Focus on SEO, Open Source to Boost Online Sales - Page 2

Page 2 of 2

Second, the report says e-commerce firms need to extract more return on investment (ROI) from technology they already have deployed. Enterprises that seek to extract more ROI with technologies that are owned by the IT organization could decrease costs of service, sales, and marketing by 15 percent for large enterprises and 10 percent for small enterprises in 2009 and 10 percent in subsequent years, according to the report.

Gartner estimates that one-time costs to implement this recommendation are less than 5 percent, because they require only established resources to tune the use. Organizations should consider eliminating any established technology that does not achieve a use rate of more than 95 percent.

Next, e-tailers should focus rich Internet application tool development on sales efforts with higher conversion rates, and leverage established community Web sites, rather than building communities in their organization’s site.

IT organizations experimenting with rich Internet application (RIA) Web 2.0 sales tools, usually developed in Ajax, can scale back their development efforts to only those tools that will lead to higher conversion rates. Gartner estimates that this strategy will save around 10 percent for large enterprises and about 5 percent for small enterprises in 2009, and 5 percent in future years. One-time development costs will be paid in full by reductions in other projects.

It would also be prudent to be aggressive in any negotiations with e-commerce software vendors, the report suggests.

"If an IT organization is seeking to purchase or already owns e-commerce software, then tough negotiation with vendors is an absolute imperative. Skilled negotiators can save 20 percent to 50 percent on license fees in 2009, and an additional 3 percent to 4 percent long term. No additional expenses are required to make this happen," states the report.

Gartner predicts that vendors will cling to prices during 2009, as they seek to preserve margins, but will offer big discounts to make up for longer sales cycles and increased competition.

Finally, online merchants should make organizational changes to eliminate redundancy in job functions.

"In some enterprises, personnel perform the same job tasks on different sides of the business. For example, an enterprise may have one marketing person for online operations and another for the bricks-and-mortar side of the business. It may be possible to combine these roles and produce savings in HR. This one-time saving may represent 10 percent to 15 percent of e-commerce HR expenses in 2009 and 5 percent in subsequent years, with little upfront costs required for training," according to the report.