Bloggers Digest: October 2009

If you’re new here, welcome to Get Elastic. Bloggers Digest is our monthly ritual that highlight posts from other blogs that are of value and interest to online retailers and Internet marketers.

Miss this month's webinars? Catch the on-demand replays:

Ecommerce best practices for the Telco industry
Best Ecommerce Tests — Case Studies & Practical Advice to Raise Conversions Before the Holidays

If you've just discovered Get Elastic in the last year, check out our Halloween fun posts the Ghoulgle (see the comments for funny captions) and Online Retailers Dressed Up For the Holidays.

• Khalid Saleh shares 6 deadly mistakes of web page testing and tuning over at Search Engine Land.

• Anna Yeaman shares an example of a retailer who achieved a 26% lift in email click through rate using animated GIFs.

• Google's been busy this month with updates to Google Analytics features, covered by Marketing Pilgrim, VKI Studios and Marketing Experiments.

• WADN (What's Amazon Doing Now?): Amazon's New PayPhrase Has Definite Shakeup Potential. Could this be the future of ecommerce checkouts?

• In Do you trust your financial statements? Reconciliation tools for Online Retailers, Maxim Mironov shares how having a reconciliation system helps you make better pricing and marketing decisions.

• If you've got the resources, rolling your own affiliate program can have major SEO benefits.

• Will social networking be the biggest retail IT nightmare of 2010? One Gartner analyst thinks so.