Marty Note - Improving Site Load Times
Let's say you own and manage a $3,000,000 website. You spend 5% of your site's top line to market on Google, with emails and content. Your $150,000 marketing budget pays for team members and vendors.  

Your muliti-channel site is cooking along, but you notice customer complaints increase mysteriously on Tuesdays. Tuesdays is also when you drop emails to your 50,000 subscribers. See the problem?

Ecommerce merchants can contribute to one of their biggest illnesses as the Kissmetrics infographic on the link shares - slow load times. Lack of speed kills SEO, community and your website if you aren't careful, very careful. Ways you can slow down your website:

* Dump emails in too big a cluster

* Use your production admin UI during sales times

* Don't use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

* OR Misconfigure your CDN

* Huge images (less of an issue with cloud by why tempt fate)

* Bad code

* Too many addons, plugins and doodads haning off your blog or website every additional thing adds TIME so ask is it worth it

Now ask yourself, among ALL the hard work and cool campaigns you will create this year are you guaranteed a 10% to 20% sales increase?

Why more online merchants aren't attacking site load times with a vengence the millions they could make SO EASILY is a mystery we hope to help one of our clients, http://www.Moon-Audio.com unravel this year. We want their load times to average 2 seconds and bet that improvement will drop thousands to their bottom line.

Will report back as we evaluate ways to speed up the Moon. 
 

Ecommerce Tips Magazine
How did we make over $35M in online ecommerce? Sure we tell you then you tell five people and before you know it everyone knows our secrets (cool with us). That's why we will be sharing our favorite ecommerce tips every day next week at
http://www.curagami.com  

Be there or don't make as much money this holiday selling season as you could.  

Single Item Ecommerce
One of the reasons I'm so excited about Bitcoin as infrastructure (see this Scoop: http://sco.lt/5rrn05 ) is the real possibility of adding single item ecommerce.

Why is single item ecom so important?

One of the last big castles owned by abusive middlemen is the web's payment gateways. Auth.net is a pain. Such a pain small single item ideas can't generate ROI. Problem is BIG IDEAS often start as tiny ones.

This means the block to setting up online commerce retards innovation, slows ecommerce / social synergy and makes product development and testing harder than it needs to be.

Sure you can use a scaled "print on demand" site such as Zazzle or Cafe Press, but NOT if you want to print on something other than currently supported media.

What if we want to sell our Cure Cancer cycling socks? We don't want to go all the way to a shopify store since that feels like overkill. We want to put up a Facebook image with a little story and a payment gateway or throw a link into a tweet that does the same.

WHY CAN"T WE DO THIS?

Or can we and I just don't know about it? I looked into https://www.shoplocket.com/ and problem there is they use THEIR cart. Linking to the cart I saw six months ago with limited white label capacity would be like shifting the link OF OUR OWN PRODUCTS across an affiliate link.

I took a look at https://www.simplify.com/commerce/ earlier today and will put in our routing information and EIN numbers when I get home. If anyone knows of a great single item ecommerce engine that allows enough customization that the cart looks like YOU and isn't a holy PAIN in the you know where to create please share.

Bitcoin, while intriguing, is at least a year away from any kind of easy installation and use (at least). Need a an easy to use payment gateway by Christmas or these trips to Ohio are going to break me (lol).

More on G+: https://plus.google.com/102639884404823294558/posts/CMhU6qUQB34

New Ecommerce Marty (@scenttrail) Note
I love this post sharing tips from a handful of ecommerce experts. I might fall into that category too after a 7 year tenure during which teams I managed made over $30M in online sales.

Our AOV (Average Order Value) was never more than $62 so hundreds of thousand of transaction. When I was hired the site's sales were below a million. When I left annual sales were over $6M.

Those times weren't EASY either, but they are were in comparison to now. Now ecommerce is complicated by:

* Increased competition.
* Muddled channel marketing ROI strategies.
* Social Media.
* Mobile.
* New SEO.

Add all of those new pressures together, all discussed multiple times in the linked post, and the inescapable conclusion is "easy" is OVER in ecommerce.

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