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.

Oddly, the survey doesn’t reveal the breakdown of devices and platforms but it’s not a huge stretch to suggest the rise is, at least, in part fuelled by the popularity of the iPhone and the iPad. Looking at my own figures, I see around 50% of my shop traffic coming from iOS devices, split roughly 50/50 between iPhone and iPad, with users of the latter tending to spend more.

I’d be the first to admit that percentage increases are only of limited interest – after all a 100% increase in “not a lot” is still “not a lot” as Steve Balmer would admit – but 7% of turnover is already significant. There’s no sign of a slow-down yet so it’s reasonable to predict the average might rise to 20% or so within the next year. As an online service provider or shopkeeper, now’s the time to work out how best to get these visitors to buy. At the moment, the figures suggest the conversion rate for mobile devices is much lower than for laptop and desktop users- equalising those figures is a challenge for 2012.

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.

To be successful in online marketing, you have to look beyond this immediate response and understand what Google is trying to achieve here. Google has always ranked ads according to two criteria: the “Quality Score” of what you’re offering and the price you’re prepared to pay. The Quality Score is, itself, made up of three factors – the historical performance of the ad (primarily, what percentage of searchers clicked it); the relevance of the ad text to the search term; and, finally, the quality of the landing page.

The changes Google is introducing have the effect of increasing the importance of the landing page in the Quality Score. Google’s explanation is that too many searchers are being sent to pages that aren’t entirely relevant to their search. They get frustrated and leave the site, which is bad news for both the advertiser and Google.

Your Adwords Control Panel will tell you what your Quality Score is and specifically how your landing page rates. If you’re finding that your ad is appearing lower than it previously was, now is the time to check whether your Quality Score has dropped and, if it does, go through Google’s landing page guidelines.

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.

The site ranked best overall was Figleaves.co.uk — hadn’t heard of the online lingerie retailer, but, having visited, will definitely be returning! — with Amazon a close second. Electrical retailers did particularly poorly with Comet, PC Word, Currys and Dixons all ranked in the bottom 10 or so.

So what can small online retailers learn? The good news is that hosted ecommerce software has developed at such a pace that even the smallest online seller can offer much the same experience as giants such as Amazon and Interflora.

1: Make sure your site is easy to navigate

Your customers don’t see the difference between the multi-million pound business and your back-bedroom resale operation. Across the major retailers, navigation has improved immensely in recent years and being able to get around the store quickly and effectively is a given. If you don’t make it drop-dead simple to find and buy your products, your customers will go elsewhere — in a heartbeat.

2: Make your products easy to find

Having clear navigation makes it easy for customers to browse your store but the hotter the prospect, the more likely they are to use search. When I want to buy something from Amazon, for example, I search for the product — when I’m simply killing a few minutes or looking for ideas, I use the category links. So, you must have effective search built into your site — and this means having the technology and tagging or otherwise labelling your products effectively.

3: Be responsive

On average, this is an area where the big retailers still perform poorly. We’ve come to expect poor service over the phone (the researchers found that Dixons never answered the phone within 30 seconds) but this is also true of email contact. As a small retailer, you can knock the socks off the big boys by simply responding quickly. Many’s the time I’ve replied immediately to a customer query only to receive a surprised email thanking me for the speed of response. From my perspective, of course I’m going to respond quickly — the customer is probably ready to buy!

4: Add and encourage product reviews

Customers expect product reviews. Remember that most people have used Amazon and base their final decision to buy on product reviews even though they’re submitted by complete strangers. Any worthwhile ecommerce platform will include some mechanism for adding product reviews, make sure you enable it. However, this is pointless if you don’t encourage them – you can’t incentivise customers so it’s best to simply ask past buyers to review their purchase in a follow-up email.

5:  Be social

The research didn’t look into the use of social media and its influence on purchasing but I think it’s essential. Social media is used both to drive traffic to the site (something that makes no sense in a mystery shopping exercise) but also to make it more likely the customer will buy when they arrive. A customer excitedly proclaiming how happy they are with your product on your Facebook Page (and it does happen) will both publicise the URL of your site and give their friends and other visitors to the page a reason to buy.

Embedding social media into your ecommerce site is another way you can outmanoeuvre the heavyweights — adding Facebook Like/Recommend buttons, Facebook Comment buttons and, depending on your audience, Google+ to your product pages gives your customers one more reason to buy from you rather than your competition.

Modern ecommerce and marketing systems mean small retailers can compete online with the likes of Tesco, Amazon and, ahem, Figleaves. Nothing is more effective at transforming a company than improving its conversion rate, and research such as this offers a priceless insight into the direction the big boys are taking. A better conversion rate generates more profit from the same traffic, that’s my kind of equation.

Now, back to the online lingerie, purely in the interests of research, of course…

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.

I’m not the first to say that the TouchPad itself is a lovely piece of hardware and, following the immediate over-the-air update, webOS is stable, capable, reasonably fast and well-thought out. Indeed, looking at the package as a whole, whilst the hardware is not quite as luxurious as the iPad 2, I would place webOS well ahead of iOS4 largely due to its effortless multitasking. It’s a technological tragedy that this device and its OS are now a thing of the past.

According to isuppli.com, the TouchPad costs £200 in materials and labour to build, almost exactly the same as the iPad 2. Conventional logic is to take the build cost and add a margin to come to your retail price, aligning yourself to comparable hardware. This lead to a release price of £399 for the 16GB model which is on a par with the iPad 2.

The problem with this is that it gives potential buyers no good reason to choose the newcomer over the established giant. I estimate that Apple makes around £150-£200 profit on each iPad sold and uses the AppStore to drive hardware sales (although their 30% share of the projected £2 billion pound of revenue the AppStore will earn in 2011 is hardly to be sniffed at).

HP couldn’t hope to do the same with such a limited app store, so the only way it could have made an impact would have been to reverse the logic – make its long term money from apps rather than the hardware. Had the TouchPad been launched at £250 it could easily have been a massive success, which would have created an audience for app developers to target. Particularly the work-related apps that HP’s business image would suit. HP could then have taken a cut of its app store revenue.

The problem is that this approach takes time, with HP barely breaking even on the hardware, let alone the associated R&D and marketing costs. Looked at this way, the TouchPad was doomed as soon as HP chose the webOS route – however good the OS is, it has only limited developer support.

Android-based tablets have more chance because developers can target more than one device with a single app. But the real challenger to Apple is likely to be Amazon. It’s already demonstrated with the latest version of the Kindle that it’s prepared to sell hardware at a market-breakingly low price in order to make money on downloads. As an example, I paid £109 for my Kindle in October last year but I reckon I’ve spent around £300 on books in less than a year since. A £250 Android-based Amazon tablet locked to its app store would blow the market apart.

The lesson for small businesses is to never lose sight of where the money really is. Apple is, as usual, the exception to the rule in that it’s able to make profit from every part of the process – the mistake HP made was to imagine it could duplicate Apple’s success. Bill and Dave, you’re no Apple.

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:

Step 0: Head to www.morefrom.me

You can watch the video if you want, but I suspect most people will simply hit the big “FREE Get Started” button.

Step 1: Add your name and picture

Get in quick if you want a particular username…

Step 2: Choose your colour scheme

Some are more dubious than others, but by hitting the “Customise your theme” button you can choose the exact colours you want.

Step 3: Enter your name and email address

I had a quick scan of the terms and conditions and couldn’t find anything dubious, but as ever it’s worth going through this more closely if you intend to make serious use of this service. One thing to note is that you don’t see the credit until 30 days after the purchase, to avoid unscrupulous people buying products, spending their credit and returning the goods in the meantime.

Step 4: Set a password

And after four short steps, you’re pretty much done…

Step 5: Start adding recommendations

Now head off to your website and start recommending. It’s simple to do: browse to your chosen product and click the “Add to My Recommended” button that appears halfway down the page. Up to four of your recommendations will be surfaced at the top of your page by default.

If you’re feeling greedy, you can also tweak the prices. Click on My Account, and then the Manage button underneath “morefrom.me/yourname”. Click Prices and you’ll be able to increase them by anything from 1% to 25%. The mark up is split 50/50 between you and MoreFrom.

And that’s it. Have a look and let me know what you think.

And if you need a few hints for hardware/software to recommend, head to our very own A-List.

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.

Customers are beginning to associate a poor standard of English with email scams, making them even more uncomfortable about buying from such a site

The argument is that spelling mistakes on an e-commerce site reduce conversion rates. The entrepreneur in question, Charles Duncombe of the Just Say Please group, told the BBC that his conversion rate doubled when he corrected a spelling mistake on tightsplease.co.uk (I kid you not). Tempted though I am to speculate on what sort of spelling error puts off visitors to a hosiery website, I’d rather concentrate on the important point here. Yes, little things can impact hugely on conversion rate, as I reported back in February. In that case, changing a menu from a hierarchical view of the site to a drop down had a serious negative impact.

Furthermore, as a writer I am an arch pedant when it comes to spelling, punctuation and grammar. I accept fully that poor spelling can indicate a lack of care and an unprofessional approach that potential buyers will assume applies to the business as a whole. More dangerously, customers are beginning to associate a poor standard of English with email scams, making them even more uncomfortable about buying from such a site.

Given all the existing reasons why potential customers might be put off buying from an online retailer they don’t know, the last thing an e-commerce business needs is to further undermine its visitors’ confidence. In other words, getting the copy right on a website is at least as important as the technology that underpins it. So why would any employer leave that to a school leaver?

I’ve been responsible for overseeing the creation of massive e-learning programmes containing tens of thousands of words. I couldn’t possibly have created those programmes alone but I knew that spelling mistakes would undermine the credibility of the e-learning. In the real world people make mistakes and they don’t always take as much care as the business owner would like. So what did I do? I checked it, for heaven’s sake.

The responsibility for the copy that appears on a website has to belong to the owner or senior management of the company. Any other arrangement suggests that the website is seen as unimportant. I regard it as my duty to check every single web page and product listing that appears across any of my businesses. I probably miss the odd error here and there but rather than blame the writer (my wife is one contributor and I do have at least a little common sense), I take responsibility.

So instead of blaming school leavers and the education system, business owners should take responsibility for making sure that their business is represented professionally online as well as offline. It’s too improtant to degelate.

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.

The Difference Between Price and Value

If you’re downloading software online and subscribing to it online what difference does it make what country you’re doing it from?

Straight up, it’s important to stress that a high price does not necessarily mean poor value. It’s also worth stressing that the full CS5.5 Master Collection is a formidable achievement, offering state-of-the-art creative power stretching from photo-editing and vector illustration through desktop publishing and website creation, to video production and rich internet application development.

Compared to professional 3D applications such as Maya (SRP $3,495), for example, that makes the US cost of $2,599 for the full Master Collection an absolute bargain. The same is true of the $549 upgrade price when you bear in mind that it includes no fewer than 11 updated component applications.

It might be good value but it’s still a seriously intimidating headline figure. Of course most users don’t need the full range of power and Adobe provides the targeted Suite Editions to help keep things more affordable. However while the cheapest Design Standard suite for graphic designers comes in at around half the price of the full Master Collection, $1,399 is still a lot of money. There’s no doubt that the huge upfront cost is putting off new users from joining up to Adobe’s CS-based design platform.

The Difference Between Buying and Renting

Adobe has recognised as much and, with CS5.5, it has introduced a completely new subscription pricing model that effectively lets users rent Adobe’s main CS5.5 suite editions and apps rather than buy them. Prices vary widely but, to give an idea of rates, if you’re willing to commit to an annual subscription (complete with automatic upgrades), the monthly cost for the full Master Collection is $129.

Subscribing won’t be of much interest to current users as there’s no discounted rate if you already own CS5. Moreover, the fact that after two years you’ll have spent more on renting than buying means that, if cash flow isn’t an issue, then the traditional retail route is almost certainly your best option. Especially so if you investigate Adobe’s various upgrade and cross-grade possibilities.

However the subscription pricing will certainly prove attractive to new users who simply can’t afford the upfront cost and also to users of older releases of the software who are generally happy with what they can do, but might occasionally want to try out a new program or the latest functionality.

The Difference between the US and the UK

That’s the good news. Here’s the bad news. I gave the US$ pricing deliberately. At today’s exchange rate, US $2,599 should convert to around £1,575 for the full Master Collection, the $549 upgrade to £333, and the annual monthly subscription rate of $129 to £78. In each case I’d argue that that’s really good value.

Instead the equivalent UK pricing to buy the CS5.5 Master Collection is £2,268, it’s £476 for the upgrade and £116 for the annual monthly cost. And that’s before you add in 20% VAT!

Yes, you can still make a good case for value for the CS5.5 suites in terms of what you can achieve with them, especially with CS5.5’s new ability to deliver rich design and functionality to mobile devices including the potentially lucrative iPhone and iPad markets.

However it’s impossible not to feel exploited and angry when US designers are getting the same products for so much less. The CS5 suites aren’t a rip-off, but the UK pricing certainly is.

I really don’t understand this. The new CS5.5 subscription model shows that Adobe is aware of the importance of affordability. This isn’t done out of the goodness of its heart – Adobe knows that the best way to optimise profits is to maximize its userbase. However for some reason this doesn’t seem to apply in the UK.

The new subscription model brings home the unfairness of Adobe’s international pricing even more directly. The beauty of internet-based delivery is that it provides a truly global audience, as Adobe knows better than anyone. But if you’re downloading software online and subscribing to it online what difference does it make what country you’re doing it from? Why should the UK-based CS5.5 user be charged 50% more (before VAT) for a month’s use of exactly the same software? I really think we can live with US spellings if that’s what it takes to get a fair price.

This isn’t just a question of best business practice. Adobe’s whole cross-platform design vision is built on the principle of a universal and level playing field. The same can’t be said of its pricing policy and it needs to be changed.

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.

The ONS started tracking internet sales in June of 2009 and since then, the overall retail volume has remained roughly unchanged at £5.4 billion per week. However, the proportion of those products purchased online has increased by a massive 72% in only 21 months and now stands at 10% of all retail sales.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, internet sales in March 2011 were up by an incredible 47% on March 2010. In fact, every month from June 2010 onwards shows an average increase of around 22% on the equivalent month a year earlier.

If you’ve got an idea for an online retail business, now’s a good time to get going

What does this mean? Clearly much of this increase is down to big companies such as the supermarkets and department stores pushing customers online to order, as well as the forward march of Amazon and iTunes. The ONS doesn’t separate internet sales figures into small and large businesses as it does with other categories but the more customers get used to buying online, whether through Tesco or Play.com, the more likely it is that those same customers will buy from small businesses too. By joining schemes such as Internet Shopping Is Safe and using high quality e-commerce platforms such as BigCommerce and TigerCommerce the smallest businesses can benefit from, essentially, the same infrastructure and customer protection as the biggest players.

So, if you’ve got an idea for an online retail business, now’s a good time to get going. Grab a copy of How to Set Up an Online Business, sign up for a free trial with an e-commerce provider and grab a slice of this rapidly growing sales platform.

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.

The latest Patch Tuesday updates included one (security bulletin MS11-018, which was rated critical and covered IE6, IE7 and IE8) which protects them from a vulnerability that can compromise the browser as soon as it visits a malicious site. It’s vital if a business is using one of those versions of Internet Explorer that they apply the patch, yet it’s bundled in with all the others and likely to be lost in an all or nothing approach to updating.

Surely it would be better if Microsoft rolled out patches individually, on demand, as they became available, rather than storing them up and releasing them in a flood like this?

Many small businesses opt for the nothing approach, at least in the short term, as installing and rebooting eats into either work or leisure time. Many will have been advised to turn off automatic updating to prevent such interruptions to their business processes and will simply ignore the warnings about updates altogether.

For consumers these mammoth updates are a nuisance, but nothing more. If they want to minimise disruption they can simply schedule the update to take place while they sleep. Small businesses are not in such a position, they have to supervise the process to ensure there are no hiccups. Those businesses without specialist IT support are in a Catch-22 situation: they have to understand the vulnerabilities as they apply to their particular needs and prioritise the patching process accordingly, but they don’t so they can’t. Then there’s the problem of compatibility testing, especially if the business uses custom applications that could be impacted by the patching.

Security patching of critical vulnerabilities is vital to safeguard your business data, but unplanned patching can interrupt business processes and potentially break custom applications. Surely it would be better if Microsoft rolled out patches individually, on demand, as they became available, rather than storing them up and releasing them in a flood like this? Surely it would be better if the reasons for patching and implications of not patching were explained better to the end users rather than pointing to the somewhat jargonised security bulletins?

So, if you are a small business, how do you deal with Patch Tuesday?

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.

But when you go to read the Microsoft offer you find that the offer consists of:

1. “Webinars and seminars – we will build a programme to train 5,000 businesses”  - which sounds just like the free webinars and seminars Microsoft already provides.

2. “A free 90-day trial of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online to help you manage your customer relationships and sales pipeline. Worth £370.” Excuse me? £370 of value in a 90-day trial of some Microsoft software? I can go to the Microsoft website and get a 30 day trial for free. Do it three times if you really need to. But claiming this is “worth £370″ is an insult to small businesses.

3. “A head-start on online advertising with Bing and Microsoft. Worth £30 + sign up for a free webinar.” So you get £30’s worth of free advertising on the Microsoft advertising engine. Gosh.

4. “A free 60-day trial of Microsoft Office, the essential software suite for managing a small business,” for which, curiously, Microsoft attaches no value. Probably because it is a “free trial”.

So the reality is that Microsoft has not provided “free technology resources worth up to £400 per company”. That, dear Microsoft, would be two full licences of Office 2010 for small business for free. Trialware and a free play with your advertising engine adds up to a great big zero.