Compared to Black Friday, Cyber Monday online sales were up 31.1 percent with the average order up from $190.80 to $194.89 for an increase of 2.1 percent.

The growing trend of consumers using their networks on social sites for information about deals and inventory levels continued on Cyber Monday. While the percentage of visitors arriving from social network sites is fairly small relative to all online visitors—nearly 1 percent—it is gaining momentum, with Facebook dominating the space.

Consumers continue to use mobile as a shopping tool. On Cyber Monday, 3.9 percent of people visited a retailer’s site using a mobile device.

Online shopping peaked on Cyber Monday at 9:00 am PST/noon EST. But consumer shopping had stronger momentum throughout the day than on Cyber Monday 2009.

“Cyber Monday came in as the biggest shopping day of the year so far," said John Squire, chief strategy officer, IBM Coremetrics.

"Consumers this year appear much more willing to open their wallets and are turning to online stores for the convenience of shopping wherever and whenever they like, but also as their primary source of information about products and inventory levels. Retailers have done an exceptional job across the board of appealing to consumers with highly personalized promotions and a slew of free shipping promotions."

"With this acquisition, IBM will give clients greater insight about customer behavior and sentiment about products and services, and give true foresight into their future buying patterns," says Craig Hayman, general manager, Industry Solutions for IBM Software Group. "The combination of IBM and Coremetrics will enable our clients to maximize marketing expenditures while also making the browsing, buying, banking or customer service experience more convenient, personal and interactive for their consumers."

"IBM and Coremetrics can help businesses rapidly gain intelligence into social networks and online media sources through a software as a service (SaaS) delivery model and incorporate this insight into their business processes to create smarter, more effective marketing campaigns," says Coremetrics CEO Joe Davis. "Together, we can develop powerful new business analytics solutions, delivering a single source of information about every aspect of your online business — every customer, transaction, product, channel and supplier — to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and drive measurable business results. Further, we deliver on-the-go access to real-time analytics and performance data on all major smart mobile devices, including iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and Android."

IBM’s own Business Analytics and Optimization Consulting organization consists of 5,000 consultants and a network of analytics solution centers. The company has spent over $11 billion in acquisitions in this area in the last five years.

IBM will continue to support and enhance Coremetrics’ technologies and clients while allowing them to take advantage of the broader IBM portfolio. Coremetrics’ current employees (about 230 of them) will join the IBM Software Group.

Cyber Monday sales were up 24.1 percent compared to Black Friday 2009.  Consumers spent more per online order ($180.03 versus $170.19 for an increase of 5.8 %) compared to Black Friday.

Total sales were up 13.7 percent compared to Cyber Monday 2008 with the average dollar amount spent per online order jumping 38.2 percent from the previous Cyber Monday ($180.03 versus $130.24), led by apparel retailers.

"We are seeing good online buying momentum because people are looking for the very best deals, and are going online for the most convenient way to shop," said John Squire, chief strategy officer, Coremetrics.

"We expect to see one more spike in online spending when the final ‘free-shipping-is-ending’ promotions are announced. Until then, retailers will watch consumer behavior very carefully to gauge what’s working well and what they need to adjust. The end result will be a boon to consumers, as retailers pull out all the stops to entice consumers to make that purchase."

Consumers purchased nearly 10 percent more items per order on Cyber Monday 2009 compared to Black Friday and nearly 30 percent more compared to Cyber Monday 2008.

Apparel retailers and jewelry retailers saw the biggest increase in the average dollar amount consumers spent per online order, up 26.4 percent and 14.3 percent respectively.

Sports apparel and gear retailers experienced a rise of nearly 55 percent in the number of new consumers visiting their sites. However the average dollar amount consumers spent per online order dipped slightly by 3.1 percent.

Department stores also had success attracting new consumers to their websites, with a 33 percent increase. Overall, the average order value was down nearly 17 percent.

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Online shoppers purchased nearly 12 percent more items in March compared to the previous month, while the average dollar value increased by more than 4 percent, indicating that consumers were not only buying more items online, but they were also spending more money on average than they had the month before.

"The constant barrage of bleak economic news essentially wore consumers out earlier in the year. But in March, as the stock markets started to show some signs of life, consumers regained a measure of confidence about their purchasing power," said John Squire, chief strategy officer for Coremetrics.

"We’re seeing online purchasing behavior that is strongly tied to consumer attitudes about the bigger economic picture, and the best retailers out there are finding ways to appeal to consumers who are spending their money more thoughtfully."

Jewelry retailers saw the biggest gains in March, with the average order size and dollar value increasing 13.8 and 13.4 percent respectively.

Health and beauty retailers also saw positive gains, with the average order size up 6.9 percent and the average dollar value increasing 5.3 percent. Consumer engagement with these sites and the average time spent rose by 3.2 and 12 percent respectively from February.

Overall online retail was down compared to a year ago, with the average order size falling 8.3 percent and the average dollar value off 6.3 percent.

The number of online sessions in which consumers browsed a Web site, viewing at least one product page, stayed largely flat compared to December 2008. The number of sessions in which consumers actually completed an order was down 21 percent.

The only categories that saw increases were intimate apparel (up 5.5%) and office supplies retailers (up 8%). Specialty retailers reported a 56 percent drop in online orders, the largest decrease in any retail category tracked by Coremetrics.

John Squire
Coremetrics
Chief Strategy Officer

"Our data suggest that consumers are very nervous about the economy and that an economic recovery fueled in large part by online consumer spending has not happened yet," said John Squire, chief strategy officer for Coremetrics.

"It isn’t all doom and gloom, however. Some categories are actually doing a good job of attracting consumers. And when we look at the average number of items per online order, we see that those consumers who actually decided to buy online bought more items for a higher total dollar amount."

Compared to December 2008, the average number of items that consumers purchased per order increased 23 percent in the online retail category as a whole. The average dollar value of those orders also rose by 8 percent.

Home goods retailers were successful at getting fewer shoppers to buy more items for a higher total dollar value as they saw a 26 percent increase in the average number of items per order. In addition, they nearly saw a 41 percent increase in the average value of those orders.

Health and beauty retailers reported a 5 percent jump in browser sessions and a 22 percent increase in the average number of items per order. However the average order value decreased by 5 percent.
 

Even with an interest in social media, 33 percent of spend, on average is devoted to online advertising and 28 percent to online promotion design and implementation. Fifty-eight percent of respondents have added user-generated content or reviews in the past year. Thirty-one percent have implemented a blog and 25 percent have added an RSS feed over the past year.

The findings indicated that most marketers have plans to add a social media marketing program at some point. Fifty percent said they would implement user-generated content and 22 percent plan to implement a blog. Twenty percent say they will implement social networks and another 20 percent plan to do the same with a RSS feed.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was the top priority, but ranked fourth in terms of time and budget allocation. Twenty-two percent of a marketers time was focused on email campaigns, while the biggest portions of budgets (33%) go to online advertising.

"This study echoes many of the qualitative findings that we hear from our customers on a day to day basis-marketers are aware of the impact that social media marketing can have on their overall program, but view it as uncharted territory, not worthy of their budget," said John Squire, SVP product strategy, GM marketing services at Coremetrics.

Trust is such an important concept. This may be why, according to GetElastic.com, multiple pages in the checkout process converts better than a single page. Their data suggests that three pages or steps are optimal, converting at 6.2 percent.

Even seven pages or more (which is unbelievable to me, impatient jerk that I am) converts better than a one-step checkout process. Only one of the top 100 retailers use a one page checkout, and they convert the least at just 2.5 percent.

But why? Maybe it’s because one step seems too easy, just like a scam would seem too easy. Maybe it takes more steps to reassure a buyer, who is dealing with an invisible seller, that this deal is legit.

It would make sense, then, that providing the opportunity to actually converse with a human before a purchase could boost the chances of the purchase actually taking place. Conversations build trust and conversations look like they build conversions, too.

GetElastic has its own numbers on live chat in a nifty 46-page whitepaper on the entire checkout process, which can be downloaded in PDF or viewed in HTML, and includes data on shipping offers, coupons, security, et cetera.

"Live chat has the potential to bridge the customer service gap that exists between online shoppers and retailers," the authors say. "It can be the extra little push a shopper needs to get over any conversion hurdles that may exist such as purchase uncertainty, product questions, or technical and policy assistance."

But they’re still unsure about its actual efficacy, only slightly outperforming in the Apparel and High Ticket categories, and underperforming in every other. The authors attribute this "counter-intuitive" result to a potential annoyance factor, which can turn any would-be customer off.

Coremetrics and CompUSA have a different tale to tell on live chat, though. Coremetrics followed CompUSA’s implementation of InstantService’s live chat technology to make a case study of it. They found that website conversion rates went up by a factor of ten.

“By adding InstantService live chat to Compusa.com, we’ve given our customers the ability to communicate with a live agent who can help answer their questions,” said Al Hurlebaus, managing director of marketing and advertising at CompUSA. “This added value mirrors the in-store experience where customers rely on our knowledgeable salespeople to obtain assistance when they need it. "

Coremetrics’ analysis showed that 60 percent of visitors who chatted and added an item to the cart, did so from the most recently viewed category before initiating a chat session.

A keyword there might be "initiated," as in the customer initiated the chat session, cutting down on the annoyance factor mentioned by GetElastic. Nearly 54 percent of CompUSA customers ended up purchasing from the category they most recently viewed before chatting.

It is still unclear, though, whether CompUSA’s recent change in customer focus, from business-to-consumer to business-to-business had an impact on the results.

Jane Paolucci, VP of marketing for Coremetrics, shares some more numbers in an interview with WebProNews. She said that 68.5 percent of CompUSA customers chatted while browsing the site and that 32 percent chatted while in the shopping cart during the late stages of the buying process.

"Out of that," she said, "over 10 percent of those sessions convert to a sale, 10 times the average website conversion rate." Paolucci says that only 28 percent of ecommerce sites are currently offering live chat.

But they are "increasingly spending more money on technologies that are bringing them closer to their clients."   

Not to endorse one chat product over the other, here’s a Google search for "live chat widgets for ecommerce" to speed you along the chat discovery process should you think that’s right for your site.

Coremetrics and IBM provide embedded analysis and measurement capabilities, with customizable tagging for reporting purposes. Retailers are able to track the effectiveness of the Web 2.0 store, allowing them to analyze both page views and "intra-page activity".

"We’re currently redesigning our site using IBM’s Web 2.0 Store functionality to provide a more streamlined shopping experience, so the ability to easily and effectively track and measure the impact of this new technology is key," said Devon Montoya, webmaster at philosophy Cosmetics, inc.

"The customer experience is paramount for us, and the IBM/Coremetrics partnership has made it easy for us to deploy an integrated Web and call center solution, with much of the tracking functionality already built in."

Coremetrics and IBM have also introduced a plug and play solution for multichannel analytics, based on Coremetrics existing integration with the IBM WebSphere Commerce platform. The solution includes reports, analytics, a streamlined measurement platform for the analysis of sales, products, promotions and B2B contracts on the Web.

"As retailers become more sophisticated in their multichannel strategy, it’s crucial to provide them with a holistic view of performance, so they can continually refine and maximize results," said John Squire, senior vice president, product strategy, and general manager, search services at Coremetrics.

"Web 2.0 developments make this a more challenging task, so we’re pleased to offer an intuitive tracking and analysis solution for the IBM WebSphere Commerce Web 2.0 Store. In the case of multichannel analytics, companies with this vision have previously had to cobble together a custom solution, so this will provide an easy to deploy solution for rapid results."

This release provides the industry’s most accurate and precise analysis of online business performance by offering groundbreaking new functionality in three key areas: greatest accuracy in measuring online customer behavior; unprecedented flexibility in modeling actual site traffic; and integrated best practice metrics.

In addition, Coremetrics 2005 provides usability enhancements for easier and faster reporting, improved trending, and new capabilities for reporting on form usability. All new features are designed to ensure that eCommerce managers, marketers, merchandisers, and site designers can quickly and easily extract maximum value from online behavioral data to achieve unprecedented ROI.

“The Web analytics market is at a crossroads – and the leaders will be determined by how effectively they help clients use their customer data to make better business decisions,” said Joe Davis, president and CEO of Coremetrics. “While our competitors struggle to collect, store, and maintain individual customer information, we are focused on providing more precise views of customer behavior so that our clients can act quickly to generate rapid ROI. We will continue to focus on delivering embedded industry best practices as we build upon our legacy of providing the industry’s most comprehensive view of behavioral data.”

Coremetrics 2005 is the only Web analytics solution that offers pre-built integration with over 35 industry partners for targeted email marketing, rich media, search, and survey functionality. All the new features available in the summer release are designed to guide companies toward rapid ROI based on proven best practices and Coremetrics’ expertise in vertical market segments

Greatest Accuracy for Online Customer Behavior Measurement

eCommerce organizations are recognizing that almost 6% of online orders are rejected or cancelled because of suspicions of fraud (Cybersource 6th Annual Online Fraud Report, 2005), and financial services institutions frequently see rejections of applications due to insufficient credit. Further, cancellations are not captured by page tags or server logs, creating possible misrepresentation in Web analytics data for online merchants.

Coremetrics is committed to providing the greatest level of accuracy for its clients. With Coremetrics Transaction Reconciliation, Coremetrics moves beyond basic Web data capture by allowing eCommerce organizations to reconcile orders or applications that are cancelled or rejected in the back office with data submitted from the Web browser. Using Coremetrics Transaction Reconciliation, users can act on merchandising and transaction data with confidence and identify the product categories most heavily impacted by fraud, cancellations or rejections.

Emerging trends such as spyware adoption and consumer privacy concerns have also influenced accuracy and have increased the need to ensure that cookies used to identify visitors are minimally invasive in the customer’s browser. Substantiating research from leading analysts, Coremetrics’ research has shown that anonymous rates for clients leveraging third-party cookies to identify unique browsers can be as high as 20% and has an enormous impact on accuracy for a variety of metrics.

In response, Coremetrics has delivered the first solution to provide issuance of first-party cookies through a hosted domain and is the only solution in the industry to allow clients to upgrade from existing third-party tracking without any loss of historical customer profiles. Using first-party data collection, Coremetrics clients typically see anonymous rates below 1% of all visitor traffic.

Unprecedented Flexibility for Modeling Site Traffic

In this release, Coremetrics delivers unprecedented control and flexibility into the hands of the end-user with TruePath. Representing a revolutionary leap forward in customer path modeling and visualization, TruePath is an integrated visualization tool that provides comprehensive analysis of customer Web-browsing patterns and scenarios within a browser. Using TruePath, clients can model actual customer paths in real time as they browse their own Web sites. Unlike traditional Web analytics tools, which require predefinition of steps during implementation, TruePath allows marketers to flexibly group pages, define required and optional steps on the fly, and base path analysis on realistic customer scenarios and outcomes. Coremetrics’ TruePath allows organizations to better understand conversion patterns, optimize key site processes, and improve the customer experience.

In addition, Coremetrics enhances the flexibility of key event-tracking capabilities by leveraging user-defined scenarios to deliver site-wide conversion reporting on an unlimited number of success events. This feature, Key Paths, allows clients to define any arbitrary page, pages, or sequence of pages as a “key path.” Clients can then easily identify how many people successfully landed on the page, viewed a product or detail page, and initiated an action, as well as how many people initiated this sequence but did not complete it.

Integrated Best Practice Metrics

Coremetrics allows clients to easily measure the key conversion points on their sites with its newly released Conversion Dashboards. Designed to deliver actionable analytics with best practice Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) out of the box, Conversion Dashboards allow clients to quickly assess bottlenecks in the key conversion steps and target key areas for improvement. More importantly, using the Conversion Dashboards, any eCommerce Manager can evaluate site performance against internal benchmarks and goals, manage resource investments, and make immediate comparisons to industry-wide benchmark data included in Coremetrics LIVEmark Index.

Announced earlier this year, the LIVEmark Index is the industry’s most comprehensive benchmark for eBusiness performance, providing critical comparison data for site-wide key performance indicators across more than 150 leading retail brands, which collectively transact over $5.3 billion dollars annually

Coremetrics’ unparalleled depth of domain expertise is also brought to bear through pre-built analytical templates that deliver best practice report configurations out of the box throughout Coremetrics 2005. Industry-specific templates provide rapid insight without the need to either define critical events up-front during implementation or struggle with building out reports post-implementation. This allows organizations to focus on managing their businesses, not their Web analytics tool. Increased end-user flexibility also allows clients to add and remove metrics, as well as create new calculated metrics to tailor reporting templates to meet individual or role-based needs.

Additional New Features in Coremetrics 2005

Other features of this release include:

Usability enhancements, such as more intuitive navigation and report layout, that improve adoption and ease of use for all users.

Enhanced trending functionality, allowing for flexible selection of category- and item-level data for trending, smoothing, and comparison, as well as multi-view publishing of trend reports to users and groups.

Improved form analysis, which enables companies to accurately and automatically assess the usability of on-site forms to help optimize application, registration, and checkout forms, reduce form field abandonment, and measure the value of investment in form personalization.

Marketing enhancements that help clients understand marketing influences across different points in the customer life cycle. Clients can define unique conversion events, including email registrations, form completions, searches, or product views, for correlation to campaign response. Using this unique capability, marketers can move beyond marketing ROI calculations to measure campaign impact across distinct points in the conversion continuum.

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Your source for investigative ebusiness reporting and breaking news.

The partnership enables banks and credit unions to optimize online marketing campaigns, site tools, content, and forms so that they can deliver a better user experience, improve account holder relationships, and drive incremental sales of offline products and services.

Combining Coremetrics’ LIVE (Lifetime Individual User Experience) Profiles with FundsXpress’ secure and scalable financial products suite allows FundsXpress clients to improve online banking services, decrease operating costs, and increase revenue through a better understanding of online consumer behavior. Financial institutions will gain seamless access to a complete record of every click an account holder makes on their site, and can use this information to improve site design and user experience through sophisticated site-traffic and click analysis. Banks and credit unions will be also be able to leverage LIVE Profile data to strategically manage online marketing activities by comparing campaign effectiveness at each stage of the customer lifecycle, resulting in higher sell-through rates of products and services through the Internet channel and an increased number of customers signing up for online banking and bill pay.

“We’ve partnered with Coremetrics to give our client base immediate access to the Web analytics and precision marketing tools they need to improve their account holder relationships and drive increased adoption of online services,” said Mark Engels, vice president of business development, FundsXpress. “This partnership will help our clients understand the behavior of their online customers, leading to an increase in profitability of the Internet channel. This is another great example of FundsXpress’ commitment to providing its clients with advanced solutions to drive adoption success in their online channel through both proprietary technology and partnerships with other best-of-breed solution providers.”

“Coremetrics’ LIVE Profiles and data warehouse architecture allow financial services organizations to improve their understanding of individual site-visitor behaviors,” said John Squire, vice president of product management for Coremetrics. “Leveraging the financial services best practices built into our solutions, FundsXpress clients will be better able to market to account holders and strengthen these critical relationships.”

FundsXpress Financial Network, Inc. provides Internet-based financial services designed to help financial institutions satisfy the most discriminating customers. Its growing client list includes banks and credit unions across the United States representing tens of billions in assets. Coremetrics serves more than 400 brands representing the leaders in financial services, travel services, and retail. Coremetics’ comprehensive partner network, the industry’s largest, allows clients to extend the value of customer data through best-of-breed marketing and technology solutions.

WebProNews | Breaking eBusiness News
Your source for investigative ebusiness reporting and breaking news.