As realms of business go, eCommerce is one of the fastest – and is populated by some very impatient people. You can have the greatest product in the world, but it won’t matter one bit if your pages load so slowly that interested parties leave, searching for faster waters. And as the speed of  the internet continues to increase, the patience of online shoppers will continue to decrease, leaving the savvy eCommerce owner no choice but to make sure his sleek, well designed website loads fast.

So here you are, the dedicated eCommerce operator, and after having invested a great deal of time into designing your online store, you notice that it still doesn’t look quite right. You can’t put your finger on it – after all, you designed a website that any consumer would want to visit, one that is open and honest and friendly, and still demonstrates to the customer why they should buy your products. If it feels like you have the general concepts of design down, but would like to get into the specifics, it may be time for some discussion about advanced user experience.

Over the years, as the world wide web has grown, it has come to encompass many aspects of a users life. While once it was used for nothing more than sending email between friends, making the rare purchase of an exotic, hard to find item, or venturing into a chat room, there are now billions of ways for people to spend their time online, including one of the more recent, but important, considerations for an eCommerce operator – social media.

Yesterday, a new beta site launched offering social and tech-savvy consumers a chance to explore their city (starting in Seattle) in a fun and engaging way.

Wrazz (wrazz.com) is a new site that blends social networking and social commerce allowing friends to connect and find the best deals in their local area.

The internet is a complicated place, and there’s a very good reason that the part it’s most widely known for is called the world wide web. Even if your website is brilliantly designed, and has an excellent product, there may be plenty of other companies and small business owners competing with you. So how do you make yourself stand out among these competitors? Well, one way is to remember that the internet is more than just HTML and FTP – it has a caste system, and at the top are the technologically elite. We’ll show that not only can these elite be your best spokesmen – they’ll often do it for free.

So we’ve talked about how to build a website people like, and we’ve talked about how to gather metrics, both of which are useful skills for any small eBusiness owner. But a question still remains: How do I know what my customers really like? Thankfully, there are ways to find this out, and in this article, we’re going to talk about one of the simplest: A/B testing.

Welcome to Maturing Web Analytics. This article is for everyone who, after reading Beginning Web Analytics, following the links, and setting up your own web analytics, now want to take the next step. You have plenty of data filtering in now, so the question becomes, how can I turn this data into profit?

The Decline of Customer Service and the Rise of Self-Service

New technologies allow consumers to freely explore seemingly endless amounts of products and information online. Because of this, consumers are becoming increasingly self-reliant. People check-in to flights and hotels with automated machines and purchase groceries through check-out stations. Consumers are responding positively to self-service systems and the need to interact with customer service employees is rapidly decreasing.

For many people, web analytics is a scary term, conjuring up mental images of failed math classes. That’s probably what brought you here: You were pondering methods of bringing more traffic to your website when someone brought up the term “web analytics“, and all of the sudden those nightmares kicked in.

But when you recovered, as the serious eCommerce entrepreneur you are, you got online with the goal of looking the term up. And now you’re here, you’re interested, and you’re a little confused. What are web analytics? Are they really worth investing in? What are they going to cost me? How much time do they take?

For many retailers, there is no hotter word right now than mobile commerce. Many big name companies have already launched mobile sites and features for their brand and the buzz may entice smaller businesses to quickly jump on the mobile bandwagon. However, before even putting together a mobile strategy, there are several factors to consider.