Life In Internet

We were pretty amazed to hear in a March Shop.org Webinar that, in a recent year, fully 20% of eBags’ site sales were transacted using alternate forms of payment (i.e. not credit or debit cards). Talk about acquisition and conversion potential — given the right placement within the site, great marketing, and a fair bit of internal operational support to implement and market these options to customers.

As an increasing area of focus for retailers, today we’re launching a brand new research study focused specifically on payments. We’ve partnered with Javelin Strategy & Research to explore which payment forms retailers currently offer their customers (and what they plan to offer in the future), how much usage various payment forms are getting at this point, the degree to which alternate payments influence customer acquisition, where payments fits into the overall development budget and priority list, and more.

The success of this research, of course, depends on you, the online retailer. If by end of day tomorrow (Thursday, July 29) you don’t receive an email invitation to participate in our survey, please let me know. The deadline to participate is just two weeks from now – Wednesday, August 11. Please help us develop the benchmarks you need on this important topic. As always, we only report results in aggregate, and all retailers who complete the survey by the deadline will receive a complimentary copy of the results.

Please let me know if you have any questions about this or other Shop.org research. Thank you for supporting this new research endeavor!