Ecommerce Insites: Blog for Manufacturers, Distributors, and Retailers

Ecommerce is a force to be reckoned with in the world of retail. Being able to purchase nearly anything online has changed the way the consumer shops and bricks-and-mortar stores are feeling the pinch. 

It's both a benefit and a drawback for you and your customer. There are no showrooms in ecommerce.

When I'm not writing about ecommerce, I spend a large amount of time playing with broken glass. Now before you assume I'm insane, I'm a mosaic artist. Broken glass is the name of the game for me in my spare time, but I digress.

I loathe reality TV. No, really—I hate it. There. I said it. And I must be the only one person in the northern hemisphere that feels that way because every season there is a new and more ludicrous reality TV show vying for a spot on my TV watching line up.

User-generated content plays a critical role in the promotion of products on B2C ecommerce sites and in increasing conversion rates for products with reviews and ratings. Can user-generated content be as powerful for B2B organizations within the ecommerce space?

So, today I was reading an article at Internet Retailer about the recent hacking of the Zappos.com website and resulting loss of some key pieces of customer data.

The approach you take in launching a B2B ecommerce site has a direct effect on the success of your ecommerce initiative. Specifically, a tendency toward one approach over another can reveal what matters most to your organization as well as expose potential pitfalls you should take care to avoid.

You absolutely must have a blog if you want to be successful in B2B ecommerce in 2012 and here’s why:

Most B2B ecommerce sites—and their respective pages and product data—are safely tucked away behind the “nofollow” walls of a secure login portal. While this is an excellent strategy for keeping sensitive information like pricing, product details and support materials on a need to know basis, it also means that Google can’t index those pages and match them to relevant Google searches. Even with public-facing pages, chances are good that you don’t update your site’s content on a daily or weekly basis.

If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times.

Ask a B2B organization what functionalities they want in their new ecommerce site and they are bound to start listing off features and functionalities that culminates with the statement, “…you know—like Amazon.com.”