I know what you’re thinking. “Jeans? AGAIN?!” Can you tell that I need to buy some? I’m actually sitting here with a sweet pair of Gap brand demin on right now, except, tragically, a bout with some Ikea furniture has caused a full-on, 1983 rip to appear on one of the knees. I look ridiculous. So you can’t blame me for the fact that my eCommerce eye has lately drifted to online jeans retailers and how you can find the “right” pair online… no dressing room necessary. The latest is American Eagle’s attempt to lure shoppers into conversions with free jeans… provided that your favorite style aligns with the preferences of other AE online shoppers. Buy a pair before the end of the month, and if that style is “voted” the most popular, you get some a free pair. I don’t usually shop at AE, but it drew me in.

The reason that I found it interesting enough to post here, however, was not the promotion itself… but how the retailer managed to effectively utilize embedded video and other video-inspired media in their site and the promotion. Each jean style has a “personality” associated with it showcased in a short video, and they’re cute in a MTV teenager way, with the added benefit of showing the jeans in action. The customer isn’t forced to watch them, but they serve a useful function and I couldn’t help but watch as I explored the store. Not only that, they’ve got a extremely useful “Jeans On” rotate function that allows you to not only see the jeans on, but show the wearer rotating to see how they fit all over. You can play with one of them here. I admit, I was a fan.

Helpful media? Free jeans? Easy-to-use catalog? I’m sold, American Eagle. I’ve now got some on the way… and I’ll let you know if I win that free pair.

Varien (and I) have our first article over at Digital Web Magazine, and we’re super stoked about it. In it, we offer you some in-depth tips on what to look for in a eCommerce package to keep your business running smoothly, as well as help your online store grow and thrive. Here’s an excerpt regarding open-source eCommerce solutions (like Magento):

Choosing open-source eCommerce solutions for your online business is becoming a popular option, especially for companies seeking greater flexibility. If you decide to pursue an open-source application to manage your store, make sure to thoroughly research and examine your options. Is the project continuously updated, or has it been stagnant for a long time, with very few updates on the project and very little news as to where it is headed? Several open-source solutions are released every year. However, very few have the longevity that you will need to be used as a foundation for your online store. Examine the programmers behind it, and others who use the program. Will you be able to integrate your catalog, products, and orders into it successfully? With some research, open source could be exactly the eCommerce solution that you are looking for, allowing, in some cases, a flexibility you cannot find anywhere else.

If you like what you see, make sure to check out the whole article. I’m pretty proud of it, and I think that it can offer good advice to even the most jaded of eCommerce professionals.

This year for the first time, we’re a partner sponsor of the Blog Business Summit, a conference on business blogging that’s been touring the country since 2004. They’re essentially a convention devoted to helping business bloggers like you and me improve our craft, and (hopefully) blog in a way that keep our businesses growing and thriving.

If you were interested in going, well, Varien is here to help. Use the code below to get $100 off of your membership fee, and check it out!

Varien Discount Code: P17CHI

Admittedly, I’m only a casual user of Twitter, mostly owing to the fact that most of my updates say things like, “Playing the Wii while I should be doing something adult… like paying bills,” which, admittedly, most of my friends just don’t care about (except for the people who don’t have a Wii… they only take note to ask if they can come over and play). Even as a casual user, however, I can’t help but see the potential in its service, especially for those of us in eCommerce. For those of you not yet in-the-know, Twitter is a service that could almost be classified as “mini-blogging,” enabling its users to post 140 character-long updates about almost anything, anytime. It’s become incredibly popular incredibly fast, and more inventive uses of the service are revealing themselves all the time.

Recently, in the eCommerce world, sites like Amazon.com and Woot have begun using the service to advertise special offers, sending these updates straight into a Twitter user’s e-mail inbox or RSS feed. Imagine how far online retailers could go with this! Custom feeds for items as broad as music, or as specific as “Comedy Central TV Show DVD Box Sets”… Twitter presents a way to deliver a direct jolt to a potential consumer in a manner that very few other tools currently can. Because of this, it’s in a position to be huge for eCommerce in a way that no one was expecting. Think about what Twitter might be able to do for your online business - would it be more suited to product updates or releases? Could it be used to more easily advertise offers? Experiment! From here, the service can only become more popular… integrate into the way you do business now, and you can confidently smile when your competitors are scrambling to figure out Twitter a year from now.

It’s easy enough as an online retailer to predict some of the standard keywords a shopper might use to search his or her site for a product. A pair of women’s pants, for example, can be categorized in standard searches like “jeans,” “flare,” “size 9.” But as this article on InternetRetailer.com points out, can the consumer search your site for “comfortable?” How about “roomy?” Enter the Web 2.0 approach of Buzzillions, an online store that takes customer feedback and lets it dictate the site’s search keywords, utilizing user-based reviews of pros, cons, even best uses to aid the consumer in finding exactly what they want in a product. Since ease of search and navigation are paramount to internet shoppers, a helpful and extremely intuitive system like this can only be the beginning of this interactive searching trend. As noted in the article, ““Buzzillions is just the tip of what you are going to see.”

Which begs the question: How else can a system like this be effectively utilized in eCommerce? Where can it go from here?

Online shopping is nothing new. But what about when the customer receives the package, opens the box, and realizes it isn’t what s/he was looking for? One option is to just bring it back to the brick-and-mortar store.

But some retailers are creating solutions which allow customers to return items from their home. Retailers like Target and Amazon (not coincidentally running on the same platform) have started offering free return shipping by allowing their customers to print shipping labels for returns from their website. Shoe retailing giant Zappos even advertises this on their homepage:

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Of course, there are still limitations to the returns. Zappos has a generous limit of 365 days while Buy.com has a more limited 14-day policy. Most store returns fall somewhere in between, with some products in the same store having a shorter return time than others. With shipping on returns, there is also usually a weight limit, for example, 70 pounds on Amazon.

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Amazon offers a simple four-step process for return shipping

Although not all businesses can afford to offer free return shipping, many can still offer to accept returns through the mail, just as they send their orders through mail. It might be a bit more of a hassle to deal with these returned shipments, not to mention the refunds involved, but it’s worth the work to have satisfied customers who know what they’re getting and will come back to shop with you.

With the popularity of online video sharing websites such as YouTube it's no wonder that online retailers are recognizing Internet video as a strong tool and Internet Retailer had an article in its last issue about the rise. The biggest question that remains, however, is how to use this tool to benefit each individual company. Already, some companies, like Buy.com and American Eagle, have taken the leap into using video to promote products and help keep their customers entertained while shopping. Movie rental giant, Netflix, is doing something similar by offering video movie trailers on its site.

From short cooking programs on Yahoo! to American Eagle’s in-store broadcast to home movies on YouTube, the possibilities for video seem endless. With all these ways to use Internet video, the question is no longer if Internet TV will help a business, but how it can be used to help online retailers. Have you used video in your site? Let us know in the comments.

While doing our usability consultant series we come across many different search engines. Some are great, while others need serious improvements. A great example of a well-working search engine is the one found at online jewelry retailer Ice.com’s site. Internet Retailer pointed out in an article that Ice.com has raised their conversion rates by 25-50% by including their best sellers at the top of every search result page.

The search engine not only displays results for what you are looking for, but also the top sellers related to your search. For example, in searching for “rings,” the search engine will give you all the ring results, with the top selling four rings listed in a “Top Sellers” section at the top of the search results.

On top of that, sorting results within a search is made easy. Dropdown menus make sorting by a specific stone, metal, stone shape, or occasion easy. Links near the top of the search result make it possible to sort by price or new releases. The standard option of choosing how many products to display also makes viewing search results easier for the consumer. Retailers can learn a lot to improve their own search engines from this example.

This diagram is the selling point for Offertrax, a simple rss-based price tracking system pointed out in Springwise Though terms like “invasion of privacy” come to mind when thinking of tracking, it works in a very non-Big-Brother way by keeping everything anonymous. (Or, in some cases, non-anonymous, if the user chooses so.)

On the buyer side, consumers can comparison shop and track price changes using a MyTrax reader to “subscribe to the RSS feed of an existing track.” Shoppers with a MyTrax reader can choose to share their tracks with other users or to keep their tracks private. Trackers can also comment on other tracks and even unsubscribe to tracks that no longer interest them. But while shoppers gain from having pricing information so readily available, some sellers may suffer.

Offertrax works on the seller side by simply providing some basic html code and a “Track This Offer” button to be put on a retailer’s catalog pages. The site’s page offers online retailers a chance to increase conversion, turning the rate of casual browsers into buying customers by giving them information on pricing. But while this tool can greatly benefit comparison shoppers, will it really do what it claims and increase conversion, or will it just let customers shop around more without actually buying something? For sellers, it could even have the opposite effect of driving shoppers away from your site to retailers where the price is lower. Instead of lowering conversion, it might even encourage lower rates by supporting picky shoppers to browse around more before buying. And despite being free to customers, there are those customers who don’t want the hassle of researching before buying, making Offertrax useless to them.

Despite these customers, Offertrax looks to be in a good position. But whether it will help or hurt a business depends on the needs of the shoppers.

Visa is pushing ecommerce merchants to adopt the security rules created back in May by credit card companies by offering both rewards and fines, according to CNET. The fines will actually fall on banks if their merchants don’t follow the security rules created by Visa and Mastercard, but banks are expected to pass these fines on. Interestingly, the article specifies that the rewards “are available to transaction service providers that deal with the largest 1,200 merchants” but doesn’t specify whether the fines are limited in scope.

The rules main aim is to ensure that ecommerce stores are securely storing credit card data using firewalls, encryption and most hilarious, not using default passwords. I find the idea that you could access Target’s admin panel using the username: admin and password: admin to be ridiculous, but Visa thinks it’s a problem. Visa thinks it’s so much of a problem that they sent out $4.6 million in fines in 2006. The moral of this story; make sure you securely store your customers’ information.