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Hi there, hope you're having a great Friday!
This is Colm and Simon from CommerceGurus, with a handpicked weekly roundup of eCommerce articles.
Last year, 36.5% of all holiday sales happened over the BFCM week (spanning the Tuesday before Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday)—and the average eCommerce brand took in half of the season’s revenue by December 3rd.
The holiday sales season is very front-loaded, so BFCM results can make or break the season for you, and for many businesses that can mean it makes or breaks the entire year.
Jilt has an excellent article about preparing early and how you should research and launch your own deals to stay ahead of the competition.
Start preparing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday
Elementor is the most popular page builder for WordPress but it's not without its critics.
The main criticism around it has been the excessive DOM size it generates, with endless wrapping elements in the HTML.
Studies have shown that native Gutenberg does create cleaner markup. But the downside is that Gutenberg is still plagued by usability issues, even 3 years after launching.
And, for proper page-builder functionality such as the ability to use containers and adjust margins and padding an additional plugin is still required, such as GenerateBlocks.
I am glad to see Elementor's developers begin to address performance seriously and version 3.0 has some important improvements.
Read more about Elementor's Performance Improvements
This piece by Tom Kenny is my favorite article of the week and is summed up in the byline:
The desire to make designs as simple as possible can sometimes go too far and negatively impact usability
With some excellent examples he goes through common UI elements such as mobile menus, forms, search inputs, and icons without labels to explain what he means.
If you design or develop websites it's well worth reading and pondering over what he says in relation to your own site.
Read about False Simplicity in Design
Baymard's latest post on eCommerce usability focuses on an area many people don't think about too much - breadcrumbs on mobile.
Their research found that breadcrumbs performed a lot of heavy lifting on mobile sites, as the navigation was often hidden.
It's an interesting post and delves into more detail about surfacing the product hierarchy and making sure that long breadcrumbs are still swipeable on smaller screens.
Learn about how to better implement breadcrumbs
I've mentioned Fathom Analytics a few times in previous editions of this newsletter and now they have a heavyweight competitor in the form of Cloudflare.
One of the most essential stats about any website is: “how many people went there”? Analytics tools frequently show counts of “unique” visitors, which requires tracking individual users by a cookie or IP address.
Instead, a visit is registered: a privacy-friendly measure of how people have interacted with your website. A visit is defined simply as a successful page view that has an HTTP referer that doesn’t match the hostname of the request.
This tells you how many times people came to your website and clicked around before navigating away, but doesn’t require tracking individuals.
Read about free, privacy-focused analytics from Cloudflare
Over the next few updates to our Shoptimizer WooCommerce theme, I'll be moving away from using an icon font (Rivolicons) and converting every glyph to use SVGs.
I'll be using mostly Heroicons, which are a super-clean suite designed by Steve Schoger of Tailwind CSS fame.
They're MIT licensed so you can use them in any project.
Take a look at Heroicons
That's it for this edition. Simply reply to this email if you have any questions or suggestions, we read every message. Have a great week and best of luck with your projects!
Colm and Simon from CommerceGurus
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