Ecommerc's future is going to be a symphony of feeds. Use SellWare.com to help manage the sell anytime, anywhere future that is coming fast.

There's some great data out there on marketing channel ROI. This infographic pulls together industry studies and surveys on how marketing channels compare.

Marty Note
Somewhat disingenuous to separate channels like this. Everything is everything now and that means results in one channel are influencd in many ways by other channels. That is an important caveat for the "all or nothing" crowd who may read these results thinking they can reduce or eliminate commitment to social or PPC.

Yeah we wouldn't do that.  Your site is MODELED and substantial changes to any part of your current model could take down all the dominoes. That doesn't mean this knowledge isn't important though your results may be different. Knowing what channel is contributing profit and what channel is contributing traffic allows you to invest in the blend. Remember it is the blend that wins so don't go cutting off your nose to spite your website.

Marty Note
Solid tips here with a few caveats:

* #3 printing is a nice to have now not a must have. Printing just isn't as important, but, for some, a printed piece is easier to share.

* Reviews are now more important in their absence. Having hundreds of reviews is great as it shows the size and value of the tribe formed around a given product. A Customer's voice is always a tad different sounding too, so be sure to curate content FROM reviews.

* High res images is a good idea, but don't slow the delivery of your page down. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to help server your images and videos fast no matter who is looking at your content or from where.

* Product comparisons are great especially if they are social.

* Shipping = we would amend shipping to make sure your FREE Shipping triggers are easy to find / be aware of and set to maximize conversions.

Ecommerce Is A Mobile & Social Game
The more I do this, web marketing, the more game-like everything feels. Mobile and social are acting like huge pythons squeezing content into a game. Content shock is the other trend impacting your content marketing.

In 2003 your content could be factual and visually boring and it would work. Not so much anymore. Today you must think of your content like pieces on a chess board. How can you achieve your goals by developing relationships between your content, your customers and advocates?

Mobile and social make ecommerce a game too as WaNeLo.com demonstrates. WaNeLo.com is a "clean slate" built to mashup massive amounts of content that already exists, make creating "YOUR WaNeLo.com Store" fun (you swipe through content) and collect a nice fee for being the first retailer to get the many changes to online commerce brought to you by a smart phone near you (and most of the time people are within 10' of their smart phones at all times).

We began the conversation about how to make an online store a game a few weeks ago on G+ (https://plus.google.com/+MartinWSmith/posts/RdjAjWoJTHw ).

This @HaikuDeck shares how to make content more game-like. Here are a few easy ways merchants can begin to create gamification:

* Create an Ambassadors Program to identify your 1% Contributors and 9% Supporters.
* Provide a public profile for Ambassadors (if they choose) with a good URL (cool.com/ambassadors/marty for example).
* Curate great Ambassador content first to OTHER Ambassadors and next, and this should be a smaller set, to the public via your site.

* Begin to track key Ambassador functionality such as social shares, links and likes.
* Create feedback loops for Ambassador actions (200 Likes, 100 links and 3,000 social shares to date or yesterday or last week).

* Steal LinkedIn's famous, "Your profile is 80% complete" Call-To-Action (CTA).

Might seem strange to talk about adding gamification to ecommerce NOW when the holiday tsunami is only days away, but most ecommerce teams have their plans made up. While social media means any plan must respond to what is happening now, most ecommerce teams are working a quarter ahead.

Successful gamification isn't easy, but rewards are huge. Instead of invading Russia in the winter we suggest merchants begin building foundation by creating an Ambassador Program. Ambassadors, those fans, friends and supporters willing to help, become critical when you want to turn gamfication ON (and you will).

This holiday selling season (2014) will happen as close to real time as any thanks to the social / mobile web. Listening and curating are going to be important, but so is tapping the nostalgia and spirit of the season in creative and collaborative ways.

At AddShoppers we have been busy number crunching. “Why?” We wanted to help eCommerce store owners and social experts understand a monetary value for soc