When you look at the stats surrounding Facebook, you realize that their potential to grow revenue is equally as staggering.  For instance, Facebook now has 845 million active users which represents a 45 percent increase since 2010.  More than half of their users return to the site each day.  And these users have produced an average of 2.7 billion “likes” and comments each day in the last three months of 2011. Now, when you consider the wealth of information Facebook has about it’s users and how they enable advertisers to target based on this, you begin to see the potential for a much greater share of advertising dollars. I think it’s only a matter of time before brand advertisers and businesses discover this and start fighting over the ad inventory as they now do on Google.

But what about retailers?  How can they cash in on Facebook’s success?  To start with, retailers need to have a presence on Facebook by building a page. I know this is obvious and hard to imagine that any retailer has not yet claimed their brand on Facebook but I still come across retailers who have not.  Having a page on Facebook enables their massive audience to “Like” your brand and start sharing what they think of you with their friends.

The ability to post comments about your store on Facebook has become a powerful tool for retailers to generate content from their customers. For example, asking a question on your Facebook wall to find out what your fans like most about a particular product is a great way to generate positive feedback and endorsement for that product.  Then, what makes this even more powerful is when you have your site search technology crawl these Facebook posts and make them available in your site search results. Retailers can now instantly reach out to their most engaged brand advocates and ask them all sorts of questions.  Questions like how they are using products, what advice they have for others for selecting the best product for a particular solution, what tips they have for using your products, and on and on.  All of this fantastic content can them be made available to new visitors through site search.

To encourage more sharing, retailers have begun placing Facebook like buttons on the product pages. This practice has exploded in the past year to the point where it feels hard to find retailers who don’t include a Like button.  Generating likes for your products shows an even deeper engagement from your customers and is a much more powerful way to drive sales.  The challenge is to actually get your customers to click the like button.  It seems consumer adoption of this has been relatively low.

One thing retailers like FTD.com have done to grow their product like activity is incorporate the Like button directly into their site search results.  This gives it much more visibility and from a usability perspective is much easier for people to click like as they browse products in search results.  There’s even a added usability benefit as retailers have incorporated the ability to sort search results by the number of likes.  I expect that the desire to sort by likes might actually become more popular than sorting by product star ratings. And, this added functionality will encourage that many more consumers to cast their vote for a product by clicking the like button.

FTD.com Search Includes Facebook Likes

The final tip I would have for cashing in on Facebook’s popularity is to enable those who visit your page on Facebook to initiate a search of your product catalog easily right from within your page.  This can be done by adding a tab on your page that includes a search box and incorporating the search functionality into your other custom tabs such as your Facebook default page.  Here’s an example from Chaparral Motorsports.

Chaparral Motorsports Enables Search on Facebook

How about sharing your thoughts on what 2012 will bring?

I’ll start – While 2011 could be called the year eRetailers got interested in mobile and social media, 2012 will likely be the year of the tablet, and … more social media.

As retailers begin to understand how people search, shop, and consume content on mobile devices, the soaring popularity of the iPad (one of the must-have items on people’s holiday wish lists this year), presents new challenges for retailers, as well as for those of us who provide products and services to them, in delivering a compelling shopping experience on the new “fourth screen.”

For tablets like the iPad and Kindle Fire, the requirements for creating user-friendly search and navigation experiences are different than those for the mobile screen. We have more screen real estate to work with when it comes to tablets, which means a better display of product images and an easier-to-use touchscreen. On the other hand, “t-commerce” or “couch-commerce” will require a different experience than what is displayed on a personal computer or mobile screen. Site owners (and companies like ours) need to brainstorm ways to take advantage of the benefits of tablets (like brilliant displays of photos and videos), while keeping navigation streamlined.

For instance, tapping the screen is the standard method of navigation for tablets. However, small text menus – for instance, which you might find in lists of refinements – are hard to tap on without hitting another menu item by mistake. The same goes for buttons that are too close together, or pagination numbers: easy to click on with a mouse, tough to click on with a finger. In addition, as GetElastic reports, tablets are making it possible for website visitors to interact with content in new ways: people can “touch” content, swiping and zooming to choose how they view text and images. This tactile interaction may cause us to discover new ways to present information, new ways to display navigation, and new possibilities for innovative merchandising and SEO.

Users spend lots of time on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and now Pinterest. We can expect that the merging of e-commerce and social media will gain even more prominence in the months ahead. As we’ve discussed before in this blog, site owners have realized that if people are spending more and more time with their friends on social networks, the website search and shopping experience needs to come to the social setting – instead of trying to lure people away from their social networks.

Now, your turn. What are your predictions for 2012?

Now that the majority of holiday shopping has been completed more reports are surfacing about actual usage.  According to IBM’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday Reports, sales from mobile devices were basically three times higher this year than last.  This data, which comes directly from the web analytics of top retailers, shows mobile devices driving from 10 to 14 percent of all web traffic and from 6.6 to 9.8 percent of all sales.

Mobile commerce has clearly arrived. The question retailers now need to be asking is how well are they meeting the needs of this new mobile consumer and what can they do to improve in 2012?

According to Tealeaf’s 2011 Mobile Shopping Experience Report, retailers have plenty of room to improve.  Their analysis of social conversations around mobile shopping found that 41 percent of the chatter voiced frustrations.  These frustrations were most often related to an inability to complete the purchase and problems searching for products.  A negative mobile experience could create even bigger problems for retailers as a Harris Interactive study points out with the finding that 63% of consumers who experience a problem conducting a mobile transaction say they would be less likely to buy from that company via other purchase channels. Ouch!

As you take a closer look at your mobile commerce strategy and initiatives one of the first steps I recommend is to separate smartphones from tablets.  Based on the data around usage and responses to surveys these devices are entirely two different beasts.  Some have even asked the question if tablets should even be considered mobile commerce. Others are coining new names for their use such as Tablet Commerce or T-Commerce.

Smartphones are being used to help shoppers find store locations and check hours.  And once these shoppers get to the store they put their smartphones to work to research products, read reviews, compare prices and fetch coupons.  Tablets on the other hand are primarily used for shopping at home on the couch or in bed.  In addition, tablet shoppers are about twice as likely to complete a purchase than those with smartphone based on the findings in the survey of online shoppers conducted by Equation Research for rich media merchandising company Zmags which produced a nice infographic summary of the results.

How people feel when using these devices also appears to be quite different.  The Zmags survey found that tablet owners felt happy and more excited to shop than those without tablets.  This was a stark contrast to tabletless smartphone and laptop owners who felt impatient, stressed or overwhelmed about shopping.  Further evidence of this impatience is illustrated in this infographic about disappointment of mobile customers created from another Equation Research survey.  A key finding was that 74 percent of mobile users would abandon a site if it didn’t load in five seconds or less.

With this in mind, here are some questions to think about:

1. How will you adjust you mobile commerce strategy to address the needs of these two types of customers?

2. How will this influence the designs of your mobile experiences on smartphones and tablets?

3. What unique content will you create and provide on these different devices?

Let us know your thoughts about these questions and any other comments or questions you have about the split personality of mobile commerce.

While the news for brick-and-mortar stores was good overall, it’s the online retailers who saw some of the biggest gifts from Santa this season.  Physical stores on average grew same stores sales of 3.4 percent year-over-year and some such as Macy’s did much better with a growth of 6.6 percent.  But for Macy’s the real excitement was at their online stores with both macys.com  and Bloomingdales.com producing gains of 36 percent in December.  The story was similar with other online retailers, which according to comScore, Inc. grew sales by 15 percent year-over-year to rake in a record $37.2 billion this holiday season.

Some online retailers such as eBags announced gains of 32 percent over last year along with even stronger numbers on Cyber Monday, which broke their largest single day record by 46%.  So what drove this incredible growth?  eBags gave the credit in part to their optimization efforts which focused on site speed, site search, and their product pages.  Another bright spot for eBags was with sales from mobile devices, which grew 187 percent and accounted for 9 percent of eBags.com total sales.

In the coming days I will be diving deeper into these metrics to uncover what moved the needle for online retailers this holiday. I’ll explore which stores saw the greatest growth and reveal clues we found that could be what made the difference.  We’ll also take a closer look at the impact mobile devices and social media had for retailers this year and tell you which retailers are in the lead with these initiatives.

If you have a comment or burning question on your mind about what worked well for you this Holiday season, or how to improve your customer experience this year, leave a comment below.

As part of our site search tips – we recommend making the search box large enough to handle most of your queries. If you’re just not able to afford the real estate then this is a nice compromise. Note: There are other benefits to having a large search box – the most important being a large search box is easier to find. You want it to be easier to find to encourage people to search because typically people who search will convert 2-3 times better than people who don’t.

I think search is less important on a news site than, say an ecommerce site. I think the LA times approach of having a small search box that gets larger when you click on it is sensible. Nice work LA times!

1. Have merchandising-specific refinements – Refinements don’t have to be limited to product details. Visitors want to know what sales items, special offers, bundles and clearance items, you’re offering. Allowing them to refine by these factors is a great way to improve the usability of your site, and guide visitors to items you are promoting, while improving conversion potential.

2. Rank the products in a way that makes sense for your business – Many companies choose to order their products by popularity. This minimizes the amount of clicks people will typically make to get to the products they’re looking for. Consider also showing your highest margin products first, or the ones you have excess stock for.

You can separate the results into “items on special promotion” and “most popular items” for example, or show all items in the same results list, but with the top 5 items in excess stock first followed by the most popular items. We occasionally encounter websites that rank their products alphabetically by default. This is almost always a non-optimal way to rank your products, although it is sometimes a useful sort option.

For more tips, download the full ebook – Big Book of Navigation Tips.

Below are some tips to help you in this regard. You can find the complete set of SEO tips by downloading the complete “Big Book of Navigation Tips,” available from our website. Next week we’ll provide some tips related to online merchandising in navigation so be sure to check back.

1. Ensure your navigation pages can be crawled by Internet search engines. To ensure your navigation pages can be crawled by Internet search engines, use short URLs that include useful keywords to your navigation pages (e.g., category or subcategories) with very little parameters. Avoid using javascript-produced links because the spiders may have trouble interpreting these. Also ensure that navigation pages are not excluded in your robots.txt file.

2. Include title and <h1> tags on your navigation pages. Customize your title and <h1> tags to include the category title of each category page. These are both located at the top of category pages and are factors that search engines consider when ranking a page. The text in the title tag appears in the search engine results – so it should be accurate, unique and compelling. You may also want to include subcategories within the title tag to help rank for those more specific keywords.

3. When making any changes to your navigation, consider what to do with your old navigation links. The main issue is the old navigation links may have generated great SEO results. You will likely want your new navigation pages to benefit from your old navigation pages’ popularity. The recommended way of handling this is to use a 301 redirect. This will redirect the old navigation links to any equivalent new navigation link. By doing this, the value of the old page will be linked to the new page, minimizing the negative impact on your SEO.

Next week we’ll cover SEO, so stay tuned.

1. Consider using sliders for continuous refinements Test the placement of refinements – Using sliders for refinements like price or size range take up less space and are a nice tool to use along with AJAX to build smooth transitions from one information display to the next. Some visitors may find them more complicated than the alternatives – links or drop downs with fixed ranges, or text boxes allowing you to specify an upper and lower limit. So test and make sure your visitors do understand how they work and consider offering alternatives. Make sure your sliders work well on a touch screen device, and if they don’t you can  provide alternative way of displaying them.

2. Make sure navigational images can’t be confused as products – Navigation usability tests were conducted by showing participants a retail site with three product subcategories represented by an image and the associated text description. Many participants misunderstood that  the images were representations and took them to be three product images and assumed there were only three products. You should try to avoid these types of misunderstandings as much as possible. You can minimize confusion on navigation pages by showing products as well as subcategories. You can show other cues that will help differentiate between subcategories and products – such as showing the number of results they’ll see if they click on the subcategory images, label the subcategory images clearly and make sure there’s a clear distinction between the layout of your products and subcategories.

Last week, Mark Brixton, Country Manager for Australia, sat down with Phil Dobbie from BNET Australia to discuss 10 things ecommerce sites can do to keep their site search performing efficiently. Mark explains that site search accounts for 30-40% of a site’s revenue so there’s a huge benefit to making search a priority. Mark also highlighted the fact that etailers should be continuously monitoring their analytics to understand visitors’ behavior on the site and particularly within the search. You can listen to all of Mark’s tips on the BNET site: http://www.bnetau.com.au/blog/aussierules/10-ways-to-improve-your-on-site-search-btalk/8381.

For more tips on how to improve your site search and navigation, download our e-books:

• Big Book of Site Search Tips
• Big Book of Navigation Tips

We were also excited to see that 3 of our own clients were called out on the list – including Folica, The Pond Guy and Century Novelty. These 3 sites were recognized for the ease with which people can find products and other content on the site and the overall look and feel. You can find more specific attributes that were highlighted in the article: http://multichannelmerchant.com/photo-gallery/2011-mcmawards-website-top-search-navigation/index4.html.

Congratulations to all the winners!