“Black Friday” is so named because that is the day when most retailers’ ledger sheets go “in the black.” Competition on this day is fierce, which forces most retailers to use incredible sales, special offers and other tactics to chase after sales. With competition increasing, many retailers have decided to offer their best sales on […]
Original post by Ryan
Bloggers Digest is our monthly ritual that highlight posts from other blogs that are of value and interest to online retailers and Internet marketers.
Happy Cyber Monday!
Original post by Linda Bustos
What makes great service?
It’s something I’ve cared about a long time, since helping run consumer electronics stores in the 1980s to working at Rackspace (which regularly wins awards and praise for its quality of service).
I keep hearing about six-year-old Tiny Prints and how awesome its service is and have tried it myself. Their products are of the highest quality and the service I (and my wife, and other people I know who’ve tried Tiny Prints) get on the phone is exemplary.
What does it do? It makes custom stationary, greeting cards, and other printed goods.
Anyway, when I find a company that’s doing something extraordinary I want to find out more about them so I asked Ed Han, CEO, to give me a tour to learn more.
What did I find?
1. They are bootstrapped. They didn’t take venture capital, but started the company with $10,000 of their savings.
2. They hire carefully. I’ve seen this over and over again at great companies like Zappos or other companies (even Microsoft and Google hired very carefully at first and only got looser over time).
3. They have a mission statement.
4. They use technology ruthlessly. “We like to use technology,” Ed Han says.
5. They care about user experience before technology.
6. They, like Amazon, took on a business that’s existed for many many years before. Amazon took on books, Tiny Prints took on greeting cards and wedding invitations.
7. The management knows everyone (or seems like it). At Rackspace the Chairman Graham Weston walked me around the company and, despite having 2,000 employees, he knew something about every employee we met and personally greeted them. It’s an amazing skill I wish I had, but it said volumes about how the company is managed. I found the same when walking around with Ed. He obviously is fond of his employees and takes the time to get to know them on a personal level.
8. Their offices are open, no walls. Many of the world’s great companies are run this way. HP, for instance, had doors on the founders offices but they were never closed and were permanently open. At Zappos the CEO sits right in the middle of the building in a cube where everyone can meet him and say hi (his cube is even on the public tour, he encouraged us to sit down with him and eat peanuts).
9. They constantly learn and keep their skills and market understanding up to date.
10. They look for the best people and companies to partner with.
Anyway, watch the 30 minute tour and learn the details behind all of these points.
Oh, and Tiny Prints are having a 20% off cyber Monday sale today, so if you want some Holiday Cards now is a great time to try them out and see their great service for yourself.
Finally, thanks to Rich Bucich who both is a great photographer but also helped arrange this tour.
Original post by Robert Scoble
What makes great service?
It’s something I’ve cared about a long time, since helping run consumer electronics stores in the 1980s to working at Rackspace (which regularly wins awards and praise for its quality of service).
I keep hearing about six-year-old Tiny Prints and how awesome its service is and have tried it myself. Their products are of the highest quality and the service I (and my wife, and other people I know who’ve tried Tiny Prints) get on the phone is exemplary.
What does it do? It makes custom stationary, greeting cards, and other printed goods.
Anyway, when I find a company that’s doing something extraordinary I want to find out more about them so I asked Ed Han, CEO, to give me a tour to learn more.
What did I find?
1. They are bootstrapped. They didn’t take venture capital, but started the company with $10,000 of their savings.
2. They hire carefully. I’ve seen this over and over again at great companies like Zappos or other companies (even Microsoft and Google hired very carefully at first and only got looser over time).
3. They have a mission statement.
4. They use technology ruthlessly. “We like to use technology,” Ed Han says.
5. They care about user experience before technology.
6. They, like Amazon, took on a business that’s existed for many many years before. Amazon took on books, Tiny Prints took on greeting cards and wedding invitations.
7. The management knows everyone (or seems like it). At Rackspace the Chairman Graham Weston walked me around the company and, despite having 2,000 employees, he knew something about every employee we met and personally greeted them. It’s an amazing skill I wish I had, but it said volumes about how the company is managed. I found the same when walking around with Ed. He obviously is fond of his employees and takes the time to get to know them on a personal level.
8. Their offices are open, no walls. Many of the world’s great companies are run this way. HP, for instance, had doors on the founders offices but they were never closed and were permanently open. At Zappos the CEO sits right in the middle of the building in a cube where everyone can meet him and say hi (his cube is even on the public tour, he encouraged us to sit down with him and eat peanuts).
9. They constantly learn and keep their skills and market understanding up to date.
10. They look for the best people and companies to partner with.
Anyway, watch the 30 minute tour and learn the details behind all of these points.
Oh, and Tiny Prints are having a 20% off cyber Monday sale today, so if you want some Holiday Cards now is a great time to try them out and see their great service for yourself.
Finally, thanks to Rich Bucich who both is a great photographer but also helped arrange this tour.
Original post by Robert Scoble
Fire Your Boss, Build Your Own Ecommerce Website and Store
There’s not much difference between the real and virtual worlds when it comes to commerce. You build a store and set up your business entity…
Original post by default@goarticles.com (Dan Marx)
Designing an eCommerce site is more than making it pretty. You have certain desired actions you are looking for from your visitors. You have specific things you want to be sure they see and hopefully …
Original post by default@goarticles.com (monika arora)
Microsoft Dynamics GP, formerly also known as Great Plains Dynamics, eEnterprise, is flexible and powerful platform for eCommerce B2B and B2C Shopping Cart integration. If you are ecommerce programme…
Original post by default@goarticles.com (Andrew Karasev)
I still like listening to KGO Radio (AM 810 San Francisco) but on there they still make a big deal about having a traffic helicopter and a team that covers traffic. Every day they put on air someone caught in traffic too, mostly on the Bay Bridge, to report how long it takes him to drive from SF to Oakland, among other places.
This job skill is dying very quickly, according to the Associated Press. Why? Well, you only need to see Waze, a new crowd-sourced traffic app for mobile phones, to see just how lame this method of reporting the traffic is.
Here, let’s go for a ride around Palo Alto with Waze’s .
I’ve been using it and already I’ve found that the reports I’m getting are more complete than others (including the traffic reports in my 2010 Toyota Prius that I pay a lot of money every year to receive) and even include things like speed traps. Why? Because they are reported by other drivers on the ground. This system is even better than the Google Maps traffic on my Android phone (which is better than my iPhone).
This is a VERY disruptive company and one of my favorites to use. Get it now, it’ll save you a lot of time driving around. We’ll have to figure out something else for those traffic helicopter pilots and reporters to do, though.
Original post by Robert Scoble
When Salesforce copied Facebook a week ago and put social information into its service with a new service called Chatter it got me to look around at what else was out there for Enterprises. Companies like SocialText, Jive, Yammer and others are out there. But Blogtronix was showing up on my Twitter feed a lot and people told me to take a fresh look at the company’s offerings, which had been updated in the past week too.
So, I invited Blogtronix founder Vassil Mladjov over for a chat about what’s happening in the enterprise space. We spend 30 minutes talking about the competition and getting a look at Blogtronix’ latest offerings. Good chat about how the way we’re working together is changing quite a bit thanks to innovation in the consumer space from Twitter and Facebook.
Original post by Robert Scoble
If you attend a tech event or conference you will probably run into Brian Solis. He’s one of those rare PR birds: everywhere all the time. He’s always on Twitter and Facebook too. Plus he guest posts over on Techcrunch, which shows he’s gotten the respect of Arrington, which for a PR person is very hard to do.
I call Brian the real-time PR man and the other day he came over my house for a long conversation about how PR has changed over the years (he’s been doing PR since 1991). This 50-minute conversation is split up into three parts. If you are interested in how PR people think and where the industry is going, this is a great conversation to listen to. It’s also an interesting conversation about what’s interesting in the tech industry.
Original post by Robert Scoble
If your organization has functioning ecommerce website with shopping cart, price list and credit card processing and your Corporate ERP application is Microsoft Dynamics GP - you are probably favoring…
Original post by default@goarticles.com (Andrew Karasev)
Imagine you had an infinitely-long strip of paper that you, and your friends, could write on anywhere along the strip. Imagine that you could write anywhere along that strip anytime, or even all at the same time.
That is exactly what Google Wave is. Except it’s not a piece of paper and using a Wave you can even have things automatically write to the strip (bots) and since we’re talking computers here we’re not limited to words, but videos, pictures, and, even information from other computer services, er, APIs. There are some new things you can do on a Wave too, like hold a vote. It’s a chat room, but not the usual text-only synchronous kind.
That is what is brilliant about Google Wave. Unfortunately they didn’t stop there and make that work right. Read a guest post in TechCrunch by Martin Seibert for a great analysis on where they went wrong (they stuck this infinite strip inside an email metaphor, which makes it nearly useless if you get more than 20 people interacting with you via Wave — my account is almost unopenable because it’s so unproductive).
But let’s forget the email interface because someday someone will strip Wave out of that crappy interface and give us its brilliance: just the infinite strip.
There still are some problems with just this part of Wave. There are two that I’ve found:
1. I can’t find where the good stuff is. I sat next to a Wave user at the Defrag conference in Denver. I could see that tons of people were putting good notes into a wave about that conference. But, quick, find the useful stuff inside that wave. You can’t. Why? For a whole lot of reasons. We’re going to need curation so that guys like me can overlay a map of where useful stuff actually is. Which brings me to point number two.
2. There aren’t permalinks that we can figure out. We need permalinks for each few inches along the infinite strip so that we can link you to a Wave and say “there’s value right here.” Right now I can’t do that, so I can’t point you to specific places in the Defrag conference Wave and say “check out xyz’s notes here, they are most excellent.” Now, I’m sure some geek will point out there’s a way to do it, but I haven’t figured it out yet and the guy I was sitting next to couldn’t tell me, so it must require some sort of Sergey Brin decoder ring.
That said, these two things are fairly easy to fix. But first the Google Wave team MUST get rid of the email interface.
I wish I could tell the team to free their minds. You won’t get more adoption by putting it into something that looks like email. All you’ll do is hide the brilliance and ensure it remains unusable and undiscoverable for lots of us.
Original post by Robert Scoble
Is that time of year where people start turning to the Internet to order Christmas presents for their friends, family and loved ones. eCommerce (buying goods on the Internet) has risen steadi…
Original post by default@goarticles.com (Mark Sheldon)
It’s Black Friday and the 2009 holiday season is “officially” underway. Retailers are hoping for higher online sales, but paradoxically, will most likely see higher-than-average rates of cart abandonment. SeeWhy, a company that tracks shopping cart abandonment rates, reports the average across industries in October 2009 was 71%).
But if your abandonment rate is 71%, it doesn’t mean you’ve lost 71% for good.
We know that there’s no one reason a cart is abandoned. Forrester Research surveyed men and women who shop online and ranked the following reasons:
1. Sticker shock (tax and shipping charges revealed in cart too high)
2. Customer not ready to purchase
3. Comparison shopping
4. Second thoughts on price
5. Just wanted to save for later
(If you’re an email subscriber with images off, please turn them on to see the survey graph).
Whether the customer is comparison shopping, “sleeping on” the decision or using you cart as a lazy man’s (or woman’s) wish list (and who can blame them when most wish lists require account registration), it pays to hold the cart contents. An abandoned cart does not mean a lost sale. A ScanAlert study found 28% of shoppers took longer than a day to convert, and 14% longer than a week. Granted, the study is 5 years old, but decision making doesn’t necessarily change because ecommerce websites have advanced. The point is many conversions happen after 2 or more days or visits. And to complicate matters, many convert in a subsequent reporting period – a November visit converts in December, but is not accounted for in the November conversion report.
Support multi-session shoppers
Make sure you’re leaving persistent cookies for Santa customers that hold contents in the cart, and you’ll want to set these cookies to hang around for at least 30 days. You’ll have a better chance of converting customers who take longer to make their decision and who expect to find their carts in tact when they return to your site.
Holding a cart’s contents across sessions – sounds like a no-brainer, right? In 2007, the E-tailing Group found that 29% of top online retailers did not use persistent shopping carts. Has that number improved in 2 short years? I did a quick test on 50 of the Internet Retailer Hot 100 and 7 did not hold my cart overnight, or 14%. Still, that’s 14% too many!
One feature that I really appreciated as a customer was seeing the quantity or dollar amount of items in the cart, clearly. When returning to the site, I want to know without digging that my cart was saved.
Track your visits to purchase and days to purchase
Google Analytics’ Avinash Kaushik explains how you can and why you should measure days to purchase and visits to purchase in your Web analytics tool. (Too bad Google Analytics’ Benchmarks feature, which if you opt in can give you benchmarks for sites in your category/industry doesn’t track those metrics though it will show you benchmarks for visits, bounce rates, page views, average time on site, page views per visit and percent new visits). Santa Avinash, benchmarked days and visits to purchase are on our Christmas 2010 Google Analytics wish list.
Measure customer behavior across time periods
Another tip is to measure your customer behavior including repeat visits and conversions across reporting periods. Longer cookie durations help you track that accurately. MineThatData’s Kevin Hillstrom shares his tips on how to measure conversion rates across time on his blog.
The takeaway
To get the best picture of what your true holiday performance is, you need to factor in customer behavior, provide the usability to support multi-session shoppers (persistent cookies) and understand what metrics to track and how to track them.
Original post by Linda Bustos
The rise of ecommerce has had a fundamental effect on the buying and shopping habits of millions of people. Busy professionals no longer need to worry about even common day-to-day necessities such as …
Original post by default@goarticles.com (Sam Qam)
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