As reported in Tech Crunch, Instagram has continued experimenting on monetizing their users by embedding payments into posts.  

Unlike the current ecommerce program which sends user off Instagram to the merchant's site, the embedded payments means the user completes the transaction and stays on Instagram.   

While interesting, this is an early program so we'll monitor its effect on conversion and thus business case for merchants to adopt the offering.  For now we'd recommend merchants test the experience from a buyer perspective to get a gut feeling for applicability to their business.  

We take pride in enabling sellers to meet marketplace 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!

​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!

Judging from the chatter on Amazon's discussion boards, Amazon really screwed up this morning.

We heard early this morning from our toy sellers that they had received notification from Amazon that they do not meet Amazon's Holiday Guidelines and thus would be shut out of the toys category for the holiday buying season.

This despite the sellers' not just meeting the guidelines but actually having stellar performance!

Even if you don't sell in this category, we're sure you can understand the alarm this would set off for affected sellers -- your revenue for toys depends almost entirely on holiday sales...and here's one of your best performing channels just evaporating.  

We realize it's Halloween, but do you really need to scare the you-know-what out of your toy sellers?

​We anticipate this to be corrected soon -- we'll keep you updated once we learn more.

UPDATE: As expected, Amazon recognized their mistake and retracted the erroneous notifications.  Reports from affected sellers show they are both relieved and in need of new shorts.  

We take pride in enabling sellers to meet marketplace 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!