Guardian eCommerce - Key E-Commerce News & Tips

Imagine walking into your local supermarket as you normally would. You fill your shopping cart with groceries, and when you get to the checkout line, you see hundreds of abandoned carts loaded with items, strewn haphazardly about, but with no shoppers to be found. Was there a fire? Natural disaster?

In a brick-and-mortar supermarket, only a catastrophe could cause such an odd sight, but online it is par for the course. The majority of people who take the time to load a shopping cart never make it through the checkout line; the industry average projects a staggering 60 percent figure of abandoned shopping carts.

Why don't these people pay? Why would somebody go through the effort and maneuvers of shopping without actually following through? Quite often it comes down to price or, moreover, willingness to pay. There is a lull between loading a shopping cart and actually paying that allows a pajama-clad online shopper plenty of time to pontificate the merits of the would-be purchase, look for a better price or simply get distracted and lose interest.

There are many ways to increase successfully completed checkouts, but perhaps the most important one is to try to augment the consumer's willingness to pay. Adding alternative payments is a good place to start because it's not too difficult to see that increasing payment options can potentially rope in more potential shoppers.

If your wallet only contains an American Express card and a US$20 bill, and you stumble across a restaurant that is selling $30 meals and only accepts Visa and MasterCard, chances are you will continue your stumbling until you find an establishment that accepts your money in a form you presently have available. Likewise, the PayPal effect is real; somebody who just sold an antique doll on eBay via PayPal might have $200 sitting in a PayPal account, willing to use that balance on a somewhat cavalier purchase. It's almost like money found under a couch cushion, subject to less stringent purchasing criteria than money earned from a paycheck, and therefore increases the consumer's willingness to pay.

There are other ways that alternative payments can help. Sometimes a consumer's willingness to pay will be diminished by the lack of trust in an unknown merchant, which is something that reputable alternative payments like PayPal and Google Checkout can help offset. BillMeLater, likewise, might attract consumers who are hesitant about placing a large purchase on a debit or credit card. Other payment types simplify the experience and reduce the amount of friction in a checkout -- call it the solution to the "my wallet is downstairs and I'm upstairs" effect that brings so many checkouts to a grinding, permanent halt.

Unfortunately, there's another -- much bigger -- problem: Sometimes people want an item but they just don't want to pay for it -- or at least what you're charging for it -- no matter what form of payment is accepted, whether it be credit card, cash, check, PayPal, BillMeLater, Google Checkout, gold ingots, etc. Traditional payments and most alternative payments don't really solve this problem, because they simply shift the tender type around without really overcoming the consumer's fundamental resistance.

Shoppers are bizarre creatures. The same person who might agonize over whether to buy the $8 or the $9 pair of socks might drop $200 -- without so much as an afterthought -- on a bottle of wine, spend $120 per month on car insurance without even looking for a lower quote, or cough up anything to get the latest trend in denim. People have different price sensitivities for different products at different times.

It turns out that a terrible customer for one merchant might be a great customer for another merchant. The same person who abandons your shopping cart might be the best customer in the world -- come Valentine's Day -- for FTD, or a terrific shopper at Gap, or an ideal Geico policy holder, or a lifelong Blockbuster member. These companies, in turn, will pay a lot of money to acquire a new customer.

What if you could offer your customers your products for free if they bought flowers, signed up for a premier wine club or switched insurance carriers -- things that they apparently want to do anyway? It turns out that you could get paid as if customers purchased from you directly, fundamentally changing the whole nature and numbers of the conversion game for "bad" customers.

This is where alternative payment companies like TrialPay, Webloyalty and Affinion help. TrialPay is a different kind of alternative payment, a conversion tool for the large numbers of customers who ordinarily would not pay. Just as BillMeLater can help convert a customer who might not have enough cash to make a purchase, TrialPay helps convert customers who wouldn't normally purchase -- period -- by allowing those customers to "pay" when they transact with a trusted partner for which they have a high willingness to pay, like Geico, FTD, Blockbuster, etc. The Geicos and Blockbusters pay TrialPay for the customer acquisition, which covers the cost of the product or discount you give away to the customer.

The concept is not too far removed from Amazon's "Get $30 Off When you Sign Up for an Amazon.com Visa Card" promotion that Amazon shows in every U.S. checkout -- the key differences being that not everybody wants a credit card, and offering other services might prove more lucrative to the merchant and compelling to the consumer.

This concept can be used in so many more places. If a customer closes the browser window on the shopping cart page, you can show them a message offering them a discount funded by a blue-chip advertiser. If a customer is looking up shipping prices, you might be dealing with a frugal customer more likely to abandon their shopping cart.

Customers who haven't come back to shop with you in months or years are buying other things elsewhere. You can win them back by offering them discounts when they transact with your partners. This yields you -- as a merchant -- incremental revenue, but also recaptures your customers' attention.

When you truly increase a consumer's willingness to pay, the revenue possibilities are significant simply because the vast majority of your visitors probably never engage in a transaction on your site. An intelligent and thorough implementation of relevant alternative payment options can slowly but surely chip away at a consumer's reluctance to pay you and make a lasting effect on your business.

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What's the use of having access to a World Wide Web if you're only going to shop three or four mainstream retailers anyway? To spice up this year's load under the tree and avoid the ho-hum doldrums, here are some hot new Web site choices to find the perfect gift for even the zaniest character on your gift list:

For the socially conscious, go to the Global Exchange Fair Trade Online Store, where you'll find sweatshop-free, recycled goods that are "Fair Trade" certified to ensure that farmers and artisans are paid a living wage, and that your gift isn't made by forced or exploitative child labor. Fair Trade also promotes production techniques that will not harm the environment. You'll find products from all over the world -- Yachana Jungle chocolate, hand-painted mugs from Thailand, Tibetan Khatsa Sauce, Hmong Tribe Wall Hook, Zimbabwe Doll Friends, and much more.

Ten Thousand Villages is also a fair trade site and offers cool stuff from handmade Vietnamese serving bowls to bamboo furniture, sculptures and a leaf-and-bamboo journal. Plus, stories on the artisans tell you who is benefiting from your purchase and a little about how the item is made.

Purchases from Kenana Knitter Critters helps the group provide medical treatment and income for poor women and their families in Kenya. Proceeds from the whimsical knitted products -- ranging from African animals to funky scarves -- also help fund construction of a new school in Kenya. Each item is signed by the woman who knitted it!

For those who want to rescue the environment, check out Eco-Artware. Every item -- from chairs made from retired aluminum traffic signs to business card cases made from old circuit board -- is made from recycled goods. There's even handmade vintage vinyl cuff bracelets made from the labels of vintage 33 RPM vinyl rock records. Long live Led Zeppelin!

If you're feeling creative and want to give someone a truly one-of-a-kind gift, but you don't want it to look homemade, go to Café Press, where you can have your own design put on just about anything. Or, you can shop for some really cool gifts amongst their existing product line, from zany political tees and cups to geek presents. Anything goes on this site made to tickle the funny bone and please everyone from mainstream moms and creative esoteric friends to your favorite mad scientist.

If you're feeling a little mischievous, give the unexpected this year, like an ammunition case wine bar, good JuJu in a jar, a butterfly house, or maybe even a Happy Buddha pen holder from Uncommon Goods. I'd think twice about giving your mother-in-law the Wisdom of the Crone deck, though. She might not see the humor in it!

For the artsy-fartsy crowd, head over to the Museum of Modern Art. From zany color-bursting Andy Warhol watches to curved drinking glasses, a futuristic handheld wet-vac, and a three-port, rubber USB hub, you're not likely to find more useful and classy gifts anywhere. Well, the USB hub is a little weird -- looks like a massage ball from Mars, but it's still cool!

Quincy Shop has a cool collection of stuff from unique toys to robots that sharpen pencils and other zany desk accessories. From leather-bound journals to a polka-dot toaster, it's just a fun place to shop. There's even a brass-plated petanque set in a wood box -- a celebratory rendition of classic petanque balls to celebrate the year of The Golden Pig.

For the eerie Goth in your life, or maybe for that uncle with the taste for the macabre, try Skeletons in the Closet, the L.A. County Coroner's Web store. There you can find T-shirts with the Coroner's logo, body bags, and cadaver-shaped office supplies among other ghoulish, but harmless, gifts.

If your Aunt Myrtle is bringing her nasty Chihuahua to your house for her holiday visit, and you have to get the pooch a present too, try Pet Gadgets. Check out the Doody Dangler (ewww!) and Pawsitive I.D., a DNA testing kit for the dog (so you know for sure it's the right pooch before you pay out the reward to the guy who brought the darn dog back).

For the paranoid parents, get a snoop-proof baby monitor so Mom and Dad can listen for the baby's cry but lock neighbors and spies out so they can't listen in on household conversations over the device. Bet you didn't even know your neighbors could listen in that way, did you? The Philips DECT baby monitor scrambles the signal. You'll find it here.

Last but not least, for THE gifts for the See-and-Be-Seen crowd, go to Shop Intuition, where you can buy cool stuff shown in all the leading gossip and women's magazines. Want those perfect little black leather pants Angelina Jolie wore in People, -- get the lookalikes here. Ditto on Jennifer Anniston's ear bobs in E! and the sunglasses Britney Spears wore in the OK! Shot. These are not the actual items worn by the stars -- but they are products featured in the magazine and in the photo shoots. Now you no longer have to guess what's cool for the too-cool star watchers.

If you're sure the holidays are going to drive you mad before they're done, treat yourself to some stress relief by going to Mighty Goods, where you'll find nifty treats for yourself, from a copper still to a Voodoo knife holder (body-shaped, looks like a modern voodoo doll; you can pretend it's whichever relative is currently on your nerves as you put your knives away), Darth Vader and Storm Trooper ornaments, and a customized guitar pick (if you play loud enough, maybe everyone will go home soon).


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It is becoming increasingly unsafe to buy or otherwise conduct business online, according to the ninth annual CyberSource survey on e-commerce fraud. Fraudsters will divert approximately US$3.6 billion from U.S. e-commerce in 2007, a 20 percent increase over 2006, based on survey results.

Merchants are working aggressively to hold back the tide. Their various online security products and related best practices are keeping the fraud rate stable, notes CyberSource. Still, it's requiring the expenditure of more resources to keep fraudsters at bay.

Survey participants estimated that 1.4 percent of their online sales this year will be diverted to illegitimate sources -- the same percentage as last year. However, that's 1.4 percent of a far higher volume of sales. That translates into dollar losses equal to $3.6 billion in goods and services this year, up from $3.1 billion in 2006.

"eCommerce in the U.S. today is a highly rewarding channel that is showing vigorous growth," noted Doug Schwegman, CyberSource director of customer and market intelligence, "but it's also a channel with meaningful challenges posed by systematic fraud."

Not surprisingly, merchants are employing more antifraud tools on their e-commerce sites. These include order velocity monitoring, which detects suspicious purchase patterns, and IP geolocation, which can help pinpoint the physical point of origin of an Internet order, according to CyberSource. In 2007, 53 percent of merchants surveyed used five or more fraud detection tools, with the largest merchants using an average of eight. One possible -- and unwelcome -- result is a slowdown in response to legitimate customer orders.

Twenty-seven percent of orders were manually reviewed in 2007, compared to 23 percent the year before, CyberSource found. With online sales growing at about 20 percent per year, the number of orders requiring manual processing is growing faster than online sales. Approximately 38 percent more orders were reviewed in 2007 than in 2006, CyberSource estimates -- and that extra diligence may have cost merchants an extra $100 million.

The perception that the Internet is not safe has taken a toll on e-commerce activity.
"We know from research that we've conducted through third parties in the U.S. that one of the elements that drives consumers away from online purchases is related to fraud and security," Pragnesh Shah, CEO of Mobilians, said. "When we talk to parents of young people online, aged 14 to 18 years old, we know that kids are making purchases using their parents' credit and debit cards. These parents are concerned with getting phished or pharmed. ... This is reality."

It's unlikely the problem will abate in the foreseeable future. Phishing itself, for instance, is no longer seen as a major money pot, Andrew Klein, senior product marketing manager with SonicWall, said. The real moneymakers are the phishing tools that are continuously being developed and deployed.

Attacks on corporations also appear to be gaining momentum. "The notion of corporate phishing is not new -- hackers have played with it in the past. The problem was, they didn't know how to monetize it, so they didn't pay that much attention to it," Klein said. That appears to be changing as more firms are targeted for their customers' information.

There may be a bright side, though. More customers are focusing on data encryption as a privacy best practice, Luis Salazar, a partner in the data privacy and security law taskforce at Greenberg Traurig, said.

"I think word has gotten around that encrypting your data is the best way to avoid problems under data breach laws, so many businesses are taking advantage of this," he said. Also, "there have been so many news stories -- often on the local evening news -- about records simply dumped 'out back' that businesses have started to take notice. They are now making sure to properly discard their data."

With hackers apparently lurking everywhere, securing offline channels has become essential too.

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Some types of commerce are just not a match for the Internet . However, others -- including researching a new car -- caught on with online shoppers. The amount and types of information that can be conveyed online has brought car-buying to a whole new level -- yet few auto marketers are optimizing their use of the medium. New-car shoppers prefer visual material such as photos and video over textual material by a margin of two to one, according to a new survey by CarGurus. During the six months from March to August 2007, CarGurus tracked visitors researching new cars on its site.

Page views for different types of research were summarized and allocated into two types of activities: visual (photos and videos) and textual (user reviews, articles, specifications, pricing, etc.). Higher page views generally indicate a more engaged viewer spending more time at a site. During this time frame, CarGurus received over 1.1 million unique visitors. The study found that new-car shoppers spend the majority of their time (62 percent, or nearly two-thirds of pages viewed) looking at photos and videos versus more traditional forms of online auto research such as specifications, reviews and pricing.

This demonstrates that -- in an industry that typically highlights textual information -- online auto marketers should take note of the growing demand for visuals. Ten years ago, before auto manufacturer Web sites were common, consumers basically had two options for research: visit the dealer or pore through the pages of newspapers. Now, consumers have a plethora of new resources, including auto manufacturer sites, industry expert sites such as Consumer Reports, and third-party sites with user-generated content such as CarGurus, Yahoo Autos and Edmunds.

Consumption of user-generated content is growing at a particularly rapid rate, according to Forrester Research, which cited in a report that 29 percent of new-car shoppers view automotive user-generated content. That's nearly the same number that reported gathering information from magazines, newspapers and TV combined the last time they bought a car.

Given these new resources and the explosive growth of online photo and video sites like Flickr and YouTube , it is not surprising to see that new-car shoppers prefer to research cars online with visual mediums. However, what is surprising is to see how many online auto marketers neglect to spotlight the visual aspects of a new car and instead choose to highlight textual lists of features and specifications, with the occasional promotion (special headlamps, DVD systems or extended warranties, for instance) thrown in for good measure. A quick tour of major auto manufacturers' Web sites shows that very few have video, and though photo galleries are more common, they are generally limited to fewer than a dozen photos.

With the proliferation of broadband connections, online video and robust picture galleries provide an opportunity for online auto marketers to create more visual campaigns. Cars are an emotional purchase. Providing visual research tools allows consumers to connect with a car emotionally -- to fall in love with it instead of just being introduced. In spite of this opportunity, most online automotive marketing campaigns in the form of banner advertisements take consumers to landing pages packed with verbiage, rather than providing material with visual impact to further draw consumers into the brand.

One example of an auto manufacturer that is addressing the consumer's stated desire for pictures and video is Toyota's current Tundra campaign. Banner ads for the Toyota Tundra take would-be buyers to a landing page where the consumer is immediately immersed in a video about the truck. After the video ends, Toyota presents a marketing message differentiating the Tundra based on its braking power. Typical landing pages for other automotive banner advertisements recite statistics or grids of features. Toyota, however, has done a magnificent job of engaging the consumer with this campaign.

Another great example is Porsche USA, which provides not only video footage of each vehicle on its Web site but also offers screensavers and wallpaper that help encourage strong brand affinity and an emotional connection between the consumer and the car. The CEO of Kia reported at Forrester's 2007 Marketing Forum that consumers who visited Kia.com were 60 percent more likely to buy a Kia. That's a stunning figure. Imagine how much more loyalty auto manufacturers could inspire if they were to truly leverage the interactivity and visual nature of the Web medium, rather than treating it as an online brochure.

The people have spoken, and they want visuals. Auto marketers: Will you deliver?

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There's little doubt that Google the other members of the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) made one of the biggest technology marketing splashes in recent memory on Monday with their introduction of Android. What kind of lasting impact the platform will have on the cellular industry, however, is less certain.

Android is billed as the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices, and it boasts an impressive list of supporters, including T-Mobile, HTC, Qualcomm, Motorola, and others. The goal, according to the participating companies, is to foster innovation and lower the cost of developing and distributing mobile devices and services. On the surface, that sounds certain to bring benefits to the industry, to developers and to consumers. The reality, however, is that much has yet to be decided.

"If you pull the camera back and look at what's happening, the industry is continuing to change," telecom analyst Jeff Kagan said. "Networks are speeding up, handset makers are loading handsets with all sorts of new features and functionality, and the cell phone is increasingly becoming the 'third screen'."
Cell phones are more complicated to use than laptops, however, making it harder to get value from them, Kagan said. "If you look at the typical wireless phone, it's loaded with all sorts of amazing technologies that most people are too confused to learn how to use," he noted. "Now we're starting to see a variety of companies addressing that -- Apple with the iPhone, and now this new environment from Google, which aims to make it easier."

Android is an important step in the right direction, and one that comes at the right time, but it is just one step, he asserted. "I think getting companies together is the right idea," he said. "Will it be the only framework, or the one that dominates? Who knows. But it is a move in the right direction." Only a handful of companies and a few networks currently have joined the OHA so far, Kagan added. Those companies will certainly benefit if the platform endures. Then again, if it does endure, others will join it too, he explained, making it less clear who the winners and losers will be.

By focusing on the software platform and not devices, Google has minimized the risk for OHA participants and enabled the participation of handset manufacturers, Chris Hazelton, senior analyst for mobile device technology and trends at IDC Research, said. "These companies are still competing with each other and with the Android platform," Hazelton noted. "Google is spearheading this effort, but it's an alliance -- not an operating system and not a device -- so there's not as much risk."

If Android succeeds -- however that may be defined -- "Google will obviously win out among the alliance members because it doesn't have competition within the alliance," he said. Neither Yahoo nor Microsoft is involved, for example.

Those that may suffer, meanwhile, include the competing platforms, such as Symbian , Palm, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and other Linux operating systems, Hazelton said. "But it's still very early to tell, because the OHA partners are not limiting themselves to Android."

A Win-Win
HTC, for example, has said it will continue working with Windows Mobile, he noted.
If the platform does not take hold, it will still push the evolution of smartphones, Hazelton added. Even if Symbian, which currently dominates the market, continues to lead, for example, "someone will still develop an easy and enjoyable, painless way to browse the Internet via mobile devices," Hazelton explained. When that happens, "Google will have a strong play because that's its bread and butter."
Simply by putting the emphasis on the mobile Internet, then, Google stands to be a big player whether or not Android "wins."

By changing the way applications are delivered to handsets, meanwhile, the platform provide more revenue opportunities for developers, which could make them more willing to spend time developing applications, Hazelton noted. "Development companies could now become much more interested in mobile," he said. Consumers, on the other hand, stand to gain more choice and potentially lower costs and greater capabilities, he said.

Carriers, meanwhile, will become more committed to 3G , since that's necessary for mobile Internet, he added. Is Android likely to bring about a revolution? The answer again is uncertain. "It's a revolutionary idea for the mobile space because it's heading off the potential domination of the smartphone space by one operating system," Hazelton said. "The smartphone market is still pretty young, and now we have a large player committing to open source."

"There are people who would posture this as being good for consumers, but that's probably more posturing than anything else," David Chamberlain, principal analyst with In-Stat, said. "What you get with Linux is a way for people to get in, tinker around, and potentially end up with incompatible versions," Chamberlain said. "It's as open as any of the other operating systems, but really there's nothing new under the sun. To get a phone knowing people will be tinkering with it and making perhaps incompatible versions doesn't impress me."

Yet the combination of Google's vision for openness and the participation of Qualcomm, in particular, could still lead to some exciting consumer benefits, Chamberlain added -- most notably, the potential for multiservice devices. "You could end up with a handset that you could link up to just about any wireless network in just about any country in the world," he said. "That would be big news." That, in turn, would mean that the industry economics could end up being much more favorable for operators, which now spend between $150 and $300 to subsidize subscribers' phones, Chamberlain said.

"Putting the burden of the total cost of the handset onto the consumer, rather than having it carried by mobile operators, would be absolutely a game-changer," he concluded. "And the benefit would go to the mobile operators."

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Ted Leonsis wants you to pay bills and transfer money online in a new way, with no fees. The entrepreneur and vice chairman emeritus of AOL has teamed with AOL founder Steve Case in a venture called "Revolution Money," a kind of combination credit/debit card and online payment system. It's a unit of Case's Revolution, which has launched several other companies. The RevolutionCard launched in September. Revolution MoneyExchange has launched, aiming to take on online payment leader PayPal by offering free money transfers online at revolutionmoney.com.

The concept is similar to what Google tried with Google Checkout, without great success. However, there's a twist: Revolution is tied to a next-generation credit and debit card that promises to be more secure and less expensive than current cards.
Revolution's target market is the millions of young people who spend hours online at social networks. "We want to be to social networking what PayPal is to eBay," says Leonsis, chairman of Revolution Money.

Later this month, Revolution will launch on AOL's AIM instant-messaging service. AIM "buddies" will be able to transfer money to each other or to participating merchants via an instant-message window. From there, Revolution hopes to be on Facebook , MySpace and anywhere else young people gather online.

To use the service, like PayPal, you sign up and type in your bank account information. Revolution transfers the money from your bank to the vendors, at no cost to merchants. However, if consumers want to pay with a credit card, their only option is the RevolutionCard. Merchants will pay 0.5 percent of the sale, with no monthly fees.

When consumers buy goods via PayPal, they can use a variety of credit cards, and merchants pay fees of typically 2 percent to 3 percent. Google Checkout -- which also accepts credit cards -- is free to merchants through the end of the year. Google hasn't said what its plans are for 2008. Greg Sterling, an analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence, says Revolution will find it very slow to wean customers from PayPal.

"Google Checkout has clearly underperformed," he says. "People have inertia. They may not love PayPal, but they also don't seem to want to switch." Leonsis says Revolution MoneyExchange will do it the same way AOL slowly picked up customers for AIM, the instant-messaging juggernaut that launched in 1995. "I send you a message, and if you don't have AIM and want to hear from me, you have to click to get AIM," he says. "As you fill out these forms to virally accept money from your buddies on Revolution, it's not us marketing the service. It's me sending you money."

AOL Vice President Andy Spillane calls Revolution a "new and novel" extension of what AIM was originally designed for. "Suppose I forgot to pay my pizza bill in my fraternity, but I'm on spring break," he says. "If I can use AIM and log in, know who my buddy is, and send him the $9.99 I owe him for the pizza -- fine, I've solved a problem that we never really intended AIM to be used for. That's great."

Leonsis predicts the service will have 1 million merchants and 1 million customers signed up within a year. While the Revolution credit card is available now, just a few merchants are accepting it, including Northwest Airlines and Shipley Energy, which operates a Pennsylvania chain of convenience stores.

Case knows it will take time to sign up a large customer base. "It's chicken and egg," he says. "But that's why it's called Revolution. Because it is hard. I wouldn't want to do this if it was easy."

...Protecting Online Consumers While Exposing Trustworthy Web Sites!

How Well Do You Really Know Your Website? If you're like most webmasters, you have probably spent years building your site. You have spent years adding content, building links and cultivating traffíc - but how well do you really know your website? How well do you know the intricate details of your website's traffíc? Where do your site's visitors come from? How long do they stay on your site? Just where do they go to on your site and how well do they convert into buyers or subscribers?

Do you know your site's rankings in the major search engines? What are your site's top keywords? What's your site's Google PageRank? Who are your IP neighbors? What your site looks like in other browsers? How much is your site worth? These are just some of the questíons you should know, mainly because the more knowledge you possess about your site, the better equipped you will be at improving it. So here's a simple líst of free site checking tools/sites that will let you 'Baby' (monitor and watch) your site.

1. Google Analytics -- Perhaps one of the most helpful analytical tools you can use on your site. Google Analytics will give you a wealth of information about your site's traffíc. Where it comes from, how long it stays on your site, where it goes on your site, how well your content converts... invaluable information every webmaster should have in their possession.

2. NetMechanic Toolbox -- Review your site's mechanics - find broken links, test browser compatibility, find bad HTML code, spot slow-loading pages, and review your spelling... all by using the NetMechanic Toolbox.

3. Keyword Suggestion Tool -- This free keyword suggestion tool will tell you how many searches are done in WordTracker and Overture for your site's keywords. Extremely valuable information since much of the web's traffíc and ecommerce is keyword driven.

4. Iwebtool -- This is another free site which offers many valuable webmaster's tools that will give you information about your/any site. Google PageRank, PageRank Prediction, Link Popularity, Search Engine Positions for Keywords, Backlink Checker... also Visual PageRank where you can see all the PR values of all the links on a given page - both internal and external.

5. Alexa Traffic Rankings -- Alexa tracks the web's traffíc by using the Alexa bar in a surfer's browser. Most people know it is not an accurate assessment of the traffíc on the net but it is a handy measuring stick, nonetheless. It is also a handy tool for comparing sites and seeing the long-tern traffíc trends of different sites, including your own.

6. Your Site's Traffic Logs -- Most webmasters know your raw traffíc logs are worth checking and reading. They contain valuable information about your site. Especially helpful, if you're checking for broken links on your site, you don't want to see those 302's everywhere. Close examination and regular checking of your traffíc logs and stats will point out the profitable keywords on your site.

7. BetterWhois -- You can use this site to find out the domain information about your site. Do you have control of your domain? Many webmasters buy their domain name thru their web hostíng company. While this is not a problem in itself, if any dispute should arise, who has administrative control of your domain; you or your hostíng company? Can you change hostíng companies?

8. Google Alerts -- Another valuable tool from Google which notifies you by email when your link or site is found anywhere on the web. Great for keeping track of any new links your site is getting. Many webmasters also use this handy tool to keep track of their competitors' sites. They also use Google Alerts to keep track of whenever their own name is mentioned anywhere on the web.

9. IP Neighbors -- Many webmasters have their site hosted on shared hostíng plans, which means there can be hundreds of sites sharing the same IP address. This site lets you discover who your IP neighbors are. Why would you want to know your IP neighbors? Well like neighbors everywhere; there are good ones and there are bad ones. For example, if you have a neighboring site that uses email to sp@m, it could get your IP address blocked or shut down.

10. Any Browser -- Use to this handy site to discover what your site looks like in different browsers; you could be in for a real shock.

11. Google Toolbar -- The Google Toolbar can be placed on your browser so that when you're surfing you can see the Google PageRank of each page/site you're visiting. Many SEO experts believe Google is not giving us the true PR of a page and this bar is rather useless. However, like the Alexa rankings it is a handy measuring stick, nonetheless.

12. What Is Your Site Worth? -- Please take this last analyzing tool with "a large grain of salt", but it is fun to use and to see how much your site is worth. Measurement here is done largely by the amount of links you have coming into your site.

In conclusion, all of these free handy tools/sites will give you a better, more complete picture of your own site. Remember, the more knowledge you acquire about your own site and your competitors' sites, the more equipped you will be to succeed. This is one case where 'Babying' can truly benefit your site.

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The holiday season may bring joy to consumers and retailers alike, but hand in hand with that joy comes the inevitable pain of post-holiday returns. Gift returns can be a hassle for consumers, but for retailers they pose a daunting logistical challenge, requiring speedy adjustments throughout the pipeline as consumers are reimbursed and products are returned to inventory.

Adding to the pressure is the fact that consumers have increasingly demanding expectations. Retailers may struggle under the burden of the additional challenges of the holiday season, but 20 percent of consumers actually expect better service during the holidays than usual, Patti Freeman Evans, senior retail analyst with JupiterResearch said.

Even during the rest of the year, there's a gap between expectations and delivery, she added: 53 percent of consumers expect to be able to make returns and exchanges to any channel, for example -- no matter how they bought the product -- yet only 42 percent of retailers make that possible. Gaps like that don't bode well for future sales either. Easy returns are consistently in consumers' top five requirements for a good shopping experience, Gartner analyst Mim Burt said.

Even more compelling: One-third of consumers say that if they encounter a problem during the shopping process -- such as unsatisfactory handling of a return -- they're unlikely to shop with that retailer again in any channel, she added. "Unless the retailer can give consumers a highly satisfying experience, those consumers will be unlikely to come back," she said. In other words, retailers have good reason to go all out to please consumers both during the holiday season and afterward.

Returns tend to be directly related to holiday sales, so stronger sales lead to increased levels of post-holiday returns, Ken Johnson, vice president of corporate development for retail technology vendor Newgistics, said. Thanks to the subprime mortgage crisis and high gas prices, among other economic factors, overall U.S. holiday sales are projected to increase by a modest 4 percent this year to US$474.5 billion, according to the National Retail Federation. If those predictions play out, it will represent the slowest growth since 2002, the NRF says. That might suggest lower levels of returns come January, Freeman Evans noted.

Yet the picture for online sales is brighter. JupiterResearch projects an increase of a full 20 percent in U.S. online sales in November and December over those from 2006, for a total of $39 billion. Indeed, online sales are expected to account for an increasing proportion of retail sales in the coming years. For example, whereas the world's biggest retailers reported e-commerce sales amounting to an average of about 8.5 percent of their overall sales at the end of 2006, that number is expected to grow to 15.8 percent by 2011, Burt said.

It may be good news for e-tailers, but returns are always proportionately higher for online purchases than for those made through stores, she noted. Bottom line? Happier e-tailers during the shopping season; a bigger crush of returns afterward.

So what can retailers -- both online and in stores -- do to prepare for post-holiday returns? The first thing is to do everything they can to minimize return levels in the first place, Scott Silverman, executive director of Shop.org, said. Shop.org is the National Retail Federation's digital division.

For online channels, that can be a matter of simply providing consumers with more detail about the product so that they have a better idea of what to expect. One effective way to do that is to give customers the opportunity to write product reviews, Silverman suggested. "The retailer may write a paragraph describing the product, but nothing will convey what it's like to use better than hearing from hundreds of customers who have used it already," he explained.

Providing more product information helps with conversion rates into sales on the front end, and by creating more realistic expectations it also reduces the incidence of returns on the back end, he said.

In terms of managing the returns that do come in, retailers are also taking the traditional step of adding staff for the season to help with returns processing, Johnson said. Eliminating any restocking fees and offering a choice among reimbursement methods are also steps retailers must take to satisfy consumers, Gartner's Burt added.

Tapping into consumers' desire to have flexibility in the channels they use for returns, another key step is for retailers to allow them to return merchandise to stores, even if it was purchased online or from a catalog, Silverman added.

Not only does that flexibility make returns more convenient for consumers, but it also can create an expected advantage for retailers: A full 26 percent of consumers returning a product purchased online to a store actually end up purchasing something else while they are in the store, he said. Had that return been made through the mail, those follow-up purchases may never have been made, creating a sort of "silver lining" for retailers on the returns process.

Retailers can also make it easier for consumers to return holiday gifts by giving them the option of using SmartLabel technology, Newgistics' Johnson noted. SmartLabels allow consumers to place return packages in the mail from home; Newgistics then collects the packages early in the mail stream and returns them to the appropriate retailers, he explained.

Overall, retailers are generally improving their handling of returns on the front end, Burt said. Quickly incorporating returned products back into inventory and onto the balance sheet is another challenge many retailers are currently struggling with, she said.

The next challenge, Burt added, is to provide better integration with historical customer data so that retail associates processing a return can recognize when a customer is a frequent buyer, for example.

"While a lot of returns software has traditionally concentrated on loss prevention rather than the customer experience, with much of the processing power dedicated to detecting fraud, that's starting to shift," she noted. "A return is just a reverse customer order," Burt explained. "Retailers are usually careful to be customer-friendly with orders going out, and they should do the same thing when an order comes back. The next step is to say, 'you buy a lot from us -- here's an incentive to come back.'"

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