Ecommerce & Web Marketing Research: November 21-30 2004

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November 30 2004

Black Friday lucky for Ecommerce

Comscore have just released their Online Shopping Holiday update. Amongst the findings:

• Online sales during the holiday shopping season to Friday, November 26 came to 5.7 billion dollars, 23% up on the same period in 2003.

• Online sales during the five days ending Friday, November 26 (“Black Friday”) were $1.23 billion, up 35% on the same period in 2003.

• Thanksgiving is traditionally a slow online shopping day, but this year was phenomenal - 133 million dollars, an increase of 100% on last year!

• 250 million dollars was spent online in the USA on “Black Friday,” an increase of 41% on 2003

View the Online Shopping Holiday Update report

Shopping cart software Learn more about shopping carts or read our reviews of some the best shopping cart software around! Need to learn more about merchant accounts or payment processors? Try our ecommerce guides

November 28 2004

Google processing 301 redirects faster?

Last week, I published an article on pagejacking. It was spidered and displayed in Google results within a few days. I noticed that the page name spelling was incorrect, so I used the standard, search engine friendly method for renaming a file once it is already displaying in the SERP's; a 301 redirect. 

When I've done this in the past, it usually took Google a few weeks to spider the renamed page, drop the old file name from the SERPs, then display the new one. Other search engines were even slower. In this particular instance, it only took Google 3 days to make the change! Excellent stuff.

If you need to rename or move pages around within your site, a 301 redirect really is the safest way to go. Bear in mind though, how quickly the changes reflect in Google will have a lot to do on how regularly Google spiders your site - check your server logs to determine this.

Learn more about 301 redirects 
Learn more about search engine spiders

November 24 2004

Holiday shopping visits up 60%

Nielsen//NetRatings has released its sixth annual Holiday eShopping Index. The report states that this year’s online holiday shopping frenzy commenced the week ending November 14, with an increase of 60% in online shopping visits in comparison to the prior week. 

Growth in visits to increasing 60 percent in online shopping visits from the week prior. Shopping visits to websites in categories including home and garden, books/music/video, and toys/video games categories were the leaders in the increases. For example, the traffic to KBToys.com skyrocketed 276 percent

Read the Neilsen Netratings press release (PDF)

Phishing on the rise 

Phishing (definition) is becoming an increasingly prevalent blight on the web judging by the Phishing Activity Trends Report - October 2004 released by the Anti-Phishing Working Group. Amongst it's findings:

• Number of active phishing sites was 1142, that's nearly double July's figures.
• Country hosting the most phishing sites in October was the USA, followed by China and Korea
• Average lifespan of phishing sites 6.4 days
• Longest lifespan recorded 
• 6,597 new, unique phishing emails were reported to the APWG, over 3 times the number reported during August.

Read the full report (PDF 141kb)

November 23 2004

USA Internet access tax ban update

The USA House of Representatives last week approved a version of a new Internet access tax ban, which prevents the application on state and federal tariffs on Internet connections for the next four years.

Read more

Holiday purchasing intent survey results

Doubleclick have released the results of the Consumer Holiday Purchase Intent Study. Amongst the findings

• 84% of respondents expect to make purchases in retail stores, down 6% on 2003
• 64% plan to shop online, an increase of over 15% on 2003
• Female online shoppers made up 60% with 54% having incomes over $50K
• 28% plan to spend between $251 and $500
• 19% plan to spend between $501 and $750

Read the full holiday purchasing report.

Pick up some Xmas marketing tips.

Buying/selling text links Buying Selling

Hackers target banner ad servers

The number of parasites on the web really disgusts me. It seems that every day, online sociopaths and criminals find another way to make life in the world of ecommerce just that little bit harder. If only these people would use their skills legitimately...

It appears that some hackers are now targeting banner ad servers to redirect users to other sites that contain virus files that are then executed on the users computer. This new angle has the potential of causing a great amount of damage in a very short space of time.

Hackers recently compromised a German marketing network server involved with ad delivery on hundreds of sites. Some users visiting web sites that were partners of the ad network were redirected to another site and delivered a file containing the Bofra exploit which then attempted to execute on their system. The Bofra IFrame exploits an Internet Explorer vulnerability and is a variation of recent MyDoom code.

Read more.

November 22, 2004

Free email storage wars

It's hard to believe that only a year ago, millions of us had Yahoo and Hotmail accounts with only a few megabytes of storage space. Actually, one of Hotmail's FAQ's still states inbox storage space of only 2 megabytes - I've emailed Bill about it :).

In the latest salvo in the free email wars, Yahoo has announced that it will double the storage space for users.

Here's where the "Big 3" currently stand:

I've often wondered if all the spam in free email services accounts were added up, how many terabytes it would be. 

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