Well, it’s winter again. In case you’ve spent your entire life isolated on tiny island off the coast of the DPRK, this means it’s time for incessant holiday promotions. In the internet age, however, that doesn’t have to mean blasting Jingle Bells at 180 decibels and shrieking “Happy Holidays” on every flyer. It means being attuned to the actual reasons customers are shopping online.

The key motivators for online holiday shopping are selection, shipping and convenience, and price. Each of these factors can be exploited on your website.
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We often have customers coming into us asking for a shopping cart. Admittedly, this is often a complex process. There are few brand names the average consumer will recognize. Many times, a list of 300 features consists of ten you care about, 30 which you assumed were in every cart, and 260 which are only of use if you do drop-shipping to customers in Outer Mongolia and accepting payments in Vanuatuan Vatu. Now, we don’t expect you to come to us saying “CS-Cart please”, or “We want Zen-Cart”. We’ll do the research, but you have to meet us halfway– there’s a lot you can plan in advance to make the process easier and much smarter.
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The tablet metaphor has finally taken off in 2010 and 2011, on the success of the iPad series and its initators. In spite of my skepticism, people did buy them and seem to be sticking to them, in ways not seen by the five or six previous generations of tablet-PC launches (remember the 386-era Pen Computing premise? Or the Pentium III “slates” and “Convertibles?” Thought not.)

Although the shiny Apple ad may focus on a billion App Store products, the pervasiveness of the web was a key factor in the success of tablets. Much as in the Netbook craze a few years previous– the form factor all but demands easy access to a broad range electronic content. You going to carry around a stack of discs for your paper-thin tablet?
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I’m blogging today at home, as the Web-Op HQ blew a breaker today. That segues nicely into today’s concern– how to maintain customer trust when things go south.

High-visibility outages aren’t new. Sony, in particular, averages one per week. However, only some firms can emerge from them with their dignity– and customer base– intact. Here’s how:

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Brick-and-mortar retailers often have a hard time transitioning to the web, because they’re still trying to provide an information service which keeps their stores running. After all, they’re paying the rent and electric still, so they don’t want all their business to come from the website.

However, designing a site to be too much in service of the brick-and-mortar customer experience can be a web nightmare. Here are some issues you might want to avoid.
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