Welcome to the Escape Blog

Interesting post by Clarke & Son (Basingstoke Law Firm) about retail websites and a report by the office of fair trading… with key points:

• 14 per cent of sites appeared not to comply with the law because they either provided no physical address or provided only a PO Box number;
• 15 per cent of sites appeared not to comply with the requirement to give shoppers information on their right to cancel within seven working days;
• 31 per cent of the sites appeared not to comply with the requirement on cancellation to refund the full cost of the goods. Of these, 56 per cent excluded the cost of original delivery from refunds; and
• 40 per cent of sites did not indicate when the price was first shown that compulsory additional charges would be added, but subsequently included such charges at checkout.

1. Tips on improving your customer service from E-Consultancy
2. The importance of a compliant e-commerce website on Retail Bulletin

I have been tempted to the free web stats package that is Google Analytics having been a massive fan of Hitslink for so long, which costs from $10 per month.

Cost wasn’t the main reason though. I have always been put off by Analytics delay in delivering results and it’s more generic feel. It does what I guess it should - displays less specific reporting information to gather trend data.

There are pros and cons for both systems however:

Hitslink

Pro

• It’s real time allowing you to be very responsive*
• Easy interface allows you to drill down into the nitty gritty data
• More comprehensive reporting with multiple graph views for data - houry, daily, weekly, monthly, etc.

Cons

• It costs - prices start at $10 per month - e-commerce measurement is more expensive
• Can’t discern between pay per click and natural search traffic
• Code needs hacking to deal with pay-per-click visitors otherwise each PPC visitor page is seen as different from the actual page, confusing the stats

(* I find this very helpful with a new e-commerce solution to track where a specific order came from. This feature also helped me sell a lot of a specific product once when it was reviewed one Sunday morning in a newspaper magazine.)

Analytics

Pro

• Free and easy to set up
• Ability to set goals allows you to optimise your site more effectively.
• Integrates with Pay Per Click automatically -allowing you to measure natural vs. PPC visitors

Cons

• It’s about three hours behind real time
• The data is sometimes to generic, requiring you to keep drilling down too far
• Lack of incremental reporting - ie. month on month

Summary

I find my transition to Analytics works very well with standard websites, but I feel uncomfortable with the delay in reporting for my e-commerce sites and would tend to actually run both. This isn’t the best answer as it may slow down the website running the stats.

The delay of reporting that Analytics has, has allowed me to to take a bigger picture view of my websites checking stats once a day, rather than every few hours.

Every person who cares about success on their website should be measuring their stats. Analytics is a great product, especially the price tag, and delivers data that, without a doubt, can help you improve your website. Any start-up should load this product and learn how it works.

However, when it comes to e-commerce, my nerves tell me to have Hitslink for the real time response. There’s nothing like running a sale alongside an e-mail campaign and adapting the messages as results happen.

E-Consultancy had an article about a recent study by Reevoo for YouGov about shopping online habits.

The basis of the reports states that comments and product reviews by consumers do sway new buyers but questions the accuracy of the reviews and calls for a more regulated system.

Third party endorsements are powerful way of selling and the larger retails can afford to offer consumer opinion on products, because they can switch suppliers and are not reliant on a small product range.

This is an ongoing theme on the web at the moment - Answerability. Too many people are doing to many things on line with a view to staying anonymous, with extreme cases of bad blog comments, and Cyber bullying through Facebook.

The questions is as with all media. How independent can any comment actually be?

The pay per click model allows you to target search terms. It was only a matter of time before advertising started getting even more targeted and with a model such as Facebook, which holds a lot more personal information about a person, their new advertising platform could be one to watch.

Facebook advertising gives you…

• Advanced Targeting - target by age, gender, location, interests, and more.
• Flexible Pricing - cost per click or cost per impression.
• Trusted Referrals - attach friend-to-friend interactions about your business to your ads.

While it’s still yet to be seen whether Facebook can go the distance as a business model,  and I have my doubts, it’s  a very cost effective way to do some low cost advertising as an early adopter.

Great article on Webcredible about the use of images on e-commerce sites.

I especially like number six about the scale issue, which was pointed out to me recently regarding a solution I have worked on.

Well worth reading my friends….

Experimenting with ways people can find an e-commerce site is a minefield. Google Adwords always seems to be a worthwhile model but is getting harder, which moves me personally into other avenues to drive sales.

One interesting article I read this morning, from E-Consultancy, suggests that many online retailers are moving [back] into old fashioned printed catalogues to drive ‘flick-to’click’ traffic.

Although it’s a US based report that is cited, they also go on to mention that in a recent survey by Experian of 1,500 British home shoppers, four in five had found products in an offline catalogue before ordering them online.

When people talk about online stores, and designing for certain audiences, including advertising - how many think about the over 65’s? I must admit, it’s not a group that would immediately spring to mind for me.

Perhaps it’s about time it did, Craigy Boy, with 20% of the spending going on, according to Retail Bulletin:

Pensioners now shop online in record numbers with nearly a fifth of all purchases made by the over 65s according to findings from the GfK Home Shopping Monitor. While the online shopping habits of 50-60 year olds are well documented, GfK’s research shows that over 65s now shop online in big numbers.

A bit of self-indulgence for two minutes if you’ll let me but one of the opportunities for online shops as I see it is the ability to create loyalty and value for your customers. It’s the reason The Boomerang Solution does what it does the way it does it.

This post on retail bulletin re-inforces this idea based on a recent survey from Verdict.

Verdict stresses that sales cannot be grown blindly, and that the key lies in maximising traffic to sites by both attracting and keeping shoppers. With over 31m UK consumers currently shopping online, the key priority for e-retailers is to have much closer relationships with the customers they serve to try and secure their loyalty. This is for two reasons.

Reliance on Google Adwords is the problem for so many online businesses and whilst it makes Google rich and does deliver traffic it only increases our acceptance that this is the industry standard when it’s not.

A healthy balance of advertising can be achieved by building the relationships. The old saying “It’s easier and cheaper to keep an existing customer than to get a new one” rings very true.

How you attain loyalty in customers goes back to the basics and relys on your market and customer profile. I personally find that above and beyond great customer service, the informational route really works for me for my online shops. Yes, it takes time to add information-based and educational content, even to the point where it may feel that you are giving it away, but the pay off is much more rewarding and spreads the reliance.

That approach and adding value through loyalty has allowed me to create an opt-in database of over 900 people in 12 months for TS Beauty. Moving forward it makes me much more confident that I can retain customers, rather than pay for new ones, reducing my advertising costs whilst increasing relevant sales.

I am always intrigued by business and the way some companies manage to embrace change, while some moan and do nothing. You can guess which grow and which tend to fade away.

One that I have referenced in the past is the charity Oxfam - yes, charities are still businesses - and how they started using E-bay as people started to sell their second hand goods themselves, rather than donate them to their shops. They turned the threat into an opportunity.

Once again, their name popped up in the Sunday Times yesterday with the news that they now have their own web shop.

The launch is expected to revolutionise the way Oxfam raises money and sells to customers, almost 60 years after it first opened high-street shops. The charity, which is trying to cash in on the growing trend towards ethical shopping, hopes to become a key player in the online-shopping world.

It has 750 shops across Britain, staffed by 21,000 volunteers. In the last financial year, it sold goods worth £80m and made £25m profit.

Business challenges never go away, it is us that has to adapt to these changes. And, they are coming thicker and faster than ever before.

On an aside, even the design of the Oxfam site is fresh and very modern.