What happened when they went recruiting proved to be a great example of  the content on the website having a direct effect on the quality of staff they recruited.

The Bath Empire meet the team page:

10 people were brought in for interviews for a job in the warehouse. I was amazed to find out that when it came to interview day 7 of the potential candidates turned up in white shirts and blue ties.

It was fantastic to see that the recruits took the time to look at the site and look for an affinity with the existing team.

Simply, its proof that your websites quality has a direct effect on more than just sales.

So what next?

Take the time to considered how you can improve the quality of your team page. Im off to fill the Supplyant team page with bikini clad lovelies and see what happens at our next set of interviews

Being in the online business, my friends always ask me how they can “do e-commerce”. If they have no experience of selling online my answer is always the same, “get yourself on eBay and have a go”.  eBay is a great place to start; it’s bootcamp for e-commerce with a tough set of rules to follow that will shape you up for retailing online.

Why should I start on eBay first?

• It teaches you retail discipline
  eBay forces you to provide good customer service; the feedback system demands you do nothing wrong.
• It teaches you good product choice
  If you can’t sell your product on eBay with all those ready made customers your chances of selling it from your own site aren’t so good.
• It teaches you how important a good product description and pictures are
  Look at the guys with huge feedback numbers and notice how they all have great descriptions. They do this for a reason; awesome long copy descriptions sell harder and show good intent.
• It teaches you how important pricing is online
  Selling on eBay is a reality check for traditional retailers as your normal margins often disappear in two seconds flat.
• It teaches you about e-commerce in a risk free environment
  You don’t have to invest in a shiny new web shop to retail online. With eBay, setup costs are tiny and the worst possible scenario is that you don’t sell anything.

If you can you go onto eBay and sell over 25 items in a month with 100% feedback & high DSR in shape then congratulations, you have passed basic training and it’s time for you to go-large.

Why eBay isn’t for Wimps….

Be prepared for eBay. If you’re going to get serious expect the following:

• It requires your time to maintain an eBay business
  Managing the eBay process is time consuming so you have to be prepared to devote time & effort to making it a success. 
  
• It requires exceptional Customer Service
  eBay never feels a particularly fair environment to deal in, particularly if you are a distributor not used to dealing with consumers directly. You will find yourself having to give away product or pick it up with no good reason other than to keep your feedback high. Poor feedback at the early stage could see you struggling to recover or being banned. Don’t blame eBay for this though – if you can’t cut it here then look in the mirror, not at eBay rules. And if you are thinking of doing Amazon instead, it’s tough x 2…. that’s another story.
• It requires you to understand pricing & salesmanship
  Do you have have descriptions that are only half as good as other eBayers? Look at yourself to see if you’re up to scratch. Good descriptions create happy customers and good feedback. They also create lots of social buzz. Want to know what we’re talking about? click here

Acceleration on and off eBay

Think you have mastered eBay? Great, now you’re ready to REALLY jump-start your online retailing. We would love to hear from you.

What’s your thoughts on eBay? Let us know by commenting below.

Who are we looking at?
Ebuyer | Asos | Argos | Boden | B&Q | MyDeco | Apple | Tesco | Ebay | Amazon | John Lewis

1. Layout

Its appears to be true that there is now a way e-commerce should look and feel. There are standardised design elements throughout big brand e-commerce

The Header

Consistently menus now reside on the top, with logo on the left, search & shopping basket on the right.

Home Page

Always featuring a big picture of some kind, normally full width with no side navigation

Category Pages

Sidebars to narrow searches are commonplace and getting more intelligent.

Products – full width

Once you get to a products page its now mostly full width, with no side navigation, and heavily product focused above the fold.

2.  Video

Video is a trend that seems to be cropping up regularly and I love it! Video provides masses of extra emotion and trust on any product it appears on. For me the best use of this is at ASOS, fantastically emotional salesmanship on the kids cloths and great runway videos for the products in adult fashion. Its also in use at  Ebuyer with selected lines giving QVC style buying guides. Do your videos have to be flawless to get a response? If you take a look at this youtube clip of somebody unboxing his new ipod with over 650,000 views you’ll see that real user videos are also a massively powerful customer conversion tool.

3. Quality of photography

If your retailing online and want to roll with the big guys there no excuse for an under exposed 50×50 jpg anymore.

I see a few consistencies from my chosen retailers:

• Giant images are OK for homepages (see examples below)
• Branded commodity items image quality isn’t so important (have a look at Argos, Tesco and John Lewis sites for examples of this)
• Providing more that 1 image if possible is most definitely better
• Modern e-commerce layouts absolutely place focus on product shots
• At each of the sites I looked at there was no genuinely poor images.
• On a number of sites I saw standard product images teamed up with “in use” pictures with people in them

4. Search tools

Search results on all the sites I looked at were pretty good. I loved the search on ebuyer, it was intuitive and helpful. Apples search was awesome, extremely polished I’d recommend you try it.

Second stage filtering of search results was an absolute requirement for all stores for me mydeco ruled on this one, the colour chooser was a nice touch. Despite Apple having a great search it was one of the few stores were I didn’t feel a need to search as the navigation was incredibly clear.

5. Delivery

A constant frustration for me with online shopping is poor delivery information. I started out in Automotive parts and its shocking how poor many of  the distributors of these parts are compared to leading online shops.

ebuyer and asos stood out as excellent examples of going above and beyond for customers.

• Ebuyer offers next day delivery on orders up to 11.00 at night. WOW!
• ASOS offers same day delivery in London. WOW
• Zappos in America stood out with its free delivery both ways promise

2 consistent elements cropped up.

• Free delivery is commonplace (and so it should be, it removes all confusion)
• Delivery on a nominated day is gaining traction

Conclusion

If there is one thing that’s clear above all else is that the strength of modern platforms means its all about high quality content. Many of the sites I used looked and functioned in pretty much the same manner.

Selling online now is more about the determining why somebody should buy it from you. Is it the quality of the service, the great video help, the  awesome delivery or something else.

I wouldn’t use any of the companies because they have a great site, but because they are great companies. Good sites are just a  tool to that may provide enough extras to push customers in your direction rather than some other retailer.

If you have favorite sites you think I should be checking in on I’d love to hear them.

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 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

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.

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

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.

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.