Ecommerce is changing fast. This Scenttrail Marketing post shares and explains 30 "must master" to win ecommerce strategies and tatics.

Yesterday at the Digital Summit in Charlotte, NC we ran into a familiar problem. "Marty we don't have any content," an growing ecommerce website shared.

I shared the good and bad news. The bad news is developing an effective content strategy takes time, focus and money. The good news is there are things to do in parallel that bring all pieces together such as:

* Create an Ask.

* Begin to CURATE content.

* Curate 90%, Create about 10%.
* Listen and set up Key Performance Indicators to LISTEN better.
* Develop a testing culture.
* Begin the journey to sustainable online community.

Added video notes to explain all of this to our Ecommerce Questions Haiku Deck: http://shar.es/1guIF1

Find video notes on platforms, content curation and community on Curagami's YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/tSHeIxtrs4g

Crowdfunding is a new powerful marketing channel similar to what email marketing used to be - high profit, low cost with big social and UGC benefits.

Ecom's New  Best Practices
Better have all of these if you expect to make money online these days:
* Easy To Get Free Shipping.
* Easy To Find Sale Section.
* Deal of the Day (once Woot.com only now becoming ubiquitous).
* What's New.
* Best Sellers.
* For Him, Her, Kids navigation (if applies).
* An ASK for User Generated Content.
* Clear "WE VALUE UGC" signals.
* Exciting "Magazine-like" content.

Via Tomorrow's Ecommerce: How To Design Tomorrow's Ecommerce Today on Haiku Deck http://shar.es/1nkirc

Content Curation is the "new marketing" & this post shares 6 reasons curating content should be your online marketing's elephant.

Finding the need to curate content acute as we develop HackHeadphones on Shopify. Why create new content when everything we need can be curated from sources such branded websites (using videos from Shure.com), Amazon and other "portal" sites.

We are making sure to give credit where it is due and someone might throw a flag, but bet we can negotiate mutually beneficial terms since using content with attribution is closest thing we have to advertising these days.

Creating a distributed content network with widgets is a vast blue ocean of low cost, high reward Internet marketing today. Won't be that way for long.

Marty (@ScentTrail) Note
As a former Director of Ecommerce I know what trends will be a "must respond" while others are "nice to haves" if time allows. Here is my rating for the 5 Ecommerce Trends outlined by FourthSource:

Wearable Tech - Nice To Have
Sure I would blog about wearable tech and I would make sure whatever I was doing had a large PHONE and PAD component, but turning the battle ship to face the wind on "wearable tech" feels way to premature. Give it a year to let the gems emerge and then MAYBE wearable tech becomes a "must have".

Automation - Must Have
Yeah automation of front and back end processes is critical to ecommerce health. The "ship the same day" banner being thrown down by ebay and Amazon means some merchants may need to look HARD at their 80/20 rule (80% of most websites volume comes from 20% of their products) and create faster delivery options for the 20% especially to their VIPs. 

The other "automation" trend I see in 2014 but not mentioned here is front end dyanmic presentation based on predictive modeling. We can't keep batching and blasting the same content to every one. Use of personas and segments combined with dynamic zones, zones you fill based on what you know about the visitor either from their "new" or "returning' status, a cookie you previously planted or their behavior. Websites must act more like email with relevant information getting to the right group faster.

Tablets and Mobile - Must Have
The discussion of tablets and mobile misses the mark a tad for me. Biggest issue is how we ARCHITECT information now. Content needs to become a series of highly visual "rich snippets" held together by a flexible map of tags, interconnection, glue and chewing gum (lol). Mobile is a revolution not a thing, so think Mobile First in 2014.

Oliver Jäger's rap at the end is essential:

"In a day and age where information and connectivity have become an indispensable part of a modern lifestyle, it’s not just bricks-and-mortar retailers that need a new strategy. Online retailers are increasingly also having to adapt to the new multichannel, information-rich reality.

What this means is that in 2014 we’ll continue to see more and more retailers moving into the content space. Modern consumers are much more demanding and sophisticated, expecting their shopping experience to be a holistic and comprehensive one. "

Right on Oliver!