Here's a link to an informative study on ecommerce from Marketing Sherpa. Good stuff! This proves that the big time sites are not just relying on paid ads or affiliate marketing for their traffic. You need to be knowledgable about all the different ways that you can drive traffic to your site - not just the most obvious ones...
http://www.sherpastore.com/samples/Ecom_Benchmark_Exec_Sum.pdf Some of the topics covered in the pdf:
#1. Ecommerce site traffic -- where do high-growth online
merchants get their traffic from? What's the breakdown between
sources such as search vs. email?
#2. Affiliate marketing -- are merchants continuing to add new
rules about affiliates use of search and trademarks?
#3. Eyetracking lab data -- when consumers visit ecommerce sites,
what do their eyes look at? How many images? How much copy? Do
they scroll below the fold? What's the most clicked part of the
page? (PDF includes four-color "heatmap" of lab test results
from Wal-Mart's home page.)
#4. ROI -- How are marketers actually measuring ROI from e-retail
marketing tactics? Which numbers really matter? (Data from
1,101 marketers on this.)
#5. Online shoppers -- why do consumers abandon some sites
without purchasing? We asked 1,120 real-life shoppers what
sometimes stops them from completing transactions.
Labels: online marketing