Rick Whittington Consulting

Last week, the new Monif C. Plus Sizes e-commerce site went live.  Monif C. is a fashion designer in New York City, and her creations have been featured in Essence, TLC’s What Not To Wear, Ebony, Glamour and BET.com, just to name a few.

Completed in just about 6 short weeks, this e-commerce site runs on a customized Magento platform.  Some of the best customer-facing features are the ability to browse the site in multiple currencies, a one-page AJAX checkout process, the ability to share your wishlist with others (so they buy you the right gift the first time) and cross-selling at the product level.  Customers can create an account to store order history and track orders, manage an address book and check their gift certificate balance. To give customers the most options, they can either check out as a guest (without registering) or with their stored account information.

Behind the scenes, the site features the ability to process both web, store and phone transactions, full inventory control and much more.

See the site in action at http://www.monifc.com.

Perhaps one of the biggest challenges online retailers face is creating a personal experience. If a customer walks into a store, they are greeted, given service, and assisted in making a purchase. With a web site, that personal connection just isn’t there. I wanted to share a recent case study with you to show you how we helped a client create that personal connection with their customers.

Read this entry »

Shrewd business owners know that to survive a downturn, you have to cut unnecessary costs,  advertise to gain visibility and get referrals. In tough economic times, referrals are more important than ever. That’s where social networking comes in.

Read this entry »

SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin recently published a graph of his opinion of how Google’s ranking algorithm has changed over time.  What did this graph say, and what does it mean?

Read this entry »

Since many small businesses (especially in today’s economy) don’t want to spend a fortune on testing and research, I was pleased to see Marketing Sherpa’s brilliant new article called “Case Study: Increase Conversions with Simple Site Redesign: 7 Steps” (you can read this article and see creative examples for free until April 15th).  The article provides some great advice to companies looking to test redesigns on the cheap.

Read this entry »

Last Monday, I was interviewed about social media on Job Search Radio.  I spent about 20-30 minutes speaking about using social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to find a job, and also discussed the RichmondJobNet site that we put together for the Greater Richmond Partnership.

Listen to the show here