News and Blog

Walmart has just introduced a new mobile app for Android and iOS to allow users a more streamlined, simpler checkout process. Neil Ashe, president and CEO of Walmart's global ecommerce was quoted saying "It’s fast. It’s simple, and it’s a secure way for customers to use their smartphone." Forbes wrote on the subject : "Some may be wondering why Walmart would put the time and effort into building a proprietary mobile payments platform when other options abound. We can’t forget, though, that the biggest competitor of the world’s largest retailer is a company rooted in digital shopping innovation: Amazon. With Walmart building its own mobile payment solution, it effectively owns its customers’ mobile payment journey as well (just as Pay with Amazon does). Does this prove that the big-box retailer is taking the next step in thinking like a technology company? It has had its sights set on doing so for some time now, but this may be Walmart’s boldest move yet.

You might have noticed that you are no longer seeing tweet buttons with a counter on them. As of late November, Twitter has officially done away with the old tweet count feature that they have had since their beginning. While some are upset at it's removal, believing that the tweet counter helped users gauge the quality of their content, Twitter explained that the number could be misleading. According to Twitter, "The Tweet button counts the number of Tweets that have been Tweeted with the exact URL specified in the button. This count does not reflect the impact on Twitter of conversation about your content — it doesn’t count replies, quote Tweets, variants of your URLs, nor does it reflect the fact that some people Tweeting these URLs might have many more followers than others." However the main reasoning behind the deprecation of this feature is more technical.

Entrepreneur has published an article on three ecommerce trends that you should be keeping your eye on in the future. The first is that commerce will become more seamless. Essentially this means that the process of checking out is going to head in the direction where the process is as simple as possible, and checking out merely requires the press of a button rather than filling out all your information. The second trend ties directly in with the first, and is that digital wallets will become even more popular. It is these digital wallets that will give you the capability to simplify the checkout process. The third trend that Entrepreneur mentioned is that innovations will be available to all businesses. "The most sophisticated capabilities necessary to enable these sorts of experiences will very shortly be available to businesses of all sizes." This is a result of software as a service platforms (SaaS) that allow smaller businesses to have more powerful online presences.

Late last month Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, responded to a tweet confirming that the next update to Google's search algorithm should come out late this year. With only a little over a month left in 2015, the update should be coming out very soon. One significant feature of the algorithm is that it should be real time, meaning that changes to your site should be processed by the algorithm as soon as they happen. Obviously this will have some important implications. Search Engine Land has published some tips on preparing for this update. 1. Anchor Text Distribution "All of your links shouldn’t include exact-match anchor text. Vary your external links by brand, URL, long-tail keywords and non-descriptive keywords." 2.