How Online Trend Watching Helps Our Business

Ted Sherman
*Note: This was written by a Yahoo! contributor. Do you have a small business story that you'd like to share? Sign up with the Yahoo! Contributor Network to start publishing your own finance articles.

As a small business owner who sells online, it's essential for me to keep current on both online retail trends and online retail data. To keep competitive, I need to know what people are doing online and also specific information about what and where they are buying, or not buying. Small business owners can use online retail trends to better match their website, products and marketing campaign to what people are really doing now.

When we began seeing trends toward people using smart phones more for web browsing and e-commerce, we made sure we designed a site optimized for those devices. When we realized another trend was viewing websites on HDTVs, we designed another version of our website optimized for HDTVs. We saw the trend, we adjusted our business plan to accommodate it, and now we see increased revenue as a result.

Online retail data refers to specific numbers, dollars and information about online sales. This might be the total dollars being spent online, amounts spend at specific websites or during certain selling seasons and more. As we sell different items on our site through third party retailers we are able to choose which items are offered. We review online retail data to determine which items and types of items sell best, so we can offer them on our site.

Small business owners can use online retail data to see what customers are buying and where they are spending their money. This data can also be used for advertising and marketing purposes. If you plan on advertising your small business you can research which websites are the most popular, with great specificity to your audience. Or if your small business manufactures products, you can determine which sites have the highest sales volume for your type of product, to then analyze the data compared to the commission they charge.

More from this contributor:
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It's Time To Change Your Financial Thinking
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Published by Ted Sherman - Featured Contributor in Business & Finance

Navy service WWII and Korea, BFA, MA. Retired, experience: exec. speechwriter, advertising, sales promotion, PR, graphic art, photography, travel and humor writing. Follow me: @travel4seniors, Editor of tra...  View profile

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