Thanks to the vast choice, lots of bargains and the ability to avoid crowded shopping centres, on-line festive shopping is predicted to be big this Christmas. In fact, e-tailers reckon it will be even bigger than last year when UK consumers spent £4.6 billion on-line on presents, food and other festive products. Another piece if research also showed that 37% of people bought at least half of their festive shopping on-line in 2008.

But e-retail industry group IMRG is concerned that on-line consumers know how to make “safe” buys on the web. IMRG’s director of operations, David Smith, is reported as saying: “Consumers love shopping on-line for Christmas. We want to make sure they protect themselves, keep their personal details secure and be certain about the retailer.”

To help consumers, IMRG has set up an Internet Shopping is Safe (ISIS) programme.
E-retailers that sign up to the scheme commit to trading responsibly and have their website and services regularly checked by IMRG. ISIS-accredited retailers now account for around two-thirds of all UK on-line shopping.

You can find out more at www.isisaccreditation.imrg.org, as well as shopping site, Kelkoo.co.uk.

Media research company Nielsen recently set out to prove that social media use put a significant dent into email use. They believed that the more time people spent on social networks, the less time they were likely to spend using email.

However, the subsequent research revealed that the opposite occurs: the people consuming the largest amount of social media are also the people consuming the largest amount of email.

It makes sense, really. We often get our social media updates through our email anyway, via notifications. It’s also quite possibly the case that people who use social media more are on their computer more – and therefore more likely to use their email too.

It does appear that an increase in one communication channel correlates with the other.

Like everyone else, we are now on twitter! Follow us for up-to-date information about the company along with some of our followers. Mostly it will of course be business related…mostly

Anyone who is in the business of on-line promotion and marketing will know just how import social community networks can be – and especially Twitter.com. Most important of all, however, is not simply the number of Tweets created, but the number of re-tweets…

A recent survey claimed that about 1.5% of all tweets are actually re-tweets and the chances are that this figure is set to increase. Many more people are becoming familiar with twitter and twitter culture and more tools are coming out for sites making it easier to re-tweet.

Soon enough, too, Twitter will incorporate the retweet feature on to Twitter.com, which means that the number of re-tweets will rise significantly.

But there is an art to Tweeting and re-tweeting that will help your business and product marketing along no end.

One of the queens of Tweeting is Shéa Bennett, who writes the blog Twittercism. She has come up with an equation re-Tweet optimisation: Twitter has a 140-character limit, so it’s vital that you consider your user name and how many characters you need to leave free. Bennett believes you should always  ensure that you leave a minimum of 12 to characters at the end of each tweet. If not, you are forcing those who want to retweet to edit your submissions so that they can give the proper credit. Because of this extra work, there are many times when they simply won’t bother retweeting you at all.

Whether you leave 15 characters at the end – or more – the key to creating successful retweets is to think about the usability for your readers. It’s a simple concept and one that you should aim to get right…

Take note all you budding e-commerce site owners. A PayPal study has revealed nine reasons why they abandon their shopping cart:

1         46% said high shipping charges
2         37% said they wanted to “comparison shop”
3         36% said a lack of money
4         27% said they wanted to look for a coupon
5         26% said they wanted to shop offline
6         24& said they couldn’t find a preferred pay option
7         23% said the item was unavailable at checkout
8         22% said they couldn’t find customer support
9         21% said they were concerned about security of credit card data.

Rather like window shoppers on the high street, most on-line customers tend to browse, look around some more, and then return to a site to buy.

A new study by McAfee of 163 million online shoppers revealed that the majority are “digital window shoppers”.

But where shoppers see a security cue, conversions were 11% higher. Indeed, the longer it took a customer to complete a sale, the more responsive they were to security cues.

A senior research analyst for McAfee is reported as saying: “On-line retailers who ignore the role security plays in converting digital window shoppers to customers are missing out on a great deal of money.”

The survey found result also revealed:

* 65% of all shoppers will wait a day or more to complete a purchase.
* The average delay in completing a purchase is 33 hours and 54 minutes.