Marketing Forecast from Ad-ology

Multichannel retailers are making progress in offering shopping services across channels, but some still fail to use the cross-channel experience to increase sales, The E-tailing Group says in a new study. Three particular areas where retailers need to improve are: failing to provide same-day or next-day in-store pickup of products ordered online; not training store clerks to cross-sell to online shoppers who arrive to pick up web orders; and not displaying across each retail channel integrated merchandising, promotions and marketing material.

Consumers are becoming increasingly less willing to wait for pages to load on e-commerce sites, despite the addition of more rich features such as video, zoom and animated content. Today’s online shoppers expect sites to be faster than ever. While most online shoppers said in a 2006 survey they would wait 4 seconds for a site to load, when the survey was repeated this summer, 47% said they grow impatient when web pages take more than 2 seconds to load. Improvements in technology, however, are allowing proactive companies to improve site performance. With the holiday season approaching, online retailers can tweak and test their sites to improve site performance.

U.S. retail e-commerce sales (excluding travel) will total nearly $132 billion in 2009, down about 0.4% from 2008. Assuming the recession ends this year, as many economists have predicted, eMarketer forecasts that online sales will begin to rebound in 2010 and hit full stride in 2011.

As an online retailer, you’ve done everything right – built a flashy site, negotiated great prices from your suppliers, optimized your ad spend, and still – consumers fill their shopping cart and then leave without purchasing. Some studies estimate up to half of all b-to-c e-shopping carts are abandoned while b-to-b prospective purchases fall through about 35% of the time. Is there anything you can do to stop these defections?

Conventional wisdom says that women account for most retail expenditures in the U.S. But there’s one arena where men are more likely to open their wallets than women – online shopping. If you’re selling products and services that men are looking for, you might want to ramp up online campaigns to draw traffic and increase sales.