Comparison Shopping Engine Strategies

ChannelAdvisor ADC launched -- and we want you to come see it!

Our good friend Tank Stikman will be around to say hello if you come out to ChannelAdvisor's Agile Development Center, or ADC.

For around nine months we've shifted away from developing our products in the traditional "waterfall" method to an Agile / Scrum approach.  This means we're now releasing product updates every 30 days or so -- which also means that our products can better reflect what customers really want.

The ADC is in the building next door to 2701 Aerial Pkwy, ChannelAdvisor HQ, and we've outfit the new space in a way that encourages and fosters the Scrum methodology.

You're invited
If you're in the RTP area, come to our open house next Tuesday (Feb 12) and we'll show you the sights!  Rumor has it there are awesome door prizes like an iPod Touch or a Wii...

ChannelAdvisor is really looking to ramp up the size of our engineering team, so definitely come if you're engineering-inclined -- and invite your friends, too!

RSVP here: http://www.channeladvisor.com/openhouse/

Send questions to Scott -- scott.hurff at channeladvisor dot com

The Color of Money

Red beats blue.  Green beats light blue.  But light blue beats red and green. 

What?!

Marketing Sherpa wrote up a useful piece on office label maker Dymo and their efforts to study button characteristics and how they drive conversions.

While highly specific to Dymo's site, you can use their approach to conduct experiments for color, text narrative and button size.

If you knew that simply changing the color of a button increased conversions by 4 percent, would you do it?  Please say yes, or I'll worry about you.

Some lovely bits:

Amazingly, a larger 'Proceed to Checkout' button lifted conversions 44.11% over the existing 'Add to Cart' one. Of course, the design team scrambled to make the permanent switch. On the cross-sell page test, the words 'Proceed to Cart' beat 'Add to Cart' by 21.8% -- and, therefore, replaced it across the site.

With the cross-sell page, they were pleasantly surprised to see that expediting the shopping experience by removing the cross-sell step actually reduced conversions by 15%. "That finding doesn't exactly fit all of the prevailing school of thought on the huge importance of speed either," Klazema says.

Use this for your site. 

If you're a merchant -- especially if you're in the SMB range -- you really need to look at this.  It's relatively simple to track these sorts of things and if you're not doing it, then you're not going to understand how your customers react to your site.

Written by Scott Hurff -- scott.hurff at channeladvisor (dot com).

Ask the Feed Doctor: Anthony Alford

Remember those cool little "Easter Eggs" you used to find in games like SimCity 2000 that you had to hear about from the game's developers?

Anthony Alford, one of the developers of ShoppingAdvisor over at CA, has been helping people business rule-ize their feeds for years.  Now he's launched a series over at the CA Blog called "Ask the Feed Doctor."

Go get your dose of feed clean-ness.