If your retail website sells dozens of products, you’re likely using a shopping cart instead of a solo order flow. One of the biggest advantages to using a shopping cart is the ability to easily upsell a customer to related products. If you have a large product inventory, then you’re able to turn on all kinds of upsell recommendation engines in your shopping cart to help users find related products and increase your revenue at check out.

However, you need to be careful when you do this not to interrupt or irritate your users. When you recommend other products, your upsell technique should be helpful to the user, not distracting.

For this article, we’re going to use the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People on Amazon.com because the book is offered on multiple platforms and because the shopping cart is a best-practice example.

Here are four of the best shopping cart upsell strategies:

Best Shopping Cart Upsell #1: Bundling Upsell – If you have a complimentary product, let the user know on the product page. In this upsell, you are suggesting that the user buy two or more products together for one low price (the price can offer a discount or not). This works well when you have multiple products on the same topic or one product on multiple platforms, such as a book in both paperback and audio form.

Here is a good example of bundling on Amazon.com:

Your upsell strategy when bundling products is only effective if you are offering your users a service. The best way to do this is to carefully select your related products so that they make sense when put together.

Read the rest of this article Four Best Shopping Cart Upsell Strategies…

This stuff will never get old to me, and I finally caught it in time for a screenshot (before I just missed it and only caught it on it’s respective category page).

Writing an article on the iPhone is kind of challenging mentally. You get a slew of iPhone haters, everyone who doesn’t have an iPhone HATES, I mean HATES iPhone articles. And until it picks up, I ask myself if I should really write another one.

But yet, every time I write one, it ends up on the front page of Digg. So, yeah it’s worth it to take the crap of a couple haters I think.

I have a few new topics to write about for mashable that I’m working on. So far I’ve covered a couple different topics, twitter, roadtrip tools, viewzi, and of course a bunch of iPhone apps. You can see all the ones I’ve written here.

I like writing for mashable, it’s my outlet for fun social media and techy stuff.

Here are 18 iPhone drinking apps that will keep track of how much you’re drinking, store drink recipes, help you figure out what to tip your bartender, and more.

Which have you tried out? Tell us more in the comments!

BeerCounter – You know how you start off the night knowing exactly how many beers you might intend to consume, and by the end of the night you’ve actually consumed the equivalent of a personal keg? This app is a free and simple beer counter. Every time you consume another drink, add one to the roster. No cheating, this app might be better kept in the hands of your designated driver.

Read the rest of “18 iPhone Drinking Apps to Get the Party Started”…

An email feedback loop (FBL) is a service that many ISPs will provide to companies who send bulk mailings. On their end, it’s beneficial because it identifies pro-active companies and reduces the amount of spam sent to their users.

On your end, this is very beneficial because the #1 reason for poor deliverability is spam complaints. By subscribing to an email feedback loop, you will know who is marking you as such so that you can remove them from your list and get your domain white listed with the top ISPs.

What you’ll need in order to register for email feedback loops:

• Access to accounts on your domain: abuse@ or postmaster@
• IP addresses that you want to receive feedback loop emails for

Feedback Loop Forms you can fill out online

AOL Feedback Loop – This page will give you access to the email feedback loop form, application information, amongst other requirements and info.

Comcast Feedback Loop – A very simple form from Comcast.net that includes an informative “terms of service” agreement and privacy policy.

Read the rest of “10 Email Feedback Loop Lists”…

We recently had a client who discovered something that was wrong with their email marketing and tracking campaigns, and we wanted to share it with you.

Now, take a few minutes to look at your fulfillment history and the tracking codes that are attached to your sales. Do many of them contain “white web” codes? White web codes are simply the codes that come up telling you that a user just happened upon your site and bought a product.

What our client learned recently is that EVERY link in your email must have a unique campaign ID attached to it. When our client started attaching a tracking code to every link in their email newsletter, they gained a 50% increase in their revenue per thousand emails sent. The revenue was always there, it was just being allocated inappropriately.

Read the rest of Email Marketing and Tracking - Increase RPM with Better Links

In order for an Internet hub to convert visitors into buyers, you need to align the topics you write about with the products you sell. If you are writing about a topic that a reader can’t upgrade from, then you should either create a product, or start writing about something you do have product inventory for.

Topics that sell must have something to sell! A good example of this best practice in visitor conversion is Johns Hopkins Health Alerts. They have 22 topics on their Internet hub from Arthritis to Women’s Health.

If you’re visiting JohnsHopkinsHealthAlerts.com for information on Arthritis, you’ll not only find articles on the subject, you’ll find an array of products and services related Arthritis.

Read the rest of: Topics That Sell – Increase Visitor Conversion Rates by Lining up Products with Topics…

With the launch of the app store for iPhone 3G, and now for the original iPhone and iPod Touch, there’s quite the collection of tools. And I’m not just talking about social media tools, I’m talking household, real-life tools.

Think about consolidating your junk drawer(s) with these 11 apps:

Tea Timer – No worries about that tea being overcooked, or anything else that involves a kitchen timer. You now have Tea Timer right in your pocket. Countdown times can be set from 30 seconds to 15 minutes. This app goes for $0.99 and the creator disagrees that the Timer feature in the iPhone native Clock app works just as well.

You drink the noob hatorade: You claim that you’ve used Twitter since the dawn of 2006 and you don’t necessarily want Twitter to become the next MySpace.

or

You invite your mom to Twitter: You think Twitter is the best thing since AOL and want to know the exact doings of everyone you care about, at all times (in 140 characters or less).

If your stance is the latter, then you know how hard it is to convince someone to join, never mind use Twitter. If your stance is the former, well this article is probably just going to irritate the crap out of you.

For everyone else, here’s how to get your mom, friends, and colleagues on Twitter:

1. Find them some valuable people to follow

If you’re dedicated to the cause, you’ll find people of interest to your subjects who are on Twitter. If your subject is already into social media, then this task is easy. There are dozens of social media mavens on Twitter, which you probably already know. If they’re not, then you’re going to have to do some more digging. Here are some suggestions:

Continue Reading Seven Ways to Get Your Mom on Twitter

Even if you’re not rocking an iPhone or BlackBerry, I know from personal experience (like last month, before I had an iPhone) that you can still have a digital adventure with something as simple as the Sony Ericsson w580i. In fact, if I’d had an iPhone then, I wouldn’t have been able to take all of the embarrassing footage I ended up with after 62 hours in the car.

Plan your trip with TripIt.

What makes TripIt a good planning tool for a roadtrip is that it has a mobile counterpart. So whether you start at home or start on the road, you’ll have access to your itinerary from anywhere. Book your hotels on Hotels.com and you have yourself a digital agenda.

Blog your whole story with Utterz.

There are, again, dozens of blogging apps for the iPhone. But not everybody has, or wants, an iPhone (keep stickin’ it to the man guys!) and there have been blogging apps for the mobile phone since the dawn of social media. An especially great mobile blogging platform is Utterz. Utterz is fantastic because it works with all of the popular blogging platforms including Blogger, Wordpress, Flickr, Typepad, Drupal, and others. You could also use MoBlog to start a whole new mobile blog, but I’m not sure what the value is in creating yet another blog unless it’s your primary site.

Continue Reading 25+ Tools for a Road Trip 2.0

If you’re not familiar with Geocaching, it’s a treasure-hunting game based on the community over at Geocaching.com. Their website boasts that Geocaching is “the sport where you are the search engine.” According to Wikipedia, Geocaches are currently placed in over 100 countries around the world and on all seven continents, including Antarctica.

To sum it up Twitter-style in 140 characters or less: Geocachers hide a cache somewhere in the world and log its GPS location. Others find the cache, log its find & replace it with something new.

A serious network of Geocachers over at Geocaching.com enables all of this. Some serious Geocachers also use geo-location video sites like Seero to post videos of their finds that sync with the trail from their GPS devices.

You can also use GeoGraffiti (available as an iPhone app) to leave shout-outs for other Geocachers when they get to the cache coordinates.

TomTom vs. iPhone 3G Apps

There are a variety of GeoCaching applications, but since there’s so much hype with the iPhone 3G and its supposed GPS, I wanted to test it against a more primal form of GPS: TomTom One.

The contenders in this 2-day Geocaching mission were: $1.99 GeopherLite App for iPhone 3G, the free Google Maps app for iPhone 3G, and a TomTom One GPS device.

Continue Reading Treasure Hunting with the iPhone 3G