5 TIps To Cross Ecom's Rubicon
Smart merchants are beginning to cross the ecommerce rubicon between content and commerce. Discover 5 Tips to cross your online store's ecommerce rubicon.

5 TIps

* “Magazine” your content
* Curate from brands
* Curate from customers
* Lean & Visual Win
* Tie In Email, Social & Mobile

Going to incorporate @Guillaume Decugis and Scoop.it's ideas on Lean Content on this not very lean post too. I set aside some content to keep the post pinging with fresh content.

Evergreen means our team will refresh the content (or ask for help from our Ambassadors to do so) regularly. Not all content is equal. Places in our "evergreen" regularly scheduled updates category must be earned (lol).

So help 5 Tips to Cross the Ecom Rubicon earn evergreen status, or better yet contribute your thoughts and we will curate in.

Crossing the Rubicon between content and commerce is the BIG ISSUE in online retailing today. Discover our tips to cross and add yorus.  

Ecommerce For Everyone
There are some web marketing lessons learned best by creating an online store such as:

• Words Matter as they lead (or don’t) to conversion.
• Design Matter as it leads (or doesn’t) to conversion.
• Money Is The Best Metric.
• Money Helps Create The Best Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
• Money helps create a testing culture.

 
Creating a store is so easy, we developed Curagmai's Bookstore with Amazon's Associates tool in about half a day, everyone should have an ecommerce store these days.  

As Rodney said in Back To School - Shakespeare for Everyone!

Read our Ecommerce For Everyone post: 
http://www.curagami.com/magical-thinking/news/shakespeare-for-everyone-ecommerce-lessons/

& Visit the new Curagmai Bookstore
http://www.Curagami.com/books.html 

Do you have an affiliate store you want to share? Email martin(at)Curagmai.com and we will create a gallery of cool stores for personal brands, companies and B2B marketing teams. 
 

Learning Ecom
There are some Internet marketing lessons you can only learn if you sell something. Amazon makes it so easy to add a bookstore to your site every site should have one...if only because there are some things about web marketing you can only learn by selling online.

Curagami's New Amazon Power Bookstore:

http://www.curagami.com/books.html

While writing content for online environments you must think of the following paradox: reading is the PRIMARY action performed on the web. AND people try to read as LITTLE as possible (online) 20%!...

Deep Dive Moon-Audio Web Analytics
Spending the day (and probably most of the weekend) deep diving #googleanlaytics  listening for the music of http://www.Moon-Audio.com. Here are a few of the questions I like to ask every quarter:

* YTD vs. LYTD sales by product & brand. 
* Site heuristics (time on, pages viewed, bounce YTD vs. LYTD. 
* Top 10 Internal searches (compared to last time we looked). 
* Top content. 
* Referring sources. 
* New vs. Returning YTD vs. LYTD. 
* Growth in social. 
* Most linked, shared & reviewed content (will be their Dragon Audio Cable so check against last bench marks). 
* Review the funnel (top entry / exit, Recency, Frequency, Monetary RFM values). 
* 80:20 rule in product sales, brands and content.  

 Read more about analytics deep dives on G+: https://plus.google.com/+MartinWSmith/posts/EHq6vvSJhxf

Ecommerce Strategy vs. Tactics
Which comes first ecommerce strategy or tactics? Trick question. Doesn't matter as long as you end up swimming in a blue ocean.

How did we made more than $30M in online commerce? Watch our first Ecommerce Master Class Video & to learn about directed search wins hearts, minds and loyalty. Can watching a 2 minute video really make millions? Worked for us :). M

Hero Marketing: Compete with Amazon shares passion, customer focus, exponential thinking & need to create movements not promotions needed to win online and how SMBs can compete with Amazon.

Here are 5 tips to increase e-commerce sales through quality customer service and relevant content, targeting the 2nd step of the consumer conversion funnel

WaNeLo.com
WaNeLo.com understands something you don't. They understand there is NO WAY to compete head-to-head with Amazon. Better to shift to a "blue ocean" by creating a highly social, mobile and gamified environment.

As a "mashup artist" WaNeLo.com can create pages that cost pennies, pages that may generate dollars. Are there bumps with this "new age" affiliate marketing? Of course, but, as the pagespread chart illustrates, you don't beat the giant YOU CO-OPT him :).

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.

$50,000 New Ecommerce Web Design Contest
FOMs (Friends of Martin's) are working on a cool event to support my +FedEx keynote talk in Maryland at the end of February. We have 3 partners willing to contribute time into a "prize" to help online merchants pivot to the NEW Ecommerce.

If you would like to contribute email Martin(at)Curagami.com (not on our site yet as we may fill our partner roster from friends and social. Read more about the contest on G+
https://plus.google.com/102639884404823294558/posts/M3n5Ds4Tk9p

Never been more important to know your website's long tail than in ou social / mobile / connected time as Amazon proves and WaNeLo illustrates.

There is a new invisible giant, a giant using 5 "tricks" so the "new seo" is hard and harder to see and understand. This Haiku Deck and Curatti blog post is about how to see the invisible giant. How to win hearts, minds and loyalty online.

Revolution Has Begun, Now Join & Contribute
Are you as frustrated, bored and wanting more from ecommerce as we are? "We" is five marketing, merchants and Magento programmers who know TOGETHER we change the way we communicate, share and sell things to one another.

Learn More
http://bit.ly/ecom_revolution_google 

Bad links can kill your website's hard-won authority, reputation & traffic. Use Google's disavow tool to protect your site's traffic from SEO bandits.

Crowdfunding is a new powerful marketing channel similar to what email marketing used to be - high profit, low cost with big social and UGC benefits.

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.

Social & Mobile Ecommerce
Ecommerce is being transformed by social and mobile. The implications for merchants are VAST. How your Ecommerce site creates conversations and digitally listens will determine its value. No matter how social your online store it isn't social enough for the immediate future.This Haiku Deck can help your site do things like:

* Create conversations that lower costs and increase profits.
* Build an online community.
* Learn to listen "digitally".
* Scale your store to the next level.
* Create an engine that mines User Generated Content.

Can your store be too social? Not so much as it turns out.

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

There is a new invisible giant, a giant using 5 "tricks" so the "new seo" is hard and harder to see and understand. This Haiku Deck and Curatti blog post is about how to see the invisible giant. How to win hearts, minds and loyalty online.

We've named the hard to see new seo The Invisible Giant. Thousands have now seen, interacted with, shared and commented on The Invisible Giant. Have you?

Haiku Deck
http://shar.es/1nCjlP

Curatti Blog Post
http://curatti.com/invisible-giant-hard-see-new-seo/

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.

If you've been looking for a perfect web template for an on-line retail business you came to the right place, because today I'm gonna show you 16 of the newest and coolest e-commerce website templates.

Curagami Score & Ecommerce
At our Startup funded startup Curagami we’ve created a new “super metric” called a Curagami Score”. We combine 11 different metrics from pagespread (number of pages in Google) to inbound links. We also have a few proprietary metrics such as LEI (Link Efficiency index).

Once you know a site’s Curagami Score its possible to create an ecosystem combining ANY website. Once you have an ecosystem you can compare even the most unlikely sites. Why would you want to create such a comparison? Because it’s interesting and informative to know who is “winning the day” in online marketing.

I created Curagami scores for websites from Red Bull to Schwan’s wondering if we could learn even more lessons from the master brander Red Bull (see my Curatti post Red Bull Branding Lessons).

Once we created Curagami scores for six different websites we can add them up and compare the share for each. The pie chart, from my Connection: The New Ecommerce Haiku Deck, shows the results.

One easy deduction? If Zappos and the other Ecommies on our comparison list were to adapt a more Red Bull-like branding approach their online “castles” would grow stronger faster. Zappos was closest the running of the Red Bulls but still a distant second. Look how completely Red Bull dominates their space.

Monster is so far away from Red Bull they won’t catch up in this lifetime UNLESS they disrupt instead of trying to copy and “be like” their bigger brother. Now imagine you knew your Curagami score and your competitor’s. How helpful would it be to know where you are winning and losing online?

Funny, that’s what we were thinking.