“one drawback of online shopping is that the experience can feel sterile and isolating. Customers in such an environment may be less likely to have positive feelings about the online shopping experience, may be less inclined to engage in the online equivalent of window shopping (e.g., will not linger in front of a display), and may ultimately spend less money than their counterparts who shop in physical stores.”

Very interesting, and a cool idea. But is it distracting if you are there to order a specific item, or would it encourage you to browse and spend more? I would love to see what they are planning.

Read the story at MacNN

ps. Notice the new look? I’m about to redesign my main site, looking for a new look and feel for the blog. This may not last, but I quite like it.

Check it out!. I’m also number one in Yahoo and number three in MSN. I get all my work through my site or word of mouth, so its great to see it ranking at the top. If you’d like to benefit from my expertise, do get in touch

The Top 10 online retailers in the U.S based on conversion rates were:

proflowers.com, 14.1%
Coldwater Creek, 13.3%
FTD.com, 13.0%
QVC, 12.8%
Office Depot, 12.4%
eBay, 11.5%
Lands’ End, 11.5%
Tickets.com, 11.2%
1800flowers.com, 10.0%
Amazon, 9.6%

Although, as I’ve mentioned before, QVC site visitors have already been pre-sold the item by watching TV and are coming deliberately to buy, rather than to browse. In which case its maybe not such a good stat as 87.2% dont buy….

Web Analytics. Its all about interpretation….

Ebay and Amazon are givens, but interesting to see HMV hanging in there at number nine…

The answer? Use the unix tools on my mac to process the server logs, and extract the information I need.

Say I have a logfile from a client which is in a custom/weird/old format. I usually want to analyse the path to purchase. If I know that the 5 steps in the path to purchase are called shop1.php, shop2.php - up to shop5.php I can search for lines in this logfile which relate to someone calling one of the shop*.php pages using grep:

grep -i ’shop[1-5].php’ serverlog.log

This pulls out a line of text, but its got some information in there I don’t need if i’m just interested in how often a page in the purchase path is called. In this case I want to pull out the first 20 characters of the 6th (so you tell AWK to look at the seventh) column of data

awk ‘{print substr($7,1,20)}’

Then I want to sort the log,

sort serverlog.log

count how many occurrences of each line there are

uniq -c

then sort the lines in descending order

sort -r

I can pull all of this together and use pipe “|” to join up all the commands:

grep -i ’stage[1-5].htm’ serverlog.log | awk ‘{print substr($7,1,20)}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -r

Using unix I can pretty much get any info I need. Cool eh?

If you really want to get into this kind of stuff, which you may, given you are still reading this, you should checkout the unix text processing bible
“Unix Text Processing, by Dale Dougherty and Tim O’Reilly”.