E-commerce

• App Stores, Check it out – all the cool kids are doing it
• Online shoppers are waiting two days to buy
• Are you calculating the lifetime value of your customer?
• Emptying  shopping carts:  when should etailers empty customers’ shopping carts?
• I’ve had a look at the growing trend of click & collect, definitely one to keep an eye on
• Sounds simple, but content needs to be relevant to the search query if you want conversions

Social Media

• Google Buzz stay safe kids video, hmm if you need a video to show you how to stay safe….
• Every news-writer has a Dashboard with Metrics determining his compensation
• Using social media for niche business – have your cake and eat it

Marketing

• Tricky one, but just how much impact does an offline campaign have online?
• A marketers favourite question, what’s the value of word of mouth these days?
• Google introduces “Remarketing”, maybe should have been called “Reminding”
• AdWords, sure everyone can do that but RedFly are the first to jump through the new qualifications and are now (the only) certified partner in Ireland. Well done Redfliers
• Voting in the IIA Net Visionary Awards?, check out Fiona Hilliard‘s blog for Argus Car Hire, Best business blog by a mile

Advertising

• Is it wrong I recognised most of these? The Evolution of Advertising in Sports Video Games
• Those Hunky Dorry Ads, who’s getting their knickers in a twist?
• Contrary to popular belief, the digital revolution is not limited to advertising industry

I buy a good chunk of books, around 30-40 a year usually in batches of ten or so – almost exclusively online with the reason being that online websites do the hard work for me, offers me suggestions and make it easier to buy in bulk and to buy impulsively.

Here are three ideas that traditional bookshops could learn from the Internet:

1. Stop Trying To Compete With Online

Right now bookshops are trying to play catchup with the likes of Amazon & BookDespository by mimicking their features but without the distribution, value or service. I checked out the online store of Ireland’s best known bookshop and most books are shipping in 3-5 days. OK, it’s not 24hrs or same day like the big online stores but they really hamper themselves with delivery charges of €4 as well as the uncertainty if the book is even in stock. As a consumer there’s three great excuses not to buy online a) Slow delivery, b) Might not be in stock; c) Delivery cost was 50% of the book value.

Applying an offline model to an online store is a poor idea if you can’t be competitive or offer some method of differentiation. This creates a poor perception of the offline bookshop if the online store price can be easily compared to online only stores.

2. Connect Online & Offline Stores

The functions of an online store should not be significantly different to that of a bricks & mortar store, especially in terms of distribution and promotion. A bricks and mortar store merchandises it’s shop window, shelves and point of sale, it’s no different from how a website merchandises it’s homepage, pages and shopping cart. Right now offline stores treat their online presence like a totally separate channel. Ideally both stores should at least compliment each other and at best connect with each other. Here’s what would be great, you’re browsing for a book online, and the website shows that you can buy it and then collect it at your nearest store, or at least tell you if it’s in stock at a store. Failing that, how about free shipping within 24hrs!

There’s so much more that can be done to connect the same consumer to either the online or offline store, utilising an online profile to keep you up to date to book suggestions, online specials, new products and in store offers.

3. In Store Book Finder

The great thing about buying books online is that you can simply input an author, book title or ISBN. Book shops already have an inventory system, but this is seriously hamstrung. Recently I dropped into book shop in Dublin looking for anything by Sci-fi author Philip K. Dick, I couldn’t find anything so dropped over to the information desk where the nice lady tapped in the author details into her terminal and pointed me over to the relevant sections. Hold on a minute, she probably not only got the shelf number, but also the stock number, titles and other related goodies. That’s the kind of thing that should be made accessible to all customers making it easier to find books they want, and books they didn’t know they wanted.

These are three ideas which could form the basis of developing a greater connection between a bookshop and their online store; which would give them a competitive edge over online only competitors. We know it’s cheaper to buy online. If a bookshop used their advantage of having a physical store by embracing online interaction, Not only do I think it would be hugely successful, it could be the decision that saves their business.

Are you Wasting 50% of your Time?, well are you?

Twitter LCD, the massive nerd in me might give this a go.

Facebook adds conversion tracking, and some problems with it.

New Google leads capture extension.

JavaScript making a comeback in Email Marketing?.

Still on the EDM theme, Social Media + Email = More Power.

Toblerone Twitter MPU ad, clever that.

Yellow pages logo’ing, great to see the original brief and how David Airey attacked it.

More design, this time- the four people you should ask for website feedback

Killing bad site links, easy and dead handy too.

It’s that time of year again, and the shortlist for the awards have been announced. The awards are taking place next Saturday, 27th March in Galway and tickets can be bought online.

It’s great to see so many interesting and diverse bloggers, some of which are new to me and duly added to my reader. Myself and possibly herself will be heading along to the event, I’ll be handing over the award to the best newcomer on behalf of lastminute.com – and the competition will be close among five great new blogs – 9 Bean Row, Good After-Morning, Pretty Far West, The Style Bitches and Chronicles of a Year Long Breakup.

I’m looking forward to putting some faces to names, so if you’re heading along as well, pop over and say hello

Top Irish Websites

(View all websites)

While I’ve said before that this does not fully conclude what websites actual traffic is, it does offer an indication and when comparing with Dec 2009 will show changes.

For example, Facebook.com is still the highest visited website with identical numbers to December, apart from page views which has now grown from 1.4B to 1.9B – has facebook become more sticky? the rise of younger members with their love of Farmville type applications would be a good indicator of this happening.

I’ve been asked a few times on what exactly is useful about the data extracted from Google, personally I’ve been using it as part of competitor analysis, selecting all websites in the industry I work in as a basis of understanding our place in the market. As a web only business – this is extremely important. I don’t reply solely on Google, but combine a number of sources and assumptions to deliver a more robust evaluation.

Has anyone discovered something or found a use for the Google traffic stats?

The ten most expensive global domain sales in 2009:

1. Fly.com – £1,152,173.24
2. Russia.com – £904,319.74
3. Call.com – £678,749.65
4. Server.com – £478,143.83
5. America.com – £474,977.28
6. Files.com – £449,845.74 [updated]
7. Christian.com – £366,917.29
8. Top.com – £327,916.88
9. Talk.com – £303,994.08
10. Brazil.com – £302,489.98

Half that list are still just holding pages, while others have an obvious lack of content and general poor design. Take Christian.com for example which is running a very average WordPress theme, and Files.com – Is it worth half a million? (nope, because I got the domain wrong, it’s FILES.COM

The priciest domain, Fly.com was bought by Meta-search giant TravelZoo who most surely deem it worth the purchase.

Internet users

• 1.73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009).
• 18% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
• 738,257,230 – Internet users in Asia.
• 418,029,796 – Internet users in Europe.
• 252,908,000 – Internet users in North America.
• 179,031,479 – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
• 67,371,700 – Internet users in Africa.
• 57,425,046 – Internet users in the Middle East.
• 20,970,490 – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

Social Media

• 126 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
• 84% – Percent of social network sites with more women than men.
• 27.3 million – Number of tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009)
• 57% – Percentage of Twitter’s user base located in the United States.
• 4.25 million – People following @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s most followed user).
• 350 million – People on Facebook.
• 50% – Percentage of Facebook users that log in every day.
• 500,000 – The number of active Facebook applications.

Websites

• 234 million – The number of websites as of December 2009.
• 47 million – Added websites in 2009.

More here….

So how do you know if you know how many users are accessing your website with an iphone?, Luckily most analytic packages will let you drill down and see the operating system and browser type.

From Google Analytics, its Visitors > Browser Capabilities > Browsers and OS.

A very small percentage are accessing using the Safari/iPhone combo, but Wii, PS3 & ipod touch visitors make up roughly 10%, so enough to warrant some configuration.

Accessing my site with an iphone looks like this, which doesn’t render too well as the width is too much and doesn’t zoom correctly.

Adding the WPtouch plugin, sets a mobile friendly theme for iPhone, iPod touch, Android, or BlackBerry Storm, with support for the following user-agents: android, aspen, blackberry9500, blackberry9530, cupcake, dream, incognito, iphone, ipod, opera mini, webmate, webos.

Once installed it looks like this to mobile visitors.

Very easy to install and configure, but makes a massive difference – definitely one of the must have additions for wordpress users.

(I’ve used a mac app called Iphoney to test)

So with load time and responsiveness being an extremely important factor, it’s no surprise to see Google on hand to help out developers with the addition of Site Performance under the labs section of Webmaster Tools. Page load time also important for Google Adwords and is a new ranking factor for Google SEO – two massive reasons to sit up and take notice.

This gives a good overview of average page load times for my Wiffy.ie website, 7.1 seconds pretty bad.

Of course Big G not only helps you recognise the problem but also offers some helpful suggestions.

Most of these suggestions would require some web development knowledge, so Google recommend using their Page Speed extension where you can knock yourself tweaking your web page. I’d also recommend the lori extention which shows page load time.

Much of the optimisation is founded in utilising stuff that proper web developers (who know scalability) would consider such as GZip compression at the server side, and using a content delivery network (CDN) as well as what I would consider good practice from web designers like combining css files, and optimising script loads and minimising unused code

Yahoo also have a great resource with their Best practices for speeding up your website which puts their 34 best practices into 7 categories, and also provide YSlow (similar to Page Speed) – so there is a lot of help out there on investigating and improving page load times as it’s definitely going to be a recurring theme in 2010.

What’s really cool is you can record screen, cam & audio as well as some extra cool stuff like remove recording from VNC.

Now all I need is a real reason to use it.