Ecommerce Article Roundup for July 26th, 2013

For this week, we have articles about JC Penny, shopping cart abandonment, and the ubiquitous social network logins.

• Learning from JC Penny's Failed Pricing Scheme - Mixed messaging, confused demographic, and pushing away previous shoppers.
• Why Shopping Cart Abandonment Happens - 67.75% of online shoppers abandon their shopping cart before completeing their purchase. Why does it happen, and what can you do to minimize it and lure people back? The number one reason: presented with unexpected costs. 
• More on Abandoned Shopping Carts [infographic] - Quick overview with some various tips on combating it.
• Social Logins Are Not Worth It - Thinking about putting a Facebook or Twitter login button on your website? Mailchimp offers some data from their own website that will make you think twice about the benefit of these buttons. While it seems they were a huge success...digging deeper into the analytics told a different story. This is also a great example of a company incrementally improving a product with huge gains. It would be interesting to see the stats on mobile logins, since that would be where these buttons seem to add the most value.
• What We've Learned About Responsive Design - An older article, but still with many relevant points. You can't ignore mobile, and responsive is just one solution to the problem, and still in its infancy. One tip to take to heart: when focusing on mobile, don't forget to actually be responsive on larger desktop screens. While taking care of one orphan, don't just make another orphan.