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Well once again Christmas is rapidly approaching us, people will soon stop complaining about shops going all christmasy too early and start to think about buying presents themselves. For retailers, both online and high street Christmas 2009 is going to be very interesting. It’s fair to say that Christmas 2008 was not easy for many retailers. The so called recession was just taking hold, the media were in a frenzy trying to suggest that capitalism was about to go into melt down. To say it was a tough year for retailers would be an understatement.

I think this year things will be different, despite what we see on the news the capitalist lifestyle goes on, people are still shopping, buying new cars and new clothes. There is still plenty of money sloshing around in the system and those that have it are not afraid to spend it. Indeed without this being the case there might be a real danger of economic melt down.

One sector that has continued to do well throughout the recession is the luxury market. The credit crunch did not affect those who were cash rich, in fact to them it has represented massive opportunity to make money. It is those in debt or who need credit who have suffered dearly. One such example is a company selling chess sets who against all apparent odds established themselves just as the economic downturn took effect.

They were part of a company who had previously sold cut price wooden toys and games but in 2008 they decided to become the UK’s biggest and best online chess retailers, with a speciality in selling very luxury chess sets. They managed to secure an exclusive contract with one of the worlds finest producers of wooden chessmen and then set about marketing these amazing products using modern and dynamic Internet retailing techniques. One excellent thing about their website is the photographs, they are so clear and really show all the detail of the products they are selling.

The results were good, while other companies were scaling things back these guys saw their turnover double! While the competitors blood boiled and they lowered their prices, the customers flocked to this new company and wanted to shop for quality, not discount. They quickly realised that they were onto a good thing so has to set about securing trademark and copy rights over their chess brand and identity.

So this Christmas it might be time to buy a chess set and see for yourself what this new company is all about. It’s nice to be a part of their success, especially at a time when more companies are going bust than starting up. We can guarantee that you wont be disappointed if you do. Oh yes, I almost forgot, if you are looking for them, they are called The Regency Chess Company, look them up, I did!

Once again Amazon have decided to bring in their ‘Christmas selling Guidelines’ for toy and games sellers on their marketplace platform. The guidelines only apply to third party sellers who sell products in the toy and game category on their site. The upshot is that sellers who don’t meet the ‘criteria’ get banned from selling on the site during the peak selling season (Christmas).

What is most galling about this process is the lack of tolerance on Amazons behalf. If a seller suffers a mere 1% order defect rate they will be suspended during Christmas. Contributions to the order defect rate are brought from receiving a negative feedback comment from the customer. So if you make one hundred sales, and one customer leaves a bad comment your business could be left in tatters!

Of course Amazon feel that this is all justified in the name of preserving the customer experience. We would all agree that keeping bad sellers off the platform is vital, all year round, not just at select times of the year. I sense there is a second motive, one whereby they wish to cull a certain number of sellers in this category. Why else would they set such low tolerance and draconian criteria for their sellers at this critical time?

The whole system is drastically unfair. Amazon ask their customers to rate the shopping experience after they have purchased from a third party seller. In the innocent eyes of the customer they are simply leaving a comment, nothing more, nothing less. They are completely unaware of the fact that if they decide to give a low feedback score the end result could be a small business shutting down, the staff being made redundant and sent home all due to the main sales channel of the company has been removed!

It’s likely we will never know the true reasons behind Amazons crazy plan for the Christmas Selling Guidelines, what ever they are the net result is a huge amount of stress for small business owners who rely heavily on Amazon for their sales income. At a time when the economy is in recession and business needs all the help it can get it comes as a very poor show from Amazon to implement this vile policy for a second year running!

Website testing, we have all done it right? What do we mean by website testing? Too many online retailers are neglecting this essential practice, instead focusing their efforts on trying to get more targeted traffic to their website. Of course, everyone tests their website in the very beginning. That first live test purchase on the company credit card to ensure everything is working as it should. But what about real testing, what we are talking about is of course usability testing.

When you are involved in the design and building of a website it soon becomes impossible to look upon it objectively. It’s too easy to assume that all of your visitors are finding the navigation, checkout and purchasing processes just as easy as you do. This is however a big mistake, until your site has undergone proper testing you will have very little information about where things are going wrong for your visitors and what might be standing in the way of them buying something or completing a conversion.

Ask yourself what you do when you are browsing a website and you get stuck, the navigation is not doing what you think it should, you can’t find something, or a web form is not playing ball. The usual course of action is to hite the nuke button and leave the site never to return.

Our online chess set retailing business recently embarked on a series of website tests. Prior to this we had spent hours if not days staring at our site, our checkout pages and navigation in an attempt to try and refine the customer experience and make it a easy as possible to buy from our site. The website testing really is the acid test. Having now undergone the testing we can see that before it took place we were essentially fumbling around in the dark. Imagine a new software program tested by the guy who programmed it, is he the best person to test it?

Usability testing can take on a number of forms, in it’s most primitive form it can involve a test subject sat at a P.C using the website with a video camera behind them taping the screen. These days things have moved on. We have software such as Snapz Pro that allows you to record everything that takes place on the screen and also include an audio track. There are also live online solutions that will record the screen activity of your actual live visitors, although last time we checked this was still beyond the budget scope of the average small E-retailer.

More complex forms of testing involve eye direction sensors that actually record where abouts on the screen the user is looking. A large sample frame of testing subjects results in data that looks rather like a weather temperature map, with a hot orange colour for the areas that gained most attention, and cold blues or the areas that gained the least attention. These tests have been used extensively to evaluate the effect of online advertising. Tests like this on major search engines have showed that (not surprisingly) people dedicate most of their attention to the top left hand side of the page, avoiding the sponsored ads on the right and losing their attention further down the page.

Testing for small online retailers on a tight budget

Testing doesn’t need to involve huge cost, gadgets and expensive consultants. You can undertake your own testing quite simply and easily. Download some software that will allow you to capture the session and save it as a movie, ideally with a sound track. You then need some test subjects. It’s prudent to get as many possible test subjects as you can. At least ten to start with, maybe twenty or thirty if you can muster it. The aim of the exercise is to record the web browsing activities of your test subjects and then analyse the video to see where they had difficulties in using the site.

Reverse your goals

In order to create some consistency within your testing group it’s wise to set a goal and ask your test subjects to enter the site from the home page and then try to achieve this goal. We have created scenarios for people to work through with an ultimate goal of them purchasing a product. We provided them with the test credit card details from our payment gateway so that spending real money wasn’t going to be necessary.

The Revelation

The results were, as we thought they would be, very surprising. We were shocked to see some testers getting completely stuck at stages in the checkout and aborting their purchase. As well as the videos we asked the test subjects to provide some verbal feedback on their user experience. The results meant we were put to work making improvements to our site, specifically the checkout process, pretty much straight away.

If you are the webmaster of an e commerce website and you are not testing, you should be. Effective testing and implementation of improvements will increase your conversion rates, which in turn means you will get a lot more bang for your buck when it comes to paid traffic. As the old saying goes…. testing testing, one, two, three!

The situation is very familiar to online merchants. Shortly after your website goes live and your first google sponsored ads are launched the phone rings. “Can I speak to the person in charge of your online marketing please?” Seasoned E merchants will know exactly what I am referring to. A company calls you to offer you an amazing opportunity to be one of the merchants within their highly successful sales platform. They have a slot for a merchant selling just the sort of products you sell and they want you to fill it.

They promise 1000s of sales, for which they will take a commission, but there is a small sign up and integration fee, often in the region of £1000. At this point you might have conjured up images of a large Nigerian man on the other end of the phone trying his best with the latest scam. The reality is that the person on the other end of the phone is working in the UK, for a UK registered eMarketing company, but you were right about the scam part!

For legal reasons I will mention no names in this blog post but it’s safe to say that eTailers both young and old need to be extremely careful when signing up for these so called sales platforms. It’s quite typical for these companies to mention a selection of household names, brands and newspapers that they are affiliated with, indeed one of them even associates themselves with a member of the House of Lords! Don’t be fooled by the verbal tirade of positive affirmations about the so called product they are trying to sell you.

Changing names, changing faces

The massive amount of bad press that these companies receive online, on blogs and in forum posts has lead to the unsurprising situation whereby many of them have undergone a name change. As all good marketing professionals will tell you, changing the name of your reputable & established brand is a great idea! (That was me being sarcastic by the way).

It seems that every time they call there is a new member of the sales team, staff turnover in these places is high, very high. With poor record keeping and no joined up thinking the result is that no matter how loudly you shout the word “no” you can expect a freshed faced sales recruit to be back on the phone to you within six months. I have lost count of the number of calls I have had from a relatively small number of companies.

Avoiding the scams

On my travels I have spoken to many internet merchants who have fallen foul of these marketing companies, it pains me every time I hear of another small business who have handed £1000 or more over to one of these truth dodging organisations. Here is my top five checklist for dealing with these companies.

1. Do your research. Google their company name, check out what others say on forums and do some detective work

2. Offer a bigger commission. There is logic to the madness, offer to pay them an increased sales commission per transaction in exchange for wiping the joining fee to zero. If they know that x% of nothing is … well… nothing then they are certain to turn your offer down.

3. Contact other merchants on the platform. If you are seriously thinking of signing up try contacting another merchant who is already on the platform, ask them how they are finding it.

4. There is no magic bullet. Always remember that with internet marketing there is no single marketing method that is going to bring you all the sales you want. If someone is trying to tell you otherwise, they are lying!

5. Bin the hard sell. If a cold call marketing sales person is giving you the sort of hard sell you would expect from a double glazing salesman then end the call. Serious internet marketing plans are not made on the spot and they don’t require you to ‘Sign up today’.