On Internet Business

How to increase online enquiries by 25-40%

Posted by Michael under Online Retail

Converting click interest to enquiries is a key part of running a successful online business and LukeW recently reviewed a new way of creating an enquiry registration form, designed by Jeremy Keith.

The key difference between the form, which can be found at Keith’s own site, Huffduffer, and the traditional sign-up for more information form, is the narrative format it uses to ask for information. While classic forms uses boxes – often with a pull down menu offering a choice of pre-set options – the input system on Keith’s form is sentence-based, it allows people to write a phrase in the box.

In all other respects the form operates in the classic way: you can tab between boxes, you can start entering information by select any text box, and if the data that’s entered is in an unacceptable format the form handles the error by posting up an error message with an indicator of where the error needs to be created.

It seems counter-intuitive to suggest that a form that requires more work from the individual (choosing a selection of words and entering them) would increase response rates, but it does. And the evidence comes from Vast – a leading vertical search platform for cars, travel, and house purchase in the USA. Vast ran some online testing, using a ‘contact this dealer form’ that measured the response to a traditional form and a narrative based one. The results were fascinating – narrative-style forms increased conversion by 25-40%.

Standard forms look like the one on the left: classic boxes and lots of pull-down menu items with a three part box for entering a telephone number. It’s the kind of form that most of us see on the internet almost every time we visit a retail- or service- based site.

On the other hand, the narrative based form offers less information about ‘what to put’ and more scope about ‘personalising’ the form according to the viewer’s own wishes. The three telephone number boxes have shrunk to just one field too.

There isn’t enough data yet to work out why the narrative form seems more appealing – but it seems likely that there are two reasons: the first is that we naturally think in sentences, not information bytes, so that language logic of narrative seems more comfortable to us, the second is that having scope to supply information in the form we want seems less intrusive than being told we have to give that information in the form that is acceptable to the recipient – we’re happier to give exactly the same information, if we have the scope to decide the words we supply it in.

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We are up for another award ! Quayside are finalist in Online Business of Year Award

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Online Retail

I’m delighted to discover that we  are a finalist in the Online Business of the Year category of the Fast Growth Business Awards. It’s thanks to an excellent team that supports the company that we’ve got this far, and the national recognition that this delivers to Quayside is definitely their reward for exceptional levels of dedication and ingenuity at a time when the business environment has been tough and the economy has made it tough for any organisation to thrive.

Our short-listing is an exciting acknowledgment of the quality of Quayside’s teamwork, and the Fast Growth Business Awards London awards dinner in April will be a highlight of the year for me, not least because last year’s winners, Seatwave.com are a truly innovative online marketplace where fans can buy and sell tickets for concerts, sporting events, shows and almost any other kind of live event imaginable.

Being in such good company is a fantastic incentive to continue our growth and development.

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EU and retail sales – online up, store-based down, problems ahead

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Online Retail

It’s predicted that online retail business in Europe could increase by 20% in 2010 – massively exceeding store-based trade. Key market increases are expected in France, Poland and Spain as they develop the online retail habit that has already bitten the UK, Germany and Italy. Research conducted by the Centre for Retail Research for price-comparison website Kelkoo predicts that the euro-based online shopping market could reach 172 billion euros in 2010 – which would outstrip the forecast for USA online retail growth of just 10%. By contrast, the predicted growth for shop-based European retailing is just 1.4 %.

The UK will see the lowest rate of growth, just 12.4%, although overall it is the largest European market, being worth around 50 billion euros. It’s a staggering rate of growth in comparison to retail – for example, German retail sales dropped by nearly 2% last year.

And while online retail booms, the euro economy as a whole is worrying everybody – the PIGS: Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain all have national credit rating under extreme pressure in the euro-zone – and while the Irish government has pushed through difficult budgets to ensure economy stability returns, Greece in particular seems unable to commit to the same degree of rigour. As the governments in Athens, Lisbon and Madrid face pressure from other euro-zone nations that really don’t want to be bailing out their neighbours, tiny Latvia which chose to peg its own currency to the euro-standard is worst off of all – it’s lost a quarter of its economy since the worldwide recession started, and retail sales have dropped by nearly a third.

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Review – the value of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to business

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Online Retail

Mechanical Turk is a service provided by Amazon, better known for book sales, that allows individuals to complete simple tasks for small payments, or businesses (called requesters) to post low grade work which is then completed swiftly by a range of people.

It’s a dual user website, like elance, where businesses post HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) and individuals apply to complete them. The difference between elance and Mechanical Turk lies in three areas:

1. The payment to service providers
2. The relationship between the requester and the HIT completer
3. The nature of the tasks.

First, the payments – each HIT has a fee, often a really tiny amount, and the business may pay sixty individuals a few cents, rather than one individual the whole amount as they would with elance.

Second, there is no interrelationship between a requester seeking to have HITs completed and the people undertaking them. The whole process is mediated by the Amazon service so you don’t have any real sense of who’s doing your work or why.

Third, the tasks are short-term, repetitive and requiring lower skill levels than elance. If you want several dozen people to test the registration system on a new website, Mechanical Turk is your baby, but if you want detailed feedback on their experiences of the registration process, it’s not.

You can limit the geographic location of the folk who complete your HIT, so for example you can ask only UK workers to review your UK road sign quiz, or only German speakers to read your new German-language website.

Payments are managed by Amazon Mechanical Turk which takes a 10% fee over and above what the requester is going to pay the HIT completers –if a HIT pays $0.20, Amazon Mechanical Turk collects $0.02. The minimum commission charged is $0.005 per HIT.

And that’s one of the biggest problems – you can use the Mechanical Turk, if you’re not a USA based business, but it’s complicated, or as Amazon put it: Requesters must provide a U.S. ACH-enabled bank account and a U.S. billing address in order to submit a request for tasks to be completed through the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site. If a Requester is not a legal entity, but is submitting tasks to Amazon Mechanical Turk as an individual, he or she would also need to provide a U.S. driver’s license number. So if you have an American arm to your business, Turk may be valuable to you, but it’s not truly international for requesters as it is for HIT completers.

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Online retail the real 2009 winner

Posted by Michael under Online Retail

UK shoppers, buying online, spent more than £5.4 billion, according to Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG). That’s an increase of over 17% on the same period to 2008 and a single month increase of nearly 4% on November 2009.

While that’s good news for online retail generally, the breakdown of figures is of particular interest to the online-only retail community as their index actually declined as the index for multichannel retailers rose.

Why did multi-channel retail perform better in 2009?

1. Good multichannel marketing allows the customer to choose how they interact with the retailer – this may make the difference between purchase and non-purchase with a customer who’s vacillating about making a financial commitment. Being able to buy in the way that suits them best, whether it’s a phone call to a living person or the impersonal efficiency of shopping online, can be the final impetus that triggers spending.

2. Seamless experience – the best multichannel retailers have managed to ensure that their entire team is focussed around supporting a customer’s desire to buying through the channel that they prefer – which means ensuring that they allow returns through all channels, offering loyalty rewards across channels and making voucher and gift purchases work as easily through every channel. This seems to have generated a more repeat sale buzz than online only, because customers learnt that they could, for example, make an initial purchase online, request a return over the phone (ie immediately they realised the product wasn’t what they wanted) and then use the resulting self-printed refund voucher in the nearest retail outlet.

3. Order capture – this seems to have been a biggie in helping the multichannel retailers boost their sales. Use multiple channels as back office ways to get stock from one store to another, or to help people order out of stock items for home delivery, or just to show them that they can drive twenty miles and pick up the item that’s out of stock locally, seems to have met customer needs in a way that the simple ‘out of stock’ message given by some online only retailers didn’t.

4. Multichannel staffing grew up – Web, catalogue, telephone and face-to-face marketing have different skill sets. The best multichannel retailers have found ways to ensure that staff don’t take a single skill set into each area of marketing: rather, they’ve created skill categories and trained staff moving from one channel to another to understand the customer needs they face in each channel. Confident buyers like online and face-to-face, for example, while those still needing to be persuaded often choose the telephone route so they can ask questions without worrying they will feel the pressure to buy that would be provoked by asking the same questions instore. Understanding the customer needs means that sales staff respond in a channel appropriate fashion and that drives sales, upselling and repeat business.

And the news continues to look good – IMRG chief executive James Roper says that ‘2010 looks set to produce another year of strong results for e-retail, with demand expected to remain high as consumers habitually look online for best buys, and a pipeline of significant improvements emerge, including wider product range availability, even better web sites and a greater choice of convenient and more reliable delivery options.’

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Is the App store the only model for online business?

Posted by Michael under Online Retail

Econsultancy is taking issue with an article by Farhad Manjoo in Fast Company magazine, which claims that the app store model may soon hit a “dead end”.

Manjoo’s argument is that developers don’t need Apple – or, as he puts it ‘in the age of the Web, developers can get their programs to end users without anyone intervening’ and econsultancy considers this to be ‘a notion that’s as dangerous as it is naïve’.

So what’s the truth? Econsultancy says that the Apple App store is like a digital Wal-Mart and like that company, it has created a one-stop venue for people browsing for digital entertainment and content. Just as Wal-Mart has high standards and rejects many would-be suppliers, so does Apple, and in the same way, these standards allow customers to shop with confidence, in both stores, the customer is safe, well-served and going to be happy with their purchase.

That makes perfect sense – but there are other models to consider. In the bookselling world, Amazon has sent hundreds, if not thousands, of bookshops to the wall – but Waterstone’s has succeeded in making a high street book shop business work in the face of the online competition by focusing on a different kind of client and offering a different kind of service – at Waterstone’s the staff have direct input to the books they sell, provide their own reviews of material, and make recommendations to customers about what they might like. For those who like to browse the books, getting a physical impression of them, or take a possible purchase to the coffee shop so they can flick through it over a cappuccino, the Waterstone’s model works better than the Amazon one. And they’ve parlayed it into a substantial online business too.

So what does this mean for online sales and apps? Is there scope for a more bespoke service where some kind of online ‘adviser’ walks purchasers through what’s available and offers personal advice on which app might be best, based on what they already use?

Possibly, but it’s not clear what the business model would be that supports this kind of personalisation. One clue might come in the wide number of apps that aren’t English-language based: there does seem to be some scope in the Farsi/Chinese/Francophone marketplaces to try something different to the App store. Alternatively, there are niche markets – culturally or physically, that might be developed into a different customer base.

Econsultancy points out that ‘Developers can act like prima donnas and complain about how hard it is to get shelf space and how Apple doesn’t give them the treatment they feel they deserve, but the numbers don’t lie: Apple delivers buyers. And without those buyers, there’s nothing for the suppliers (developers) to supply.’ This is true, but only true as long as your requirements as a buyer fit the App store model.

There is scope for developers to explore the possibility of using the open web model to build a different customer experience for those who are already outside the App store customer parameter. But this means that developers have to give up thinking only about product and start thinking about customer too, which they are notoriously uncomfortable in doing – while they clearly give thought to what a customer wants from an app, there’s little evidence that the thousands of developers out there think much about what a customer wants when purchasing an app, and unless some aggregate of developers sits down to build a Threadless style community shop, the App store will remain the Wal-Mart of applications.

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Why Google’s Personalized Search matters

Posted by Michael under Online Retail, Search

Since early December, Google has been personalising everybody’s search results, unless they opt out of the personalisation service. Why and how and what does it mean?

What is Google personalised search?

Essentially, Google’s search engine now ‘learns’ from your past searching behaviour to tailor the results it produces in a current search by comparing the results with the ones you clicked on in previous searches. So if you regularly click on search results from the TF, or the Daily Mirror, more of those search results will start showing up in future searches, because Google will give them a higher ranking, as compared to other results, because you seem to favour their content.

Any user can easily opt out of the personalisation option, and already most journalists are opting out, because it’s not in their interest to have their search results limited in this way – whether the general public will understand what is happening and how it affects their access to the internet is another matter.

Why does it matter?

A good question, to which the answers, as yet, are not clear. One troubling aspect of the situation is that Google is being coy about the percentage of search results, per searcher, that are being personalised – is it 80% or 20%?

And does it mean that, over time, a searcher will only see results from sites they favour, so if you prefer to buy British, for example, and therefore tend to click on British businesses in a search list, would you, over time, end up ONLY seeing British business results? Google says no because it wants to maintain ‘diversity’, and to ensure that areas of the web are not ‘inaccessible’ to people because of their search history. But that doesn’t mean that there won’t be seismic changes in the way online retailers and other businesses find themselves being represented in searches over time.

What is the impact likely to be?

As yet there are only questions, rather than answers, but those questions are crucial ones for the SEO market:

1. Can this effort by Google to drive personalisation, as an opt-out rather than an opt-in feature, be seen as a counter attack on SEO?
2. Will new sites suffer as a result of the creation of a personalised search history; how does a new brand become a favourite and; what could the break-through mechanisms be that would allow this to happen?
3. How can website managers adequately judge their site ranking in Google with personalisation being applied?
4. How confused will users be by the different kind of results they get as they move between computers and find that items that appeared high on their ‘personalised search’ computer don’t show up on the first page of their ‘public’ computer or one they share with other people at home or work?

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How a slow web site can damage your internet business

Posted by Michael under Online Retail

Matt Cutts – speed matters

Recently, at PubCon Las Vegas, Google representative Matt Cutts strongly suggested that the speed with which a page loads will be an important indicator for rankings.

Cutts, who is head of Google’s search quality team explains in the video that site speed will likely become a ranking factor in the near future:

“We’re starting to think more and more about … should speed be a factor in Google’s rankings, because … even in AdWords if your site is slow that can be a factor in how much you might have to pay…. Historically we haven’t used it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the Web should be fast, it should be a good experience. And so it’s sort of fair to say if you’re a fast site maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus, or if you have a really awfully slow site then maybe, you know, users don’t want that as much.”

As multimedia and rich media content become more popular online, page load time becomes a greater challenge to webmasters and SEOs. However, it is in a business’s best interest that site performance and site engagement be considered together. So what can you do to support your online business in a speedier, richer environment?

Resources to speed up your website:

• The Closure tool helps developers to build efficient rich web applications with JavaScript
• Page Speed is a tool to streamline your page’s loading from the viewer’s perspective
• Webpagetest does what it says on the tin! This application tests the download speed of your website.

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What is a good conversion rate ?

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Online Retail

Conversion rate is a critical measure in the success of an ecommerce website. Conversion rate = number of orders placed/number of visitors. According to research by Nielsen Online, the US sites with the highest conversion rates for January 2009 (as a percentage of unique website visitors) were:

Schwan’s, which is the premier site for home delivery of frozen foods and dairy products including ice creams, entrees, meats and desserts. It ships right across the USA. Conversion rate = 52.5%

Proflowers is hardly known outside the USA, but is the equivalent of interflora in the UK, you can send flowers for delivery from ProFlowers, or alternatively order plants, roses, and Christmas gifts to be delivered. Conversion rate = 27.3%

Quixtar is part of Amway Global and produces and sells Nutrilite dietary supplements, XS Energy Drinks, personal care, home care, air and water purifiers and Artistry cosmetics, relying primarily on person-to-person referral rather than advertisements for sale of products. Conversion rate = 22.4%

Blair.com – a 100 year old company, originally mail order, selling men’s and women’s clothing and household items, now largely an ecommerce business, it has a conversion rate of 21.8%

Office Depot is both a home and business to business supplier providing office supplies, print, furniture and office machinery. The online site has a conversion rate of 21.1%

Vitacost.com offers more than 800 brands and 26,000 vitamins, herbs, antioxidants, organic and natural foods as well as cleaning and personal care items with such mystifying names as natraceuticals and cosmeceuticals – which harness the power of medicine to the aspiration of personal beauty. The site’s conversion rate is 20.4%

DrsFosterSmith.com – from 1983, when three veterinarians got together to offer an online pet product catalogue, Drs Foster & Smith has grown to well over 600 employees and has a conversion rate of 20.3%

FTD.com bears the familiar Interflora logo but is in fact Florists’ Transworld Delivery a floral wire service, retailer and wholesaler – it actually bought out the Interflora cooperative in 2006. It has a conversion rate of 20.2%

Amazon is a Fortune 500 company and is considered to be the global leader in e-commerce. It sells everything from books and electronics to tennis rackets and diamonds and boasts a conversion rate of 17.2%

CDW is a reseller of technology products and services for individuals and business and has a dedicated arm that sells computers and associated products to the American government. CDW recently agreed to be acquired by a private equity firm for a value of over 7 billion dollars. Conversion rate = 16.9%

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Online Customer Service

Posted by Michael under Online Retail, Social Media

It seems that online buyers have even worse experiences than face-to-face consumers, as a Harris Interactive survey, reported by Zen International, discovered that 75% of those who buy online had problems using websites to make purchases in the past year.

It’s astonishing that this is the case because businesses are likely to lose immediate sales but also the domino effect of bad experiences being reported on social media for future potential customers to discover. And that’s a likely scenario as 13% of people said the had reported on bad experiences in 2009, against 8% in 2008. And 74% of people who responded to the survey said that negative information about a company that they found online would affect the likelihood of their doing business with that company in future.

So what practical steps can be taken to ensure your business offers not just great products but also great customer service?

• Encourage customer feedback – make it easy for customers to tell you what they think about you. The customer is always right, but even if they aren’t they will still be telling people about the poor product or service they encountered. So you need to engage with your customers and understand them, so you’re ready to respond effectively.
• Empower customer service representatives – the front end of your business is the people who deal face-to-face, by email, or by phone, with your clients. Is it worth arguing over small amounts of money? Is it worth losing a customer? Allow customer service people to fix problems swiftly and to ensure happy customers – don’t be a company that palms off problems, never responds to queries or creates a labyrinth of obstacles for people to get through before they can let you know they are not happy, because if they don’t tell you, they will tell the world.
• Monitor customer satisfaction – set up a questionnaire so that you can monitor and track customer satisfaction.  Make it easy and quick so your customer doesn’t mind completing it and offer an incentive, perhaps one respondee a month gets a freebie, so that they know you are giving something back in return for the information they supply.
• Monitor social media – a great tool for monitoring customer comments is tweetdeck which allows you to quick and easily see what is being said about you and reply to customers using this form of social media. It is the customer that now decides the method of communication and businesses need to join the conversation. Such systems of monitoring also allow you to head off problems before they develop, for example by telling clients how you’re going to deal with deliveries over a postal strike, which allows them to know that their business is important to your business.

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