Can free shipping help truly compel your customers to buy more often? Here is how the psychology of free shipping can encourage customer retention and boost sales.

Read More at Jeff Bullas: https://www.jeffbullas.com/the-psychology-of-free-shipping/

Marty Note
Solid tips here with a few caveats:

* #3 printing is a nice to have now not a must have. Printing just isn't as important, but, for some, a printed piece is easier to share.

* Reviews are now more important in their absence. Having hundreds of reviews is great as it shows the size and value of the tribe formed around a given product. A Customer's voice is always a tad different sounding too, so be sure to curate content FROM reviews.

* High res images is a good idea, but don't slow the delivery of your page down. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to help server your images and videos fast no matter who is looking at your content or from where.

* Product comparisons are great especially if they are social.

* Shipping = we would amend shipping to make sure your FREE Shipping triggers are easy to find / be aware of and set to maximize conversions.

Top 5 Black Friday Websites Curagami's annual list sees Big Boys move in. Amazon tops the list. There are surprises & we share our Black Friday scorecard.

This holiday selling season (2014) will happen as close to real time as any thanks to the social / mobile web. Listening and curating are going to be important, but so is tapping the nostalgia and spirit of the season in creative and collaborative ways.

Ecom's New  Best Practices
Better have all of these if you expect to make money online these days:
* Easy To Get Free Shipping.
* Easy To Find Sale Section.
* Deal of the Day (once Woot.com only now becoming ubiquitous).
* What's New.
* Best Sellers.
* For Him, Her, Kids navigation (if applies).
* An ASK for User Generated Content.
* Clear "WE VALUE UGC" signals.
* Exciting "Magazine-like" content.

Via Tomorrow's Ecommerce: How To Design Tomorrow's Ecommerce Today on Haiku Deck http://shar.es/1nkirc

Ecommerce Website Design For MacGuffins
In film a "MacGuffin" is a plot device that helps move the story. Online McGuffins are expected "cost of poker" design and marketing elements whose absence hurts more than their presence helps. A web MacGuffin's job is to help move visitors on their journey to become buyers and advocates.

Common Ecommerce MacGuffins Include:

* Free Shipping.
* Free FedEx Shipping for premium brands.
* Email subscription boxes with VIP treatment for joiners.
* Social share buttons.
* Satisfaction Guarantee.

While it is difficult to know what any individual site's MacGuffins should be since that is determined by their business vertical EVERY website, without exception, has at least one expected MacGuffin.

Some website categories may have 5 to 10 expected MacGuffins. There are 5 rules for designing websites to create the trust and assurance MacGuffins provide:

* Place MacGuffins where they can do the most good.
* MucGuffins should be LARGE and IN CHARGE in easy to find.
* You flaunt MacGuffin convention and "best practices" at your peril.

* Social Share buttons should be ubiquitous and use branded colors.
* Create friendly easy to understand policies about things like "satisfaction guarantees" and then NEVER enforce them. 

Writing a more complete post about designing for website MacGuffins now and will share a link on Scoop.it when finished. 
 

Ecommies - Identifying ecommerce trends, rate and review ecom tools and hold annual awards.

Holiday 2013 Awards
First Ecommies Holiday ratings are in. William-Sonoma & REI.com top the list in November and December.  L. L. Bean gets "most improved" award from November to December and several trends emerge:

* Free Shipping out and back is trending especially in December. 
* Free shipping all orders is trending. 

* Hiding free shipping behind either codes or triggers is declining.

* Deal of the Day is trending with majors like REI.com adding DOD.

* Standard credit card based loyalty programs prevalent. 

* Still many catalog and retail merchandising tactics such as "door busters". 

Ratings report card on Google docs: http://bit.ly/1bPhwz3 

Holiday ecommerce merchandising wasn't very inspired this year. December ratings went DOWN from November. Based on this year's performance ecommerce is clearly in a rut.