Spring is in the merchandising air. Never mind the polar vortex hitting the East and Midwest. Easter and its Bunny are arriving Sunday, March 27 – a full three weeks earlier than last year when it hopped onto the scene April 20.

With this year’s abbreviated shopping season, every merchandising day matters. Whether your shoppers celebrate Easter or just long for spring, this is the time to remind them that warmer weather is on the horizon.

Easter is historically the fifth largest spending holiday of the year (after Valentine’s Day but before Father’s Day, Super Bowl, Halloween and St. Patrick’s Day), according to the National Retail Federation.

Even if you’re boasting the most beautiful in-store displays, there’s good reason to focus your attention on winning online spring shoppers. Last year, online Easter shoppers planned to spend an average $221.39 – a whopping 58 percent more than brick-and-mortar Easter shoppers, according to the National Retail Federation.

What will shoppers put in their baskets? Food, clothing, gifts, candy and flowers are the top five spending categories for Easter. But don’t make your visitors hunt for what they want.

Read their minds. If shoppers type “Easter” in your site’s search box, make sure your site returns relevant results right away. Candy Warehouse is crushing this by instantly showing search suggestions and product results.

Curate a collection. Boden is using a banner to prompt shoppers to “Make room for new-season dresses.” But the merchandising doesn’t stop there. Clicking on the banner takes shoppers to a collection of spring dresses.

Show the love. Harry & David’s search results not only showcase the most relevant products, but shoppers can quickly see which items have the best and most reviews. This is a great to give browsers the social proof they need to make a buying decision.

For more tips on improving your e-commerce merchandising, download our free white paper Use Site Search Data to Improve Merchandising or register for free and come along to SLI Connect

Originally appeared: SLI

The Google-led Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) initiative has launched, with the intention of significantly speeding up the mobile web.

One of the criteria that Google uses in its algorithm to rank websites is speed. On mobile in particular, many websites perform slowly due to the extensive amount of downloads needed.

As such, publishers opting to use AMP will be rewarded with increased visibility in mobile search results for news, including Google’s News Carousel – the highly coveted positioning at the top of mobile search results.

The Guardian has embraced this change, having worked with Google on the AMP project since its inception. This new option competes with the likes of Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles. However, these services are considered much more restricted.

So far, advertisers are unsure how best to proceed with the transition to AMP; however according to the IAB, there is confidence in the market that the service will take off.

One thing that many attendees noted at last week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was the relative lack of coverage for tablets – something which gives further fuel to the argument that tablets are falling from favor.

As GlobalWebIndex has highlighted before, tablets have failed to transform into must-have devices in the same way as smartphones, with very few internet users seeing them as essential. But as this week’s first chart illustrates, tablets are declining in popularity even for some of the behaviors which used to be strongholds.

Although owners were once just as likely to second-screen via a tablet or a mobile, it’s the latter which has been winning the battle in recent years. By the end of 2015, 6 in 10 tablet users were second-screening on a mobile, whereas just 1 in 2 were doing so on their tablet.

That mobiles have won this fight is yet another indication that tablets have hit a ceiling. Proclaiming the ‘death of the tablet’ may be an over-statement, but it’s increasingly clear that these devices will not reach the heights that were once predicted.