2011: A Digital Ecommerce Retrospective

Another year come and gone and the ecommerce world continues to expand.

2011 saw the untimely and much mourned death of Steve Jobs, a new congressional bill called SOPA stirred up vigorous debate about the future of the internet, Netflix spent the year running around like a chicken with its head cut off and of course, you can’t step anywhere anymore with hearing about the rise of mobile and cloud computing.

Here at Building Keystones, we want to end the year with a look at some of our top posts and reflect on the eclectic ecommerce tips and tricks we spent our year investigating:

Yes! You Need A Facebook Strategy Now – Everyone from Lady Gaga to 1-800-Flowers are sporting Facebook stores. This post highlights the reasons why companies in the digital product space need to seriously consider developing their presence on various social media networks and how doing so affects their customer relations.

How Do You Handle Subscription Renewals? – With the maturation of SaaS products, digital content paywalls and downloadable software products, there is even more demand for improved multi-period subscription billing. So how do you handle subscription renewals?

Four Tips For Increasing Email Deliverability – As we noted in last week’s post, email is far from dead. Check out this post from earlier in the year and make sure your email marketing campaigns are as effective as they can be.

Is SaaS Right For Your Business? – The cloud is the hot topic right now in the ecommerce world. Use this post as a guide line for jump starting the conversation in your company about whether a SaaS solution is right for you. BONUS: This post contains a free download to the in-depth Forrester report sponsored by cleverbridge – Software Vendors: The Shift to SaaS

Let Your Customer’s Voice Be Heard– A personal favorite. This was my first original contribution to Building Keystones based upon several years experience in customer service and the blog’s first post about the topic. A must read for anyone in any line of business, for as Kevin Stirtz said, “The first step to success in any business is to ask your customers what they want.”

As we look forward to another year of providing exceptional ecommerce know-how, we wanted to thank you, our dear readers, for your time, your engagement, and most of all your feedback. We hope that 2011 was one of constant success and lasting improvement for you and your ecommerce business and that 2012 continues along the same path.

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And we are still offering our free download of the Gartner Magic Quadrant Report for Ecommerce 2011.