Website owners can’t afford to ignore mobile

Tuesday, November 1st, 2011

Making a success of an online business is often about noticing trends and acting on them early. Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG) has just released figures that show the startling growth of mobile traffic in the past couple of years. If you run an online shop, this is now a bandwagon you need to jump on.

IMRG has been running a quarterly index since the first quarter of 2010. The index tracks a range of critical performance indicators across some of the biggest names in online retail including John Lewis, Marks & Spencer and Matalan. In its first index, covering Feb-April 2010, mobile visits stood at 1.4% of the total, but by the Aug-Oct 2011 quarter they’d quintupled to 7%, with some retailers seeing figures as high as 12%. Whilst mobile users, on average, don’t spend as much (making up less than 4% of total sales) the trend in both traffic and contribution to turnover is heavily upwards.

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Google’s new AdWords algorithm

Friday, October 14th, 2011

The peak shopping period is upon us and, for most online shops, the effectiveness of their Google AdWords campaigns can make the difference between a fruitful festive season and a bleak new year.

It’s at just such a critical moment that Google is rolling out changes to its AdWords algorithms having successfully tested them on its users in Spain, Portugal and Latin America. The algorithms are used to determine where in the sponsored rankings your ad will appear so a change can mean a dip in your position and consequent loss of traffic which, as business hots up, can cost a lot of money. The knee-jerk reaction is then to increase the bid price which, of course, reduces profitability – again costing money.

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Five ways to boost online profits – courtesy of Amazon and friends

Monday, September 12th, 2011

No feedback is more valuable than customer feedback, but mystery shopping comes a close second. Whilst “spot the stooge” was a popular game amongst store staff when I worked for Dixons (rendering the process pretty pointless), ecommerce sites can’t tell the difference so they need to be on best behaviour at all times.

Research firm eDigitalResearch has been mystery shopping leading ecommerce sites for over 10 years now and its latest findings make interesting reading for even the smallest online retailer. For the purposes of this research, they visited 51 of UK’s biggest retail websites — including Amazon, the main supermarkets, online clothing retailers and department stores.

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What businesses can learn from the TouchPad fiasco

Friday, September 9th, 2011

I wonder what Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard would have made of the TouchPad fiasco? One of the fundamental tenets of successful business is to start with a good product – the problem with HP’s defunct tablet is that this was also where it ended.

I was lucky. Using a barrage of open browser windows I managed to order one of the £89 bargains via Best Buy. I didn’t fully believe I’d succeeded until it turned up on my doorstep two days later.

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How to earn money from your own tech A-List

Thursday, August 4th, 2011

Chances are that people constantly ask you what phone to buy, what laptop, even what TV. Well now there’s a way to make money from your recommendations.

It’s the brainchild of Brian Trevaskiss and team at the MoreFrom Group, and the idea is that you rebadge morefrom.co.uk as your own site. If people order from you, you’ll get 1% commission (or more if you manually increase the price), which appears as credit in your MoreFrom account. So you don’t get cash, but you can put that money towards future purchases.

The other clever thing is that you can order from it yourself. So let’s say you’re about to buy a £1,000 laptop. By ordering it from your version of the site, you get £10 credit applied to your account. This could be of particular appeal to small businesses that rack up purchases over the course of a year.

And if your business would benefit from an online shop, MoreFrom is offering a way to rebadge its site to do precisely that. Head to www.morefrom.biz.

So how easy is it to set up your own site? Shockingly so. Allow me to demonstrate: (more…)

How a spell checker can boost your web profits

Monday, July 18th, 2011

It must be summer because the stories about how moronic our offspring are and how much better things were in the age of steam are surfacing. Indeed spelling mistakes could apparently cost companies “millions of pounds”.

Whilst you might imagine such hyperbole coming from one of the beleaguered red tops, in fact this is a claim made by an online entrepreneur. With a keen eye for a marketing opportunity, the Confederation of British Industry has swooped in to link these spelling mistakes to the lack of skills of school leavers.

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Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 isn’t a rip-off: the UK price is

Thursday, May 12th, 2011

My review of the new Creative Suite 5.5 (CS5.5) has just been posted and there’s plenty to talk about in terms of new functionality and what this means in relation to the future of cross-platform design.

However, it’s not so much the extraordinary and mouth-watering creativity of CS5.5 that is likely to strike users as the extraordinary and eye-watering cost. (more…)

The time’s right to start your online business

Sunday, April 24th, 2011

The Retail Sales Figures for March have been published by the Office for National Statistics, showing a tiny rise in sales over the past year. Some industries were up (mainly non-food) and some down – perhaps surprisingly including DIY sales. All very ordinary, very boring and slightly depressing. Except that hidden within the numbers is a very surprising statistic.

You see, I’ve got only a passing interest in the overall figures. It matters not a jot to me whether B&Q is doing better or worse than last year. I mainly focus on my own companies’ turnover, but I’m also interested in the overall trends in online sales. Fortunately, the ONS presents these figures at the end of its Statistical Bulletin.

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The nightmare of Patch Tuesday for small businesses

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

More and more businesses are dreading that Tuesday every month when Microsoft release a bunch of security patches and updates.

Patch Tuesday should be a thing to look forward to, of course, seeing as it’s when the latest round of application and operating system vulnerabilities get a nice big sticking plaster to protect your systems and data from exploit. The trouble is that when, as with the latest Patch Tuesday, there are no fewer than 17 security bulletins (nine rated as critical) covering a whopping 64 vulnerabilities –  many of the patches requiring a full system restart – it all starts to become something of an IT management nightmare. Especially for the smaller business where there isn’t an IT manager or even an IT department to handle such things.

The vast majority of smaller businesses that I talk to are not IT savvy, they get by and rely upon the systems and software they are supplied to do their job. They don’t switch browser to Firefox or Chrome, they run Internet Explorer because that’s what everyone else uses and it came with the box. What’s more, they often run an older version of Internet Explorer as they apply the “if it ain’t broke” rule. Wrongly in the case of older versions of IE, of course, which are broken from a security perspective.

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£400 of freebies? Pull the other one, Microsoft

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

StartUp Britain is an initiative to help startup businesses in the UK. Clearly this is a good thing in principle though some have suggested – not least my Real World Computing comrade Kevin Partner -  that some of the sponsors and backers of this Government-applauded but privately backed venture are rather in it for themselves, judging by the help and offers that have been made public.

However, things hit a new low with Microsoft’s offer: it is offering “free technology resources worth up to £400 per company”, which sounds pretty good to me at first glance.

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