Consumers are a demanding bunch. And apparently, they’re also a busy bunch. They don’t have time to twiddle their thumbs waiting for a website to load. So, when a website doesn’t render fast enough, they’ll take their business elsewhere. It’s as simple as that. Because of these time-strapped consumers, eCommerce website owners must make performance optimization a priority. Tuning a site to load quickly is a multi-faceted effort, however, seen in the fact that page load performance is often broken into...

Every element of a website can have a subconscious effect on visitors. Dotting every I and crossing every T becomes an understatement for UI/UX designers when something as seemingly insignificant as the placement of a dollar sign affects buying behavior. If a dollar sign can have a big influence on sales, imagine how important color choice can be. Because color can have such a weighty effect on purchasing habits, designers put a lot of stock into their choices, far beyond a...

Let’s face it. Although there are tons of surveys and research projects focused on issues prevalent to the eCommerce community, there aren’t a lot that drill down on website page performance. That lack of insight has led numerous individuals to continue to reference outdated studies, like the one conducted by Akamai in 2009. Five years ago, when Akamai reported that 47 percent of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less, the eCommerce environment was much different...

When budgets are tight, do-it-yourself projects come to the rescue. In fact, a study released by Lab42, a market research firm, highlighted DIY as one of the top three searches on Pinterest during the 2013 holiday season. Of those surveyed, 15 percent said they spend less money by using Pinterest, “likely due to DIY projects.” So what do arts and crafts projects on Pinterest have to do with eCommerce page load performance? Well, they usher in the idea that slow load times can...

Believe it or not, there are still folks out there in the World Wide Web that are relying on old, ancient browsers. These dinosaurs, the older versions of Internet Explorer and the NetScapes of an Internet gone by, are still out there today, and they’re still roaming the information highway, albeit slowly and with a skewed image of the online world of 2014. Even harder to grasp perhaps is the fact that your site visitors might possibly be entering through one...

Back in the days when the Hare Khrishna were spreading the Hindu word at airports and other public places, single-stem flowers could be found in the nearby trash cans. For anyone who was paying attention, the Hare Khrishna would, from time to time, fish those flowers straight out of the garbage. This odd behavior was described in the book "Influence: The Power of Persuasion," written by Robert Cialdini. In it, Cialdini described the rule of reciprocity, which the Hare Krishna leveraged...

As it turns out, Jaron Lanier, a leading computer scientist, author and scholar, has the ability to see into the future. Well, not really. But as the man who coined the term virtual reality, he’s pretty good at making educated guesses. In his new book, “Who Owns the Future?,” Lanier predicts a future that is led by those who own the biggest and most effective computers that are able to gather and analyze data better than anyone else, thereby calculating...

Minus the chore of finding a good parking spot and lugging around multiple shopping bags, online retailers are trying to replicate in-store experiences for their customers in the digital world. And other than a few snags, they’re getting much better at it. One of the snags tripping up many retailers, however, is the big task of inventory management. More often than shoppers would like, an item is placed into an online shopping cart – maybe even purchased – before finding out...

On average, shoppers switch retailers when they cross channels – talk about customer disloyalty. But can we really blame the consumer class for their shopping habits? Probably not, considering how difficult it is to draw a line in the sand between one retailer and another. Let’s face it; most big companies are just too similar in the type of goods they offer, the price structure they deliver and the purchasing experience they create. As a result, there is little differentiation between...

Since the dawn of the Internet, magazine publishers have had to rethink the way they connect with their readership. As they watched the consumers who were once giddy about their glossy pages begin to favor digitized editions, they scrambled to follow the curve and stay relevant. Lucky for most magazine publishers, print subscriptions were never their bread and butter. Print advertising, however, was. “It wasn’t so long ago that almost every magazine chased ever larger circulation, even if it meant losing...