How valuable is your competition?
Posted on | January 18, 2012 | Comments Off
One of the key components we cover during an E Commerce review with our partners is a competitive analysis of other websites, other products, other newsletters, other blogs, SEO activity and even activity on other social media being posted around their store.
There is a whole heap of information that can be gleaned from competitors:
- Home page campaigns give us a great insight into what can be pushed at any moment in time.
- Popular product boxes (if they are true) tell us valuable information about top sellers
- Newsletters give us some great content and therefore help to refine and develop the E Commerce Calendar
- Facebook pages help us understand the way they use their brand
- The way the site is categorised helps us to check if certain popular categories have been missed
But is this information reliable – and is competitive analysis in some way unethical?
In terms of reliability, a lot can be said from the professional appearance of the store. A badly designed, badly executed store is more likely to be showing duff content – Easter campaigns being run at Christmas for example. Integrated campaigns – where the home page matches a newsletter and social media messages on the other hand can be said to be very reliable. For most of our stores we aim to track our competitors newsletters for over a year – so we can see what they were running last year a few months in advance so we can run similar campaigns. In doing this we have noticed two or three that have run EXACTLY the same campaign and newsletter two years on the trot….
So is it unethical? Are we conducting some kind of content or product copyright theft? Well given we would normally look at five or six competitors we think not – as our stores are altered as a result of a proper appraisal of all the competition rather than just nicking someone else’s ideas. And even then what in E Commerce is unique anyway. Can anyone really say they own a BOGOF campaign or a 20% off sale?
Combined with a good analysis of Google Searches and using other product sales and search data competitive analysis is extremely valuable.
UK E Commerce Christmas Sales
Posted on | January 12, 2012 | Comments Off
A wide range of articles about on-line Chistmas Sales in the UK have started to emerge from various sources.
Generally online sales were up 18.5% over Christmas compared to last Christmas (BRC-KPMG Retail Sales Monitor) with the last week before Christmas being particularly “dazzling”. Key growth areas were food and clothing and footwear. The use of deals and voucher coupons in particular seemed to be pretty important. MetaPack reinforce these figures and go further showing a 30% year on year increase with the last week before Christmas going into Frenzy with double the amount of sales to last year in that last crucial week. This perhaps indicates that shoppers now have more faith in delivery services leading up to Christmas – and also perhaps becaue a lot of online stores now operate pre Christmas sales to boost sales once delivery prospects look bleak. Boxing day was the busiest ever according to Experian Hitwise.
Marks and Spencers – already the largest and most successful UK online venture – have announced a 22% increase in direct on-line sales during Christmas 2012 . This was largely through an extension of their next day delivery deadline and the introduction of their Christmas Food to Order service on-line, which contributed to a 12% increase in orders. John Leiws also had a record breaking year with sales close to 600 million pounds.
Food ordering at Christmas is clearly a rapidly growing market – ICO3 partner Simply Cornish Hampers enjoyed a 400% increase in sales from last year and will no doubt continue to grow next Christmas. In similar statistics Sainbury’s announced that its online Grocery store sales were up by a fifth – to reach new record highs. Waitrose, part of John Lewis, also announced large increases in online sales – with wine sales particularly strong.
Multi channel selling and mobile phone usage in particular continues to increase and become very significant. According to consumer research specialist Intersperience, 30% used their mobiles to carry out price checks and review products, with 1 in 5 consumers doing it there and then in stores to check how much cheaper they could buy the products online. Even more cheekily 20% of them actually bought the goods there and then in store! This Store to Web buying behaviour is increasingly being embraced by more ambitious online stores who offer discounts or incentives to buy online while in store and will I think be a far more prominent feature of high street online selling next year. Already major high street stores are offering free WIFI access to customers to use while they shop and we have heard that the new John Lewis store in Exeter will feature many innovative store to web incentives. A key peak in mobile phone usage came on Christmas day and boxing day according to Adfonic – not surprising perhaps that Happy Christmas shoppers were using their new smart phones for the first time – but I think it is more than this. Other figures, for example, released by John Lewis showed a huge surge in shopping for gadgets on Boxing Day.
Kindles sales were huge over Christmas and were this years must have gadget. 1.2 million Kindles were given as gifts this year according to a YouGov survey. That said more than half a million people received IPADS as a gift
Finally the Logan Tod & Co’s 6th annual Online Future Shopping Index predicts that next Christmas online shoppers will spend 18% to 22% more than they did in 2011.
Ill publish more statistics as and when I find them.
E Commerce Websites Usability Guide
Posted on | June 21, 2011 | Comments Off
Search
It is important that the user can search easily for products and that the returned results are highly successful. Many E Commerce sites now use Google Site Search. We are experimenting with this for some of our partner sites.
Relationships
Trust and Security
Graphics and Icons which clearly show how trustworthy the site is and what efforts have been made to make the site secure are very important.
Breadcrumb Navigation
The user can clearly see where they are in the category structures and can see a breadcrumb to navigate back down all the various levels.
Previously viewed item.
Image lightboxes
Highly visible delivery options
E Commerce Launch Event
Posted on | May 9, 2011 | Comments Off
More than 45 people attended our E Commerce launch event at the Tamar Science Park, Plymouth last Friday.
Amongst the guest list were Geoffrey Cox, MP for Torridge and West Devon, Simon Chamberlain of Ultimate Succession and several other representatives from GAIN, Lloyds Bank, the University of Plymouth and Tamar Science Park.
We were also able to invite all our E Commerce Partners including The Pet Express from Plymouth, Birdkids from Fowey in Cornwall, The Arundell Arms from Lifton in Devon, Coast solutions from Plymouth and Cut Plastic Sheeting from Ivybridge, Devon.
We received a very positive response to all the speakers and about the professionalism of the event. We will
be holding more E Commerce partner events in the near future.
E Commerce in Cornwall – an asset for small businesses
Posted on | April 9, 2011 | Comments Off
Cornwall is one of those counties that from a retail point of view presents many challenges. There are no obvious large retail centres – at least in the way that Plymouth, Exeter and Bristol have large centres – so there is no great shopping “draw” to the county. Also many of the stores suffer from the huge seasonal variation in visitor numbers to Cornwall, with more than 5 million visitor trips to the country in summer substantially adding its permanent population of 500,000. In some towns like Newquay the increase in numbers during the summer months is astonishing – as high as 31 times higher than the normal population (http://db.cornwall.gov.uk/ltp/marchannex2/chapter_57.html)
A good E Commerce Proposition for local Cornish retail stores provides them with an opportunity to compete on an equal footing with any other retail store in the country and provides better stability when the summer visitors have left. With the current national standard of delivery being “Next Day” all retail stores in Cornwall are able to provide this using most Courier companies at very similar prices to outlets in London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. E Commerce can also help focus shops on less “short term” wins and more longer term wins: knowing that their Stock does not have to sell by the end of September because they can sell it through their website, Amazon and Ebay is a huge confidence boost to owners who might worry about over investing at the beginning of the season.
Putting Together an E Commerce Site Plan
Posted on | April 4, 2011 | Comments Off
ICO3 has a business plan to take on 50 E Commerce partners in the next four years – thats one a month. We are plannig to recruit from each sector and pick the best possible entrepreneurs and store from each sector. This sort of vision requires a great deal of planning. If you were to become a partner of ICO3 – or even if you are just planning your own online busines, here are some of the things you will need to think about:
24 MONTH BUSINESS PLAN: If you have a business plan for the online sales it is useful for us to see it. If you don’t have one we can discuss an outline business plan showing key dates such as expected or needed revenue streams, break even point and other things.
PRODUCT ITEMS: We need any CDS, PHOTOS, PICTURES, BROCHURES, WEBSITE LINKS you might have for any of the products you intend to sell – The more the better.
SECURITY INFORMATION: Any user names and passwords you might have – or information about where we might be able to get them from. At the very least we will need your Ebay and PayPal user name and passwords (Ebay to start listing; Paypal to start integration with the website). With Ebay we normally also need to resolve further security checks to confirm our identity.
RELEVANT CONTACTS: Names of people you might need for us to talk to. A brief organogram of the business so we can see who is who in terms of who will be involved in the project.
Blog posting on partner sites
Posted on | April 3, 2011 | Comments Off
It’s great to see our own partners blogging about what they clearly know a lot about. Coast solutions in particular do a great job of blogging about their sage software and sage support and have just this weekend added two or three great articles.
We are soon to employ some freelancers to help with some of our blogging activities as our partner numbers grow. It was an interesting exercise to ask for bloggers. Their qualifications varied tremendously … from rookies just starting out and wanting 7 pound an hour to experienced journalists and published poets!
I landed myself in hot water with some of them … One girl in particular wanted to know whether my rates of pay for blogging (between 5 and 10 pound an hour) were an April fools joke. Another quite brazenly asked for 25 an hour. Hopefully we’ll appoint a nice team soon but I should imagine it will be transient as who could possibly write every day about cut plastic sheeting?
Site momentum on E Commerce websites
Posted on | March 30, 2011 | Comments Off
We often use the phrase “site momentum” when we talk to clients about building long term traffic growth.
The phrase comes from the tendancy for Google to give a new or drastically changed site a fair crack of the whip when it is first launched but then to drop it again unless the momentum of the site is maintained through comments, reviews or other external activity.
We find creating natural links and new content at the right time and at a furious pace is the best way to create momentum … And many sites are doing this now.
The interesting side effect of this is that sites that are left alone die much more quickly. We left one of our e commerce sites alone for just a few months and visitor numbers went right down to as low as 1 or zero a day!
100 little E Commerce jobs to improve ROI
Posted on | March 29, 2011 | Comments Off
We always say in our presentations to new companies that the thing that makes E Commerce sites work is lots of good old fashioned roll your sleeves up hard work.
I guess what i mean by this is that there is no magic formula or simple technique … Its just more about getting everything right: Establishing trust, building a brand identity, All the usual seo and ppc strategies, Making the customer experience as smooth as possible and conducting vast amounts of market research and statistical analysis.
The more we make our partners successful the more I realise just how disjointed it is to outsource these areas individually or even try to get some lean marketing graduate to make it all up as she or he goes along. Here at ICO3 we have 100 different daily, weekly and monthly tasks we undertake to a strict work regime. None of them are earth shattering in terms of originality – but what is original is we make sure they are done.
Blog Every Day
Posted on | March 28, 2011 | Comments Off
At a recent conference day for the academy of chief executives I was reminded of the importance of blogging.
Apparently SEO experts who blog “multiple times a day” have a very good chance of getting their keywords to the top of relevant search engines. Tt reminded me of one of the best things I ever read with SEO. Forget all the back linking, keyword loading, newsletters, articles and all that other jazz: just write a page of content every day and you will be there or there abouts.
Just to make sure I have my keywords in this post they are E Commerce, E-Commerce, ecommerce and even Internet Commerce. hey I even got a link in there!
So what evidence is there that this is true? For our various E Commerce partnership we have traditionally focused on blogging every week – we recently changed this to every day. Ill let you know the results when they come in. The first result was to get someone from a wrestling website to say how much they enjoyed my post about cut plastic sheeting. hmmmm