Ecommerce quick guide

Ecommerce success factors

Successful Ecommerce sites are no different from other online businesses since they have a well defined digital marketing strategy and online brand-strategy.

But retailers also have specific techniques to manage which we cover in this section including merchandising, payment and security and sales optimisation.

Other digital marketing tactics like Paid search, SEO, Social media, Email marketing and conversion rate optimisation all require different approaches for Ecommerce sites.

Ecommerce definition

Put simply Ecommerce is online buying. Our coverage of Ecommerce includes all transactional ecommerce:

• Retail (of course)
• Financial services (applications and "straight through processing")
• Travel (holidays and flights)

There is a broader view of Ecommerce which includes non-financial transactions also like B2B lead-generation and email marketing which we cover in other parts of the site.

Recommended member resources for Ecommerce

Toolkits on

• B2B startup digital marketing plan workbook and case study

Ebooks on Ecommerce

• E-commerce design pattern guide
• E-commerce statistics benchmark

Online training on Ecommerce

• Website and e-commerce personalization guide

Marketing templates on Ecommerce

• E-commerce success mapping
• Google Analytics for e-commerce template
• Multichannel retail proposition audit and competitor benchmarking template
• Online retail merchandising guide

Related statistics

Our compilations of Ecommerce statistics focus on conversion rates:

1. Which are the most important retail e-commerce traffic sources?
2. E-commerce conversion rates - how do yours compare?
3. Forecast growth in percentage of online retail / Ecommerce sales
4. 38 Indispensable E-commerce stats to inform your 2017 multichannel sales strategy
5. Incredible new stats show just how important reviews and ratings are for ecommerce sites

Tools & Software

The most important type of tools we cover here are personalisation for Ecommerce:

• 30 website personalization and recommendations software tools
• Essential Ecommerce Cart Recovery Tools
• Essential Ecommerce Management Tools
• Selecting Ecommerce personalisation software
• Our interview with Malcolm Duckett about Magiq dynamic personalization

Best websites on Ecommerce

• Internet Retailing - a UK portal and monthly magazine we recommend all retailers subscribe to
• Internet Retailer - The best US site for online merchants
• Catalogue Ebusiness - another UK site to help catalogue publishers integrate their online and offline marketing
• Retail Technology - A similar site to Internet Retailing with more alerts on Ecommerce developments and case studies
• Elastic Path blog - Some of the best practical advice on how to grow sales online

Key techniques for Ecommerce

These are the related techniques which we recommend as important for managing Ecommerce effectively. View these hub pages giving details on best practices, statistics and examples for these techniques:

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