Target Leaves Amazon, Puts Pieces Back Together
Red-and-white-happy retailer Target has announced the launch of their spankin’ new, autonomous Target.com, thus ending a 10-year reliance on (and stiff payments to) Amazon for their e-commerce platform. The move was most likely spurred by continually escalating online sales and Target’s perceived need to break away from one of its toughest competitors. Internet Retailer estimated that Target’s online revenue grew a substantial 10 percent from’09 to ’10–from$1.21 billion to $1.33 billion. “We believe that e-commerce became strategically too important for Target to outsource this business to Amazon, in particular given the increasing competition between the two companies,” said Colin Sebastian, an analyst for Target. With its new IBM software-based site, the company plans to offer faster checkout, an enhanced customer-review template, and improved graphics. This is big news for both Target and Amazon–now let’s see how the former does swimming in the ocean on its own!
Read more at internetretailer.com.
August 24: Time to Start Thinking Holidays!
Allison Enright of Internet Retailer, who just so happens to have also written the preceding article, is reminding e-retailers that now–the peak of summer–is not a moment too soon to begin enhancing your web pages for holiday shoppers. One of the most (recently) important things your company can devote energy to is making sure all your web pages load flawlessly on all devices. As we’ve previously touched on, tablet and smartphone use for online shopping is burgeoning big time. Therefore, it behooves any e-retailer to make certain their customers can always access product pages with immaculate ease on this (five months from now), the most sacred of shopping weeks.
Read the full story at internetretailer.com.
Neato Video SEO
Earlier this week we discussed optimizing your images for search-engine affability. Two days later, Grant Crowell of the Video Commerce Consortium wrote a great piece on enhancing your video for SEO purposes. According to Crowell, video SEO enhances existing website SEO. He also explains how videos embedded in e-commerce sites are better positioned for SERP ranking than those on YouTube. Crowell covers a host of techniques for SEO-ing your video, including syndication, meta data, embedding, and more.
Read the in-depth story at video-commerce.org.
