Supplyant

I was speaking to somebody the other day about the pro’s and cons of particular couriers.  I gave my opinion on a courier called Home Delivery Network. I thought might be a good fit for the products they were shipping as they had a reputation for low delivery damage.

At the next meeting I was told  “we’ve done some research online and found out that HDNL are rubbish”

I searched for “Home Delivery Network Reviews” and came up with this truly awful review.

So I use DHL for our internal deliveries… how did they fare?

So what about ParcelForce the preferred carrier of the person I was speaking to.

So were do we go from here.

Management of online reviews is set to become a hot topic in the next few years.  Strong brands can get away with bad reviews to a certain extent, but a bad review can signal the death of a weak product or service.

Equally as a consumer, to state the obvious,  make sure you look at similar products before jumping to bad review conclusions.

As the saying goes “Everybody shouts if your drains smell but nobody takes the time to tell you your drains smell great”

Whats the best review you have ever seen?

The new year is always a great time to refocus your efforts and polish up your marketing plan. I spent a lot of time over Christmas pondering what e-tailers must do in order to have a successful project. Here’s my thoughts:

Do every one of these 4 things well and you cannot fail

• Have a truly great product,  unique service,  or a notable offer (the last resort is lowest price).
• Provide good quality listings and a simple checkout. Good enough to not put people off.
• Get found. Don’t wait for customers, go and find them.
• Provide awesome customer service whatever the cost.

To be clear, if you mess up any one of these you will fail. Do these right and you will win.

Are you covering each of these rules?

Louis Vuitton is on a mission. It has singled itself out as the spearhead of campaign to manage its brand online, and the largely un-regulated search engines are its enemy.

Louis Vuitton has a  problem with the google adwords results. They hate the fact that google is profiting from allowing people to use the Louis Vuitton brand name in adwords. They also feel that Google is profiting from giving people who infringe trademarks, with fakes, the ability to promote.

Google generates $21 Billion a year from adwords so as you can guess they dont really want to change anything unless they have to.

What you will notice is that the words Louis Vuitton doesnt appear in the title. As you can see there are plenty of way to circumvent that if you need to.

Unfortunately for Louis Vuitton the European Court of Justice has ruled against them, so its business as usual. This issue is far from dead though with appeals already in place.

If you need help with working these methods into your adwords contact us today

Sometimes when your really involved in a project its easy to get stuck in “cant see the wood for the trees syndrome”. In this zone its easy to become obsessed by adding new features, new site designs and continual revisions to copy that you feel are going to improve your sales enormously.

On the wall next to my desk I have a piece of paper with my simple rules of e-commerce which I always revisit to remind myself whats really important.

Here’s my 5 simple rules:

Rule 1:  Its not about you, its about them

Its wrong to use your site to tell people how great you are and how great your products are. Its been proven a million times before that talking in terms of your customer works better. Look at your site or the products and ask “Whats in it for me?”

Rule 2: What is remarkable?

What are you really good at? Can you offer the best delivery times in your market, the latest ordering, best returns policy, cheapest prices, latest products. What do you do well enough that somebody would write about you on another website or tell friends.

Rule 3: Get found.

I spoke to somebody the other day who proudly claimed to be “Northampton’s best kept secret”. What an idiot i thought, you don’t get rich by being a secret. Get out and about, speak to people, promote. If you have rule 2 sorted properly then shout about it as loudly as you can.

I ordered an item just last week from a really ugly site, just because it was the only one I could find that sold what I wanted.

Rule 4: Don’t give them a reason not to buy

How many times have you visited a site and it looked great and the prices were good only to find checkout was a pain and it wouldn’t tell you what the delivery price is until you log in. Show the site to some friends and see what they think when they use it. Have a look at these reasons why people leave you.

Rule 5: Remember that thing you did that worked really well on another site?

Its painful sometimes to keep doing the same things over and over again. But its less painful when your profits skyrocket because you stuck to something that’s proven to work.  I’m not advocating stopping new ideas here, but new development is expensive and time consuming. Better to start quick with an old idea than never get going with a new one.

In my opinion, if you follow these basics methods you cant go too far wrong.

Do you have any rules you follow? I’d love to hear them.

I remember first hearing about IKEA in the early 90’s. My friends were telling me about this great shop,  it had really cool cheap furniture with really stupid names.

On my first visit I was blown away, there was simply nothing else like it. How could the local store possibly compete with this furniture monster?

In those days IKEA were considered an overnight success but I read a very interesting article that gave some great facts about IKEA that confirm that if you keep at it and the ideas good it will happen.

Great facts from that article:

• The big idea came about because IKEA’s owner couldn’t fit the chair he brought in his car
• Its estimated that 1 in 10 babies were conceived on an IKEA bed.
• IKEA floundered for 30 YEARS before it found success overseas.

A great quote

The second great quote i came accross was from the founder of the LinkedIn business network:

‘If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.’

I’m positive the first IKEA  flat pack chair wasn’t the best chair ever, but he got it out to market. This quote  shouldn’t give you an excuse for not giving your website everything you’ve got.

What I hope it re-inforces is that your site will never be finished. Testing and measuring the successful elements of your sites design as early as possible are the key to fine tuning it to your audience.

Got any great quotes or stories tell us about them here

I found this excellent picture over at digg that showed two very different tactics in determining how you should feel about tweaking your logo.

Remembering the Target

The Coke v Pepsi battle is one of marketing’s finest case studies:

• Coca Cola (aka the market leader)
  Just think of coke’s Xmas adverts; traditional values rule for the Coke marketing team. They are secure with the biggest market share. People buy Coke because its not changed for a hundred years. Mums buy Coke for the family
• Pepsi (aka the challenger)
  Everything that Coke is they attack. The flout tradition and push directly for a young audience desperate to try new things. They will try anything to get some extra market share. Kids buy Pepsi for themselves

So what does this mean to me?

If your the market leader, never change your logo. People buy from market leaders because they feel safe.

If your not the market leader find ways to be different to them. People wont remember your logo changes but will remember what makes your products and services better.

Something that happened to me that really singled zappos as  a cool company.  My brother Nick was talking on Seesmic, a video blog site,  about company culture. During that conversation he was contacted by a guy called Tony who offered to send a copy of his companies culture statement to see if it would help.

Two days later all the way from the states arrived a really cool 200+ page book signed by Tony Hsieh of Zappos featuring each and every one of the employees at the company, telling the readers what they thought of it. Nick wasn’t going to buy anything from them in the states, it was just a really cool thing to receive.

Zappos has just sold to Amazon for a staggering $900 million.

Some cool zappos facts:

• Zappos.com has more than 10 million customers.
• 75% of business is repeat customers
• They uniquely offer free shipping both ways (if something goes wrong, dont worry we’ll pick it up)
• CEO Tony Hsieh receives about 2,000 e-mails a day.
• Tony now has 1,039,695 followers on twitter

The things I find interesting are:

• The site isn’t “flashy” but “functional”
• Everything is geared around exceptional service, nothing to do with the web
• The zappos culture is right in front, its preached on every page
• They have made a point of being open, embracing social media like twitter and facebook.

And why did amazon buy them?

• Zappos is growing quickly and shows no signs of stopping
• Zappos culture that has been fundamental in its  success. Amazon will love learning from this
• Zappos has great customer service.  Associating with this is great.
• Zappos has grown a group of amazing people. From its leaders to the post guy they are unified.

Everybody’s favourite social network Facebook today officially declared it had reached 250 million users worldwide. Whats even more staggering is that it added 50 million new users in the last 3 months or 500,000 new users every day. Whats amazing is that Facebook isn’t the site with the fastest growth, that lies with Twitter.

Lets put this into context:

Number of years it took to gain 50 million users for other media.

• Radio – 38 years
• TV – 13 years
• The Internet – 4 years
• Ipod – 3 years

What does this mean to me?

• If you and your company are not on twitter already get on there and at a minimum secure your company names.
• If your designers have not made consideration of this media and don’t have it in the road-map they are too slow.
• If you think this is all about websites your wrong, Twitter and Facebook are very mobile phone friendly applications.
• If you don’t act now, it will be too late.

Take a look at this video we posted earlier to bring you up to speed on how quickly its all moving.

If you need help with your social media strategy please contact us, it would be great to hear from you.

When your starting a new project its important to do your research and due diligence to understand  whats going on out in the big wide world of the internet.  Luckily Google has a great tool for visualising search trends.

Google Insight allows you to look at how many people are searching for a particular phrase over time. What this tool allows you to do is gain some great additional information about the market, which in turn gives you great insider knowledge to use in your business plan.

• Seasonal ups and downs in particular niches become really clear
• Which of your competitors is growing and which is shrinking
• How different brands compare over time
• Is a brand or market segment you’re looking at, growing or falling.

Example 1: Supporting the good online retailers.

Two wheel brands have adopted very different strategies with online retailers marketing.

Dotz provide great support to high quality online retailers. They see the benefits to the Dotz brand by working closely with retailers, who are then able to present their products in the best light, adding further value to the brand. Nice work from the distributor.

Wolfrace continue to support online retailers that over-discount and show the products in a poor light. The upshot is that the poor representation and over-discounting has devalued the brand. Wolfrace are now trying in-house retailing and should use the extra control this will offer them to begin rebuilding their brand.

This graph shows growth in interest in the brands.

Example 2: Seasonal trends in the DIY sector

Its incredible to see how closely Homebase and B&Q track over the years

Do you have any good examples for you market? click here to comment online

Registering at websites is a pain in the rear end.

It takes effort and that stops people using your site. Giving  details to untrustworthy sources scares your visitors and stops them registering.  OpenID has been developed to address these issues.

OpenID fixes the problem by using trusted sources like Google and Facebook to hold your contact and password details. What this means to your users is that they will no longer need to register at every new website they visit. Instead they can simply use their Facebook password, saving them time and hassle!

OpenID has been kicking around for a over 5 years, but it’s only now that the key Internet players like AOL, Google and Facebook have come on-board, that it seem to be gaining widespread recognition.

What this actually means to you as a website owner is

• Sites that use this technology offer a better user experience
• Shopping sites will see a reduction in errors with customers details
• The registration barrier is removed meaning more people will  be interacting with blogs, reviews sites and other discussions
• Your users details are held securely by the issuing authorites like Google and Facebook.

The good news for you is that OpenID integration is due for release on all Supplyant platforms within the next 2 months

The other good news is that  you may already have an openID account

Want to see it in action? There’s a great example of how this is going to work over at http://uservoice.com/session/new