5 TIps To Cross Ecom's Rubicon
Smart merchants are beginning to cross the ecommerce rubicon between content and commerce. Discover 5 Tips to cross your online store's ecommerce rubicon.

5 TIps

* “Magazine” your content
* Curate from brands
* Curate from customers
* Lean & Visual Win
* Tie In Email, Social & Mobile

Going to incorporate @Guillaume Decugis and Scoop.it's ideas on Lean Content on this not very lean post too. I set aside some content to keep the post pinging with fresh content.

Evergreen means our team will refresh the content (or ask for help from our Ambassadors to do so) regularly. Not all content is equal. Places in our "evergreen" regularly scheduled updates category must be earned (lol).

So help 5 Tips to Cross the Ecom Rubicon earn evergreen status, or better yet contribute your thoughts and we will curate in.

Crossing the Rubicon between content and commerce is the BIG ISSUE in online retailing today. Discover our tips to cross and add yorus.  

After Curagami's annual Black Friday online retail study ecommerce 2015 trends such as free returns and ship to store are clear. This Haiku Deck explores trending online retailing tactics, strategy and pressures merchantsface in 2015.

Discover the hashtag tracking tools you need to make it easy to create, manage, track and report on social media hashtag campaigns.

Marty Note
I've always felt the #hashtag is a vastly underexploited secret weapon. One reason hashtags have been under exploited for their intense #BI (Business Intelligence) value is tools to easily understand them were lacking.

Not so much anymore as this Social Media Examiner post shares.

Why are hasthags secret weapons? Hashtags are and will always be too "quanty" to become mainstream. No matter how good the tool set you still have to have a math / model geek to help marketers understand implications and form actions.

Imagine a model that understands existing benchmarks well enough to drive a push notification when a tag (and thereby the underlying content) is trending (i.e. its change delta is above some set number). What is the value of being first to surf that social wave?

Could be millions

Problem is wave knowledge rests with the Quants while surfing knowledge rests with marketers. You would think that is a needs based marriage made in heaven.

Not so much since marketers don't know what they don't know and so can't ask and wave smart quants know WAVES not how to merchandise the wave into MONEY.

Trust that our Startup Factory Funded startup Curagami is thinking about how to introduce wave smart quants to ecommerce surfing merchants ( http://www.curagami.com :). M

Not sure why ComScore expected strong online sales late in the season. With shipping concerns, weather and other December issues the holidays begin to shut down online around 1.15 and sales become very quiet by 1.20.

This year that trend was accelerated by the calendar with Christmas in the middle of the week. As we discussed in our Ecommies piece for Curatti (Is Ecommerce Stuck In The Mud http://curatti.com/is-ecommerce-stuck-in-the-mud/ ) ecommerce wasn't very inspiring this year.

Ecommerce merchants are caught in tectonic shifts in the mobile/social web. Online merchants are slowly realizing social marketing is more than one way communication. Social marketing is a conversation, but few online merchants treat social media marketing like an active two way conversation.

The mobile revolution is about much more than smart phones too, yet few online e-retailers are organized around a "mobile first" idea. Battles continue on free shipping, battles that should be all but over as leaders have adopted free shipping out and back (i.e. for returns too) especially in December.

Free shipping out and back is now a meme, a meme that will take over by 2015 (if not before) since it is easier to understand than using coupons or trigger points. If ecommerce is going to dig itself out of the mud embracing social/mobile will be a good first step.

Letting go of print catalog and bricks and mortar behavior online would be a great second step (though much harder to realize).