Ecommerce Links: April 2012

It's that time again - here's our roundup of 10 killer ecommerce and paid content posts from around the web this April.

• Kicking it off, Elastic Path's own David Chiu guest posts at Econsultancy with Subscriptions 101: 3 Steps to Recurring Revenue.

• Pop quiz: what's better for form usability - left or right aligned labels?

• Is it time to flatten the box office? Media business analyst Richard Greenfield thinks so, calling for Hollywood to do away with the traditional theater release window. With steadily declining theater ticket sales, HDTV penetration at 70% and average screens at 44 inches, new releases could be delivered for a premium to living rooms.

• Developers rejoice! Amazon Appstore apps can now have in-app purchases. Bring on the freemium apps...but Amazon will take the same 30% bite Apple takes.

• Is it time to take Pinterest seriously yet? The little-social-network-that-could reportedly drives more revenue per click than Facebook and Twitter. While that's not hard to believe (per click), why not check it out for yourself with these 4 different ways to track traffic from Pinterest in Google Analytics.

• Email deliverability matters, but there's a great divide between best practice and average marketers in their success.

• What's the difference between correlation and causation? Get it straight at the Adobe Digital Marketing Blog.

• Mystified by multichannel attribution in your analytics? Join the club, and read Avinash Kaushik's blog post.

• For our friends in the EU, Econsultancy has several posts to prepare you for the e-privacy directive - the grace period ends in only a few short weeks. Unfortunately, only 23% of web users would say yes to cookies when asked. And non-compliance to the directive likely will harm your business. Fortunately, the powers that be are not going to be hard-nosed about compliance right away. Says ICO's Dave Evans:

"We have a team of investigators, but we won’t necessarily be trawling the internet looking for abuse of the directive. In time, we may choose to look at particular sectors to see how they are informing users, based on the information we have received.

Enforcement won’t be driven by individual complaints though, and how we deal with this may well depend on the response from business. For example, if someone says, 'we’re not doing anything about this', then we may pay them more attention.

All of our enforcement actions are likely to be in the form of negotiations. If people listen to our advice and are prepared to take steps towards compliance there shouldn’t be a problem."

• Now for the fun stuff - can you ever have too many examples of creative 404 pages? I didn't think so.