Wal-Mart’s ecommerce website gets a revamp with new social features like ‘Trending Now’, which is designed to match the shopping patterns of the new-age online customers.
The world’s largest retailer is making extensive use of its 4,000-plus store footprint along with mobility to achieve dominance in the digital sphere.
Walmart now credits revenues to brick-and-mortar stores for online purchases that are picked up there, reducing the sense of internal inter-channel competition, according to Neil Ashe, CEO of Walmart’s global ecommerce division. He added that about half of the merchandise ordered on Walmart’s website is shipped directly to a store, according to published reports, and that Walmart is also the only e-commerce site that allows its customers to pay cash for online purchases.
If you don’t have enough users who visit your website, it will obviously hit your ecommerce business badly. The success of an ecommerce business depends on the website’s traffic, so it is imperative to work on increasing the traffic to your website. Here are some tips:
Email Marketing
Yes, email marketing is not dead and it is still a strong marketing tool. Have a tool like MailChimp or Aweber to capture the list of subscribers from your website. When you have a sufficient number of people, start sending newsletters on a daily/weekly basis to get back the users to the website.
Social Media
Share your new offers, discounts, blog posts and virtually anything related to our business with social media. This is where you will get maximum traction. Have a proper strategy in place and work according to that.
Offline Marketing
After the proliferation of internet and social media, you would be thinking that offline marketing is dead? You are wrong! It’s still has so much to offer. If you use it strategically along with online media, then it can do wonders. For example, have a QR code of our website and apps on your print material rather than just the URL. It’s easy for the target audience to access the content. Also have your web and social media profiles on your business card too.
our business with social media. This is where you will get maximum traction. Have a proper strategy in place and work according to that.
Two years ago, when Strangeloop started tracking the load times of 2,000 top North American ecommerce sites, we had a hunch we’d spot some interesting trends over time. We did not expect, however, to see that pages are continuing to get slower rather than faster. Yet according to the Fall 2012 release of our quarterly Ecommerce Page Speed and Web Performance State of the Union, which came out today, that’s exactly what’s happening.
Not only are pages slower, they’re dramatically slower. Since November 2011, when we last tested these sites, the median home page has taken a 9% performance hit, with load time increasing from 5.94 seconds to 6.5 seconds. This flies in the face of conventional belief that, thanks to faster browsers, networks, and devices, the average end user is enjoying a premium online experience. This is clearly not the case. As user expectations continue to grow, the gap between expectations and reality continues to widen.
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Maintenance of IT systems within the distribution center of a retail outlet is complex. Applications like enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, warehouse management systems (WMS), warehouse control system (WCS), and others like labor management system (LMS) and transportation management system (TMS) are just some of the integration systems that top the maintenance checklist. A small problem in any of these areas could cause damage to the entire system.
To avoid such problems, it is imperative that you understand how data is collected originally within the various applications. This understanding can uncover deficiencies in processes or controls or even the base applications. These deficiencies can then be counter avoided by placing additional controls within the process of analyzing the base data for business intelligence applications. Software updates and maintenance releases are a must for all retailers systems. Read more
The two-tier design of applications consists of the three components of an application: presentation, processing, and data—distributed into two layers among the client and server. In this design, presentation is handled exclusively by the client, whereas the business logic required for processing the data is split between the client and the server. All application codes reside on the client side and the data on the database server.
One of the major advantages of two-tier architecture is the speed of application development. The time required to develop a two-tier system is considerably less than the time required to develop a system with n-tier architecture. Read more
Cloaking: This is the technique where web sites intercept each request, recognize the ones from search engine bots and serve up different content to the bots rather than serving up the same pages seen by the end user. It is obvious how this can be misused; you can load the web pages you serve up to the bots with misinformation to get a higher ranking. An action such as this can very well result in the search engines blocking your web site.
Link Farms: Being a part of link farms, where web masters agree to put links to each other’s sites on their pages to increase their ranking, is also a quick way to get blacklisted.
Monitor and Control bot Traffic: Modern search crawlers constantly update their caches, and hence, trawl through the World Wide Web at amazing regularity to detect changes. There is a good chance that these requests from bots might overwhelm the web site, and controlling this is of high importance. One solution is to have a mirror website running on the site dedicated to serving bots only. A load balancer can then be configured to redirect all requests from spider bots to that particular web server.
According to a research done by Forrester, “88% of Web buyers say that they have abandoned an online shopping cart without completing a transaction”. The critical part is that the percentage was same five years ago and it shows the merchants hardly did anything to improve this. Since the business is done online, Merchants need to provide valuable offers based on the personal behavior and likes of the customers. Read more
Wal-Mart’s ecommerce website gets a revamp with new social features like ‘Trending Now’, which is designed to match the shopping patterns of the new-age online customers.
