Overall Retail Sales Stagnate

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A report by the US Commerce Department shows e-commerce sales in the US shot up 14.1 percent over the past year while overall retail sales have only climbed one percent year-over-year.

In the second quarter of this year, US e-commerce sales jumped to $83.9 billion in the second quarter compared to Q2 2014, even after adjusting for seasonality, according to the report published Monday.

In total, 7.2 percent of the estimated $1,171.5 billion in US retail sales transactions took place online during the second quarter, rising from 7.0 percent in the first quarter of the year and 6.3 percent a year ago.

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When not accounting for seasonal retail variations, the Commerce Department estimates US retail e-commerce sales racked up to $78.8 billion, jumping 5.1 percent from Q1 and 14.4 percent year-over-year. When not accounting for seasonality, the report finds e-commerce sales drove approximately 6.6 percent of all retail sales.

The data was based on a sampling of around 10,000 US retail companies, excluding food services, and may have included firms without an e-commerce presence.

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E-Commerce Tips To Help You This Valentine’s Day [Infographic]

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Valentine’s Day is huge for online retailers, but some e-commerce sites are already wondering why they haven’t felt the love this year. If your e-commerce business isn’t seeing the traffic or conversions you think you deserve during this time of year, consider some of following tips and statistics about the big day tomorrow.

valentines-day-and-ecommerce-large-picture

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How To Succeed With e-Commerce This Halloween [Infographic]

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Man people across the country are scrambling to get a last minute Halloween costumes as the holiday grows closer, and that means marketers are making their final Halloween ad push. This is especially true for e-commerce sites who make up are hoping to get their own chunk of the nearly $7 billion spent annually on Halloween costumes.

Thankfully, your e-commerce site can still reap its own piece of the pie, so long as you move fast and know what customers are looking for in the final days before ghosts and vampires wander the street for a night.

Nextopia investigated online Halloween purchasing behavior and shared their findings in a convenient, easy to understand infographic (seen below). So long as you know when and where people are spending the money, e-commerce can be a hugely successful market this time of year.

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SEO for Huge E-Commerce Sites

Doing SEO for a massive site can be complex.  In the case of a large e-commerce site, you have a ton of pages with the different products.  How do you organize the categories do good SEO for all these pages?

This is a full project to do solid SEO, but some critical elements must be kept in mind.

  • Google likes unique posts, good content
  • Duplicate pages can hurt rankings
  • You don’t need to have top listing for every one of your 10,000 pages

By looking at these concepts, this means that using the 80-20 rule is a great approach for doing good SEO for a huge site.  Chances are 20% of your products produce 80% of your revenue.  Focus on only these elements.  Make these pages have solid content and fine-tune the on-page SEO here.

By doing this, you don’t spend so much time on the other few thousand pages, and the results are worth it.  In addition to this, try to be careful about categorization – it can hurt to have categories cross each other to make duplicate pages.  For example, having a clothing store with a leather category and a shoe category could have the same page in both “leather->shoe” and “shoe->leather”.  There are ways to avoid this, although my recommendation is to initially construct the categories in a way that this never becomes an issue.  By taking care of this up front it will help with many potential duplicate content issues.

Beyond these details, keeping great SEO for the site in general will always help.  Following all these tips will increase your traffic and listing positions.  For more details on SEOing e-commerce sites, check out this article by Eric Enge on Search Engine Land.

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5 SEO Tips for E-Commerce

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Doing SEO for an e-commerce site is tricky.  Almost all the pages are virtually identical, so it’s hard to determine how to do standard SEO for these pages.  Here are five quick tips to help you do some solid SEO for your e-commerce site (a shortened version of the excellent explanation on Search Engine Land):

  1. Do solid SEO on product pages. Focusing on these will help draw traffic to each specific product.  Standard SEO rules apply here – especially remember the title tag, as that will make a big difference.  And keep it search engine friendly – using a lot of Flash or something else the spiders don’t like is not recommended.
  2. Proper categorization. Every product fits into specific categories.  Making sure you use this as best you can will help.  If selling a television, keep all categories in mind, such as a brand name, the size of the television, the type of tv, so forth.  The more detailed your categories, the easier to find (good SEO).
  3. Avoid duplication. Having duplicate pages is a big SEO no-no.  If you have your URLs structured based on categories, then you can often have each category branching through other categories to a single product, resulting in different URLs but the same content (duplicate pages).  To avoid this, you can use parameters (the same URL, different arguments) or even just 301 the duplicate pages all to one single product page.
  4. Use the on-site search engine. To start, having a good on-site search engine is highly recommended for all internet marketing purposes.  If you have one – checking the queries people put into it are easy ways to see what people are searching for that couldn’t find it naturally.  This is a big “SEO THIS” sign.
  5. Social media! Yes, get on board.  By letting people comment on your products or share them with others through social media, you can often get more inbound links than you might expect.  Just make it easy for users and visitors to be able to share, whether it be through on-site widgets or a site blog, or even profiles on social media sites.

These tips will help your products on your e-commerce site be found, both through social media and through the search engines.  These tips are a revised version of the excellent explanation by Aaron Bradley on Search Engine Land.

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