On Internet Business

The future of blogging: Tumblr v Posterous

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Online Retail, Social Media

The Guardian newspaper has been considering the future of blogging – and the answer depends on where you stand.  According to their social media mavens, for the big tech blogs like Mashable and TechCrunch, there’s no contest, it’s Wordpress all the way, but for the amateur blogger, and those who are time-short and twitterate, two mobile blogging systems are racing up the popularity stakes – but which is best: Tumblr or Posterous?
 
To a certain extent it depends on how you respond to each platform – both are simple to use, each has advantages and disadvantages, and each requires you to learn a few new tricks to convert your old blogging behaviours to new micro-blog ones.

What’s new in blogging?

Posterous has been running an aggressive campaign to seduce users who are familiar with blogger and wordpress systems, as part of which it’s just gone live with a Wordpress blog important which means that old blog content established in a Wordpress platform, can be grabbed, along with comments and tags, and dumped straight into a Posterous account. On the downside, it doesn’t mean that you can transfer your URL structure and that means you can lose quite a bit of your ‘Googlejuice’ – the mojo your site has created through links to your blog.

But when you look at the usage stats, rather than the functionality, there’s no doubt that at present, Tumblr is leading the field. As PC Magazine puts it, when you’re ‘fatter than Twitter but thinner than Blogger’, you’ve positioned yourself just right for the average user!

Business Profile: Groupon

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Online Retail

Groupon is taking the bargain world by storm. The company offers a single ‘Groupon’ daily in each of the cities it serves, and the groupon (contraction of group coupon) is based on an online assurance contract that contains a tipping point algorithm. This means that if a certain number of people sign up for that day’s offer, then the deal becomes available to all of them, but if the tipping point isn’t reached, nobody gets that deal. Retailers love the concept because it means their risk is massively reduced and Groupon profits by taking a share from the retailers. Groupon, which bought out its European rival MyCityDeal a couple of years ago, has 11 million subscribers in 22 countries and is available across the UK in 37 cities from Aberdeen to York.

But now the model has evolved from single daily offer per city, per day into something called a Personalized Deals initiative which means that subscribers in several US cities will get deals tailored to their personal tastes and previous purchase record. As the Groupon blog puts it, ‘Personalized Deals will start out dumb, but like a baby dipped in some sort of mutating ooze … get smarter quickly. As Groupon gets to know you better, we’ll target your inbox with scarily accurate deals and scarily accurate hand-drawings of you.’

Marketing to the Individual

What does this mean? It’s a huge change in the nature of marketing, allowing retailers and service providers to increase the number of deals made, but with no control over who they’re made to. That power lies in the hands of the intermediary (Groupon) which uses the details supplied by its subscribers to avoid wasting their time, which is one of the biggest complaints people have about advertising and marketing – when it’s done via mass media, it reaches many more markets than the target ones.

This also allows Groupon to have more masculine deals on offer to men – while women have driven the growth of Groupon through social networking, the masculine market can be better serviced through less ‘sexy’ but more man-friendly offers, like power-tools and hardware deals.

Improving your Website

Posted by Michael under Online Retail, Social Media

Mashable has recently produced an excellent round-up of the resources available to designers seeking to obtain advice on how to improve designs.

An outside perspective on the design of a new website can make a difference both in pinpointing issues that are more important to users than the designer had realised, or to help validate design areas that the client may not be fully convinced about.

Critique The Site

This is a sweet little tool, allowing for instant feedback about a website’s design by means of a frame to the left of the web page under consideration, where users can leave feedback. There are a couple of downsides: first, reviewers have to log in using a popular web service such as Twitter, Gmail, Facebook, or OpenID before posting a review, and there’s a limit to the amount of people you have access to – it doesn’t have a pool of reviewers to review your site, unlike some of the other options. Plus point, it’s free.

Please Critique Me

Please Critique Me is an interesting approach in that it’s a resource run by web design agency offering free design critiques by one of its design teams, with a panel that includes some notable names. Valuable both for its critiques and the resources available on the site itself.

SitePoint

SitePoint is an online media company with a forum that allows for feedback from its pool of more than 350,000 registered users. On the plus side, it’s active and informed, on the minus side it’s a time consuming and sometimes frustrating way to read feedback and there’s some veering off topic which will probably infuriate the designer seeking responses. Still free though!

Bounce

Bounce is a web app that plugs in your web design’s URL, generating a screenshot of the site which people can then comment on. Minus points, a screenshot is not necessarily a good way to examine deeper website functionality. Plus points, it’s easy, its fun and it’s free, which has to be a plus.

Five Second Test

Five Second Test is more based on functionality – reviewers see a screen capture of the web design and then respond with one of two forms of evaluation: memory test (shows users a web layout for five seconds, then asks them what they remember) or click test (participants are required to click on the most prominent items on the page within five seconds). If you wish to find out if your web design’s crucial design elements are both visible and memorable, this may be a tool for you. It’s free, which is a plus, but the free option gives you only five responses and you’re put at the bottom of the testing queue in terms of priority, so it could take a while. There are paid options from $5 to15 which allow you to have a higher queue placing and to customise the user instructions

Concept Feedback

Concept Feedback is something of a crowdsourcing approach. Each reviewer rates one of four items on your site, those items being: design, purpose, originality and engagement. Reviewers are themselves reviewed, both by being given feedback on their own designs and by rankings. It’s a free service if you choose to review five concepts before you post your own, but premium services ($10-50 per concept) allow you to post the concept before you review others, to have your concept featured on Twitter to generate more reviews and to be guaranteed a minimum number of reviews.

UserTesting.com

This costs $39 but it guarantees remote trials of your site – you receive videos of each visitor as they explore your site, alongside written summaries of any problems they discover. On the plus side, it’s really fast to get feedback, minus points – you do have to pay and you may find you have to convert video feedback to some other kind of recorded information before you can adapt your site. A user’s confused expression may be worth a thousand words, but if you’re working for a client they probably won’t want to sit through videos to discover what people think of the site you’ve built for them.

Usabilla

Usabilla useful for usability testing on live sites. It works by gathering visitor feedback using both annotation and task performance measurements and asks people to complete tasks for which the time taken is recorded. Free for a single web page and offering up to fifty participants for that page, it’s a good system for a small site. There are paid-for features that can be anything from $49 to $950 per annum, which may be cost-effective only for the bigger retail sites.

Feedback Army

For $15, Feedback Army will ‘host’ a focused debate of your design based on 4-6 questions you supply. You get ten reviews with an estimated time lag one to three hours turnaround – a fantastic way of obtaining swift and cheap reviews.

Userfly

Is a funky little system that gives you a screencast of how users interact with the site which may make it a more useful system in analysing why an existing site doesn’t work than in assessing a new site. You plug a line of code into your web page and that’s it. Plus points, it’s a simple system. Minus points, you have to do the analysis yourself. There are premium plans $10-200 per month and get you more captures (results), the ability to use the https protocol and longer storage of your captures.

How to set up an online store in minutes for next to nothing

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Online Retail

Lifehacker recently explored how to set up an online shopfront, but how do their top five recommendations work out for UK based online retailers?

1. Sell Simply is as basic as it gets – sell through Twitter and pay a dollar! That’s all there is to it. You list your items for sale via Twitter, they are listed on Sell Simply, and Paypal takes care of the actual transaction. It’s basic, it’s easy, it’s ultimately portable and if you like life to be straightforward, this is the best system for you. Of course, if you want control, complexity, personalisation and presence, this is not going to be your shopfront of choice, but for those getting started or testing an idea, it’s a brilliantly simple route to commerce.

2. Big Cartel is easy to use. The process of store building is simple, mainly because there is a limited amount of stuff that you can change. The shopping cart system is easy too, although it’s tailored to artists and creative types, not mass volume sellers. The pricing structure is also simple: testing the water is free – load your basic store with five items and see how you go! If that flies, you can move into a ten dollar per month store or a twenty dollar per month store. Overall, Big Cartel is an excellent system, aimed at shopfronts that have around 100 pieces for sale (that’s 100 listings, not 100 actual items) and it’s very clean to use. Clean but not that customisable – there are elements you can play with, but one Big Cartel store is often quite a lot like another Big Cartel store and that could be good (easy for customers who are familiar with the system to navigate) or bad (making your unique offering look just like everybody else’s little business)

In terms of the process there are advantages and disadvantages: you will be paying in dollars and you have to inform yourself about what applies and doesn’t apply under USA law in relation to exportable items, but it’s a very simple process to operate the store and paying by the month means you know what you’ve let yourself in for – there’s no nasty surprises if you sell above your predicted volumes.

3. Shopify is another pay monthly storefront and shopping cart system – rather than a basic free model at the bottom of the scale, you get to try before you buy for a month, but then you’re into a monthly package ranging from $24 for 100 products through $59, $99 $249 to $699 per month for 50,000 products. There is also a transaction fee for every purchase made through your store which drops the higher your monthly fee package.

The advantages of Shopify? It’s totally customisable, you can play with every element of both HTML and CSS so if you want a totally unique shop, you get to either edit their templates or design your own from scratch. Downsides? Once again you’re paying in dollars, and this time you’re subject to Canadian law and that of the province of Ontario – probably not a problem for most vendors but there are pretty odd things you can’t sell online and it’s the vendors responsibility to ensure he or she is aware of the restrictions that might apply.

4. Etsy is a venue. It’s important to remember this, because it’s got some unusual and sometimes frustrating features. The good side is that if you’re a craft-based business, it’s designed with you in mind. Setting up your store is really easy but not very customisable. The fees are a little more complicated to understand: there’s a $0.20 listing fee for four months and a 3.5% transaction fee when the item sells. The complication is that there is a fee per quantity so one scarf in stock incurs a fee of $0.20 for four months but three scarves of the same pattern, once listed, cost you $0.60 for the same period, with the transaction fee applying when each one sells.

For the crafter/designer, Etsy has a major bonus feature: alchemy, where people list the item they want to have created for them and Etsy members bid for the work.

5. Self-Hosting – this was ranked three on Lifehacker, but is the most time (and potentially cost) consuming option. You need a web server, basic coding skills or a web person to hand, and some design appreciation too. There are cart systems you can install yourself into your own shopfront, so you don’t have to create a secured payment system unless you really want to.

This method gives you the most control and choice, but is also the most likely to cause frustration and delays in getting to trade. The advantage of the established shopfront systems is that users already know how to navigate them; by creating your own you may inadvertently set up something customers don’t enjoy or don’t have confidence in.

Online retail up – general forecast down

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Online Retail

The Capgemini index shows that online sales have remained robust, with the total online retail sector being up 13% on April 2009. There’s been a wobble for online travel – related in part to the ash cloud – and evidence that recession-aware shoppers are still keen to spend on their homes and gardens for summer.

In April 2010 online consumers spent 9% less than in March on travel, a growth that is slower than market average, but online clothing rocketed with a 21% spend increase compared to last year. Discounting of beers, wines and spirits in the last weeks of the April also caused a sharp rise, as consumers ordered in their booze for the early and late May bank holiday weekends and the World Cup.

Sales for retailers with both online and store locations are up 22% on 2009, compared to a sales increase by only 6% on the same month for those who have physical locations only.

So how does this sit with the report ‘Internet retail trends 2010: Ten actions for your business’? The report was compiled for Webloyalty, by Verdict, and it says that despite growing by 13.3% in 2009, online retail has been hard hit by the recession.

Key findings of the report

• Growth will be harder – easy successes have now peaked and future progress will be slower and harder won, with more switching of customer loyalty rather than new customers meaning that retailers should focus on maximising revenue online

• Acquiring new customers will become a challenge – maintaining existing customer loyalty and developing systems to create repeat business are likely to be key features of successful online retailing in the years ahead.

Does the index bear out the predictions?

It’s too difficult to tell how accurate the long term forecasting is yet, and supra-national issues like oil spills and ash clouds have unanticipated effects on retail (eg we can expect tent sails to rise as Brits who would have holidayed in Florida etc opt to remain home and avoid both disasters) but there does seem to be some evidence of a slow-down in new customer gain which could suggest that the most successful future online retailers will be those who hold onto their market share and persuade those customers who’ve bought once to buy again.

Building a website quickly without technical skills

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Online Retail

Every business needs a website, but what if you want to trial a business idea, or need multiple websites for cluster or boutique businesses, and have limited capital and time to put into this aspect of your concept?

Enter Yola (formerly synthasite), Intuit and Subhub – three solutions to the same problem.

What they offer

All three have a similar basic offering: a free service that allows you to bang together an off the shelf website template with your business’s individual details.

As the price rises, the offers become more complex and more tailored. At the interim level, Yola offers extra storage and a customisable domain name and at the premium level, a website designed for you is included along with more storage and space.

Intuit is not available as a .co.uk which is a shame, as its business package is a great deal for retail-based business options. The free package is very similar to Yola but the pay-based options included retail support and payroll: an all-in-one package that must make many .com, .net .org. biz and .info entrepreneurs very happy!

Subhub has a free trial that rises to ‘pro’ and ‘max’ and what’s interesting here is that the difference between these pay-for services is essentially a one-off design fee to create a tailored website for the ‘max’ option – the other service offerings remain pretty much the same.

What they cost

Yola is $49.95 per annum for silver level and $349 for premier.

Subhub is £49.97 per month for pro and then a further £597 for the website design plus a bit more storage for max.

Intuit costs $4.99 per month at the bottom of the scale, rising to almost as much as you are willing to pay, but a fully functioning retail site seems to come in at around $200-300 a year according to many users.

What the EC Digital Agenda means for online business

Posted by Michael under Online Retail

The European Commission’s recently announced Digital Agenda was negotiated against the background of the rise of the Celtic Tiger and Southern European ‘harmonisation’ but unveiled against the current economic situation – Greece and the Ireland in crisis and other countries battling their deficits. So what might the Agenda achieve and how will it support the growth of sustainable business online?

Burdens or Benefits?

First, there’s the legislative burden: 31 new laws across the EU, all aiming to increase the number of Europeans accessing online services and the range of resources they can use when they do. Key goals for business include the 2020 aim of half of all European households subscribing to 100 Mbps or above broadband services; steps to encourage electronic payments; removal of regulatory barriers and simplifying digital copyright management and licensing. It all sounds great, but it all needs to be paid for and there’s no detail on how such goals will be met. For example what’s the incentive for the goal that all citizens should be able to access basic broadband by 2013? The EU is full of rural areas where operators currently don’t find it economically viable to deliver services.

Then there’s the plan to have a rapid response system for cyber-attacks. In a UK currently scratching its head over the scrapping of identity cards, such over-arching structures, predicated on security and defensive measures, will be viewed with vast scepticism.

Business Focus

However, one area where rapid progress could be made is a key one for online retail, service provision and communications: by 2020, the EU aims to have 20% of EU citizens using cross-border online services – at present a bare 7% of online transactions made by European consumers are cross-border in nature.

Neelie Kroes, VP European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda, made it clear how the Agenda needs to work, ‘Europe must maximise the potential of ICT in delivering economic growth… To fully realise the potential of Europe’s digital future we need the full commitment of Member States, the ICT sector and other vital economic players.’

Productivity Tools Review

Posted by Michael under Entrepreneur Resources, Online Retail

It’s not everyday that you need to build a form or mock-up a software application, but when you do, it’s important to have the kit to enable you to work swiftly and effectively. Three that can really help are Formsite, Balsamiq and Cacoo:

Formsite is flexible and simple to learn – it’s an HTML form builder that allows the user to create anything from a customer survey to an order form or an employment application process. You can work from a template or start with a ‘blank page’ and tailor the form or survey to your own needs and because the form is stored on the Formsite server, you don’t have to install or download anything so it’s good for work on the move. Their most recent addition is a Spam protection facility that stops robots from completing your forms and distorting results.

Priced in dollars, starting with free access which offers a strictly limited range of forms and responses, and rising through $10, to $100 per month, for extras like consulting and customisation it’s a fully flexible system that allows form-building to be simple and response reporting to be an effective part of your business.

Balsamiq is priced at $79.99 although there is a free demo version you can download to play around with, that demo doesn’t have a save function, for which you need to have paid for a licence key. Obviously if you’re just ‘doodling’ software with your team, the free version may be enough for you as Balsamiq allows you to create software mockups using drag and drop and editing tools that appear on the desktop. It’s a really simple system to learn, and can allow you to brainstorm with a client or team from first principles, so that when an idea comes up while you’re on the road or just grabbing a quick coffee, you can start work immediately using the pre-made elements to offer an instant visual.

There is perhaps one annoyance: to ensure that customers don’t think that putting together a mockup is the same as coding software, Balsamiq has opted to keep the system in a kind of hand-drawn, low-fi style which can look a little odd.

Cacoo is a free web app that allows you to work through your Cacoo.com account to create diagrams like site maps, wire frames, UML and network charts. It also allows for real time collaboration and users can upload their own images and create freehand line-work. It’s a relatively new system which means that it doesn’t, as yet, have a ‘premium’ option for paying users, although that’s due to come by the middle of this year. It would be good if that premium payment allowed users to export files on formats other than PNG and to save files to Autocad formats.

Perhaps the biggest weakness of the current system is that it lacks an import feature, meaning that all files have to be created from scratch from within the Cacoo space.

Affiliate Marketing – caveat emptor?

Posted by Michael under Affiliate Marketing, Online Retail

The past two weeks have seen a small but hot war take place in the British travel marketing sector as affiliate marketers found out that one travel company had different pricing policies for consumers arriving direct or via an affiliate.

UK-based accommodation site VivaStay is offering cheaper rates per night for booking hotels to users arriving direct at site, with a price hike of up to £4 for those who land via an via an affiliate link. Fascinatingly, their own terms and conditions state: Lowest Price Guarantee: We at vivastay.com are committed to offer our customers the lowest possible price in the industry for the products and services we provide. For this purpose, we have contracted the industry’s most renowned land arrangement providers in order to pass the best prices on to you. Hmmm …

Lawrence Target of CheapBeach was testing links for his new site when he discovered that customers using affiliate links to get to VivaStay would pay a premium. He said ‘For Vivastay to sneek in the implementation of this added hidden charge to the customer from an affiliate link is outrageous. Thankfully not all merchants and travel providers are quite so underhanded. “It is an affront to the very fabric of Affiliate Marketing and I suspect that other affiliates will also be dropping them like a stone, how can you work with a merchant you just can’t trust, it only works if both parties are in synergy, a proper partnership, that is what achieves the best returns.’

Danny Gallo who is ‘Marketing and Sales’ at Viva Travel, VivaStay’s parent company, responded to the concerns at the A4U forum, used by many European affiliates. His comments are interesting: We at Viva Travel have looked in to the issue concerned and take your points seriously as no-one wants to damage brand integrity. After much discussion in the team it has been found that the issue raised is indeed occuring and as [forum name removed] pointed out, the issue is in regards to the commission paid out whereby if the prices were identical to the direct prices (users visiting our site without using an affiliate link) then we as a company would suffer a loss. However, when customers use the discount codes available to them the prices are much lower than going direct. I agree with [forum name removed] that this should perhaps be more transparent and we are looking in to ways that this can be enhanced to accommodate this. As to whether this is allowed, we are not sure as we have not been advised that this is against any rules and this is the first time that this has been brought to our attention. I’m not sure also as to whether it’s allowed that affiliates use coupon codes or make transactions via their own referring sites, as [name removed] has done which not only reduces the price of the purchase but also awards the very affiliate a commission for their own purchases, which we find in itself to be unfair and guilty of a similar “crime”. Again, as this is not stated in any rules per se, we are not to follow suit and make any accusations. Lastly, we would expect any affiliates to approach us first directly rather than posting a demeaning post with attempts to damage the brand. This would enable us to rectify the issue for all concerned in an amicable manner beforehand.

However, affiliates claim the practice definitely damages their own reputations. A disgruntled blogger said: How can you legitimately build up a loyal readership on your site once the readers realise they are going to get screwed every time they follow one of your recommendations? …. how is that fair to the affiliate who sent the traffic, when they get paid nothing for a converting customer?

Comment policies and businesses

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Leadership, Online Retail, Social Media

Since I raised the reputational issue it seems to have been flavour of the week all over the place. Mathew Ingram, a senior writer at GigaOm.com, a leading technology blog network in the United States and previously communities editor for the Toronto, got into a major twitter debate about the value, or otherwise, of anonymous comments.

Then econsultancy weighed in with a digest of the article and their top five tips on how to set a policy for comments and in the same week, Lisa Barone wrote an article at Small Biz Trends that unpicked which bad commentary it’s worth responding to, and which should be ignored.

So what does this tell us about the business world – is there a sudden rash of nasty (anonymous or otherwise) commentators out there? Not exactly, but there do seem to be two things going on that underline the relationship between business and social media:

1. Economic stringency seems to be creating a sub-group of consumers who are more active, and pro-active, in giving both good and bad feedback online – these are very social media savvy individuals who are comfortable using a wide range of online communication tools to express their feelings and there appears to be a developing behaviour in this group to buy, consume or experience and then to comment on what was obtained for their money, whether it’s a concert ticket, a coffee or a car service that they’ve purchased.
2. New social media users, usually between forties and their seventies, and being educated about social media by their children or grandchildren: these are consumers who’ve got a strong sense of community and customer service and may have spent years complaining fruitlessly about bad or no customer support. While they may be social media novices, they are experienced complainers, and they are mobilising around the failures of big business in particular, and commenting not just on business but on political and social issues that affect them.

It is these two groups, converging on the ‘comment’ function from very different directions, that are driving the upsurge in user-response and that’s why businesses, everywhere, need to have a policy, because comments may only take a moment to create and send, but they can negatively affect a business for years.