Profile: Heather Dougherty is Director, Research at Hitwise. Heather is a leading authority in online commerce and marketing, a result of covering the field extensively since 1997. At Hitwise, Heather will continue her focus on this space, providing insight into online consumer behavior and competitive intelligence to Hitwise clients. Heather's expertise in the online commerce landscape has been quoted extensively in the press, including Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Business Week. Heather has also been a guest on ABC World News Tonight, CNBC, NPR, and CBS Radio. Heather speaks frequently at industry events such as Shop.org, Internet Retailer, Ad:tech and Search Engine Strategies. Prior to joining Hitwise, Heather was with Nielsen/NetRatings as the senior retail analyst, where she provided strategic analysis and designed custom research projects. Before her time at Nielsen, she spent four years with Jupiter Research covering the online retail and commerce space, including marketing and promotions, merchandising, and personalization. Heather earned a B.S. in Business Administration and Marketing at The Ohio State University.
Kayak merges with SideStep to increase position in Travel market
Last week Kayak announced merging with SideStep, a rival travel search tool, after securing $196 million from Sequoia Capital. Both websites offer a similar end product – price comparison services for an array of travel products and earn revenues through advertising and referrals of travel bookings. The websites will remain separate according to the announcement [...]
Shipping deadlines loom for holiday gifts
With the majority of standard shipping deadlines upon us from online retailers, traffic has increased for the websites of major shipping providers. For these websites, avoiding a site failure should be easy thanks to the predictability of the peaks. Historically, there are 2 consecutive days that make up the peaks in traffic – the Tuesday [...]
Social Shopping Still Small, but Usage Increasing
The advent of consumer-generated content focused specifically on shopping has driven a significant amount of user reviews on a variety of blogs, retail sites, and comparison shopping engines. With the exception of some blogs, the majority of the reviewers lack a personality for the reader to identify with, and instead many sites rely upon the [...]
Viral Hit ‘Elf Yourself’ Leading Humor Website
In case you were wondering what you would like as an elf, Office Max has brought back last year’s popular microsite Elf Yourself. The website allows users to upload photos of up to 4 people to generate personalized, dancing elves and record a synchronized message through a special toll-free phone number (to create an elf-like [...]
Alternative Online Payment Growing In Popularity
Traffic to the Alternative Payments Category is up 17% for the week ending Dec. 8, 2007 over same week during the previous year. The main driver of this growth was from the increase in traffic to Bill Me Later, which is up 271% from last year. The service is growing in popularity through ‘buy now, [...]
Nintendo Wii Hunt is on – Comparison Shopping Traffic off to Early Start
On Tuesday, Dec. 4, I presented at Search Engine Strategies in Chicago on a panel titled “Shopping Search Tactics”. I have included a high level summary of some of the key points from the presentation with some exclusive new analysis. This year the holiday season started well ahead of the traditional trend for the comparison [...]