The Tuna Boat

E-commerce at Warp9 Speed!!

Ever been to an online retail site, ready to buy that last-minute gift, and just when you have found THE PERFECT pair of boxer shorts, the site fails for one reason or another? Considering that online sales continue to blow away everyone's expectations and projections, you would think that this kind of failure would be an exception and not the rule. How about this statistic - online shoppers in the U.S. spent $23.2 Billion over the 2004 holiday season, excluding travel!! That's $23 BILLION, with a B!! And most shopping carts break down in the middle of the shopping experience. How ridiculous!

The top 300 online retail sites account for over 55% of all online sales and they average a conversion rate of only 3.8%. That means for every 100 shoppers that go to an online site, less than 4 buy anything. Worse than that, some sites record upwards of 80% cart abandonment, meaning that after a shopper has selected an item and put it in their shopping cart, something prevented them from going through with the sale. Could you imaging walking through a Target or Old Navy and see half-full shopping carts all over the aisles? That would suck!

Ah, but there is an answer to the woes for these online retailers - and it's called Warp9. One of my many activities is overseeing the sales effort for Warp9 and I have to say, it is by far one of the most robust e-commerce applications on the market. The clients that utilize Warp9's system include Magellan's Travel Supplies (www.magellans.com), Wind and Weather (www.windandweather.com) and the newest client, Carabella (www.carabella.com).

In the wake of implementing a new e-commerce platform and increasing its Web marketing, Carabella has seen its online sales grow to 50% of TOTAL sales from 20% in just four months! And now on Warp9's platform, the cross-selling promotions and other capabilities has created an online site that rivals the best in the biz.

And now the company is about to release this really cool feature that lets retailers load up their catalogs and the customer can flip through it as if it were sitting right in front of them - a virtual catalog where they can actually click on a picture and read the description and order as if they were flipping through at home. It is VERY COOL! Let me know if you know any companies that are trying to launch an online site or want to improve their current system and we'll get 'em on the Warp9 platform. They will be blown away.

Moving at Warp9 speed,

Brian

posted by Brian Altounian @ 8:46 AM