The Retail E-Commerce Challenge

I’ve written before about the challenge of bringing a bricks and mortar sales operation online. Well it seems those in the know in the e-tail sector are all too aware of the relative poor level of sales being generated online for some of the well known high street retailers.

Speaking recently to an e-tail Director, it became apparant at some of the internal issues faced by traditional retailers, including a huge misunderstanding of online trading. It is not enough to use a successful store model online. Why would you try and cash in on those £4.99 value transactions online which work so well in your stores to drive footfall and sales, when the online delivery charge is £5? Am I prepared to pay £5 for convenience? Perhaps, but the online commercial model, whilst sharing the same business foundation as the high street stores, requires a differing layer of development.

In today’s world of high-speed internet, choice and convenience, it can hurt your business considerably by not playing the online game seriously. Consider it a new branch of your business as opposed to a new sales channel… one that needs to be thought out for its business proposition, product placement, differentiation and marketability amongst other things.

The good to come out of the challenges faced by a recession and reduction in footfall for retailers is to find cheaper routes to market and market penetration, leading retailers to give online commerce the commitment and investment required to leverage lower cost sales and marketing to those already online. This leads me onto the issue of customer insight, far too big a discussion area for this post, but one which must be at the centre of the online drive.

On a final note, the travel sector is in many opinions years ahead of most other sectors. Perhaps retailers in particular have lay in wait too long with the comfort of their traditional sales channels negating any need to change. Now’s the time to review your business model.

Realistic Affiliate Marketing Expectations

Affiliate marketing is a hugely competitive arena. Even if you find your niche, it will only be a matter of time before a super affiliate or merchant challenges your space.

You need to be realistic in your vision of what you can leverage; if you’re working alone alongside your 9-5 role, it is very unlikely you’ll be joining the elite any time soon unless you hit a goldmine or perhaps suffer from insomnia with more hours in your day than most people.

Super affiliates become a network of specialists in their own rights, leveraging highly skilled talent to help further their profits.

I’ve seen a number of affiliates struggle from setting unrealistic expectations. Take my example. I aimed to become profitable after 6-9 months and achieve my first monthly income target within 12 months, using a structured approach to building my online presence. I’m well on track and with continual traffic and revenue growth at a steady pace, giving as much back as we put in.

Knowing what to set and how to set targets comes with knowledge of the industry which many affiliates may not have, but start small and over achieve. It will help massively with your motivation and give you further confidence to build on from each success.

What is worse than striving for success without seeing any payback? We have more ambitious targets next year, followed by global domination! Ok, maybe not just yet, but by starting small, your failures are also less magnified, from selecting the right host for your website to creating and marketing it the right way.

Finally, having consulted on a number of affiliate ventures, through the brilliant affiliates4u forum, I know how daunting and tough it can seem, but with a wide network of support available through forums and down to earth super affiliates there really is no reason to give up!

What challenges have you faced and how have you kept your motivation levels up?

Google Android G1 Phone: Increased Battery Life

Here are a few unscientific proven steps you can take to maximise your Google Android G1 smart phone battery life. It may well work for other Android mobile/cell phones  but until I upgrade (or get a free one through the post) I won’t know!

Firstly, like many smart phone owners I began by downloading loads of cool Apps and doing lots of unproductive stuff like using 3G to watch funny YouTube videos, connecting via the Wireless card just because I could and checking emails and of course Tweeting from the Android G1. (My previous phone being a Sony Ericsson Cybershot – great for calls and photos).

After completely draining the battery on the first day (initial charge was around 12 hours) I soon realised that this wasn’t too practical; yes I liked the fact that my underground tube journeys or longer train journeys would not be as boring anymore yet I still needed to be able to make calls with it too!

Step 1 – 3G is Wrecking my Mojo

After some research I found that the most battery draining feature was actually the 3G Internet browsing option. Apparantly it requires more power than Bluetooth and the Wireless Network card. It is far more superior in speed to the 2G network but this comes at a price.

Whilst 3G enables faster internet browsing, really, what difference does this make to background applications? If you’re on a data plan then 3G will of course download quicker but it will still download the same amount of information as 2G so unless your network operator is charging by the hour, you won’t gain too much.

Besides, I’m on a UK network on which I pay a small monthly amount for unlimited (loosely speaking) Internet usage via 2G and 3G.

Now what I do is to default my connection to 2G, and switch to 3G only when I really need it (like when using Google Maps or checking in on work emails).

Step 2 – Radio Silence

If you’re not actively using Bluetooth, disable it. Same goes for GPS and the Wireless internet card. I use Bluetooth in my car so its switched on when I enter and switched off when I leave. I use GPS for maps, simple switch on and off. Finally I use the Wireless card at home and I only switch this on when I need it.

Great, already increased battery efficiency by around 40% I reckon! (don’t quote me, I made that up).

Step 3 – Exposing the Undercover Sync

Another battery drain is background sync. What is it? It will sync your email, calender and contacts amongst other things via the internet. Unless you’re constantly updating things and *need* your G1 synchronised (I currently don’t) then switch this to manually update. This includes things like weather Apps, Twitter and partially pointless Apps like moonphase (did I say pointless? I did download it afterall… I mean sometimes useful).

By reducing the number of background sync items  you save your battery life 2-fold; firstly by reducing your internet usage but also in reducing your CPU usage by not having these items burning your CPU whilst on standby.

Step 4 – The Terminator

What a cool intro to step 4. Actually it is nothing more than closing applications that you were running. Since many of the G1 Apps do not have a simple ‘close’ action to close the program down, it will sit as a task on your Android consuming small amounts of memory and CPU (which wastes your battery). By installing a simple app like the fantastic Task Manager App (free trial version, worth paying for) or the freely available, yet basic TasKiller App you can ensure your G1 is running optimially by closing down apps.

Step 5 – Smaller Tweaks

And finally here are a few other things you can do to improve battery life. Again this is based on my experience with the G1 so you may have differing results.

a) Reducing the screen brightness will save battery. I’ve set my back-light to 0% which means I have a slightly dimmed view of my screen but as I’m now used to it, I don’t notice it until the sun is shining on it, when you do need to turn the back-light up (i.e. using Google Maps on the street!).

b) Ensure any Apps you stop using for example when the trial is finished, are not consuming your CPU. I installed a trial of an email client which when expired, still continued to request updates. Delete the App or upgrade it if you use it!

c) Set your screen timeout according to your usage. Mine is set to 30 seconds which is more than enough. If I’m browsing the map for directions I’ll use the handy Toggle Settings desktop widget to quickly set the screen to ‘never timeout’.

d) Ok some sarcastic person would probably write this so here it is; to save maximum battery, don’t use the phone. Heck, turn it off. Not highly practical though hey?

e) Or perhaps buy another phone. My old Nokia lasted 5 days. It made calls. Period. However I don’t want to ‘just’ make calls I want to surf the ‘net, take pictures, write a blog and check twitter updates whilst reading an e-book from my phone.

The Results

There you go. Some if not most of this has probably already been covered off seeing as though the Android G1 is now at least a year old (G2 looks great, though I love the keyboard on the G1). Let me know if any of this works on the G2!

Perhaps they’ve improved battery life on the newer versions of the Android phones but in any case, I’m now getting 3 days usage from my Android G1 which includes perhaps 1 hour talktime a day, 2 hours Web usage and other apps. Not bad me thinks.

Recommended Apps List to Help Save your Battery

• Task Manager (monitor and close apps)
• Toggle Settings (quick on/off actions for popular settings)

What are your experiences? Have I missed something off the list? Or perhaps you’re not experiencing the same level of battery karma as me?

Depesh

WordPress Expired Post Notification

Having been working on a WordPress site for someone I’ve brushed up my PHP skills and enjoyed using a powerful blogging-cum-content management system, which to be honest provides a great deal of flexibility and control yet delivers intuitive ease of use.

So the latest problem was on how we could set a date for certain posts to automatically ‘expire’ in as far as having a notification appear within a tag/categories (archives) listings page or within the blog post itself.

The easy thing was to learn how to use ‘Custom Fields’ to set any data you wanted attached to the post. We were already adding dates, so that for example, if we required the article to expire at the end of June, we could simply enter 30/06/2009, and display this as a message on any page where the post was shown:

$expiry = get_post_meta($post->ID, “expiry”, true); //eg 31/03/2009 = 31st March 2009 (UK date format)

then in the HTML, enter:

<p>This post expires on <? echo $expiry; ?> </p>

So what happens when the post has actually expired? Your message would be a little out of date; ‘.. post expires on’ needs to become ‘.. post has expired’.

This seemed easy enough. Using PHP’s built-in function to convert any date string into a set of numbers which could be easily compared, I set about doing just that. However a few hours later I just could not get it working. The problem? I’m in the UK, and the function I was using, ‘strtotime’, expects the date string in US format!

UK format = dd/mm/yyyy

US format = mm/dd/yyyy

So, here is the final solution I came up, perhaps you’ll find a good use for it too!

1. Get the expiry date from your post Custom Fields (this has to be within ‘the loop’ in WP)
$expiry = get_post_meta($post->ID, “expiry”, true); //eg 31/03/2009 = 31st March 2009

2. To check for a valid date I’m only checking that the string has a forward slash
if(stristr($expiry, “/”) != “” ) {

3. Get today’s date as MM/DD/YYY
$todays_date = date(“m/d/Y”); //eg 05/06/2009 = 6th May 2009 – need this as ‘strtotime’ expects US date format

4. Convert this into a ‘time’ format, which makes comparison of absolute numbers easier (number of seconds since 1970…)
$today = strtotime($todays_date); //eg 123456789000

5. convert our UK date format from our blog post to US format by spliting the contents into an array then putting back together again in US date format
$expdate = explode(“/”,$expiry);
$expiration_date = date(“m/d/Y”,mktime(0,0,0,$expdate[1],$expdate[0],$expdate[2])).”\n”;

6. Convert this into a ‘time’ format, which makes comparison of absolute numbers easier
$expiration_date = strtotime($expiration_date); //eg 1234567890001

7. Now compare the 2 numbers! If your expiry date value is higher than today’s value (i.e. it is further from 1970 than today) then your blog post is still valid!

if ($expiration_date > $today) {
//place your code here for valid posts
} else
{
//place your code here for expired posts
}

If there are any better, streamlined ways of doing this please drop your thoughts!

WordPress Multiple Tag Concatenation

Having used WordPress for over a year now I feel the time is right to share some tips I’ve found when creating pages, blog posts and mini-websites using WordPress . Some if not most are probably already being blogged but if not this may be of some use to you.

Combining Multiple WordPress Blog Tags for ‘Hybrid Pages’

I recently encountered the need to be able to segment my posts, to make them easier to categorise and hence link to allow visitors the ability to view relevant posts. Ever landed on a blog website and not known where to start when confronted by a long list of blog posts? Not very user friendly. Now if I create a post tagged ‘Customer Journey’ and another one called ‘Information Architecture’, someone visiting the website may want to filter out anything irrelevant aside from anything to do with ‘User Experience’ lets say.

There are a few options.

1. Let the user conduct a search (though we all know WordPress search is not the greatest…)

2. Add the tag ‘User Experience’ to your posts

3. Categorise your posts into ‘User Experience’

All 3 are viable options. However, with WordPress I discovered you can link to tags using

/tag/[TAG]

where the [TAG] is the single tag you wish to use; ensure you concatenate words using a hyphen e.g.

/tag/Customer-Experience

Will link to all posts tagged “Customer Experience”

However the smart guys at WordPress allow you to add 2 or more tags together e.g.

/tag/multi-channel+social-media/

which will search for all posts containing “multi channel” AND “Social Media”. Each tag is followed by the ‘+’ symbol. (currently nothing matches up!)

Finally if you wish to search for posts containing either keyword,

/tag/multi-channel,social-media/

hey presto, you’ve now searched all posts containing either tag using the comma as a separator. Clever? I think so…

The potential for this is three-fold

1. Improved Usability - you can of course categorise your posts, but with ever changing post topics and varying tags you may have the need for ‘short term campaigns’ in terms of creating links to post categories to help users find information. Instead of changing categories you can simply choose which tags to point to. E.g. I’m blogging about holidays. As holidays are seasonal, I wish to now link to all beach holidays I’ve written about, in Europe that are ideal for families. Next month I wish to link to blogs related to winter holidays, in Europe ideal for families. Whilst categories would do the job (ensuring each and every post is categorised under ‘European Family Beach Holidays’ and ‘Winter European Family Holidays’ accordingly) it would be extremely time consuming should you wish to then also link to ‘Spanish Beach Holidays’ from your menu. Instead you can concatenate the tags and create links to all related posts.
2. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – For SEO purposes, creating links is fantastic. You can use your keywords, which are called keywords as you expect this to be usable by your users. In the same way search engines will look upon your link text, link URL, title and body content quite favourably should you keywords match all the way down to content. Used as a menu link this signals to the search engine that you consider it important and so may your users….
3. Blog Fluidity - Static menus are always a must for usability when it comes to designing a website. Blogs are far from static so you do at times need ways to link to the most relevant posts at a higher level and this is where concatenating tags is extremely useful.

I’m sure there are other ways (e.g. using the ?tag= parameter) however in building strong, usable URLs I’ve found search engines and users alike get on well with this method!

There are some other enhancements I’ve made on other WordPress installations, such as displaying the tag query ‘meaningfully’ and creating specific page layouts depending on tags used and I’ll aim to blog these at some point…

Depesh

The InterWeb – Past, Present and Future

As I sit on this Virgin Pendolino train from Manchester to London a few random thoghts occur.

How amazing life is, with an entire ‘real life’ network of people, actions and thoughts. How could such a thing have simply evolved over time, without a more powerful existence to guide it.

Secondly, and unrelated, was how beautiful the British countryside really is and without the train journey I’d have probably never seen it.

yorkshire-countryside-uk

So this is a web log about the web so I thought of them in context to the InterWeb. For those that are not familiar with the distinction between Internet and Web, the Internet is the train and train track, the Web is a collection of all the destinations reachable via the train. The InterWeb therefore is my generalisation of both. Back to the topic…

The InterWeb as we know it, knew it and theorise it to become was not invented, in the same way as life as we know it was not. They
evolved over time. Such is the nature of our Universe that everything evolves, within the constraints of the environment.

However every now and again, just like the fish jumping out of the water, things need to evolve outside of its inherent constraints. Ask a cool sounding ‘Futurologist’ what the Interweb will look like in 5, 10 or 20 years down the line and you’ll hear lots of fanciful, some plausible thoughts including discussions on Web 3.0 (or the next big leap in web). However evolution cannot be mapped or guessed. At best we can guess but quite often we’ll be way off the mark. Just ask those born in the early 1900′s about the year 2000. It never happened that way… – but how could they have possibly known?
What did happen was technology. Technology has always existed. Who knew the power a transister would afford us, in the early days of its existence? No one did and know one thought to think about every possible application. Instead the technology acted as a catalyst to the evolution of computing into the device you’re reading this digital text from.

The future of the InterWeb is unknown. Will the train tracks change to allow us to take different journeys? Maybe new trains will enable new ways of working and thinking. Perhaps the entire structure of websites will change. Perhaps social media really is that catalyst for the evolution of web, maybe its the iPhone. What’s certain is that we as humans are full of endless possibilities. What limits us is the environment that we live in. We await the next catalyst to set off the next stage of online evolution – however I very much doubt anyone will be able to predict it.

In the meantime I reflect on this train journey and doubt, within the limitations of what I know and understand today, whether the experience of visualising the beautiful scenary can ever be replaced by anything digital, whether it be the next gen Google Maps or a new Virtual World gizmo…

What do you think this new online world looks like? Will we even get close to seeing the Matrix in real life? How much could we improve and globalise Second World? What’s the future looking like for Social Media?

Use your customers to define your web strategy

So often I hear of web strategies taking a top-down approach from the business, trying to translate (a quite successful) traditional “offline” (that is, not online) strategy and developing this online.

“our customers do such and such, so the website needs to do such and such”

Consumers use websites in different ways. Individuals use the same website in different ways. They use different websites in different ways. Customers use call centre, bricks and mortar, online in different ways. If you walk past a shop and see some nice jeans in the window, what do you do first? Take a closer look? Check the design and picture yourself wearing them? Check the price tag?

What next? Walk into the shop? Walk away? Ok so you like them and you walk in. You see the sign post for ‘Men’ and find the ‘jeans’ section. You see the jeans that were on display and take a closer look. You like them, you find the correct size, you try them on, you buy them. Now imagine how you would do this online; you display an ad banner targetting men, 20-35, with images of jeans. The user clicks. They land on your website. But there aren’t any jeans on the homepage. So the user clicks the ‘Men’ link. They find the jeans section. They view the image of the jeans. They like them (that zoom-in and pan feature worked!). They select a size. The purchase them. Sound ideal? Well that was a highly idealistic journey comparison and research will find that it is just not that easy.

So my comparison with the shop window was an ad-banner. The ad-banner is competing with other ads just as a shop-window competes with other shops. Once they come closer, perhaps the shop-window is comparable with your website homepage? That’s where the comparison ends. Once you walk into the shop, in a matter of seconds you can pan around and get a good feel for the ambience of the shop, the type of people the shop attracts, the lighting used, the music played and of course, the types of garments on sale. All in the space of a few seconds. If the music is hard-core rock, what’s your interpretation of the shop? What if the music is classical? There are so many different touch-points in a bricks and mortar environment that cannot be reproduced online. Ok so your website has ambient music. I don’t browse with my sound on. Do you? Does your customer? So when they land on your website, do they know what kind people are attracted to your website/brand? Can the sense the quality? Do they feel they belong as they might by walking into a shop? Can they quickly scan the homepage like they might a shop and get a feel for what you have?

Using your customers

I’m an advocate of consumer feedback. It sounds so simple yet so many continue without it. Converse with your customer. Ask them why they’re here. What is their impression of your website? Do they understand your brand/website? Don’t second guess your customers! Your analytics package (you have one right?) will tell you what, but not why.

Part of setting a strategy is understanding why people come to your website. Understand why they are on your website and compare this with what they actually do. Spot the opportunities.

There are many ways to model this; find out why they’re here. Here are a few tools to get you going: http://4q.iperceptions.com/ and http://www.edigitalresearch.com/ – and get a good consultant to interpret the data.

Match this against your KPIs to determine how closely you really are serving your customers and to identify opportunities. Collect feedback. Read it, action it.

The bottom line is your website has a purpose

Your commercial website has a purpose. Your business has a goal. Your job is to meet business demand, online. Your business thinks they know what you need to do with your website, you’re a ‘techie’, you know this online stuff so you need to make it happen. What you need to do is to actually push this back to the business. Find out why people visit your website and action this insight. So you sell furniture. Your business wants to sell more online and reduce the call centre burden. Your boss wants you to make it happen. You create a website, with a shopping cart and product info, the perfect shopping portal! Your marketing team are doing great, 5k UVs/day in 3 months. Money is rolling in. Your share of business is 10% and things are looking good! A year on and you’re still at 10%. 18 months and nothing has changed. Revenue is up, as is the whole business but your share has remained constant. So what’s wrong? Your website is good, your marketing is good. But people are not buying online. Find out why! If you’re attracting a fairly constant stream of traffic to the website (and assuming they’re not ‘bouncing’) then they’re interested in your product, to some extent. Survey them!

Ok so survey’s are not 100% perfect due to their self-selecting nature but it will give you a good insight into what is really happening on your website. Perhaps most people visit your website because of that fancy new tool you developed to allow your visitors to plan their new living room? Perhaps they visit to view the products before calling to place their order? Perhaps there just is not enough information on your website to allow them to qualify their needs? What if 20% of those that visited intended to buy but only 2% of them convert on any given day? Potential? Is the data correct?

Your website strategy

Your website strategy will be made up of wide-ranging tactics, insights, plans and deliverables but if there is one thing for sure, involve your customers. Find out what purpose your website has for them. Don’t assume they’re going to fall into line and act as your business wants them to act. Getting your business demands and customer needs to meet 50:50 is a big task but with a little insight, you can make it happen
Depesh

Website Conversion – Influences from beyond

Are you spending resource, time and effort on improving conversion? Well done, you’re on the right path. However are you in full control of your online marketing? You are? Great.

If not, you’re probably in the majority. You’re working hard to ensure a percentage of all visitors leave their mark on your website every day. Whether it be leaving their details to request some print material or purchasing whatever you’re selling.

So you’ve done a grand job and conversion is up. At least it should be. But your traffic has also jumped. It’s jumped so high that your conversion has dropped! What now?

Look at your actual volumes. Conversion is a great measure of how well you’re utilising your traffic. However don’t forget to keep an eye on your metrics! What use is an increase in conversion if your traffic drops and your revenue remains constant..

Depesh

Web 3.0 – The Final Destination?

Web 3.0 has been bounded about even though the majority of websites are still coming to terms with Web 2.0 – Web 1.0 is where most companies are at!

Web 3.0 is seen as the next progressive step for online. Making online think for us, making the online world easier to navigate and leveraging more from the web. Web 3.0 can be many things to many people. However, reading an article in the Financial Times today described Web 3.0 as a form of worldwide ‘social media’ platform. That is, Web 3.0 will bring people, information, websites and content even closer into a single consciousness.

Can you imagine asking a website ‘what car should I buy next?’ and for the website to scour the Web to find out more information about you, about your lifestyle and other factors which influence the way people like you think to suggest the best car for you?

There are many steps in the way of progression in reaching this higher state of consciousness but believe one thing – if we can think of where we want to be and not worry about how we’re going to get there, or how long it might take, then there is no limit to the things we can achieve. This is Web 3.0.

Depesh Mandalia

Online Customer Expectations

Do website users really know what they want?

Well actually this depends on quite a few factors. However what we do know is that there is a pressing demand from the general web browser (that is, a person not a program) to get things done quickly and to get it done right. So does quick=speedy page loading? No. Speed means access to information. Get the customer through your shop door and to the shelf or rail with the product they want ASAP! This is of course obvious but how many websites do you know that do this?

Lack of Information Vs Information Overload

Getting the balance just right is the most difficult task but offers the most reward. The e-commerce site I’m currently managing has quite a sizable number of pages (4 digits). So is this enough? Well relatively speaking the customer speaks the loudest. Analysis has shown that whilst we have as much as 10 to 15 times the information contained in our brochures, customer are still not satisfied. Afterall, it is the customer that knows what they want, not us! Or do we? Analysing traffic through your website can seem like walking through a maze.

The Little Big Brother Approach

Whilst web analytics can tell you the what and when, how do you work out the why? You can either ask them directly, in focus groups and lab tests – let’s be honest, how many participants can we really capture in full-flight – or you can install some clever software that will actually allow you to play-back customer journeys through your website! Clever? Well not as clever as being able to set ‘triggers’ to record certain journeys. Saves a fair amount of time working out why exactly your attrition levels are so high. You thought the page was so simple that it must be the users that are doing something wrong. Well set a trigger to alert you when someone hits this page and play back the sessions. You might just be surprised.

Customer Expectations

Customers are more and more expecting to spend less time searching and more time consuming information online. Go ask Google. That’s why it is key to reduce any ‘low-hanging fruit’ issues with your site as possible and concentrate on a strategy to streamline your customer journey for the mid-term. Information is key, but make it relevant, easy to find and don’t make your customers think too much!

Depesh Mandalia