Large ecommerce retailers have spent much time and money in identifying the right set of features that can generate maximum revenue from their sites. Smaller ecommerce players can learn from these retailers and can identify the features that will provide maximum benefit to their sites, too. The following sections highlight some of these key features that can be used by the smaller online businesses.

1. Customer Segmentation

Consumers that come to a site create a ton of information — the orders they have placed, the products they have browsed, the search terms they have used, and their saved addresses. All this can be used to target different customers in different ways. This is known as customer segmentation or personalization. Most large sites analyze their customer base, identify the different customer segments and define the strategy for targeting each segment. This means that different customers might see different pages based on their interaction with the site.

If your site has a variety of different products, it is worth analyzing the customer base and identifying the different segments. This can be done by using survey tools like ForeSee Results, Zoomerang, SurveyMonkey and others. Once that is done, you can work on defining specific content that will serve each segment. There are several tools that can help achieve this. Some of the examples are Monetate and Adobe’s Test&Target extension. These tools can offer a free trial version, to costing a few thousand dollars — depending on the size of your site. Carefully understand your site’s requirement to pick the right tool. The changes should result in a higher conversion rate.

2. Rich Product Content

Customers want to feel comfortable buying a product online and large retailers provide them with rich product content. This includes multiple product images, ability to zoom in and out of each product image, detailed product description and specifications (if applicable), product ratings and reviews, promotional offers for the product and the shipping lead-time.

A site does not need to offer all of these bells and whistles, but at a minimum can offer its customers multiple product images and the ability to zoom in and out. This will improve the comfort level of the customer before he or she makes a purchase. Customers cannot hold and touch the product, but by providing this feature they can see all the details of the product from different angles. The good thing is that this feature is fairly quick to enable, though it will take some time to take high-resolution pictures of your products from multiple angles, if they are not already available.

There are several freeware packages available that can use all these images to create a 360-degree view of the product. A good example is in an article published on Ecommerce Developer, “Full 360-Degree Product Image Rotation in JavaScript.” The example on the left shows a product that allows users to zoom in on the image and select different images that show the product from different angles.

3. Inventory and Accurate Availability Information

Providing accurate product availability to customers during the shopping process leads to improved customer satisfaction. This feature, though, is not easy to implement and it also does not apply to every retailer. Some retailers do not maintain inventory (e.g. outsourced warehouses) or do not have inventory (e.g. digital downloads) or have products that are manufactured after receiving the order (e.g. made to order products).

Amazon was one of the first sites to share inventory visibility with its customers, at around 1997. These days a lot of large ecommerce sites display available inventory. This helps if your site sells products that are in demand and have limited quantities available. Some sites have taken this a step further and now price the product based on the demand and the available inventory. A few sites also have the availability to get rain checks by allowing customers to join a wait list.

Some smaller sites manage this manually, though, as the size of the product offering grows on the site, it becomes cumbersome and time consuming to do. There are several free and affordable online inventory management solutions that can be used to manage your product offering. Some examples of these are Clearly Inventory, Zoho CRM, and inFlow Inventory.

4. Guided Selling

Guided selling helps consumers get to a targeted list of products based on their answers to a series of questions shown on the site. Buying a computer or a TV on a large site is a good example of how a customer can navigate to the desired products by selecting a series of guided options. This feature works well on sites that have several similar products that can make selecting a single product for purchase difficult; this also works well on sites that sell products bought for gifting. Blue Nile’s “Build Your Own Ring”, below, is a good example of how the guided selling feature works.

This feature is not easy to build but smaller retailers can start with having gifting guides and suggestions on the site (e.g. gifts for mom, Easter gifts, and so on).

5. Cross-selling and Up-selling

Cross-selling and up-selling is the process of guiding a consumer to additional related products with enhanced features and, in most cases, with higher prices and margins. Cross-sell and up-sell is heavily used on large ecommerce sites. This is an easy-to-implement functionality that can result in significant revenue uplift. Related products can be displayed based on static associations. Or if your site supports dynamic rules, then a cross-sell or up-sell can be based on associations like “What other users purchased after seeing this product” to show the recommendations.

There are several hosted providers that can help create cross-sell and up-sell and the functionality can be up and running within a few days. The Filter, Directed Edge and ChoiceStream are a few examples of the hosted cross-sell and up-sell providers. Many shopping carts also provide the functionality built-in, or through a plug-in.

6. Ease of Returns

When building an ecommerce site, returns is usually the last thing a merchant thinks of. But the ease in which a product can be returned has become a unique differentiator to help convert consumers who just browse the site into shoppers. For example, Zappos changed the customer mindset towards purchasing shoes online by simplifying the returns process.

The good thing is that returns is a relatively straightforward process to implement, in most cases, and it helps consumers make decisions when they cannot choose between multiple sites or are concerned about “getting stuck” after buying something online.

The best way to design a return policy is to put yourself in your shoppers’ position and see what kind of policy would make sense to them. If you can afford free return shipping, that would help differentiate your site from the others. Customers do not like paying for shipping and especially for return shipping. At a minimum, you should enable functionality on your site to print a return label for the product the customer wants to return. This has become fairly standard and is now available on almost every large retailer’s site.

7. Loyalty Programs

Large online retailers reward their customers by offering them special discounts, financing options and reward points that can be redeemed for free products. If your site has a lot of repeat customers, then this is one of the key features to enable. This feature helps build a relationship with the customer by making them feel a part of the site.

Also, there are several third-party loyalty programs — Smart Button, Epsilon, Innoviti and others — that can work with your site. Loyalty programs can also be used as an additional revenue stream by selling additional loyalty points to shoppers.

8. Address Verification

Address verification is done on almost every large ecommerce site. It works behind the scenes, transparent to the end customer. This is done by either calling a third-party service or having a component that takes an address (mostly shipping address) and compares it against a standard address database — such as the U.S. Postal Service — and returns a verified address that exists in the database. The data is also formatted to align with the needs of the shipping carrier.

This small component results in multiple benefits. It reduces the fees for correcting addresses that are charged by shipping carriers; it minimizes the number of returned orders due to unknown addresses; and, most importantly, it delivers customer orders to the right address the first time. And, as we all know, satisfied customers lead to repeat business and increased referrals.

9. Gift Cards

Gift cards provide retailers the ability to provide customers additional flexibility when making gift purchases. Gift cards typically are purchased with set amounts of value to be redeemed later to make purchases through the retailer.

Gift cards are an easy way to increase revenue without spending significant time and money in overhauling the existing ecommerce site. Large retailers use gift cards very effectively to increase revenue, especially during the holiday season. They are also used to target last-minute and undecided shoppers. Moreover, retailers that fully leverage the functionality of gift cards enable customers to combine gift cards as a payment method along with the other supported payment methods like credit cards or PayPal.

Smaller retailers can easily leverage off-the-shelf solutions to deliver gift card functionality to their customers. But they must ensure that they have the capability and the understanding to manage the end-to-end fulfillment process for this highly desirable customer functionality.

10. Payment Methods

It’s now common to offer customers multiple ways to pay for their purchases. A retailer does not want to lose business because he or she did not support a customer’s preferred payment method. Smaller retailers need to understand the requirements of the consumers that are accessing their sites and then enable the desired payment methods based on those findings.

Credit cards, PayPal, Google Checkout and Bill Me Later are the most common payment method options on large ecommerce sites. These methods do not take significant effort to enable, but provide site-flexibility and convenience for customers that are increasingly demanding alternative payment methods.

Note, however, that offering too many payment methods will confuse the consumer. Online sellers need to balance between meeting customer requirements and supporting multiple payment methods.

Every spring the MIT Sloan Sales Club organizes a one-day conference featuring top executives and CEOs on the latest sales topics. On May 6 Managing Director Brian Zimmerman and Venture Partner George Roberts are scheduled to participate in two panels:

• Brian will join Bob Kelly, Chairman of The Sales Management Association; Donya Rose, Managing Principal of The Cygnal Group; Pat Elizondo, SVP of Xerox; and Lance VanderBrook, VP of Worldwide Sales of Kiva Systems to discuss ROI on Sales Team Management
• George will join Peter Levine, MIT Senior Lecturer; Jules Pieri, CEO of The Daily Grommet; and Alex Taussig, principal of Highland Capital Partners on a panel discussion about making the sale to venture capitalists

As Managing Director of OpenView Partners, Brian works with OpenView’s portfolio executive teams to aggressively and profitably grow their sales and marketing organizations. Brian has over 20 years of management experience in sales and marketing. Brian is a founding member of Openview Venture Partners. Prior to joining OpenView, Brian was a Principal at Insight Venture Partners. Prior to Insight, he served as Director of Corporate Sales at Tidal Software, a systems management vendor specializing in job scheduling.

George partners with OpenView’s portfolio companies by helping them achieve their goals through strategy, focus, and operational execution. Since 2003, George has been making private investments and serving as a board member of several fast growing venture capital funded software companies including ScriptLogic Corporation and Fieldglass Inc. From 1990 to 2003, George spent 13 years at Oracle Corporation, most recently having served as EVP of North American Sales. While at Oracle, George was responsible for over $1 billion in revenue and over 2,000 employees, reporting directly to the company’s CEO and Chairman, Larry Ellison.

“It is a great opportunity to participate in such a renowned conference. I look forward to networking with emerging and existing sales leaders in the Boston community and the discussion around ROI on sales management,” stated Brian Zimmerman.

Orlando Ayala, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft and David Skok, general partner of Matrix Partners will be presenting the keynote speeches. Learn more about the conference on OpenView’s website. Friends of OpenView Partners can save $75 off of the conference ticket price by using the following coupon code: “MITSCLB_SpeakerFriend” on the online order form.

About OpenView Partners
OpenView Venture Partners is an expansion stage venture capital fund with a focus on high-growth software, Internet, and technology-enabled companies. Through its staff of seasoned operating executives, who collectively bring several decades of technology and management experience to the firm, OpenView is able to help portfolio companies with quickly ramping up Product, Go-To-Market, and Organizational and Operational functions to best practice levels. The firm was founded in 2006 and has a total capital under management of approximately $240 million. OpenView just launched its new content site. Check out OpenView Labs for more information. OpenView Venture Partners is based in Boston and invests on a worldwide basis.

Backup and recovery solutions provider Acronis has tagged distributor Mindscape to take the company’s consumer products through ANZ channels.

Mindscape will distribute and market current and upcoming Acronis products—including the True Image range—through retail and reseller channels in both countries under an agreement effective immediately, according to a statement released by Mindscape.

“We are thrilled to add such a recognisable and trusted brand like Acronis to our software portfolio,” says Mindscape sales and marketing general manager Tonia Velasco, in the statement. “Aligning ourselves with [Acronis] extends our business into a growing market which we are very excited about.”

Mindscape Asia Pacific is a leading software distributor in Australia for companies such as Broderbund, Encyclopaedia Britannica and The Learning Company.

“The decision was easy with Mindscape’s diverse portfolio and years of experience in consumer software distribution and republishing.,” says Karl Sice, general manager for Acronis, in the statement.”

“The additional capital will provide additional opportunity to really accelerate and be more aggressive about taking our products and services to markets around the world,” said Frazier. He declined to say which markets the company is targeting and would not offer a time frame for any expansion plans.

Exinda, a global provider of WAN optimization solutions, today announced it is taking its WAN Optimization solutions on tour throughout April, May and June, 2011. The company will offer live product demonstrations and share its expertise on improving application performance and user experience in the wide area network as part of the upcoming Angelbeat events.

“Angelbeat has increasingly grown in popularity among IT professionals and network managers who want to stay abreast of emerging issues and trends, and the technologies available to address them,” said Kevin Suitor, Exinda’s vice president of marketing. “These events are an opportunity for managers to engage in meaningful dialogue with our team to understand how our Unified Performance Management (UPM) approach can help them to solve their business and networking concerns.”

“Our UPM strategy delivers full visibility, control and optimization of each user and application on the network. This is the solution that enterprises of all sizes are looking for to allow them to manage their network amidst the evolving IT landscape,” added Suitor.

Exinda will offer live demonstrations of its WAN Optimization solutions at the following Angelbeat events:

Charlotte, NC        April 26
Raleigh, NC        April 27
Richmond, VA        April 28
Crystal City/DC        April 29
San Francisco, CA    May 23
Salt Lake City, UT    May 24
Phoenix, AZ        May 25
Long Island, NY        June 14
Stamford, CT        June 16

Each one-day Angelbeat seminar focuses on the top two issues of 2011- cloud computing and smartphone/ tablets – and helps you understand the impact from their deployment on your existing security policies, network architecture and overall IT infrastructure. The proven Angelbeat methodology of concise technical presentations across these multiple/complementary areas is followed. CPE continuing education credits are provided. You can register to attend your chosen event at https://www.angelbeat.com/event-registration or calling 516-277-2057.

About Exinda
Exinda is a proven global supplier of WAN Optimization and Application Acceleration products. The Exinda Unified Performance Management (UPM) solution encompasses application visibility, control, optimization and intelligent acceleration – all within a single network appliance that is affordable and easy to manage. Founded in 2002, Exinda is headquartered in Andover, MA and has established regional offices in Canada and the United Kingdom to support the growing global demand for its products and services. Exinda is a 100% channel business with products being distributed by a worldwide network of solution partners who offer local support and services. For more information, please visit http://www.exinda.com.

If you are responsible for the website of your brand, chances are you have seen small content and design changes make big differences in metrics and site performance.

Especially if your site is an online store.

The most sophisticated e-stores are constantly testing and optimizing content. What’s most interesting about THAT, of course, is that often the most sophisticated sites sport designs that are anything but clean and simple, which is what I think most people would default think was most powerful.

My “home page” on Amazon, for example, features 62 products and two banners, along with a couple dozen tabs and what have to be hundreds of text links to various sections and content. Plus about 400 words of content. Who’d a thunk that this page would drive the best results? But it surely does if Amazon is delivering it to me. Over the years Amazon has tested and optimized hundreds of store page designs. It’s a process of continuing incremental improvement that has been a major contributor to their retail power.

But for somewhat smaller operations, there are often resource and “turf” challenges between marketing, website and IT teams that limit the scope and frequency of site testing. Which is rather a shame because little things can mean a lot. And while best practices provide general guidelines, you never know when a change in button color can drive a huge increase in sales.

Monetate is a SaaS offering that helps sites test, optimize, and personalize content quickly and easily. The idea is to ease the process of both directing, implementing, and analyzing testing scenarios. The service offers the benefits of one-time cut-and-paste integration, and enables a remarkably broad range of capabilities, including:

• A/B/N testing of photos, colors, copy, headlines, offers, even sales “badges” like “our bestseller”
• Multivariate testing to identify the best combination of components to drive sales.
• Dynamic graphic rendering to add personalized text to pages
• Audience segmentation and page personalization based upon a variety of criteria, including geography, gender, first time visitor/repeat customer, and environmental targeting.
• Sentence-based campaign builder interface that makes it dead simple to identify the target, offer, layout, and testing scenario for the site.
• CRM targeting and data appends
• Easy to implement mobile solution
• Catalog item and flow analysis

That’s a pretty darned cool feature set for a SaaS because it means that a marketing team could test virtually every aspect of a site to see how it impacts performance. And because of the simplicity of implementation, IT and the web team experience a whole lot fewer headaches.

Monetate already has a fairly long list of clients. A few tier ones and a whole lot of what I would call 1.5s, meaning national brands that likely sell millions online. But perhaps not hundreds of millions. That seems a particular sweet spot for this offering. If you know you should be doing more site testing in your online store, I suggest you give these folks a look.