| Recent
Articles |
Quoth The Googlebot, "304!"
The latest news from Google Webmaster Central disclosed how the search engine's spider saves a webmaster from unnecessary bandwidth costs.
NetSuite Plugs In Keyword Marketing
The Keyword Marketing Module provided by on-demand business software firm NetSuite would be available to its customers at no additional charge.
Consumer Created Content Impacts Purchases
TJupiterResearch has discovered that consumer-created content (blogs, forums etc) are having an increasing impact on consumer's online purchasing.
Amazon Soon To Unbox Video
It wasn't too long ago that Ad Age reported that big-mouthed television executives let it slip that Amazon was preparing an online video content service, called Amazon Digital Video. A Net detective proves...
Google Parks Trailers With Movie Listings
Searching for a movie on Google will return a link to the film's trailer along with the reviews and showtimes that have been appearing in the Google Onebox.
|
|
| Recent WebProNews
Articles |
Belgians Ban Google From Their News
The Chilling Effects website revealed a judgment rendered by the Court of First Instance against Google that would ban them from indexing Copiepresse's French- and German-language news and photographs
MySpace: A Place To Plan A Hit
A 22-year-old Arizona woman is facing conspiracy to commit murder charges after trying to hire a hit man to kill her boyfriend's new...
Universal Angry At MySpace, YouTube
Universal Music Group CEO Doug Morris called the two media sharing websites "copyright infringers" and hinted at legal action against them. YouTube has until the end of September to appease Morris and company...
Google.org Aspires To Charity, Profits
Google.org has been getting a fair amount of attention lately. "The philanthropic arm of Google" was formed in late 2004, and, unlike most charitable ventures, is a for-profit entity. Although that sounds somewhat...
|
|
09.18.06
New Online Shopping Trends
 By
Jordan Williams
In this article, I am going to be talking about some new studies and reports that have been made available. I do not want to bore you with a bunch of numbers and statistics, but sometimes by looking at the numbers, we can realize certain areas that we can improve on for online businesses and realize areas that we do well in. We can give ourselves a big pat on the back and feel good about ourselves.
The first thing I want to talk about was done by comScore which is sponsored by Google. Now they examined the search behavior of 83 million Americans that were conducting over 552 million searches. They did this within 11 product categories and they were using either one or more of 24 different search engines, which by the way included the three major search engines, which were Google, MSN and Yahoo.
Now in their findings, they found out that out of those people that were doing search related purchases, 63 percent ended up buying their purchases offline and the other 37 percent ended up completing their purchases online. So you can see by this study that most people end up buying their products offline in a brick and mortar store, but 37 percent is still pretty good and that is nothing to squawk at. In fact, even though 37 percent may seem like a low number, the people that are making online purchases is increasing and at a very dramatic rate each and every year.
The Department of Commerce recently stated that the total eCommerce sales for 2005 were $86.3 billion and that is an increase of 24 percent over 2004. A 24 percent increase in one year for people that are making online purchases! Wow! That is actually a very big number, a very dramatic increase. Can you imagine if we continue with the trend this year and have another 24 percent increase of people that are buying online? That is very good news for us as online business owners.
This study also found out that most people do not buy right away. In fact most people like to shop and compare when searching for products to buy on the Internet. The study found out that over half of the online holiday buying activity occurred in multiple or subsequent Internet sessions. So this is a strong trend known as latent buying, where people will first go on the Internet to do their research or browsing and then they will go on the Internet at a later date to actually purchase the product online.
In fact there are three phases that people go through when they end up buying a purchase online. The first phase is called the browsing phase. And I will just use myself for this example. I was actually recently going on the Internet to look for a new digital camera and I went through these three phases without even knowing it.
The first phase is the browsing phase: In this phase a person would just go on the Internet to find general information about the product that he is searching for. In my case, I was looking to buy a digital camera. So I was browsing on the Internet to find out what brands there are and what models of digital cameras there are. I was trying to find out what features digital cameras have now and what can be included in different digital camera products and that is what most people go through in Phase 1, where they just browse to find the general information about features, details, uses of the product that they want to buy and see what brand names are out there for it.
Then is Phase 2: That is called the compare phase. Once they have all of their information about the different features of the brands, then they compare the details from brand to brand or from model to model of the product that they are thinking about buying. In my case, with a digital camera, when I went into Phase 2 to compare digital cameras, I looked at different brands and compared one brand of digital camera to another to see if one had better features than another camera or see what the price was. I went through different web sites and shopping comparison search engines, to see if I could find the lowest price and the best features and the best quality. So that is Phase 2 and that is called the comparison phase, where people actually compare prices, they compare features and quality of specific models and brands.
And then comes Phase 3, which is the most important phase. That is called the buying phase. That is where they actually make the purchase online. Now for an online business, it is very important for us to be accessible and available for all three of these phases. You want the search engine visitors to come to our web site at all three of those phases, so that they can get use to seeing our web site and the products that we offer.
So for Phase 1, during the browsing phase, you want to make sure that we have a large list of general keywords that related to our web site or products that we offer. These will just be general keywords. Now for Phase 2, the comparison phase, you want to make sure that you have more narrowed key words for your web site and your products. You want to include keywords that include the model names, or the brand names of the products or services that you offer and for Phase 3, you want to have extremely narrowed keywords that related to your web site or products and in Phase 3, you want to include the particular name of your web site or the particular exact name of the product or service you offer.
Click here to resume reading the article.
About
the Author:
Written by Jordan Williams who is the owner of WebCashLink.com. |
|
