Monday, September 16, 2013

Monthly Update - August 2013 - Part 2

Our take on Industry news

Yahoo overtook Google last month in unique visitors for the first time since 2011


In an interesting survey, BrightEdge found that mobile users in ecommerce are 30% less likely than desktop users to make a purchase, and that tablet users are just as likely as desktop users to make a purchase. This is actually contrary to what we see of customers on our clients websites – mobile and tablet users are 25% *more* likely to buy than desktop users.

Yahoo announced this month that it had 197 million unique (desktop) visitors in July, putting it in first place over Google’s 192 million. These tallies (per ComScore) do not include mobile devices, but do put Yahoo into the top spot for the first time since May 2011.

According to a ComScore report, US online purchases by mobile/tablet users in Q2 2013 were up 23.7% year over year to $4.7 billion (from $3.8 billion in Q2 2012). Desktop/laptop online sales were up 15.3% to $49.8 billion over Q2 2012.

Amazon had a 45 minute outage on August 19th, and eBay had a six hour outage not long after. Both of these outages appeared to result from maintenance gone awry. Amazon Web Services (AWS), a popular Cloud Hosting Platform used by many popular websites to provide data and hosting services, was down for more than an hour on August 25th. This outage affected NetFlix, Instagram, Vine and others.

According to the Wall Street Journal, several major chains – including Target and PetsMart – have been asked by the SEC to provide additional reporting of their online sales. Traditionally, online sales are not broken out separately in financial reporting. According to Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel during a Feb 27 analyst conference call, Target Corp online and mobile sales “grew faster than industry averages” in Q4 2012 – no detail was provided to back up this claim. The SEC interest results from concerns that unsubstantiated claims like this one could be used to boost investor confidence.

Site Updates Released this Month
1.       Homepage code was modified so that no page flash/reload happens as dropdown values are selected
2.       New server infrastructure was rolled out to improve performance and fault tolerance
3.       Control Panel toolbar was added to improve usability
4.       Control Panel order page toolbar was added to improve usability
5.       The Print Order and Print Invoice pages now more prominently display your business name
6.       A “Receive All Orders” button has been added to the Print New Orders page
7.       A new image viewer control was integrated into the websites

8.       The Control Panel notification icons change colors to be more obvious

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