ecommerce

Create Your Own Groupon in No Time at All

By Andrés Velasco, 14/01/2013
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Coupon and special deal site are starting to sprout like mushrooms. A number of factors are promoting this kind of web:

The crisis: if I can save 50% when I go out to a cool restaurant, why shouldn’t I?
The summer is a good time to launch coupons, as we like going out when the weather’s good, but we need plans, as routine is boring and we need to do new things. If these new things come through our email inbox and we don’t need to look for them, so much the better.
We feel exclusive when we get one of those wonderful 50 coupons which we are interested in.
These websites are easy to create and manage.

Heard about Groupon?

Let me give you a few data:

In June 2009 they had 152,000 subscribes. In March 2011 they had 83.1 million.
It has presence in 44 countries.
7,100 employees as of March 2011
In the first quarter of 2011, it made a profit of 66.7 million dollars.
In the same period, it had 56,781 customer activating coupons on its website.

Who wouldn’t want to have a similar page? The chances of competing against Groupon are minuscule, unless we are talking about other markets (China). Even so, the idea of creating more specific coupon/deal websites, or websites which provide a competitive advantage with respect to Groupon, seems good.
With a budget of less than 1,000 euros you can create your own coupon/deal website, so let’s give it a try. You need to follow these steps:

Visit other similar websites to get an idea of the market and what you are facing. Take a good look at the design and the way in which they are used. E.g. RetailMeNot, DealOfDay, CoolSavings, Groupalia, Atrapalo.com, DealOn.
Think of a name that includes keywords related to this sector: coupons, offers, deals, discount, sale…
And now for the technical bit. There are several options to create the website:
- Creation from scratch: You’ll have to have at least a designer and a developer (this option surpasses the initial budget)
- Buy a COTS (Commercial Off the Shelf) package including the coupon web application ready to be installed in the server.
- Adapt your CMS: WordPress, Joomla, Magento, etc. to integrate the “couponing” functionality.
- Do the same in Facebook.
Makes deals with companies interested in publication through this medium, design your coupons well, and upload them to your website. Giving out restaurant and wellbeing offers is a good way to start. You won’t find it hard to make deals with local restaurants, as they will gain more visibility and possible regular customers with your help.
Now comes the hard bit, Visibility. Promote yourself on Twitter and Facebook, create newsletters, use Google Adwords or Yahoo! credits, write a blog about the offers on your website, etc. Make people see you.

In my next posts I will examine these points in more depth.

Etiquetas: cots, development, ecommerce, facebook, groupon

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Our 5 Predictions for eCommerce in 2013

By josek, 28/12/2012
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2012 was a great year for eCommerce in general, as we have seen how sales records were continually broken in different countries and sectors. There were also some bad news, such as the closing down of some eCommerce websites (the most recent one, Alice.es). These pieces of news help us to keep our feet on the ground and realise that being in a sector which “grows by itself” does not equal surviving, and that growing in this sector is not an easy task at all.

But what can we expect in 2013? We are sure that there will be a lot of work, growth, and great changes in the sector. But we would like to specify 5 trends which we strongly believe in and which we believe will attract the most movement and effort over 2013:

Responsive design as standard

Mobile Commerce is one of the trends currently driving the market, and, with the rise of smartphones and tablets, in 2013 we will see a lot of growth and development in this respect. Taking this into account, and the fact that the mobile market is quite segmented, retailers who want to offer shopping experiences suitable for all users must adopt responsive designs that adapt to any kind of terminal or resolution. Responsive design is a great tool which, we are sure, will attain a significant level of acceptance, becoming the standard for online store design.

No More eCommerce (Cross-channel)

eCommerce will cease to be an “experiment” for many brands and retailers, and thus we will lose eCommerce differentiation. We will have to increasingly focus on cross-channel and multi-channel strategies, and thus we will talk more about Commerce and less about eCommerce. As the “store owners” or sellers, we must be able to adapt to the various channels and use them in a suitable way, but we shouldn’t make the online channel compete against the rest of channels. 2013 will be the year of “online awakening” for many offline giants, and, both for them and for the rest of retailers, what will be important will be the global view and the complementary nature of the channels. eCommerce will grow a lot in this way, even if it loses its name along the way.

(Real) personalisation for all

Unique shopping experiences are one of the key factors in the success of eCommerce, and e-retailers are increasingly clear about this. We already published an infographic of how eCommerce is becoming more and more personal. Taking into account the maturity level of personalisation solutions (such as those which we offer here at BrainSINS) and the increasing interest and level of adoption of this technology by the main online stores, in 2013 we will see how personalisation reaches the “mass” of online stores, becoming the core or at least a differential element for many of them.

And it won’t reach only websites, but will become integrated in multi-channel strategies, particularly in the mobile channel, which as we said will grow dramatically in 2013. Adoption of these technologies will also lead to a significant change in the discourse on privacy which has generated such incoherent laws as the European cookie regulations. Users will start to realise how use of their public information and navigation data can provide value for them during the shopping process, and this change in user perception, together with an increasingly ethical behaviour on the part of retailers, will lead to a reconsideration of this kind of restrictive legislation, which places European retailers at a disadvantage with respect to American retailers, over 2013/2014.

The rise of loyalty programmes and gamification

We also strongly believe that 2013 will be the year when the conversion funnel is turned around, and a large part of the eCommerce sector will start to develop loyalty programmes and even adopt gamification techniques to increase user motivation, loyalty, and connection in a more suitable way. Until now, many retailers focused on growing buyer figures as much as possible, but they forgot to offer added value for their customers – the users who had already placed their trust in them.

Many online store managers are realising that they have a mother lode in their databases, and those who are capable of implementing the best loyalty programmes and connecting in a more adequate way with their users will be able to grow their income in 2013 while investing less in user capture. It will be probably in the user loyalty area that the knowledge acquired by offline retailers will play a key role to adopt more successful strategies.

Real Social Commerce

Social Commerce is one the main trends together with Mobile Commerce. But whereas Mobile Commerce only displays positive signs, Social Commerce leaves a bittersweet feel, with highly positive news (particularly trend and future trend reports), but also with many actual experiences were not quite so good or cheery. As we see it, Social Commerce has the potential described in many reports (or even more so), but the problem is that the “implementations” which we have seen so far are too basic.

In 2013, we will see how many projects based on actually social and collaborative shopping experiences are created. The winner of the EEC Launch this year was Edenes, a promising Social Shopping platform, and this won’t be the only social platform to emerge in 2013. Taking into account the fact that Social Commerce still has a long way to go, many of these projects will fail due to their inability to connect with user needs and reality, but the winners will have a brilliant future ahead of them.

Etiquetas: 2013, ecommerce, predictions

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Tools to Improve Your Online Store: Comments and Ratings

By Andrés Velasco, 09/12/2012
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What sells best? Word of mouth. Comments add a product confidence factors for visitors. If I am hesitating between two products, and product A has received one good comment (or one good rating), but product B has 10 ratings, 7 of which are good, I will buy product B due to the trustworthiness given by the fact that 7 different people have tried it and approved it. There are even techniques to automate this analysis process.

As an e-commerce store user, there is a factor that devaluates comments to a very high degree: misspellings. Amazon has an entire team that corrects misspelt comments. Just this makes comments more serious, which makes us trust them more.

As for Ratings, they are a basic tool which every e-commerce store should have for its products, as it’s the first thing you see: starts, numerical scores… anything that shows the product quality/acceptance by customers who already purchased it.
In addition, these tools can be used to obtain patterns-purchase relationships between products and users. For example, if I gave the films The Lord of the Rings and Thor 4 stars, and Pepe gave 4 stars to The Lord of the Rings only, we probably have similar tastes, and it would be a good idea to recommend Thor to John next time he enters the store. This is known as a “collaborative filtering”, and can be used for cross-sale, for example.

The screen captures used in this post were taken from 3 online sites which have built these tools in a way I like:

The first screen capture in the Ratings comes from www.imdb.com, which isn’t an e-commerce store, but I think the way in which they summarise the ratings for series/films is every interesting.

Etiquetas: comments, ecommerce, online store, ratings, tools

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Tools to Improve Your Online Store: Post-Sale Service

By Luis Martin, 10/10/2012
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Under the umbrella of “post-sale services”, we include everything that takes place after the E-Commerce order has been confirmed. In this post, I will describe the main aspects to be taken into account at this stage. These elements are the following:

Order details: A buyer expects to find a detailed description of his or her actions after a transaction. Usually, in E-Commerce trade an invoice form will be submitted after confirmation, and this invoice should be immediately sent to the buyer. This invoice should also be printable.
Order tracking: After a purchase is made, a user may feel uncertain about what’s going on with the product which he or she just purchased. Whenever possible, you should minimise this feeling. One of the best ways to do so is to offer reliable, updated delivery tracking. Logistics services companies usually offer this kind of service, so you just have to request it and integrate it in your store.

Feedback: Once the order has been made, users should be able to evaluate their purchases (perhaps under the form of reviews or ratings) and make comments about their shopping experience. Many store owners think that they mainly stand to lose by using this kind of 2.0 elements, but if you are confident about your services, the benefits can be huge.
Post-sale recommendations: There’s nothing better to improve conversion and engagement than encouraging future purchase. The user who has already made a purchase is more likely to come back, and you should take special care of him or her. A study of his or her navigation and purchase patterns can help you to offer personalised monitoring and assessment, be it immediately after the purchase, in future visits to the store, or by email. This information can also be used to design special offers.
Claims and Returns policy: Here I refer to this excellent post by my colleague Jose Carlos Cortizo.

Even though most of these points should be the minimum for any serious E-Commerce store, the fact is that many stores currently give a lot of importance to what goes on before conversion, and very little to what happens afterwards. Please don’t be shocked: conversion is always the main objective for an E-Commerce store. But conversion, properly understood, is a sale that hasn’t been “troublesome” for you or for the user. Generally speaking, you shouldn’t regard a sale as completed until the legal guarantee (14 days according to current legislation) is over. Given this scenario, the post-sale service would be the real final step in the conversion funnel.

Etiquetas: customers, ecommerce, online store, post sale, service, tools

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Tools to Improve Your Online Store: Videos

By Andrés Velasco, 25/09/2012
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We already talked in another post about the benefits of having analyses/reviews in our product pages. But we often don’t feel like reading a review, either out of laziness or because we are doing other things at the same time which prevent us from reading. There is a solution to this problem: videos. Not everything in YouTube is jokes, music videos, or political speeches. There is a wide range of videos related to all kind of products available to us.

Videos provide visual confidence in the product, as we can see its real size.

What kind of videos can you find on the Internet that will help you to sell?

Unboxing: Videos showing the unpacking of a product, so you can see what is included in the box and how it is organised. In this case, hats off to Apple, as even its packaging is well designed.
Use of product: These videos usually receive many visits, as they show how the product is used under normal conditions. In most cases, you can also discover more ways of using it than you had realised, and live comments from the people recording the video are included.
Tests: In these videos, the products are tested out in terms of durability, performance, etc. You can find homemade tests as well as tests performed in specialised labs.

The platform par excellence to find videos is YouTube, but you shouldn’t forget about Vimeo, which has higher quality videos, although its catalogue is smaller.

This is one detail which should be taken into account when it comes to purchasing expensive products, as one doesn’t usually cough up £100-200-300+ without mulling it over beforehand. If there is a video of this kind for the product in question, it will make the decision to buy (or not) quicker, as I already explained in my post on analyses/reviews, and it will make customers stay longer in your store, increasing their feeling of comfort.

I know that you probably don’t have enough human resources (and time) to find videos for your products, but why not allow your customers to find them for you? This contradicts what we have previously said, as you would be making your customers work, but now we are talking about fans. Customers who are loyal to your store probably won’t mind providing contents about the wonderful product which he or she bought for your website. You can also encourage users to submit videos through your Facebook fan page, or through Twitter. Of course, you’ll have to check out those videos, in case their content is not quite what you had in mind…

Talk again soon!

Etiquetas: ecommerce, multimedia, online store, tools, videos

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What Indian consumers are buying online? #infographic

By josek, 12/09/2012
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Nice infographic from MySmartPrice, an online aggregator and product price comparison platform, that offers insights about what Indian consumers are buying online. Some interesting data:

In the last year, the number of Indian consumers buying online has increased 80%
55% of sales comes from Top Tier I Locations (New Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune)
52% of online sales are from mobile & accesories
Top selling brands include Samsung, Nokia, Blackberry, Sandisk, Kingston, HP, Dell, Sony, Lenovo, LG

Etiquetas: ecommerce, evolution, india, indian, infographic, report

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Tools to Improve Your Online Store: Cross-Selling

By Luis Martin,
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E-commerce is practically a science by now. In an ecosystem of ferocious competition, online store managers restlessly seek the way to increase customer satisfaction and thus sales. A technique which has proliferated in recent years and which provides very high value is cross-selling.

The concept is simple: offering customers products that complement their purchases. For example, an airline can offer hotel rooms or rental cars in the city destination. The monetary profit is obvious: cart size increases. In addition to its most obvious aspects, recommending purchase products has a number of interesting effects, such as the improvement of the useful navigation experience or catalogue discovery.

However, the mere fact of offering alternatives need not yield any of these benefits. Many stores include a cross-sale recommendation banner in every product page on the basis of such criteria as belonging to the same category. This kind of recommendation might be rather catalogues as up-selling (or even down-selling), as in many cases the customer will change his or her mind and buy one of these alternatives, but not both products.

A very common type of cross-sale is based on product co-occurrence in other users’ carts (“users who purchased this product also purchased…”). This very Amazon-like suggestion can work very well if you have a large number of data. In some cases, these suggestions are manually created by configuring discount packs. However, these techniques are based on a premise that can be dangerous: supposing that all customers share the same purchase profile.

In order to carry out quality cross-selling and thus maximise the probability that the ticket price increases, the two main dimensions of e-commerce should be taken into account: on the one hand, the catalogue; on the other hand, customers’ purchase profiles (both individually and with respect to other similar customers). The complexity of cross-sales in this case increases considerably. Many managers of online stores are aware of the potential benefits of including personalised recommendations, but either lack the necessary structure to develop them or everyday problems are simply given precedence over any kind of potential innovation.

Luckily enough, there are providers such as BrainSINS out there in the market, offering this type of service as Software as a Service (SaaS), which can be integrated in a very simple way in any platform.

Etiquetas: cross selling, ecommerce, online store, recommendations, tools, up selling

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Tools to Improve Your Online Store: Social Media Elements

By Luis Martin, 11/09/2012
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First of all, this piece of advice is not aimed at promoting social commerce or at designing a social medial campaign for your store (at least, not a directed campaign). What we are talking about is something as simple as it is absent in many stores: elements that allow users to share their experience of the store. Social media come first to mind, but you shouldn’t discard other media, such as email.

The social component is already present in normal users’ Internet navigation to such an extent that including this kind of element in their experience of your store is practically compulsory.

You should also think that mobile commerce will grow enormously, and a large part of the success of social networks such as Twitter is associated with the smartphone phenomenon. Ecommerce must leap onto that bandwagon, and if it is assisted, all the better.

I like to think of this kind of component as a sort of “netlocalisation” service. If your customers check into their neighbourhood café on Foursquare, why shouldn’t they share their experience of your online store? Moreover, this opens up a whole range of gamification possibilities for your customers. We will talk about this soon.
You shouldn’t be confused about this: the point is not to attract more customers, but to obtain customer loyalty. In the end, you will increase your site’s engagement using the power that social media currently have. And, believe me, that’s a lot of power.

Etiquetas: ecommerce, elements, online store, social media, tools

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Tools to Improve YourOnline Store: Lists

By Luis Martin, 10/09/2012
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In most stores, the best way that users have to organise information is the cart itself. This isn’t a bad idea, as a well-configured cart can provide enough information and functionality to support navigation through the catalogue. However, there is a crucial problem: the cart is not conceived for this purpose. This “creative” use leads to several problems, such as:

Expiry: a set of products stored in the cart will remain there until the user makes a purchase. For this reason, the shopping list should be kept separate from the wishlist.
Lack of social component: The items stored in a cart cannot be shared with other users. Perhaps your customers would like to socialise their interests within the store.

Luckily, you can offer your customers specific functionalities which cover these needs, leaving the cart to provide support for purchases. There are three fundamental list types which can provide value to your customers in any eCommerce.

Buy later

This is the typical “reminder” list, including products which will not be bought right then, but which are likely to be bought in the near future. It is crucial to offer the possibility of transferring items from and to the cart, in both directions.

Wishlist

The “wishlist” is much more than a reminder list. It allows other users to have a view of the customer’s preferences. This socialisation promotes the gift aspect, something which no eCommerce should forget.

Shared lists

This concept comes from the world of content, and refers to public lists of related products which users make available to the community. Customers generally expect feedback from other users with similar profiles, be it to give their opinion or to include or withdraw items (cooperative debugging process).
In addition to the functional benefits for your customers, you should think that the way in which these lists include products is of value for the eCommerce business intelligence, as it makes it easy to identify relations between products and user profiles which can be useful in various areas, such as usability, labelling, and, above all, cross-sales.

Etiquetas: ecommerce, lists, online store, problems, tools

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