For anyone working in ecommerce during the Christmas period, there are three words that fill them with fear – Out of Stock. How do online retailers handle this online, are they helping or hindering visitors to their website?
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All posts tagged ecommerce
Out of Stock – 5 ways that online retailers do it and 3 key learnings
Mega Monday? Not this week…
Both Amazon and Apple are both trying to migrate the Thanksgiving driven seasonal shopping duo of Black Friday and Cyber Monday over to the UK this year.
5 of the best Magento resources on the internet
There must be hundreds, if not thousands of blog posts regarding Magento. The quality varies greatly from expert insights from developers implementing Magento in Enterprise environments right through to first time developers giving awful hosting advice.
In this quick blog post the select groupof links below make up what I consider to be 5 of the best Magento resources online.
7 reasons why Magento should be your next ecommerce solution
It’s almost one year ago to the day that I updated the great-save.com domain to point at our new Magento Community Edition (CE) powered website. In those 12 months I’ve become very passionate about this ecommerce solution and learnt a huge amount about the key strengths of the open source platform.
Review: Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh (CEO, Zappos.com)
Over 244 pages Tony Hsieh, CEO of the world famous Zappos.com brand provides a wonderful insight into what made him the ‘hip, iconoclastic’ and inspirational CEO that he is today. When was the last time a book left you with a inspirational thought or idea after every section you read? This book not only delivers happiness, it delivers inspiration.
A $1.6 million e-commerce nightmare at 6pm.com
It’s every e-commerce managers nightmare – a product went live with the wrong price and customers have realised. In the bargain hungry, viral jungle of the internet a simple pricing mistake can cost you a significant amount of revenue.
Offline deliverability problems…
Typically ‘deliverability problems’ for an online business means problems with their email marketing, but for many small online businesses around the UK the Royal Mail strikes have created a whole new type of deliverability problem.
For businesses that are used to focusing on their PPC ROI and website conversion ratio, it’s often easy to take the normally reliable distribution of customers orders for granted. The recent strikes have resulted in a change of focus for pro-active, customer focused businesses from online to offline. Over the last week time has been spent:
- Researching, contacting and negotiating with alternative couriers.
- The implementation of a new third party courier into daily workflow and IT infrastructure (online & offline).
- Adding and updating online content to keep customers informed and reduce the impact on their conversion rate.
- The cost of upgrading customers orders to the least effected postal service Royal Mail offer (whilst negotiating with couriers) to ensure timely delivery and customer satisfaction.
- Dealing with the increase in customer communication via phone, email and live chat that delayed deliveries causes.
Large volume mail order businesses are in the envious position of having the resources to be able to switch couriers and take a fairly small hit on their bottom line, but for a small-scale e-commerce venture that relies on Royal Mail the strikes have had a serious impact:
Quantitative estimates of the number of items delayed (30 – 65 million items!) gives only a partial impression of the real impact on businesses around the UK that rely on post as a key part of their business. The unknown factor in all of this is customer perception, will people simply not even consider firing up Google and searching for the item they need to purchase. Instead heading for the safe harbour of the local high street, knowing that it maybe more expensive, but that potential delivery problems are not a factor in their buying decision.
One thing is certain, ‘bricks and mortar’ shops on the high street will have benefited from all of this.
Exceeding expectations – Zappos.com
Sometimes you hear about a concept that sounds to good to be true and I thought that was the case with the Zappos.com Culture Book. Fortunately after a little bit of Googling I found a blog post from a guy that had managed to get hold of a copy. He sang fantastic praise about the book and left a simple instruction on getting a copy if your outside the US – why not e-mail the CEO (Tony Hsieh)? So I that’s what did, in all honesty I was expecting to get an auto-reply or not hear anything at all, after all how many CEO’s have the time or inclination to reply to a request like this? Then within a couple of hours a response came back requesting my postal address and additionally offering a tour around their HQ if I’m ever in Vegas. Now this to me exceeded my expectations by a mile and has become a story I tell to a lot of people.
The 2008 edition is around the 500 page mark and gives an insight into how the business ethos was created and then has page-upon-page of testimonials. Now the difference with these testimonials from traditional customer ones are that they all come from the staff that work there! Whilst it sounds crazy, each one is a response to a question put to them by their CEO – What does the Zappos culture mean to you?
If you haven’t heard of Zappos, take a trip to their site, browse their blog and look at Zappos Twitter stream to begin to get under the skin of a business that in 2008 just passed the $1 billion sales mark. The whole business is built around one mission: to provide the best customer service possible. This is a fantastic goal for any company and particularly in the current economic climate should be at the top of any companies to-do list and from my experience is part of the company culture from the CEO down!
To get a copy of the book, you can now simply order one online and at $15 is amazing value for the difference that reading it could make to your business – Zappos 2008 Culture Book
Wanted: Magento Developer…
I’m on the look out for an individual or company that’s experienced with the relatively new e-commerce platform Magento. Our current e-commerce solution has done extremely well, but it’s time to move to a more substantial e-commerce solution. If you can help, email me – info [@] simonlilly.co.uk
Simon Lilly: Hi AlanD and thanks for the comment. The legislation is over zealous a...
AlanD: Does this legislation apply to every website created by anyone in the ...
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