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 snowmaggedon exposed online retail flaws

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

According to the latest study from eDigitalResearch the UK has just experienced something of a truly digital Christmas. I’m not too surprised that 86% of us used the internet on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, or that 22% of us did it via a smartphone or tablet device.

It’s no great shock that 30% of folk visited the online sales on Boxing Day either, or that 62% of those shopping online over the Christmas weekend were looking for sales bargains.

What did surprise me, however, was just how badly some of the biggest names in retail dealt with the snowmageddon disruption in the lead up to the seasonal festivities when compared to your average small business.

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Top ten price comparison websites

Wednesday, December 29th, 2010

Looking to save pennies in the aftermath of a blowout Christmas? Made a New Year’s resolution to tighten your belt? You need to get down to your local price comparison website.

It isn’t just about Kelkoo and Google Products any more either. These days there’s a huge choice of specialist sites, catering for everything from supermarket shopping to selling your mobile phone. Here’s our pick of the best.

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18 ways to boost your e-commerce conversion rate

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

It’s amazing what a tiny increase in your conversion rate can do for your profitability. Why? Because increasing conversion rate goes straight onto the bottom line, whereas increasing traffic might well cost money in terms of pay-per-click, banner or traditional advertising.

Here are 18 ideas for boosting your online shop’s conversion rate. I have used them on one or more of my sites: it’s all about testing to see if they’re effective for your particular business. There’s no sleight of hand, trickery or underhandedness here – it’s mainly about making your e-commerce site easier to trust and buy from.

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BigCommerce 6: a preview of e-commerce to come

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

BigCommerce is a feature-packed hosted e-commerce service based on the InterSpire shopping cart. I’ve been using it since January for our MakingYourOwnCandles.co.uk online shop and the experience has been excellent, bar one short period when Royal Mail integration broke.

The biggest bugbear has been the lack of built-in support for bulk emailing customers, which has meant that I’ve been forced to export my customer database from BigCommerce and import it into MailChimp each time I want to send a mailout.

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Where online businesses go terribly wrong

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Few things annoy me more than large companies whose web-based eshop indicates a level of stock which is, in reality, a total fiction. They don’t have the stock, it’s just there as a ruse to get you to hand over your credit card details and place the order with them.

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A plan you can bank on for finding parents

Monday, June 30th, 2008

Lloyds TSB has started issuing Visa debit cards to children as young as 11, allowing them to stock up on anything from cheap booze to Viagra from unscrupulous web traders, according to the Daily Mail.

When asked why the bank hadn’t informed the children’s parents that they were issuing them with a licence to drain their pocket money, the bank replied: “We don’t always have the parents’ contact details or know the family’s circumstances.”

It’s a shot in the dark, I admit, but wouldn’t the child’s address be a good place to start looking for mum and dad? Or is Lloyds TSB dishing out mortgages to 11-year-olds too?