If you’re a flower or gift eTailer, Valentine’s day is like a second Christmas for you: it’s great for business, but user expectation is high, very high. Hopefully, you’re fully prepared for the season and plan to read this to give yourself the proverbial pat on the back. But just in case, why not read on and see what the top gift eTailers are doing this Valentine’s day.

When thinking about ecommerce strategy, you have to think about 3 things – the past, the present, and the future.  What was successful in the past that is still working for you? What are you (and your competitors) doing today? What is on the horizon that you should be thinking about implementing? I have combined all three of these elements in order to provide a list of the top 5 strategies to implement in 2012.

Surely, last weekend, I wasn’t the only one bombarded with e-mails promising low, limited-time prices; free shipping; and exclusive 2-for-1 deals. How bombarded was I? From Black Friday to the Sunday night before Cyber Monday, my spam e-mail account (yes, I have one of those) had collected 125+ e-mail ads. And just for you, my dear readers, I looked through and turned on images for every single one of those e-mails to bring you this month’s Design 1, 2, 3.

Let’s get started then.

It’s almost the first week in September which means two things. Sadly, the sun is setting earlier, and happily, parents are packing their kids up, putting them on a bus and hoping they’ll learn how to make a better tomorrow. Ah, school. But what first day of class would be complete without pens, pencils and notebooks. This month’s design 1, 2, 3, takes a look at some of the top school supply eTailers to figure out who’s getting an ‘A’ and who needs to come by after class for some extra attention with teacher.

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of trampling through four-inch thick mud, under barbed wire and over junkyard cars, with 8,000 other extreme runners. It was a grand day filled with beer and bruises, and of course, lots of race... Read Full Article



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At Groove Commerce a lot of our design goals are focused on conversion and one of the areas that affects conversion the most is the checkout process. Before coming to Groove, I was never concerned with the number of steps in the checkout or the placement of the shipping rates table or if I had [...]



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After driving around this weekend and wandering into a few department stores, it’s clear that retailers have decided holiday shopping season is in full force. With that said, it’s time for e-tailers to make sure they have positioned themselves for success on the web this holiday shopping season....



[[ This is a content summary only. Visit GrooveCommerce.com for full links, other content, and more!

After driving around this weekend and wandering into a few department stores, it’s clear that retailers have decided holiday shopping season is in full force. With that said, it’s time for e-tailers to make sure they have positioned themselves for success on the web this holiday shopping season....



[[ This is a content summary only. Visit GrooveCommerce.com for full links, other content, and more!

Last week, I was buying tickets to an AIGA NY event and I was slightly taken aback at their checkout process. Now, being that I design checkouts for a living, I’ll admit I’m probably overly sensitive to speed bumps in the checkout process, but I like to think that AIGA NY (the NYC chapter of the renowned national design organization AIGA) is equally sensitive to user interfaces and design layouts.

When can half a pixel ruin a design? When the design calls for pixel level accuracy, of course. You might think that designing down to this level of detail is overkill and perhaps you feel your designs don’t call for it, but if you are in the business of creating beautiful user interfaces having the ability to create crisp, sharp UI elements is a must. Crisp UI elements create more contrast with their surroundings, are easier to read/view, can decrease file size, and add precision to your design.

Talk to anyone here at the Groove team, and they’ll bestow the benefits of finding and using the perfect eCommerce platform for you business, myself included. (Full disclosure: Groove Commerce is a loyal Magento Professional Partner.) But having all the right functionality for your site, from gift cards to multiple shopping levels, from one page checkout to dynamic blocks, isn’t enough to see those increases in conversion.

Unlike the other 99% of designers in the world, I don’t drink coffee. Well, that is to say I didn’t. Recently though, I’ve been a regular chai, latte, frappuccino drinking, from breakfast to dinner, designer. And so far, it’s been pretty tasty and only a little jittery. It’s fair to say though, that I know nothing about a good cup of joe, but I do know a thing or two about user-friendly, well-designed eCommerce sites.

We were onsite with a client last week delivering our findings from a site analysis exercise when an interesting debate broke out.  We provided the feedback that we didn’t like how their customer reviews utilized the “out of the box” stars from Power Reviews.  Typically, we make this argument from an aesthetics and branding perspective, but this client disagreed.

Ahh summertime. For many Americans that means bar-b-ques, swimming pools and roller coasters! Every summer as a child, I would look forward to the three hour drive in the car with my family to the amusement park, anticipating the breakneck speeds and loop-de-loops of the tallest and fastest coasters this side of the Mississippi. What I didn’t look forward to after three hours of driving? The long lines to buy admission tickets to get into the park. But oh boy, it’s 2010 and the internet is changing all of that!

In eCommerce, there’s a lot of talk about best practices. For some companies and clients, best practices are at the foundation of every eCommerce site. For others, best practices are rules that are made to be broken. In this month’s Design 1, 2, 3, we’ll look at some best practices and why they are the standards (hint: standards improve usability.)

There are usually two sides to every company’s eCommerce website team: the marketing team who have done research and set metrics of success, and the creative team who have also done research and applied usability standards. Because this team is still fairly new and undeveloped for most online businesses, their respective goals often misalign. Marketing wants to see that conversion rate number get higher and higher, the creative team wants to guarantee an enjoyable shopping experience for the customer to build loyalty and brand.

Usually the eCommerce industry doesn’t get a lot of press unless it’s around the holidays, and people are talking about cyber Monday. But in April and May, Time magazine, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times featured articles on online shopping. The article topics varied from “What’s Wrong with Online Shopping,” to “Shopping Scientest, Paco Underhill, Tackles Online Retail” to information gathering through online coupons. It was the Time magazine article that originally caught my eye. With a title like “What’s Wrong with Online Shopping,” my interest was certainly piqued.

Wow, I can’t believe April is almost over. Things have been moving right along here at Groove, but I’m sneaking in some time to write this month’s Design 1, 2, 3 for all my faithful readers (the six of you. Ha.) With all this good stuff going on—new clients, site launches, a move into Baltimore’s ETC building, and a three year anniversary coming up—Groove has a few things to celebrate. This got me on a kick of checking out a lot of Baltimore’s restaurant websites.