​We love to keep tabs on the trends of online selling and sharing these insights with our merchants to help them drive new sales.  Occasionally, we'll highlight a particular report from an authoritative source in the industry such as industry pundits, cart providers or marketplaces.  

This "Research Roundup" summarizes some of the key take-aways from Adobe's post-holiday report on ecommerce for the sites it monitors ("4,500 retail websites, 55 million SKUs, and more than one trillion visits").

While there are plenty of interesting statistics, a couple key takeaways stood out to us:

What:  When classifying merchants according to size, small merchants (those who, as classified by Adobe, do less than $10M online), have the highest mobile conversion rate.   That is, their buyers complete purchases on mobile devices more so than medium and large businesses!
Why You Should Care: small businesses lack the resources to out-market their larger brethren -- but they can still out maneuver them in terms of better buyer experiences to win the sale.  
What Can You Do About It: leverage our mobile best practices and be aggressive in terms of providing a mobile shopping and checkout experience.  

 
What: sales growth continues during holiday (no surprise!), fueled in part by more unit sales and cheaper products (especially in consumer electronics). 
Why You Should Care: holiday trends portend broader trends for the rest of the year, and it's never too early to start thinking about products for the next year, and adding cheaper yet higher-margin products to your inventory will ensure you well setup to take advantage of this trend now and in the future.
What Can You Do About It: work with your suppliers to identify new, cheaper products -- and start listing more products.

In a pre-Thanksgiving blog post, Google announced updates to their mobile shopping experience.  

Recognizing that mobile shopping habits continue to evolve, Google's changes to the buyer experience to help buyers "...browse, research, compare, and...[buy]."

Specific enhancements include:

• Easier access to key product information via a “Quick View” button which exposes a larger image, the product description, product reviews and seller ratings.
• A new label alerting the buyer if there’s a “newer model available” (in the case you are browsing last year’s product).
• Navigation that enables buyers to easily find similar or related products
• Merchandising so buyers can discover more products from the same brands or retailers

Underlying all of these changes is rich, merchant-provided data -- data that we can help find, organize, and enrich prior to feeding to Google.

We take pride in enabling sellers to meet Google Shopping best practices and guidelines that help drive their sales.  If you are new to us, please contact us to learn more or schedule a demo!

It's ecommerce's worst kept secret: despite mobile devices being the tool-of-choice for online shopping, that experience is restricted to just browsing.  The number of buyers actually using checkout on their mobile devices lags compared to those who checkout on their desktop.  

In fact, some studies show that mobile transactions' lag behind desktop is significant: desktop converts at almost 3x when compared to mobile.  

That's not just a problem, it's missed revenue -- you spent all that money getting buyers to your site, you know your buyers are browsing on their mobile device (and you have optimized your listings for the mobile experience)...why lose them when you are most likely to transact the sale?

So what can a merchant do?  One of our favorite industry intelligence firms, L2, has proffered up the following best practices and considerations to optimize your mobile checkout process and increase mobile transactions:

1. Use single-page checkout.  With the average checkout process being 3 pages long, a mobile user will abandon their cart rather than having to complete yet another page of checkout information!
2. Utilize auto-complete for relevant fields.  Even if you go to just one page checkout, there will be on average 12 fields to fill out -- a big deterrent for a mobile user.  Depending on the field type, the first few characters typed can expose auto-complete responses such as an address.
3. Use expedited checkout options in a non-intrusive way.  This means options like Apple Pay or Google Pay on your product detail page, or anchored to the footer of each page in the checkout process.

We take pride in enabling sellers to meet industry best practices and guidelines that help drive their sales.  If you are new to us, please contact us to learn more or schedule a demo!

Earlier in October, Adobe published their predictions for the 2016 holiday season.  With historic accuracy of 2%, it's a good set of predictions to keep in mind as you finalize your holiday e-commerce marketing efforts.

Some interesting nuggets:

• Holiday shopping continues to start earlier and earlier every year, with 31% of shoppers saying they started before November 1st -- a 5% increase from last year.
• Besides the expected sales surges on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, each and every day during the holiday season should see a whopping $1B in transactions per day. 
• Large retailers are expected to see 16.6% in year-over-year (YoY) growth during the holiday period; and smaller retailers should see 7% YoY growth.
• Whereas actual checkout is still typically conducted via websites (i.e. on a PC or laptop), up to 66% of browsing will be done on a mobile device.

What this means for retailers:

• Holiday planning should be done well ahead of Thanksgiving week.  In fact, you should have all of your plans wrapped up by end of September at the latest.
• Actual marketing tactics should begin at the start of November, latest, and continue every day throughout the holiday season
• Make sure your listings are optimized for shoppers using mobile devices.  You can look at our blog post "Mobile (is) First" for more suggestions.
• Post-holiday, measure your holiday sales strategy effectiveness against expectations -- success means you should see a 7% growth in overall holiday sales vs. last year.  

We wish all of our retailers a happy and successful holiday season!