Haven’t posted for a while but will pick up the pace again soon. In the meantime, here’s a great shot I got off a pet supplies website that is largely quite well put together but this promotional message made me chuckle:

Just published is my new article over at Think Vitamin, Carsonified’s blog. It’s about surprisingly 5 important themes for this year in ecommerce. These are generally themes to look at if you have all of the basics like well converting pages, easy checkout, etc all sorted. Check it out:

http://carsonified.com/blog/business/5-important-e-commerce-themes-for-2010

We hear it too often. There have been so many times that I’ve heard people comparing offline shopping to online shopping. Trying to recreate the offline experience in an online store.

Here are what I believe are the fundamental differences:

1) Online, you can be in 10 shops at once

The possibility of comparing lots of different website’s product at once is so easy, especially with tabbed browsers now the standard. If you’re offline, you can only see one product at once price in one store at once. This is a crucial difference. Do you know what your main competition is doing to stand out? Free delivery? Delivery options? Bundled deals? And so on. Make sure you have points of difference.

2) No parking, no journey, no walking

Simple, but there’s less logistics. You can do some shopping in literally a couple of minutes online. Visits can be short or very long on a website. Quite often in offline world, you don’t spend a very long time in one store, but move from shop to shop. Generally this is done simultaneously while online. Much less stress (in theory) than an offline shop. Also a better use of time as there’s no journey time involved like going to a town centre or an out of town centre. Make sure you take advantage of these things.

3) You have to arrange for delivery

Once ordered, you don’t have the product immediately, unlike a lot of offline transactions. Especially with slightly larger items, that means delivery to somewhere that can accept it, or wait for it to arrive one day. This can be a pain for the customer. Although a lot of stores have moved this forwards a lot recently and there’s also quite a lot of innovation in this area with lockable boxes for large parcels. How are you making delivery as easy as possible and doesn’t put people off?

4) There’s more support in store

In theory, there’s good customer service advisors in store to advise and guide the customer through the store to what they want. They can answer questions you may have, you can touch and feel the products, and they can tell you things you may not have know about the product before, or suggest things they could buy with it.

This is where offline can easy trump online. The sheer level of proactive customer support is the big boon offline.

I say this is ‘in theory’ because recently the customer service has been pretty shocking ion a lot of established UK retailers like Debenhams, Tesco and New Look. Many of them have shop assistants chatting to each other while serving you, and generally not supporting the customer. The one thing where they can stand out from offline they are turning the other way. Shocking.

So for your site – think about exactly how you can can give as much support as possible. Live chat? Possibly. Great support copy on delivery, returns, etc? Essential. Great product descriptions, images and bundling? Yes please.

Lots of commentry on the web today about Firefox 3.5 being the most popular browser. Really, when you add up Internet Explorer, it’s still IE at 55.4% and Firefox at 32.1%. See graph below. There’s a problem though

This is not what you’re clients stats are like. See below two of our major ecommerce sites for big brand names here in the UK. Note the Internet Explorer total (and underneath how much IE6 is still important too).

Make sure you work with your clients visitors, not the web news deadlines.

According to Verdict Analysis, the heady days of 20-40% year on year growth for online spending is over. With the recession and ecommerce becoming more mature, growth is set to be a more sedate 11% per annum. See below:

It’s an interesting perspective. Although I agree a lot of the major retailers are doing a lot of things right, many are doing them wrong as well.

I agree the total market size and therefore overall spending may grow at around 11%, however any individual site should be looking at taking market share via creating engaging customers experiences and staying ahead of the ecommerce curve. There’s also the growing mobile space that presents many opportunities for growth online.

As some of you may know, we work with a number of retailers helping them with their ecommerce operations. One of those companies is Next where we operate one of their 3rd party websites that sells Made to Order products such as curtains, blinds and some furniture.

It’s now been going close to 2 years and so we have a nice wodge of data that we can analyse to see the trends that are appearing. The most interesting relationship we’re seeking to understand at the moment is that between sampling (getting free samples of curtain fabrics in the post) and purchase of an actual product.

We recently sent out an email to all those people that didn’t purchase but had ordered samples, it’s been pretty successful, generating a good number of orders and paying for itself many many times over. On analysing the data of those that purchased on the promotion, we found that there seemed to be a optimum time between samples bought and the purchase date. We’e now thinking of setting up a system to take advantage of this new found optimum date to remind people at that time.

We’re now looking to delve deeper into the sample to purchase relationship to see how we can:

• Convert more people to order from sampling
• Reduce the level (and therefore cost) of sampling without reducing orders

Which should result in some pretty huge return on investment.

I think some ecommerce websites can focus too much on their traffic sources, increasing traffic from X route and their conversion rate, and not always think about some of the other simple measures on their site such as registration, sampling (if you have it) and other metrics. Are you obsessed by traffic and not behaviour?

This is the first in a series of quick and dirty posts that will just give snippets of tips on Ecommerce to help online retailers and any agencies helping them.

What’s the issue?

Today, privacy. A recent survey that I heard about on Ecom Experts podcast said that people were as concerned about privacy as security. Many websites go over the top with their security badges and messages to convince the user where they are ordering from is secure, but not enough is normally said about privacy.

Consumers need to be given the confidence that their details will be stored securely, not sold on to third parties and it needs to be clear what they are opting in or out of in terms of communications via email, phone and SMS.

What can you do?

A simple statement under where they add their personal details saying:

“Our privacy guarantee: Your information will never be used or sold to 3rd parties” or similar, with a lin to a privacy policy.

Make sure marketing communication checkboxes are easy to understand!

“Tick this box if you want to receive our monthly email with all the latest offers and new products”

Simple. None of this “please untick this box if you don’t want to not receive” stuff. Finally have a more detailed privacy policy people can read further on and get more detail on the data you collect, what it’s for and how you use, store and maintain that data.

It’s one of the most common mistakes made by ecommerce builds and systems the world over. Forcing people to register for an account to buy.

“But we need to get their information to market to them!”
You’ll get it anyway with an order

“But how will we link up repeat purchases without an account registration”
If they don’t purchase to begin with, then there will be no repeats!

If you’ve done everything right on your ecommerce site – great copy, engaging media (images and video) and have a good price point, then the checkout is the all important last step. The checkout is that point where the customer has now decided and just needs to complete the transaction. It’s the boring part, the part that should go as fast as possible with as little barriers as possible because you have already done all the hard work!

I’m not saying that account information isn’t important for a good view of the customer, of course it is, but you, as the retailer, need to give choice.

Our Laura Ashley site, I believe, does this well. There are three choices. Login, register or just checkout. Registration includes the form they need to fill in, with the reasons to do so. So they know how much they need to fill in and why. Not just an obscure ‘Register’ link with no idea what to expect.

There is always a balance. Business needs are important, they can’t just be discounted for best practice. Compromise is the way forwards. Think like your customer first, and your business second.

So, please, help your customers out. Give them choice and make it easy.

On friday night (the 13th I might add), Blueleaf were nominated for our work with Laura Ashley for the best ecommerce site at the DADI awards. The DADIs are digital indutry awards and so highly focused on websites as a whole. I’m please to say that we won!

It was a great evening – me and Adrian were say next to a few of the Drum girls and also a few of the guys from Fudge so it was good to have a chat to them about how things are going and the direction of the market. And also to observe the crowd shall we say. The place was chocker with great digital agencies: Fudge, MadeByPi, Code ComputerLove, Fuse8 to name but a few of the award winners. It’s great to be even nominated let alone a winner in that kind of crowd and shows how quickly Blueleaf is really shooting forwards. Mega proud that’s for sure. They haven’t put up any results or photos yet however when they do I’ll update this post!

A couple of poor shots below taken on my iPhone’s ropey camera – I’m sure there will be some pro ones soon.

I was watching a presentation about Amazon on Get Elastic (well worth watching by the way) and a lot of it was great insight into what they do well and why. The bit that struck me the most though was their business model in terms of inventory and suppliers. It’s worth listening to the explanation but see below the image I snapped out the presentation.

I think it’s just so simple yet brilliant. It means that for Amazon, cash flow isn’t a problem. It has the products and sells them before it has to pay it’s suppliers!

It’s always important to think about the business side of your ecommerce site as well as the site itself – how can you make your business run smoother?