Coast Digital Blog

I've just been reading about the new contactless credit card that's going to be released by Barclaycard and the mobile phone company, Orange.

To use the card, all you have to do is wave it near a special 'Paywave' reader in a shop, and the money you've spent is automatically deducted from your balance (which is subject to a pre-agreed spending limit).

It's a great way of getting through queues quickly, and the technology has a kind of novelty factor that appeals to everyone's inner child. ("I reach. I point. And *kerpow*! I hold the shopkeeper spellbound. The sweets are mine, mwah ha ha!").

The card, though, is just the first step on Barclaycard and Orange's journey to providing us with something much more exciting - a mobile phone that has an inbuilt credit card.

I used to have one

That's right. Back in 2007, I took part in this trial run by Barclaycard, O2 and Transport for London. In return for abandoning the Sony Walkman phone I was using at the time, I was given a fairly bog standard Nokia clamshell handset and had to promise to use it for six months.

At first glance, not the best deal in the world. But it was considerably sweetened by the fact that I could also use the phone as an Oyster card (a swipe card that allows you to travel on London buses and tubes) and a contactless Barclaycard. You could also swipe the phone over special posters on the Underground to instantly transfer event information to your phone.

It was enormous fun, and the fact that I was given lots of free money on the credit card and Oyster card functions made it doubly entertaining.

The only problem was that you couldn't buy anything, or travel anywhere, without having to tell your life story to shopkeepers or officials. And that slowed you down a lot - which probably wasn't the point.

This was normal

Let's take travelling first. In theory, all London Transport officials had been tipped off that several hundred people had Oyster cards built into their phones. The reality was rather different. It went a bit like this.

I get on to a bus and wave the phone by the Oyster reader. The machine bleeps in that negative 'card not recognised' way. I stop and try several times, causing a queue of people to bank up behind me.

Bus driver: "What the f*ck are you doing?"

Me: "I'm trying to swipe my Oyster card."

Bus driver: "That's a mobile."

Me: "Yes, and an Oyster."

Bus driver (wearing his best 'another nutter' expression): "It's a phone. It's not a f*cking Oyster. Get off the bus."

Me (as the card is finally accepted with a triumphal bleep): "You are *so* right."

To be fair, I ended up meeting lots of those ticket inspectors who board buses to check you're not fare dodging. They were generally quite clued up and inquisitive, and - if anything - were surprised that such a low-spec phone was capable of working as an Oyster card.

Buying stuff

Buying things was equally amusing. The problem here wasn't with the technology, but with the lack of places that supported it.

In theory the phone allowed you to access a map of shops that used the Paywave system. Ironically, just as I got the phone I had stopped commuting from Hackney into the City every day. That's where most of the shops were.

There was one further problem. Many of the shops on the map were those that were about to get the technology. Which meant they didn't have it at all.

Finally, I discovered the two nearest places to me that supported Paywave were an independent supermarket in Finsbury Park and a wine merchant about another mile or so away. I used to go to the latter quite often. We'd have conversations like this:

Me: "Hello."

Assistant 1: "Hello. You're the guy with the phone, aren't you?"

Assistant 2: "The what?"

Assistant 1: "The phone. He's got a phone he can pay for things with."

Assistant 2: "Really. How does that work."

Assistant 1: "He'll show you."

Assistant 2: "Cool."

Assistant 1 (turning to me): "How can I help you?"

Me: "A bottle of Napoleon sherry please."

Assistant 1: "That'll be £9.99 please."

Me (pointedly handing over a £10 note): "Thanks!"

As I said, the technology is a lot of fun. But sometimes you just want the anonymity that comes with cash. And I think the phones will one day provide it - when the novelty has worn off.

With Royal Mail’s national strike action kicking off today, my thoughts have turned to the millions of e-tailers that must find a way to compensate for the reduced postal service over the next couple of days.

For most people, shopping online is all about convenience. If they don’t have time to venture onto the High Street, the internet now presents a fine alternative. But with the postal strikes threatening to discourage people from placing urgent orders online, particularly during the all-important run up to Christmas, what can e-tailers do to maintain sales revenues?

Make sure you have a plan B

Many companies have had to find alternative delivery options that will guarantee their customers the level of service that they have come to expect. An increase in delivery times – even by as little as a couple of days – is simply unacceptable for some shoppers, so many e-tailers are having to absorb the additional costs associated with using other carriers to reduce the impact on customers.

For these e-tailers, communicating that deliveries will be unaffected by the Royal Mail strike action clearly and confidently on their homepage might just salvage some of the sales that could have been lost over the next couple of days.

John Lewis has already issued a statement – and added a box to its homepage – to assure its customers that a “robust contingency plan” will ensure that its deliveries are entirely unaffected. I also received an email from Next this morning informing me that its next day delivery service will continue as normal.

These might be simple enough steps for established retailers like John Lewis and Next to take, but what about the rest of the online marketplace that simply can’t afford to absorb the extra overheads?

Communication is key

Informing customers fully about potentially significant delays to deliveries, and dealing with any concerns thoughtfully and efficiently, seems to be just about the only other option. Making information visible on the homepage and order pages could save customers a lot of worry – and should hopefully lead to fewer calls to customer helplines.

It is important that pay-per-click adverts are also amended if they contain delivery information so as not to mislead users who might specifically be looking for a prompt dispatch of their goods. If this step isn’t taken, bounce rates are likely to skyrocket as potential customers click through on paid adverts then immediately leave the site as they realise that the service isn’t what they are looking for.

It’s all about loyalty

Perhaps the next couple of days will enable e-tailers to truly assess whether they have managed to create such an enjoyable online experience that customers will keep coming back for more, even if they do have to wait an extra couple of days for their purchases to arrive. After all, building customer confidence and loyalty is vital to the success of any business – regardless of whether it operates online or offline.

If e-tailers have achieved these goals, then they should be able to comfortably ride out the next few days and indeed the entire Christmas period, regardless of further postal strikes. If not, then perhaps it’s time to talk to a web design agency that knows a thing or two about implementing measurable ecommerce solutions that will truly engage customers and generate more sales.

Isn’t that what every e-tailer wants for Christmas?

Rupert Murdoch, the driving force behind global media conglomerate News Corp, is not a man who minces his words. So, when he accuses search engines like Google and Yahoo as being 'content kleptomaniacs' at the World Media Summit, I immediately wonder what he's got up his sleeve.

This is, after all, a man who introduced electronic newspaper production in the 1980s in the teeth of opposition from the print unions, and someone who has actually welcomed the future demise of printed editions in favour of portable electronic devices: "...we’re going to have no paper, no printing plants, no unions. It's going to be great."

Making search engines pay

Rupert Murdoch's present stance is that search engines should pay his publications for the content they index and aggregate in services like Google News, largely because he doesn't see why they should earn advertising revenue on his content.

This is, in my opinion, a bluff. After all, if Murdoch really wanted Google, Yahoo, Bing et al to stop indexing websites belonging to - say - The Times, The Sun, The Australian, The New York Post and The Papua New Guinea Post-Courier, then he could get one of his web experts to add a few lines of code into each site's robots.txt file. The nuisance would stop immediately.

Quality content

So what's Murdoch really up to? I think the best way to make an educated guess is to look at how his media empire has been conducting itself over recent years. Even a glance at his UK operations and the state of the domestic newspaper market shows that the game has been afoot for some time.

If you'd asked me about the newspapers I read a few years ago, I could have given you a fairly straightforward answer. As late as 2005, I was reading the Guardian almost daily (had done for 15 years), regularly buying the Times and the Telegraph (seeing at least one edition of each per week), and getting the Sun when I knew there was a good scoop in it. The only papers I never bought were the Mail and the Express. Especially not the Express. Amongst other current affairs publications I would get Private Eye and The Spectator.

Then I started getting more and more of my news online, and decided to drop the daily newspaper habit. I still get Private Eye and the Spectator from the newsstands, but if I do buy a daily newspaper I'll generally nab a copy of the Times.

That's made me wonder what happened to my long-standing brand loyalty to the Guardian. Why don't I buy that on the rare occasions I now get a paper?

Leaving aside the usual gags about getting more right wing as you get older, I think the fundamental answer is that Murdoch's Times has invested heavily in good content, whilst the Guardian has invested heavily in trying to appear more interesting and groundbreaking than it actually is. As a result, the Times has improved considerably - poaching a lot of the Guardian's (and other newspapers') best columnists along the way. The Guardian has got a tidy format, many acres of dullness, a few fertile strips of delusion, and a lot less zing, zap and panache than it had at the turn of the decade, when Francis Wheen was in G2, Matthew Norman was having anarchic fun on the Diary and Simon Hoggart was doing a peerless Parliamentary sketch (he still does, but I read that online. For free).

Net result, the Guardian is leaching readers at a faster rate than the Times - but both are suffering from circulation drops.

The strategy's not for printing

Which brings the Murdoch strategy into focus. He lost about £2 billion last year. Why is he investing so heavily in good content for his print editions? If the newspaper market is contracting, it's only going to be a short-term fix.
 
As you may know, Murdoch has convinced other publishers the way forward is to lock their content behind a pay-wall. This is fine, and I think wise, but people need a way of finding what's behind the barricades.

At the moment, this is where Google, Yahoo, Bing etc come in - they index the news sites, pull the material together in places like Google News, and make a considerable amount of advertising revenue out of the process.
 
It's also why Murdoch has got to get as many rival news outlets to follow his lead. If only Murdoch's titles went behind a pay-wall, then Google et al could relax - they'd just carry on indexing all the rival papers and Murdoch would lose readers and subscriptions.

A Murdoch search engine?

But, if Murdoch gets all the best global news outlets behind a pay-wall, they can collectively tell the search engines to get stuffed.

There's still a problem, though. Because readers have got used to cherry picking from news titles across the world (I love the fact I can trawl newspapers in the UK, US, Australia, South Africa, NZ, Ireland, Singapore, France etc etc), brand loyalty is only going to go so far. I might, if there were no other option, get a subscription to the Times. But there's no way I'm paying for additional subs for the Washington Post, New York Times, Sydney Herald etc etc.

That's why I suspect Murdoch's longer-term strategy is to get quality, paid news providers to opt out of Google and Yahoo and to set up their own search/ directory portal - perhaps a higher quality version of today's Google News. That way, Murdoch will be leading a movement that:

a) starves Google and other search engines of content
b) brings back third party advertising revenue into the portal in which Murdoch has a stake
c) creates a new search USP - quality (ie, subscribe to us because you've no way of knowing what rubbish you're getting via Google)
d) allows subscriptions to be ploughed back into journalism
e) gives the news outlets a strong online citadel, from which to expand into other online operations.

Of course, it's all speculation. But however it does pan out, decent news content is rarely going to be free in the future. The job now is to make online news generate money for the people who create it, rather than the search engines that distribute it at little cost to themselves.

And what better way to do that than with your own search engine?

For many business, it has been a tough year that has required significant sacrifices, quick-thinking and patience.

If you are in business, the question on your mind will be whether 2010 will be as challenging, or whether it will create a kinder environment. Only time will tell, but if you haven’t started to plan then it’s definitely the moment to do so.

These are my top ten tips for businesses that need to address their planning for next year. You may have your own priorities – so be sure to share them in the comments.

1. Don’t underestimate the power of engagement

If you want to generate a lot of positive consumer behaviour, you must communicate with your target audience. You can do this by using any of the four main engagement techniques (i.e. content, message, platform and experience), but be sure to record and evaluate the response as this will shape the way you present your brand to a mass audience. Your sole objective should be brand engagement.

2. The new generation of consumers expects a great deal more

Too many brands these days are oblivious when it comes to assessing what their customers want. If yours is one of them, revenue will be slipping through your fingers.

Consumers snap up the latest pocket-technology and web wizardry and, if your business acts intelligently on this trend, you should soon introduce lucrative and profitable new revenue channels. Businesses simply have to become more savvy about the digital world – mobile devices and evolved web technology are quickly going to be central to the way we do business.

3. Green is the new black

Climate change and the environment are no longer seen as fringe issues, and your business and brand need to speak and act green. Your environmental activity also needs to be authentic, sincere and likeable – and if it’s not, consumers will give their business to your competitors. Green issues will be more crucial than ever to brand promotion in 2010.

4. Price is more important than ever.

Businesses that failed to adapt during the recession, particularly by failing to change their pricing strategy, usually lost sales. In 2010 you will need to be kind to customers with competitive pricing, and in return you will build up brand loyalty. As many companies have found in recent months, if you don’t cultivate a loyal customer base you could easily go bust.

5. The ‘Three Simplicities’ – websites that are simple to find, simple to understand and simple to use

If a website is simple to find, simple to understand and simple to use, then it will be simple to buy from. By all means focus on price, promotion and brand – but if you don’t keep your website simple, your eBasket will leach sales like a colander. Talk to a web design agency if you need help.

6. Don’t make assumptions about your target audience – behaviour is what matters

There’s no need for generic audience profiling these days. With tools such as Google Analytics and social media platforms, you can tailor your planning to your actual audience. If you interrogate your data properly, then you will have a major competitive advantage – but do employ specialists who have necessary skills in disciplines like web analytics and competitor benchmarking.

7. Give customers that little bit extra

Consumers love knowing they are getting more bang for their buck, so if your brand adds extra value compared to your competitors, then they are more likely to choose you. Adding value can also be a much better option than price slashing, which can spark off detrimental price wars.

8. Give customers customisation and control

Whether it’s a product or a service, customisation options are becoming more visible than before.  With many luxuries raised to the status of essentials (e.g. iPods, mobile phones, laptops etc), you need strategies to help buyers personalise their purchases (e.g. offer different colours or cases).

This technique has migrated to the services industry and is strong within the online environment and it’s an effective way to generate a buzz about a product and increase sales.

9. Bring your marketing activity together

Culturally, marketing activity tends to be conceptualised, developed and executed within its department (offline, online, digital, PR), ignoring the activities being created within the other departments. This often results in campaigns that have very little (if any) synergy, which is a strategic no-no. Lack of communication can also result in mixed messages, which confuse your audience – to the detriment of your brand. Bring departments together more often and more intelligently and your marketing will improve significantly.

10. Affinity marketing will see brands coming together for a common cause – more sales

Affinity marketing that brings complementary brands together is nothing new, but in the UK is has predominantly taken place within the ‘white labelling’ sector – mainly supermarkets and financial organisations. However, over the past year a growing number of smaller businesses have joined forces to offer consumers more enticing offerings.

This is a great area to explore, and if the partnership makes sense to your target audience then the potential benefits can be huge. Activity costs can also be split, making it an economical and increasingly popular strategy.  

Summary

2010 will definitely be a challenging and aggressive year for businesses, particularly as many will want to compensate for the recent downturn and will be competing against new firms that have capitalised on recent opportunities. Although we can’t predict exactly what the commercial climate will throw at the business sector, logical and strategic planning is essential – and if that requires the help of an online marketing agency, then it’s worth talking to one now.

What are your business aims for 2010? Leave your comments below or contact us to discuss your digital marketing plans.

If, like me, you’ve got a background in public relations — a form of promotion that’s notoriously difficult to measure by ROI — the transparency and accountability of online marketing is a very welcome breath of fresh air.

Like all the members of Coast Digital’s newly formed account management team, my main focus is on giving our clients the best possible support and making sure levels of customer satisfaction stay high. This means reviewing what our clients are able to spend on their online activities, how that investment is distributed across the various digital services we offer, and how we can develop their particular strategy to ensure it goes on delivering the best possible results.

We can do that well because digital marketing is measurable.

Google Analytics 101

Google Analytics is an absolute godsend for reviewing the successes and ironing out the shortcomings of every online marketing strategy. Although I’d briefly explored the tool in a previous role, I’d never really taken the time to appreciate what a rich source of information it can be if you take the time to interrogate it.

Google Analytics can instantly give you the information required to calculate an overall ROI but, if you so wish, you can also use it to analyse the data that has been collected from your site and review the precise impact of individual keywords, adverts and landing pages. I’d recommend reading my colleague Darren Bond’s post on ROI to find out more.

Marketing you can measure

Coast Digital is an online marketing agency that prides itself on delivering “marketing you can measure”, and we can do that because web analytics are all about facts and results. You certainly won’t get any unsubstantiated claims, ambiguous assertions or vague estimates about the success of your campaign.

Instead, you will not only be able to identify the exact keywords that are driving the most traffic to your website, but you will also see which ones result in the highest number of sales – an important distinction as the keywords with the highest click-through rates might not be the ones that make you the most money. Indeed, they could be the most costly.

Tracking success

For e-commerce customers, tracking a campaign’s success is simple – we can calculate the return on investment down to the very last penny. However, if you own or work for a business with a more technical focus, or one that trades in high-value goods, most enquiries might bear fruit away from the website – via a sales hotline for example – making it a little more difficult to match success to the correct elements of a campaign.

It can be done, though, and this is where the strong partnerships we have with our clients really come into play. The more information they feed us about the quantity, quality and relevance of the enquiries they receive, the better able we are to hone and tailor their digital campaign – resulting in a golden circle of even more enquiries and sales, and an even better ROI.

Above all, though, we love working with people to create strategies that work, month in, month out. So, if you’re looking for an online marketing strategy that is completely measurable, and a team that will continuously review its progress to ensure that it is working as hard as it can for you, please get in touch. We’re looking forward to doing some measuring on your behalf.

Over the last few months, a few members of the online marketing team have been working hard to create the perfect set of SEO recommendations for an e-commerce website.

Well, we have implemented these suggestions – and now our client is reaping the rewards.

The original brief was quite a daunting job, considering the size of the website and the products it included. Some firms would have tarred every page in the sitemap with the same SEO brush, but – full credit to the online marketing team – at Coast Digital we go the extra mile.

If you want to create effective SEO for an e-commerce site, here are some tips to help you along the way – and some results to inspire you.

Common SEO pointers

This is day one stuff you will already know.

• META data
• Clean URL Structure
• Accessible Navigation
• Good Page Content
• Good Page Build (HTML / CSS)
• Page Headings

Some SEO gems

And here are some gems you may not have considered when you need to make sure that thousands of pages are all top-notch SEO.

Character limits of META data – this could be an issue when you have 3-5 steps in a breadcrumb trail and you are looking to replicate them in the Title / Description / Keyword fields. Make sure you make good use of the characters you have.

URL length, structure and keywords – again, if you’ve got plenty of steps in your sitemap then the last thing Google wants is to trawl through pointless ones. Clean URLs, close to the root of the domain, are what you want.

Using footer links correctly – don’t spam. Put in links that are related and not just for the benefit of search engines.

Same product in multiple locations – this is a big issue for lots of online retailers. We have the fix and it works... a mixture of robots.txt management and nofollows can help keep your domain away from the dreaded duplication penalty. The most relevant phrase for this section is: canonical linking.

Get your product page content up to scratch – a page buried deep in the sitemap is just as important as a category section homepage. Delivering a website that has genuine, well-delivered content across the sitemap is essential; otherwise you’ll fall at the first hurdle. If your client doesn’t buy into this process then it will be a hard slog to push on in the organic listings.

And here are some ‘proof is in the pudding’ type stats…

The above visitors are for non-brand related terms – so we are not claiming any credit for brand searches in our results!

If you enjoyed this post, you might also be interested in our usability advisory guide: Time for a Tune Up.

In the first part of this post, I outlined the first three steps that you need to examine when creating an effective eCommerce strategy: your business, your products and services, and your website.

I ended by saying that it’s crucial to make sure that your website is fit for the job you intend it for, and that it caters for your desired audiences. One common error I come across is when eCommerce firms spend small fortunes driving traffic to their websites, ignoring the fact that only a tiny proportion of such untargeted traffic will spend money on their sites.

The next three factors I’m going to look at are online visibility, marketing opportunities and your competitors. Let’s resume with step four.

4. Your Online Visibility

It’s all very well having a wonderful product and a fantastic website, but do users know you exist? Sounds a little harsh I know, but so many eCommerce businesses don’t have the visibility they need. Often this isn’t because competitors are pushing them out, but because they haven’t taken the necessary steps to get their brand known online.

It can be done though — with a little digital intelligence, a dash of media spend and a big helping of creativity.

First of all, it’s crucial to get good search rankings on Google. To achieve this, you must ensure that your website is search engine optimised — for a top list of SEO tips, visit this post by Daniel Butler.

A quicker, but more expensive route to visibility is via Google’s Pay-Per-Click (PPC) programme. PPC allows you to appear alongside your chosen competitors, target your audience very effectively and refine your campaign as it continues. Effective PPC is an art form, but I would certainly recommend reading Ashley Fletcher’s thoughts on Google’s Website Optimiser.

There are other digital channels worth considering, but these are the two main ways of increasing your website’s visibility, driving traffic to it and achieving and optimum cost per sale.

5. Your Marketing Opportunities

The web has one advantage that’s not open to offline businesses - a real-time environment. People can access the web 24 hours per day, and there’s nothing to stop you adding new products to your site at midnight. The changes will be instantaneous and visible to your audiences.

Online marketing can also be very cheap when you consider what you get for your money. Here are a few areas of marketing that you should consider when launching an eCommerce business

Display Advertising – online display advertising allows you to promote your business with digital billboards (or banners as they’re more commonly known). This activity can be very successful, but it comes at a cost and is not the most viable option for most start-ups. There are alternatives that work in the same way – Google Contextual Advertising is the next best thing.

Email Marketing – Email marketing allows you to get your message(s) across to a substantial number of people, who can then read your content in their own time. This has amazing benefits but getting hold of a fresh and relevant mailing list can be difficult. If you create a sign-up service on your website, you can slowly start to create a mailing list — but this will require patience. You can buy mailing lists, but be prepared to pay handsomely. For more ideas, visit 6 top tips  to build a quality list for email marketing.

Social Media – Social media have created new ways of operating in the digital world. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have created an environment in which everyone has the opportunity to get their thoughts, multimedia and networking skills across to a mass audience. Businesses have jumped on board and it’s a channel that doesn’t appear to be fading in any way. Concentrate on the three major platforms, but take a very close look at Twitter in particular — it has become a huge and vibrant playground for advertisers and consumer audiences. To learn more about Twitter’s commercial opportunities, take a look at When Twitter becomes good business .

Affiliate Marketing – Affiliate marketing has really taken off, becoming a highly profitable channel for eCommerce. Though it is not an appropriate channel for all online businesses, it certainly is one worth exploring. Launching an effective affiliate marketing campaign can be tricky so make sure you carry out sufficient research. Try our Top 10 tops for a successful affiliate marketing campaign.

6. Your Competitors

Competition is rife within the online world and, for every product or service you offer, the chances are that there are a further ten eCommerce businesses offering the same. You need to make sure your offer is much more appealing.

To do this, you need to keep an eye on your competitors and research the ways in which they engage with their audiences and customers.

However, defining your competition can be tricky as you have to take a number of factors into account. Start by examining which other companies appear alongside you in the search engine results. Create tables that separate SEO and PPC competitors. Find out who appears above and below you in the results.

Don’t worry too much about competing with the eCommerce giants, either. However, do investigate what they do and learn from them where possible. If you implement a regular monitoring programme for competitor product/service and activity, you will be better-prepared for any developments they introduce such as promotional offers, a new website or even fresh markets they may enter. All of these factors will be relevant to your overall success.

I’ve reached the end of my six steps to an effective eCommerce strategy. I hope you agree that eCommerce is about more than coming up with an idea, putting together a website and launching it. You need an underlying strategy to make sure your business is a success — and with the online world moving at such a pace, you could do a lot worse than speaking to a digital direct marketing agency and benefiting from their guidance and consultancy. If you think we can help you, please do contact us today.

The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales may have announced this morning that we’re heading out of recession, but the stark fact remains that it’s still a difficult time for small businesses.

It’s even tougher for business start-ups, which face more obstacles than usual when trying to enter their chosen market, particularly when it comes to borrowing money. However, against this backdrop, the eCommerce sector still appears to be thriving — new online businesses seem to be popping up daily, whilst established firms are investing more heavily in their digital operations.

There’s a lot of sense in this approach. Digital businesses have much smaller start-up costs, and workers may have the flexibility of working anywhere that has an internet and mobile connection.

As a digital consultant, it is great to see this trend occurring and evolving.  Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want to see the death of the High Street, but I certainly do want to see the growth of the effective eCommerce store.

Despite all the positive signs, one issue that I’m increasingly witnessing is the fact that many eCommerce businesses lack a properly structured strategy that makes the most of the opportunities available to them. I put this down to two things:

• Not planning at the outset for major success and rapid growth
• Not having a business plan that is any more detailed than “Set up, launch and make money”.

It doesn’t matter what your business sells, who comprises your audiences, or how competitive your market is — to thrive, your eCommerce business needs strategy. That’s why I’ve put together six key factors you need to consider when putting together an effective eCommerce strategy.

They are:

1. Your Business

Before investing in your new eCommerce business you need to ask yourself the following questions:

• Is your business relevant to the online market?
• Is it a unique business or are you entering an already-saturated market?
• Who are your competitors and can you compete with them?
• Is your branding appropriate and will it appeal to your audience?
• Do you have people with the necessary skills for the digital platform?
• Can you deliver what you will promise your customers?

Simple I know, but the answer to all the above should be ‘yes’. It’s not a definitive list of questions, but if you can give a positive answer to each one, then you are well on the way to online success.

The recent growth in eCommerce business is a hot topic, and one that is helping to shape both new and existing businesses’ route to the market. To learn more about how the online world is becoming and integral part of business, please visit my post on The year online and offline became one.

2. Your Products and Services

Your products and/or services are what your business is all about.

If you want to be successful, you need to evaluate your offering objectively — and the best way to do this is to research your competitors thoroughly.

You also need to draw a distinction between who you would like your competitors to be, and who they actually are — if you sell DVDs, it doesn’t necessarily mean that Amazon.co.uk is one of your main competitors.

Also make sure you have a plan of action in place for future product/service development, or for entering new markets. Product/service development is crucial in delivering an up-to-date offering to your audience. Entering new markets can always be a lucrative strategy, but you do need to make sure that the fresh market you plan to enter is related to your existing operations — you don’t want to alienate your present customer-base.

3. Your Website

It’s hard to think of a more crucial element to your overall strategy — your website is your High Street store, your digital catalogue, your business. Before launching, make sure your site is fit for the job, and that there are no irritating glitches or errors. If you’d like more advice on how best to build your online presence, please read my earlier post, How clear web design wins customers.

Tomorrow, I’ll continue this post with advice on your online visibility, your marketing opportunities and tackling your competitors.
 

(This is part two of Hannah Rampton’s post on eBay tools. Make sure you didn’t miss part one).

BayEstimator

BayEstimator is the most popular tool within the eBay Research Labs. It is very useful for those interested in creating effective, clear, search-friendly titles. Soon after launch, this tool was deactivated for a few weeks because it was so useful!

To use BayEstimator, you simply type in your item title, using all of your keywords, and the tool estimates potential traffic and relevancy of your terms on eBay. It then displays the results using a green circle that is sized to determine the ‘BayEstimate’, which is defined as “a rough measure of success”. The larger the circle, the higher the success rating.

The tool does not yet handle plurals, synonyms etc because they would make the tool and the interface even more complex. Every keyword is treated as unique, so please keep this in mind.

I tested out Bay Estimator by using it to research ‘reptile vivarium’. You can see below that I have searched for ‘Reptile Dragon Vivarium Enclosure’.
 

The availability column displays a typical item count for this search on eBay.

I can see that ‘vivarium’ has been assigned a much better success rate. However, I can see a good number of ‘enclosures’, so it would be worth be adding this into the title too. This way I can harness the most successful keyword (vivarium) along with the more popular choice (enclosure).

There is also a ‘modify item title’ column, so you can alter this a few times until you find something that contains all the information you need.

Better still, once you have generated all the keywords, you can then click on a keyword for more information. In this example I clicked on ‘vivarium’:

BayEstimator is now showing me that, in relation to ‘vivarium’, ‘reptile’ is more popular than ‘dragon’. It also generates other options such as additional keywords related to my item. As you can see, the second suggestion is ‘sliding’, which would suggest that many people searching for ‘vivarium’ add ‘sliding doors’ to further refine their search. If my product has sliding doors I may want to consider adding this into the title or subtitle.

If you click on the listed keywords, they will be added to your existing ones. You can continue doing this until you can see the stats for every keyword that you are considering, then filter out what you no longer need and rebuild your title at the top of the page.

The final column simply displays the categories that purchasers typically buy from, in relation to your keyword.

This tool is an estimator – please keep this in mind. It can offer great insight, and certainly help you create a much more effective title, but it is not the same as accessing live data. Note also that the tool does not support eBay Motors.

RepEx

RepEx stands for ‘Reputation Extractor Visualisation Prototypes’. This is a very simple tool — you just enter the username of an eBay user and it will display the last 90 days of feedback activity. You can generate multiple graphs, such as Volume Sparkline, Feedback Stats, Binary Sparkline, Volume Stars (round), Binary Stars (round), and Long Tail (all).

Hyades

Another simple tool, Hyades helps you learn about clusters of items — it groups items together and allows you to search within each cluster. This is fun for browsing but it can also give you a better view of your competition. Below I have searched for ‘Ed Hardy’ and I can clearly see the total number of items online, along with the number per cluster for each area containing ‘Ed Hardy’.

Emosi Sosial

Emosi Sosial means ‘social and emotional’ in Indonesian. All this tool does is to capture the emotions behind community feedback. A fun-looking legend is on the left and it simply displays the feedback for the user you request, along with emoticons. This tool enables real time querying, although only a subset of feedback data is obtained.

Color Search

Quite simply, this tool allows you to select a colour and then searches eBay items to match it. It is best for finding clothing and soft furnishings. It’s a great concept, but the demo works on a pre-cached set of images and not on live listings. Effectiveness must therefore depend on how frequently the listings are cached.

I hope these blog posts have given you some guidance for your eBay success. The tools have certainly helped me when using eBay stores. Whether you are clearing out your garage at home, or opening an eBay store, targeting the right keywords and categories can make a huge difference. Good luck!