Search results matching tag 'ecommerce'

Innovation in ecommerce - where's it all gone?

1701339 — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 11:04:00 GMT

Whilst preparing for a recent presentation I was giving, I found myself questioning whether innovation in ecommerce had ground to a halt. Now I’m not talking about innovations in technology here, there’s a lot of that going on. I’m talking about retailers embracing these innovations and applying them to commercial ecommerce websites.

I look back at 2007 and think about all the exciting things we were seeing/doing for clients. From the initial appearance of the single page checkout; to ‘shop the catwalk’ pages; look books; video product detail pages, etc. 2008 was all about optimisation and best practise; squeezing every last drop out of a site visitor. All good stuff of course, although it still amazes me to think how some retailers are still not doing these basics right.

But what has 2009 brought us? Outfit builders? Well, yes, but that’s not really caught on yet. Social Commerce? Blogs are great at engaging and drive traffic, but that’s certainly not new to the web (just to some fashion etailers). Luxury brands selling direct? Painfully slow. Twitter Commerce? hmmm.

So you see where I’m coming from. Not quite the heady days of two years ago that’s for sure.

Why has this happened? It’s certainly not because creative agencies have run out of ideas that’s for sure. (I can only speak from our perspective as an independent ecommerce agency trying to earn a buck of course). And there are all sorts of great new opportunities out there on new and exciting platforms like Magento Commerce. What we've found is that firstly, retailers have been extra cautious this year and are opting for the ‘safe’ option. Budgets are going to systems that do the basics really well, but aren’t going to set the world on fire with new functionality that customers are demanding. There’s also a shortage of brands actually looking to change platforms right now. We saw a massive increase in ecommerce platform deployment in 2007 and 2008, but this year it seems to about getting those systems to pay back on the initial investment. No new systems mean little progress in innovation. I’m pretty sure this will be the same story for the rest of the year as Christmas is around the corner and no retailer will dare do anything to their very stable (and very vanilla) ecommerce website.

Fair enough you might say, but at what expense? Well the reality is, to stay competitive in the ecommerce space, you need to stay ahead of what every one else is doing. There are more and more websites out there that are selling the same thing. Why would a customer prefer one over the other?

So there you have it. Four more months of struggling to get out of bed and living in hope of that brave client that wants to take the next step in ecommerce. One that understands the endless possibilities that something like open source can bring. One that allows it’s agency to really pull out the stops, using budget to do something creative, exciting and innovative in our wonderful world of ecommerce.

A BBC licence fee for a digital age?

2175094 — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:10:00 GMT

The Government – pioneered by the departing Communications Minister, Lord Carter – today unveiled its final Digital Britain report.

There is welcome acknowledgement of the contribution digital advertising – in particular targeted advertising - will make in helping to monetise online content. The Government also attaches significant importance to self-regulation and education in promoting transparency and protecting internet users’ online privacy, supporting the IAB’s Good Practice Principles for behavioural advertising, as well as www.youronlinechoices.co.uk, the new portal to help educate users. There is also encouraging news in the appointment of Martha Lane-Fox, one of the pioneers of digital commerce, as the Government’s digital inclusion champion.

But all eyes are on two specific proposals contained in the 238 page report which will alter the digital landscape in the years to come:

1. A 50 pence per month levy on all fixed copper and cable lines (but not mobile infrastructure) from 2010 to fund the rollout of next generation broadband. According to Lord Carter that’s £6 per year per household, although low income households would be exempt. The fund would raise between £150-175m a year, allowing next generation rollout to be complete by 2017, a timescale specifically criticised by the Conservative Culture Spokesperson, Jeremy Hunt.

2. Ring-fencing the BBC’s underspend for the so-called Digital Switchover Help Scheme (ie money the BBC receives to help vulnerable people switch to digital TV services - over and above its existing licence fee settlement) to help finance the delivery of regional news, other than that provided by the BBC. This ‘Contained Contestable Element of the Licence Fee’ idea is not the so-called ‘top-slicing (to you and me that’s ‘sharing out’) of the BBC’s licence fee, as has been widely reported in the media.

Significantly, this second proposal fires the starting gun of the licence fee review (due in 2013) and the beginning of a wider discussion about how the BBC’s licence fee should apply (and in what form) in a digital age (eg we don’t pay the licence fee to access the BBC’s website or the iPlayer). The report moots maintaining a ‘Contained Contestable Element’ of the licence fee after 2013 and, in his briefing to industry this afternoon, Carter did not rule out this money being used for (non-BBC) children’s content and programming.

If there is to be a lasting legacy of this report then this is it. The Government has effectively sounded the death knell on the BBC’s licence fee as we know it today and kicked-off the debate about how we fund public service content in a digital age.

Follow the IAB on Twitter.

…And access for all

2460092 — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

As you may have read in a previous post, our house is currently a building site and we’re living in temporary accommodation. Although the flat is nice enough, the family and I are all starting to miss our creature comforts: my wife and I the garden and the Sky Plus HD box, the kids their trampoline. But we’re united in yearning for broadband which we’re all struggling to cope without.

My youngest daughter is a fan of the Bratz website (about dolls and accessories, for those of you without young girls), my son his Xbox live gaming & my eldest a constant stream of YouTube - let alone all their homework requirements which seem to demand internet access these days.

As well as for work, broadband access is vital for my late night binges on iTunes & paying the builders. We’ve experimented with 3G cards, but can’t seem to get a good enough reception out in the sticks, so the whole experience becomes frustrating.

We know that around 90 per cent of people who’ve just moved home would chose broadband over a microwave if they could only have one installed in the first month. How consumer behaviour has changed in the last few years. And I hope there are no doctors reading, but I read that 40 per cent of us would rather give up fresh fruit and veg than our broadband connection!

Whatever the industry’s thoughts on Digital Britain, we can applaud the decision to give as many people as possible access to broadband. Not only will it feed my families’ needs & obsessions but it’s great news for the UK’s agencies and advertisers as it expands the vibrant marketplace that the internet creates, as well as delivering consumers all the public service information they need.

5 standout features of theOutnet.com

1701339 — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 11:40:00 GMT

So Net-a-Porter's discount brand, TheOutnet, launched last week and of course I was all over it. My agency has been involved in the launch activity but this e-commerce site is the work of their in-house team.

TheOutnet.com is essentially a designer clearance site that's aiming for those aspirational shoppers who want designer brands but not pay the full price. I think it's an interesting concept and it's definately right for these difficult times, but when all's said and done, how well does the site function?

Overall, I liked it. I thought the functionality is pretty similar to it's big sister site (net-a-porter.com) with strong branding site-wide. I've always thought that the net-a-porter site is amongst the best for fashion eCommerce so I'm glad they've followed on with a similarly well thought out website.

I picked up on 5 things that I really liked about it:

1. The Mini Shopping Basket

When adding products to your basket, the site keeps a visual representation of your items in plain site. Nice feature when buying multiple products.

2. Low Stock Indicators

I've seen these before, but I think they're executed pretty well here. Nice way of closing the deal and encouraging that purchase decision.

3. Big Savings

If a customer is saving BIG on their purchase, then make a big deal about it. TheOutnet.com does just that. I like.

4. Packaging

The beautiful packaging that a lot of the luxury retailers provide with their products is all part of the brand and the service. I know of people who buy from a particular online store over another purely for the packaging. TheOutnet takes advantage of this and although the bag isn't as glamorous as net-a-porter's, it is re-usable and they're displaying it at the point of purchase.

5. Branding

It's everywhere! Some might say that they're over-using the circles, but in my opinion, I'd rather they were over branding than not branding at all. Perhaps over time they'll drop these or at least dilute their usage, but for now i think it makes an impact and certainly stands out from the crowd.

Be great to hear anyone else's thoughts on this. You know what to do..

Digital Britain…kindly brought to you by advertising (part 2)

2175094 — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Over the last few months I’ve written a number of blogs about the Digital Britain project, the Government’s blueprint for the UK’s digital economy. This kicked off last November with a blog arguing that the internet will help the UK economy out of its current recession, followed in late January with the first in the series of ‘Digital Britain…kindly brought to you by advertising’ blogs (this is the second!) which highlighted the Government’s underplaying of the role and value of advertising to the digital economy in its interim report. In late February, I talked of the ‘green shoots of opportunity’ and the Government’s failure - in its interim report - to recognise the UK as one of the best places in the world to do ‘digital business’.

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) recently submitted its response to the interim Digital Britain report calling on the Government to:

· Recognise the importance of fostering the advertising market in order to continue attracting investment from pan-European businesses in the UK.

· Acknowledge the importance of new advertising techniques (such as behavioural advertising) in building strong revenue streams for digital media.

· Support a market structure allowing new entrants to easily develop ad-supported business models rather than create high barriers to new entry.

· Clarify the significant body of self-regulation and good practice already in existence and commit to intervene only when it will deliver enhanced outcomes for consumers.

· Acknowledge the value of novel self-regulatory schemes, such as the recently published IAB Good Practice Principles for behavioural advertising, and offer support for these schemes to encourage other players to make similar commitments.

The final Digital Britain report is expected in the summer (although speculation has mounted that it might come earlier - ambitious!). Whilst I acknowledge the importance of Lord Carter’s ‘top five goals’ (universal connectivity, faster broadband, spectrum liberalisation, resolving the online piracy issue and the role of public service broadcasting/publishing in a digital age), we hope that the Government will also examine the wider digital economy (not just infrastructure issues - 11 of the 22 action items in the interim report) as it would surely be a strategic error to create the circumstances for universal broadband connectivity without fully acknowledging the role advertising plays in supporting the vast majority of the content, services and applications delivered to consumers via broadband.

We’ll get a better idea at the Digital Britain summit in London next week (but where are the new media speakers?). Look out for the IAB Twitter feed providing you with the latest!

Follow the IAB on Twitter

See, browse & buy – all in a banner?

1701339 — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 13:39:00 GMT

Transactional banners are back in the headlines. Adgregate Markets' ShopAds transactional banner ad technology is being made available to customers of Google's DoubleClick division.

The concept of a transactional banner is simple: customers can browse and purchase products directly from a banner on a third party website without ever having to leave the page the banner is on.

When these were first heralded as the future of e-commerce, you can bet that we were all over it. A few years later and there was still no sign of these transformational widgets. Tailgate Technologies were first to market this technology in 2007 but it’s unclear how effective they were at generating sales. I’ve certainly never come across one of these banners – and I’m one of those people who actually like banner ads (I also like tv ads – go figure).

This latest announcement means that customers of DoubleClick will now be able to integrate the ShopAds’ e-commerce functionality into any of its banner ads. According to Adgregate Markets CEO Henry Wong, its own ad network has about 12 million unique visitors monthly with 1 million of these ShopAds embedded across the web.

So will it take off? Will customers feel safe in purchasing from a banner on a potentially unknown third party website?

I’ll stick my neck out and say yes.

Once people get over the tech and possible security issues, I think these banners will become a key revenue stream for the right brands. Initially, this type of transaction would be perfect for the lower value goods – certainly not the high-end luxury sector. Impulse buys, micro-payment items, electronic tickets, downloadable purchases will be first to benefit.

When confidence grows, and the technology advances, who knows what will be possible.

This is precisely why I love the Internet. A constant flow of game changing innovations that turn what we get accustomed to on its head!

I’d love to hear other people’s views on these…so please feel free to comment below.

Online retailers gain further popularity

1701339 — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:26:00 GMT

This week there’s been two pieces of research that have shown that online spending is where ‘it’s at’ - as if you needed convincing.

A league created by analyst TNS Worldpanel revealed that in an annual top 10 list of favourite retailers in the UK, Amazon came 2nd (Tesco was 1st) and eBay came in at number 10 (full report), and research carried out by PwC and WARC shows that 2008 internet advertising expenditure defied the recession by being up by 17%, with the UK now said to be ‘the world’s most advanced market for internet advertising’ (full IAB/PwC report).

I don’t think that this marks the end for bricks and mortar stores or for traditional forms of advertising, but for brands, it’s now more important than ever to ensure their online offering is up to scratch. 9 out of 10 times the first place people go if they are interested in a product is the brand’s website. Apart from ensuring that a positive first impression is made, it’s important that the online design reflects the offline brand. Too often, websites are treated as the poor cousin of the print or TV ad. This is costing brands sales and customers. People online are less forgiving than in the real world. They have many more choices of where to go and within a single click, they’re at a competitor's website.

Having said that, if online is used properly, it can also be responsible for increasing footfall to stores (I'll post a full report on this soon). More and more, customers are going online to check the range of products BEFORE visiting the real world store (which could be a significant journey to some). Why risk a wasted journey? The reality is, etailers are simply not displaying their full wares online - for whatever reason - which is ultimately costing them sales online as well as offline.

The message from these reports is clear. It’s all about choice. eCommerce shouldn’t be seen as a threat to traditional retail, but as a key tool in a multi-channel retailing strategy. In a highly competitive market, it's essential that you make your customer king. Allow them to shop and view on and offline. Give them as much insight and information at each touch point. Provide a 360 degree returns option. Everyone needs to up their game in this climate or risk losing customers to their leaner, more innovative competitors. Etailing and traditional retailing must work hand in hand to ensure survival.

Sell more online

1701339 — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 13:50:00 GMT

Hello world.

In case you hadn’t guessed it from the name, but I’ll be writing about eCommerce and all things associated with it within the hallowed (virtual) walls of this blog. The key theme will always be around ideas to ultimately help you sell more stuff online, to more people, for as little marketing spend as possible! So if that's what you're interested in/dream about/live for - then you're in the right place. Otherwise, go here.

So let me cut to the chase. I want to respond to a question that I’m regularly asked by clients, colleagues, journalists, prospects and peers in one form or another: “How do you ensure continued revenue growth (online) during a downturn.”

I could spend a long time covering everything from customer acquisition to conversion and retention but the reality is, it’s actually the same stuff you should've been doing all along that you need to continue to do. The trouble is, a vast majority of eCommerce owners (let’s call them eTailers) haven’t even been doing the basics right but they’ve still experienced growth over the past few years.

Well ding dong, those days are now over and the current recession is shaking the apple tree: If your eCommerce site is working hard for its money, then you’ll cling on and prosper. If you’re a ‘me too’ that fails to innovate, engage and attract, then your sharper, shrewder competitors will eventually win over your precious customers and you will lose business.

As a starter for ten, here are some basic tips to get you on your way to eCommerce Zen:

(For those more advanced readers, do bare with me while everyone else gets up to speed)

Tip 1: Understand your customer
Your customer is the most important part of your business (it's amazing how often this is forgotten). It's not the CEO and certainly not the design department’s urge to create everything in Flash - it really is the customer.

Bricks and mortar retailers practice this every day but it is strangely absent on most eCommerce websites. People are still being bombarded with irrelevant branding and marketing messages and the Splash page seems to be celebrating an unholy revival.

It’s more important than ever to now really understand your online customer. If you understand them, then you’ll know what they want to get out of your site. Finding out about your customer is easy; use a quick online customer survey. 4Q, for example, do these for FREE. There is absolutely no excuse why you shouldn't do this. It takes about three minutes to get it done. You’ll be amazed at what your online customer is willing to tell you.

Tip 2: Segment your email database
Segmentation is the first step to pushing relevant content to your customers. Sending product emails aimed at females to men is certainly not doing you any good. If you haven't got a segmented database, then launch an email questionnaire with a few simple questions. Send this to your database and they will do the segmentation for you. This way you can also clean out any cold leads.

Sending targeted emails to a segmented database really will increase your conversions and make you more money - I guarantee it!

Tip 3: Optimise your landing pages
You can easily extract what your landing pages are, (that includes your homepage), and how they perform using a tool such as Google Analytics. Once you’ve done this, check the pages with a really high bounce rate and related keywords from both natural and PPC and then measure how they perform over time.

Once you have identified the black holes, you need to get your landing pages up to scratch so that they can start delivering results. For example, if a visitor has searched for “child seats" and you get them to a page where they see car stereos... then it's no wonder they leave you instantly. By correlating keywords to landing pages, the changes you'll need to make become obvious.

This is what I call low hanging fruit. By doing a bit of spring-cleaning on your landing pages, you’ll very quickly start seeing some positive results. And yes, you may well need to create many of these pages but it really is worth it in the end.

Tip 4: Test your site
Testing is free! The CEO's (him again) partner’s opinion is just as valid as yours but now you can prove which one is delivering better results using some basic A/B testing. Use Google Website Optimizer (it’s free, it’s good, there are many others out there but this is a good place to start) to setup your A/B or Multi-variant tests and see how the individual variations perform. Continue testing until you’re happy with the results you’re getting.

Tip 5: Act on your findings
Ok so not really a tip but all too often we see clients collecting vast amounts of data but then letting the reports gather dust. From all the above, you have to drive change. That might be tougher than you think. But if you thoroughly execute the recommendations above and then act on the quantitive data at your fingertips, you will reap the rewards and live to fight another day!

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Over and out.

The green shoots of opportunity

2175094 — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 12:45:00 GMT

Government ministers have, in the past, got into hot water for merely mentioning the words ‘green shoots’ when times are tough. We all know the UK economy is officially in recession. However, unlike Starbucks’ Howard Schultz, I won’t be talking the economy down. I fear the wrath and another four-letter outburst from business secretary, Lord Mandelson, if I did so! Times are indeed tough and every day we read and hear about another business shedding jobs. Yesterday, Bradford-based Stylo, owner of Barratts shoes, announced it was closing 220 stores and cutting 2,500 jobs.

In yesterday’s Technology Guardian, Victor Keegan, made a very good (and related) point: he said that whilst this may be the worst of times to look for a job, it is the among the best to be setting up your own business. Keegan is spot on citing that the cost of starting a web business is 10% of what it was in the dotcom boom. He doesn’t refer to the contribution advertising makes to this. Advertising on the internet already helps to fund much of the UK’s entrepreneurial and creative talent. It’s a little known fact to many that, in the last three months, Google paid £970m to publishers for adverts on their sites. Many of these will be small and emerging businesses, using the internet as platform to innovate, compete and challenge traditional businesses.

This is an argument lost on Lord Carter in his Digital Britain interim report published last month. His ‘comprehensive analysis of the digital economy’ missed it and therefore failed to acknowledge the UK as one of the best places in the world to do ‘digital business’. But Carter and his team seem primarily focused on how to pay the people that create the content we are used to reading, watching or listening but is now free on the internet. Interestingly the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has just begun hearings on this issue and one of the suggestions put forward is a tax or levy on internet use to finance domestically produced new media. This kind of approach would be regressive. The Digital Britain report was big on bridging the ‘digital divide’ – ensuring that everyone can get broadband by 2012. Let’s not artificially create another digital divide which would disrupt an already successful approach, particularly in tough times. An internet tax here would not only mean that the UK would lose its status as Europe’s leading digital hub, but – more importantly – it would deny people from using the internet to ‘get on the ladder’ and build competitive businesses. Remember: we’re in a recession. We need the green shoots of opportunity.

Data is the new black

2460092 — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 12:30:00 GMT

This week I was at an industry event chatting with a couple of old mates – one from a traditional media background who now works on the client side, and one from a media agency – about the use of data in our industry. While my agency friend, perhaps unsurprisingly, was up to speed with most of the huge amount of data now available to advertisers and agencies, this was in stark contrast to my other friend who was unaware of the wealth of information at the disposal of professionals in the industry today. I guess my point is that there are still plenty in media who don't yet utilise the huge amount of data-points available to all businesses. It almost feels like a failure on our part when we realise that the message has not yet permeated throughout the whole industry, especially when there are so many easy to use tools and analytics packages out there. The web analytics industry has come a long way in recent years. What used to be a techie subject for tracking server performance and website hits (which clearly went over my head) has evolved into a dream for webmasters, marketers and media planners. Conversions, geography, off and online media and a host of other areas can be measured and cross-referenced. This can be combined with powerful tools like Insights for Search, or Google's keyword tool, to give a snapshot of what people are searching for and interested in. As the digital industry has grown, there seemed to be two extremes in terms of the way marketers have been using data: those focused on direct response and e-commerce players who had data at the heart of their strategy on one side, and more traditional brand marketers who were yet to engage with the hard stats online (either through choice, or lack of understanding) on the other. But the good news is that more recently there's a new breed of media and marketing industry professional coming to the fore, predictably a mixture of the two extremes: the data-driven brand marketer and comms planner, with appreciation of traditional brand values, but with a mind hell-bent on data to prove success (or failure). It is these people who increasingly need to be at the centre of business and media decisions as clients and agencies alike become rightly obsessed with quality, value and ROI in these cash-tight times. It's up to search engines, media owners and the analytics industry to make sure all my mates are data-driven and better versed in the power of numbers in the months to come.