G-Forces Polska Blog

40x page speed increase by avoiding sessions in PHP

2017-07-11T16:58:00.000+02:00

Sessions - what's not to love in them? Convenient ($_SESSION), unobtrusive and friendly helper for storing current user's account IDs (actual session information), their profile photo URL (lazy caching) or all the information which normally should be in $_GET to keep all URLs the same (asking for trouble). Ever wondered what's the cost of such convenience? Wonder no more - a lot.

Some background for reference. We're working on a piece of web software with non-trivial, but also not Google-y traffic levels - hundreds of dynamic requests per second. What's specific about our case is that our code integrates several 3rd party APIs to present valuable information to visitors. Significant part of our work is ensuring this setup performs well, so we have various layers of caching and are constantly trying to convert slower APIs to asynchronous calls to minimize its effect on overall experience. Because of this we have a set of AJAX calls which go through our web layer to either cache or slow-replying API.

We're serving from automatically scaling infrastructure on AWS, enjoying significant money savings during less demanding times (more about that in one of future posts). That setup requires that sessions are stored in Memcached rather than filesystem, which would be a default case for single instance. It does not mean our problems won't be affecting smaller and riskier setups, it just may take a while until you spot it as a performance issue, but trust me - it's there.

If you treat PHP sessions as transparent goodie which just works then I suggest spending few minutes to go through PHP manual section on that subject. It won't hurt. In context of this post it's important to mention that variables stored in session for a given visitor are loaded with call to session_start() or by default if session.auto_start is set to 1 in php.ini. That loads session data using session ID, which usually stored in a temporary cookie. It's important to note that session data is locked to prevent concurrent writes, so only one script may operate on a session at any time. If you open 2 browser tabs which use the same session and make a request which takes 30 seconds in one of them, then the other will be unresponsive until the first one finishes. Fortunately, this behaviour can be overridden by manually calling session_write_close() when you are done using it in your current request, but that's something you need to plan based on what your app does.

Why should you care?

That's why:

That's doubled or tripled performance by simply removing reliance on sessions. We're now getting consistent processing times in range of 5-8ms. 40-50% of that is making a request to Memcached to fetch cached content, which officially means it's not our problem anymore :)

Meh?

Depending on configuration of our sites the number of requests to the server can vary significantly. While an improvement from 30ms down to 5ms makes us quite happy, we also have some more radical examples, like this one:

We've easily made the site 40x faster in this case. The post-optimisation times are in the same 5-8ms range as the simpler sites, which shows that it's very easy to lose 150-200ms using sessions by default.

What can you do to recover lost performance?

- browse your source - make sure you understand how sessions are created and consider options to include it only if certain conditions are met (eg. user is accessing backend of the site). Digging into hidden layers of your web framework won't hurt - it might be opening session all the time and keeping it around until the end.
- start measuring - we're using NewRelic, but you can easily find something that meets your needs
- push sessions somewhere else - you might be fine by storing what you need in cookies rather than session if it's reasonably small amount of information. GET params and browser's local storage are potential alternatives too
- finish almost prematurely - if you really need session to be available, then at least try to have all session related operations completed early in the processing pipeline and session_write_close() ASAP. You can copy session variables to local variables for reading later. If there is an OO wrapper around your session, then consider decorating/overriding write accesses to session with opening and closing session, but try not to overdo it.
- identify locked areas - for biggest improvements look at any requests going from the browser back to the server - AJAX calls, fetching JSON, downloading assets through proxy PHP script etc.

Your mileage may vary, so make sure to test your results before and after tinkering around.

10 ways for teaching better programmers

2012-12-04T18:24:00.000+01:00

The general opinion is that Poland is a country with great programmers. International competitions for programmers won by Poles take place so often that any information concerning them are starting to become boring. Our country’s representatives could use some gratitude, and the rest of our society – some education on how such competitions translate into IT innovations and virile businesses. Because they do not translate at all. Problems solved during such competitions have a strongly academic character. There are not easier or more difficult than the problems handled each day by programmers-graduates of Polish universities. They are just different. The wellbeing at universities being the result of IT competition successes masks the actual condition of the education of Polish programmers. The truth is unfortunately sad. Universities produce thousands of IT specialists – non-flexible, not well oriented outside of their fields (yes, MA graduates consider themselves specialists!), having problems with working on projects requiring to work in teams and for more than a week. We go from a broad education to a five-year long series of casual trainings with myriads of full time corporation employees produced by the schools. Small local companies can’t afford to additionally educate graduates to reach an efficient level. Someone introducing these changes lacked imagination. We won’t win with India or China by manufacturing universal “programming resources”. The key to successes in IT education, measured with the use of the Polish economic development, is educating flexible programmers, possessing a wide range of skills, also outside of IT. They will learn the programming language necessary in a given situation within a week, but they have to be aware of the advantages and disadvantages of available solutions. It can’t be that a student graduates and believes that the technologies which he or she uses for work won’t ever change.

Below I present 10 ideas on how to improve the quality of Polish higher IT education. None of these make the life of the school or the students easier. But each will have measurable effects in the graduate’s future career, regardless whether it is going to be executed at a corporation, small company, or an own business.

1. Open source

For me it is mind-boggling that each year the works of a few hundred students are used only to grade them. Perhaps the quality of software created during classes is not high, but nothing stands in the way of that code being used by someone else in the future, for example to understand some programming ideas. All projects created during the course of studies should be automatically published under one of the open source licenses (selecting the correct license constitutes a following useful experience), unless there are any serious contraindications (for example a project executed in terms of a cooperation with a company). Additionally the publication should be executed in a generally known location (university code repository or a public SourceForge/GitHub service), and the school should keep an information where such projects are stored, in order to ensure easy access. There is nothing worse for the code’s quality than teaching a programmer that programming consists in writing a code for three nights in a row in order to present it to the teacher for 2 minutes, and then to disappear in the voids of time. One can also not exclude the possibility that a valuable open source project won’t be created on the base of a seemingly simple academic code.

2. Academic IT

Academic IT systems often constitute interesting museum exhibits. Over the course of my studies, the base for the school’s functioning was constituted by an agglomeration of incompatible programs created more or less a decade before I got there. If schools want to be trustworthy then they should, at least to a certain extent, create software for their own purposes by themselves internally. Of course not everything can be created in terms of a moderately sober and chaotic team of first year students, but if we expect a graduate to be a useful member of a team working on a space probe’s software, then we can not assume that a system assigning rooms at the dormitory is above his or her capabilities. Such an approach requires the school to have a vision in terms of developing own IT systems and project management. It will be for the best for PhD-theoreticians from these fields, and at the same time it is going to allow the students to pinpoint talents which can handle some of these tasks.

3. Links

90% of projects in the course of studies consist in individual work. In such a model it is difficult to learn the principles of creating software which is supposed to be a part of a larger whole. No one cares to name the methods logically, for a reasonable order of parameters, or even to discard a useless, commented, temporary code. Such a mode of work results in graduates having serious problems to create a code which other programmers can easily browse through. It is also more difficult to integrate a code created in such a way. A solution is to sensitize students to create software in a form assuming that it will be used outside of class. On one hand it makes it necessary to create at least a vestigial code documentation (preferably in a form implemented in the code), and on the other hand – to sensitize the need to create various access interfaces (API) for the data and functionalities made available by the created apps. Professional software for many years now is not created in a vacuum, but rather constitutes an effect of combining many loosely integrated systems.

4. White elephants

IT studies intend to prepare a future programmer to work individually on a code created from the base. The problem is that right after graduation the programmer will be thrown inside a project in development for five years, by a team of ten people, and which has been completely changed three times over the course of the years. Shock, bafflement, and horror at the sight of a code which purpose no one can even remember – that’s how a vast portion of a programmer’s career is going to look like. One has to be able to get control over that mess, order it, and transform for the purposes of productive work. So let’s throw students into working on a project created by other students, or at least themselves, but written three years earlier! Blood, sweat, and tears of a programmer’s true work. All modern programming techniques – managing versions, automated unit and functional tests, continuous integration, and many other techniques were created to get control over the messiness of real work. Schools try to show that that’s not the case

5. Flexibility

I’m observing a worrying tendency to direct the education of programmers in terms of a career path related to a specific programming language. For some time the stress has been placed on Java, and now C# is significantly leading. Graduates who have not written anything longer over the course of their studies than 10 thousand lines assume that they are experts and already know everything. No one told them that before Java and C# there was a myriad of various popular languages, or that there are hundreds of programming languages for specific purposes – they will persistently visualize data by drawing lines instead of using R, for processing text they won’t try using regular expressions, and they won’t even think of taking advantage of the capabilities of a graphic card to increase the speed of numerical calculations. Studies should inspire the will to search for the easiest solutions to the encountered problem. Innovations don’t come from creating a community of programming dogsbodies.

6. Interdisciplinarity

A general computerization of basically all fields of life is a fact for more or less twenty years now, but this knowledge somehow passes by school IT departments. Just like a few decades before, students optimize sorting algorithms, search through binary trees, and impatiently await the start of their careers when enlightened clients, after some deep thinking, will give them high quality specifications for system requirements concerning following projects. Unfortunately such a world does not exist. Whereas, there is a world in which people and companies have undefined problems, and which have to be discovered, specified, and solved by graduates of IT studies. This world is not far away - it usually sits behind a desk in the next building, at a different department. Schools should care to create interdisciplinary teams in which the programming skills of one student complement the knowledge from a different field possessed by a different student. Processing large amounts of data in DNA chains, automatic text processing, visualizing processes and data – the possibilities for cooperation between departments are limitless. At the same time the future programmer gets to know how to gather requirements, learns that not everything is always clear, that his or her role is to help to execute a specific “business” intention, and not constitute an obstruction in that process.

7. Code reuse

Most IT studies are just a smoke and mirror show in which the teachers pretend to check on the progress of individual students, while the students themselves pretend to work with each other on preparing programs graded by the teachers. Time to end this. Studies stigmatize a practice which is very desirable for companies. A programmer who can find a ready-made solution on the internet (with an acceptable license) is much more valuable than the one spending two weeks on implementing it individually. The awareness of the availability of free tools simplifying work, proficiency in understanding the advantages, disadvantages, and limitations of common open source licenses, the ability to assess the quality and usefulness of solutions prepared by others, and a habit to search for what’s ready and not reinventing the wheel, are all going to translate into a better work efficiency in the future. Of course it is also necessary to teach the students that there are situations when taking advantage of generally available solutions is not right.

8. Competition-optimization

During my studies there once was a rather simple project with a quite unusual discriminant – the base for receiving a grade was not to execute the programming task but the efficiency of implementation in comparison to the other students. Such a task is obviously very Darwinian in its nature – if only the best will win, then there is no reason to help the competition. However, something completely different happened – for a week, all of the students exchanged tricks and suggestions (of course everyone left some secrets for themselves), we’ve all followed each other’s progress and tried to stay updated as to the unofficial ranking. As a result of this healthy competition, the average efficiency of the created code increased a few dozen- a few hundred times over the course of one week, and a few hundred students studying computational complexity have learned its practical meaning. The fastest code, the least used memory, the least amount of created code, the best scale parameters of the solution – there are millions of various criteria for creating such optimization tasks, allowing students to better understand the dependencies between them.

9. Tools

Taking into consideration the scale of the projects executed in terms of studies, it’s difficult to be surprised by the fact that the emphasis on tools improving the work of a programmer is so small. In the most radical cases this means that graduates of five year long IT studies are afraid to use a debugger. In a slightly less severe form this is represented by the fact that they have only a slight idea about automating tests, continuous delivery, or even about various approaches to versioning and its role in software development. Understanding of programming tools is usually limited to an editor/IDE and the basic handling of a compiler. Paradoxically, in the field of innovating the work of a programmer, schools seem to be forced to chase after companies which despite significant difficulties with periodical changes in terms of the used technologies, can not withhold the pressure to expedite their work.

10. Working in groups

Most of the above mentioned methods can be summed up in the form of a simple requirement – more teamwork. The times of programmers individually working on a code at night, introducing a project to the world after not being exposed to sunlight for half a year, are long behind us (left more or less in the 1980s). There are still some exceptions from this rule but the complexity of today’s IT projects makes it impossible to execute them in teams smaller than 5 people, and hundreds of programmers working on one project aren’t really something out of the ordinary. That is unfortunately something IT studies fail to teach. This approach has to be drastically changed – starting with supporting programming in pairs, and ending even with a common project for the entire class. We can not expect that programmers well educated in theory are going to constitute valuable members of a team if for 5 years we purposefully destroy their natural social fabric in terms of a group. During studies challenges are reduced to the scale in which entire projects can be executed within one overnight programming session, one day prior to the deadline.
Is this a list exhausting the subject? No. Is this a list presenting perfect solutions? No. Are these changes easy to be included in the didactic requirements? Surely not. I have assumed a very convenient position here – I gave a few ideas and I push any responsibility for their practical execution away from me. However, the fact is that there is a difference between the methods of educating programmers and the actual expectations of businesses (small and large). I get the impression that the teaching methods are still stuck in the pioneering, hacker period in which the programmer was a resource, in which he or she was located in a tightly sealed place for the duration of the project. However, much has changed over the last decades, and today’s programmer has to be first and foremost a team player. And sometimes even leave that tightly sealed room.

Burning one’s bridges in business

2011-03-21T18:20:00.000+01:00

Business is often compared to war. Tricks, attacking from behind a cover, planning a number of actions in advance, and especially the need to depend on a group of people, all of which have different motivations, needs, and characters – all of these seem to strongly connect these two fields of human life. It is precisely war to which the saying about burning one’s bridges refers to. In the general understanding, it’s about making a decision from which there is no turning back and about persistently moving forward without looking back. From this point of view the character of burning one’s bridges is clearly offensive. The fact that during a war no rationally thinking leader would allow to cross out the possibility to return in a situation of a radical shift in plans (and the direction of movement) due to unexpected conditions, is quite ironic. A typical soldier won’t fight better in a situation from which there is no way out, but is going to surrender. Burning one’s bridges behind was often used in a completely different context – to prevent the enemy from continuing an attack. After returning to the east coast of the Rhine, Romans have burned the bridges so that Germanic peoples irritated by their visit could not return the favor. Of course the goal of such actions was defensive and not offensive.

Running a business, one can not afford to misinterpret burning bridges and to treat this saying as an encouragement to ignore common sense and blindly follow an own vision. Business changes with each day and one has to have as many options to change a direction as possible. One has to be aware that when running a business there is no option of not stepping in someone’s way. First and foremost this means direct competition, but after all, we may also come into conflict with a contractor or an employee. It is important not to take this personally. Sometimes a person contacting our company has no saying in a decision which has a negative impact on our company. In such situations it is sometimes necessary to keep one’s mouth shut, and take the punch with a poker face. Business changes constantly and with it so do people. Today’s employee of a company which breaks off an important contract, may tomorrow be the president of a much larger company. A person leaving your company, tomorrow may make important decisions concerning contractors somewhere else, and will surely remember what was the attitude towards him or her. In some situations it is difficult to keep a tense situation under control and not get carried away. Then it is worth to consider whether just a moment of letting off steam is worth the future of a company built with such effort for many years.

At G-Forces Polska we do our best to execute the above described principles in practice. I have to say that it is nice to sometimes talk with a competitive company honestly about the industry’s perspectives or to have an order placed by a client who from a business point of view initially seemed to be a waste of time. If you are running your own company then I strongly encourage you to consider who do you really need to fight. Often you will notice that even direct competitors are really harmless co-players in competing for the attention of clients, most often handled by a practical monopolist who you are really afraid of. Is it worth to cause them problems and make their lives more difficult? Or perhaps it is better to spend some time on perfecting own products or offer? It is worth to remember the lesson given to us by the Romans, and by burning bridges to protect the access to our own field while running forward (patents, better product quality, investments, development), instead of making it impossible to retreat in a crisis situation.

Facebook in e-commerce – a chance or a threat?

2010-12-21T12:16:00.000+01:00

The passing year in e-commerce is the year of online stores testing the potential of sales through social networks, and mainly Facebook. A number of platforms have been created all over the world, allowing to launch a store with this service, including two in Poland - inFlavo and Shop@Social. It has to be clearly stated that there is as of today insufficient reliable data concerning selling over this new medium. At the same time, the potential of a service with a few hundred million users who may become potential clients of our e-business, is tempting for many pioneers. Some time ago I began to wonder what is it that a website such as Facebook can offer online stores, and more generally speaking – how may it impact sales as such. This is absolutely not an introduction to discuss the sense of social-commerce, because I have no doubt that there is potential in a service possessing hundreds of millions of receivers. It’s more about analyzing who will be the biggest beneficiary of the changes which we are witnessing.

In order to present my thoughts we have to initially go back to the beginning of e-commerce. Many companies with their basic field of action being the internet, came to life in the 1990s. The most important and well known example is Amazon which was one of e-commerce’s pioneers, and up to this day is the leader in terms of sales among online stores. The following can be clearly seen among the factors which made it possible for Amazon to become the leader, and later allowed for a rapid sales development and the growth of the company to the level of an international corporation:

A rapid increase in the number of potential clients, proportional to the growth of internet users
A skillful price competition with traditional stores thanks to lower costs
Mechanisms and procedures building lasting relations with clients
Taking proper advantage of the sales capabilities using affiliate networks and Google AdWords
No competition from brands known from traditional trade, during the initial stage of development

This is of course not a complete list, and the analysis of the origins of Amazon’s success constitutes the subject of a number of books and lectures in terms of many study courses, but one has to acknowledge that this company started with nothing, took its chance, and joined the ranks of the largest companies in the world. I would like to focus on the last two mentioned factors.

Google AdWords and partner programs are tools which role I define as democratizing advertising. Before, advertising was reserved for the big ones. I can’t imagine advertising being executed with a budget of PLN 500/month before AdWords, unless in the form of an information posted on a wooden post outside a store. Even in the initial stages of online advertising Yahoo has copied the traditional model of media advertising, with large budgets, unclear relation of an ad with its effects, and basing sales on a direct contact with the client. By introducing AdWords Google allowed small companies to independently manage advertising on a smaller scale and with a limited budget. That, combined with a persistently created partner network of small content suppliers allowed for an organic increase of sales at the new field of internet at a relatively small competition. The first e-traders took advantage of the unique opportunity which was discovering an area in which they had basically unlimited possibilities to develop, and which has not yet become an interest of any major player. They have broadened their reach and became so strong that brands entering the field of internet had to build their position from scratch, in conditions unfamiliar to them. Up to this day small and medium sized online stores are able to win over their own niches due to the fact that they are more effective in finding receivers and encouraging them to perform a purchase.

Facebook turns this model upside down. Stores are being established in terms of Fan Pages, meaning pages gathering people with a positive attitude toward a given brand. Each brand fights for the attention of a potential client by sending messages. In a clear way this leads to a classic model of reach advertising in which the recipient having a limited amount of time at his or her disposal, begins to select the messages reaching him or her. In terms of television he or she switches to a different advertising channel, flips the page of a paper, and with Facebook restricts certain Fan Pages the access to the information read by him or her. How much more different is this model than the one included in Google AdWords where the field to be filled with ads is basically unlimited – the more precisely you will determine the target group through proper keywords, the less competition you are going to have (although, the reach of course becomes smaller).

A great war for the attention of social network users awaits us in the nearby future, and during that war there will be many victims in the form of services with less promotion capabilities. Facebook is a world in which large brands with solid market positions, will do best. It can already be seen that the difference in the scale of effects between global brands treating the internet as one of many marketing channels, and the internet autochthones is definitely in favor of the first ones. This seems to be the function of the advertising budget – the larger the budget, the more “fans” and more options to monetize them. So we have 21 million fans of Coca-Cola + loosely counting one million fans of related pages, including 300 thousand fans of the Coca-Cola Christmas Snow Globes page, and “only” half a million of Amazon.com fans (+350 thousand for Kindle). There are more fans of the Borders bookstore chain which online store takes the honorable 194th place among the largest online stores in the USA. So are strictly online stores worse in handling clients on the internet than traditional companies? No – it is the rules of Facebook which have less to do with internet promotion than it may seem.

In the Polish reality we can for example look at the Fan Page of Skarpetkowo.pl, a store run by one of the pioneers of social commerce in our country - Viren Bhandari. The Fan Page has more than 1200 fans gathered at a time when not that many people used Facebook in Poland. In the right corner - Maxwell House, Empik.com, or other traditional brands. A completely different trade, different budgets for advertising, and the result – 60 x more fans. Such are the effects of a clash between a small online store, including its team devoted to create relations in social networks, with a traditional media advertisement machine executed lifelessly by an advertising agency.

When deciding to invest in social commerce, online stores should be aware that their previous experiences in terms of advertising on the internet are more an obstacle than an advantage. When fighting a stronger opponent it is key to avoid a direct clash, and even more so to attack it on its premises. Facebook is not “ours” but “their”. Be aware of that or otherwise it is going to hurt.

PS. I don’t wish bad to the promoters of social commerce as a cool method to develop sales at a small store through direct contact with nice clients. Quite the contrary. I do believe however, that they should drastically reconsider their target ☺

Conversion at the best online stores

2010-11-14T12:06:00.000+01:00

Today I have dug up an interesting report concerning the conversion at online stores best in it. The report on which I’ve based is the Lessons Learned from the Top 10 Converting Websites report, available at www.seewhy.com. I encourage those interested in the subject to download the report, and here I will only present the interesting observations included in it.

Before a discussion will begin about the choice of stores for the report and the validity of the conversion data, I want to mention, that that’s not the issue ☺. It is also worth to mention that ten stores were presented in the research and Amazon has been added as the eleventh, as it is the most popular store so it’s easier to compare with it.

From the 10 best converting online stores:

9 out of 10 do not offer free shipping
8 out of 10 allow to register an account without placing an order
In the first five, 4 out of 5 require a full registration before purchasing
9 out of 10 include a clearly posted free phone number on the main page, only 2 out of 10 provide a contact e-mail address, so less than a chat option included by 3 out of 10 stores
The average number of checkout pages is 3.9
The average number of available shipping and payment methods is 3.7
10 out of 10 include a progress indicator at the checkout
10 out of 10 allow to ship to a different address than that of the buyer
8 out of 10 remember the client’s cart after leaving the store
9 out of 10 allows for a final verification of the cart’s contents at the checkout
3 out of 10 verify the email address when creating an account
6 out of 10 include product reviews added by the clients
6 out of 10 present bestsellers in a special location on the website
9 out of 10 allows to search for a product by directly entering the catalogue number (but Amazon does not!)
Half of the stores are designed in the 1024x768 resolution, the remaining half in a lower one, and Amazon adjusts the width of the display’s resolution

The report’s summary includes three tips for stores:

The client constitutes not a one-time transaction but a life-time one
A great search engine and cross-selling constitute the key elements increasing conversion
Remarketing, so promoting within an own client base

For a long time now, I wonder about the logic behind “traditional” methods of increasing conversion, meaning minimizing checkout pages and removing any obstacles on the client’s way to the payment screen. Of course one can not assume that a store will convert properly if the contact form is going to be upside down, but in practice such optimizations may increase the conversion from 1% to 1.5%. A good personalized mailing to an own client base, presenting news and promotions in the offer, may give the store a one time conversion of over ten percent. In this case, Amazon is the absolute champion, as its newsletters are based on so much data that one can actually state that Amazon really does predict our shopping plans before we do. It’s worth considering how these observations can be used at our own online stores.

E-business 101: content is king

2010-08-11T12:02:00.000+02:00

Many beginner online businesses struggle with the lack of an idea how to acquire clients, which is typical for the “infancy” period. There is an interesting idea how to make money, there are funds to start humbly, there are products to be sold, there’s just no one there to buy. What sets profitable and not so young online companies apart from an exemplary store created two days ago? The understanding that the key for making money is original content. A typical online “consumer” absolutely does not focus on this, but deciding to open up an online company you do have to understand these mechanisms and fluently take advantage of them.

The importance of content in business has been initially presented in the development of traditional media. Since it’s very beginning the press based its power on generating large quantities of written words. High quality materials, dealing with various topics allow newspapers to attract readers who constitute the most important capital of any press publisher. Contrary to popular belief, the press does not earn much from the money exchanged by a client for a few dozen printed pages. The basic source of income for media companies is the possibility to resell a portion of their clients’ attention to advertisers. Prices for advertising in popular papers reach significant amounts (great discounts are given in terms of these prices but that’s something for a different post). So much it is worth for the advertiser to reach potential clients. The source of the constant flow of clients is the content created by journalists, paid for basing on the amount of written content, or for example the so called lineage. All commercial media in the world function basing on the principle that somewhere there is someone devoting time to create something original in a form allowing to provide that something to larger numbers of receivers. Creating content is, and will be for some time, expensive. Why? Because this process can not yet be automated. We can put a machine worth one million dollars in a plant and save two million a year worth in people, but we can not build a machine to generate papers, because somewhere at the very source there is a human being with a life expectancy, and thus possessing limited resources to create content. Media try for a long time now to optimize the process of creating content in terms of costs. Papers include notes only slightly differing from “news” bought from press agencies, half of the paper is reserved for political news where a few hundred politicians compete for the best “headline” statements. Stock market news are basically automatically generated tables and charts, and the last few pages are devoted to sports where it’s always easy to fill half a page with score tables or explicitly comment on whether the national team performs bad or well.

The business model of traditional media has transferred to the internet without any significant changes in the form of portals. It is precisely there where creating low-cost content has been perfected. The basic information rely on agency news almost in 100%, slightly modifying the content to look original. Due to introducing such changes and the rapid speed of work appalling news can be often seen, with the same paragraph being repeated a number of times, or with a missing part of the article due to which it loses any sense. Apart from methods borrowed from traditional media, portals heavily take advantage of the free works of their readers who fight each other in the comments, in the middle of the night, to the bitter end. Perhaps this is low-quality content but it does attract following readers who can be “monetized” by showing them ads.

At first sight, what’s different between an online store handled by an experienced tradesman from that run by a beginner? The length of product descriptions. Most beginner salesmen don’t have any idea how to describe their products. I often come across stores with descriptions consisting of one sentence, and let us not even speak about stores without product descriptions or photos. In contrast, it’s worth looking at a product page at Amazon.com where, in the case of a book, apart from the basic description we will find: the table of content, an exemplary chapter, other books purchased by clients interested in that book, detailed technical data (including the issue number and its date), reviews, links to sites including detail information on the authors, or a thematic forum for clients, as well as many other things I haven’t mentioned. All of these information work in favor of acquiring clients but at the same time allow to profit from advertising, cleverly located on the product’s page. What can be often seen instead of displaying any of these information is an ad, which at a laughably low traffic is so stupid that I begin to doubt the seller’s competences and leave in fear for the transaction’s security. As the owner of an online store you are also an advertiser and publisher of your store medium due to stupidity being also present in other areas of the store's operations. Your business is based on attracting potential clients and encouraging them to perform a purchase. The brutal truth is that you can encourage them either by paying someone who already has attracted clients by creating interesting “content”, or you can do it for free and create that content yourself, devoting a piece of your life to do so. However, remember that paying someone you are spending money to take advantage of someone’s work once, while creating it individually (or paying someone to create content for your business) you will profit in long-tem.

Mobile revolution on the internet develops before our very eyes

2010-08-05T16:18:00.000+02:00

As a technology aficionado, at the standard moment of changing an old phone for a new one I tried to pick modern models, full of unique functionalities. I remember that more than ten years ago, service providers tempted people like me with promises of mobile internet included in the phone. Over the course of the years keywords indicating that this internet is already here, were always present – first there was WAP, then the “fast” GPRS, “faster” EDGE, “complete” internet browsers, and now 3G. And so for all those years phone manufacturers together with service providers played the customers with unfulfilled promises and didn’t really care for innovations. Looking at the method of using Nokia 3310 from the year 2000 and Nokia ***0 (incredibly irritating numeration, I got lost somewhere around the year 2003) from 2009/2010 one can risk stating that the main differences are a color display and icons instead of a text menu. When I think about the mobile internet offered a few years back by my provider, which worked basing on a GPRS modem plugged into a laptop, I get furious even today. Absolutely no stability, an incredibly low speed (a few times lower than possible to achieve with this technology) made this device practically useless. Of course, it was preached as the dawn of mobile internet. In terms of my phone experiments I also had the opportunity to experience, for a relatively long time, the results of an unholy marriage of a phone and palmtop – a palmphone. One of the promises which convinced me to try it out, was a complete internet browser, unfortunately Internet Explorer. The crudeness of this device and no support for the basic web technologies made me use it maybe 10 times, cursing out loud. And how about you reader? How often did you use the revolutionary internet capabilities of your phones, which often constituted the base for their promotion?

Fast forward to 2007 when the iPhone was revealed – a phone turning the standards of the mobile market upside down. Apple’s phone was closer to a computer since its very beginning, with the function to perform phone calls being just one of the equally valuable elements. What was the result? Today my iPhone constitutes my calendar, current task list, moments of entertainment at times which I would previously spend on waiting for something, and for the first time it is a device which fulfills the promise made a decade ago, and really allows to browse the internet. And how! Browsing the internet using a phone is now natural for me and my friends who also own iPhones. People who don’t like Apple may insert here phones which use Android as with it Google also powers up the spiral of innovation. In these terms, companies dominating the mobile phone market for years, have been hanged out to dry. They still sell millions of their standard phones, but profits quickly become limited, and financial markets express a constantly lower faith in their future success. Although, those are the problems of the CEOs, what’s in it for me?

Let’s start with my view as a person dealing with creating internet services. The computer market is for many years now strongly divided in terms of the sophistication of internet browsers. On one hand we have modern browsers such as Safari or Chrome, and the slightly obese Firefox right behind them. And on the other hand we have a dinosaur such as the Internet Explorer 6 which for nine years now leaves those creating websites restless, and is such a problem that Microsoft itself advertises its newer version so that IE6 can finally die, because it blocks the advancement in the development of web apps.

Paradoxically iPhone and Android phones possess web browsers based on the two most advanced computer browsers. This has lead to a funny situation in which when creating a website, it is easier to prepare a mobile version – for devices three years ago no one in the right mind would take into consideration for browsing the internet. Moreover, current forecasts indicate that in a few years there will be more mobile internet users than those using a computer!

The meaning of the silent changes, for those using the internet, is even better presented by the iPad. After our initial contact with this device we had an interesting discussion at the office as to its perspectives. We’ve agreed that we won’t discard our laptops because of it – we use keyboards too often and the software available on the iPad is too limited for us. However, we did point out that the small size combined with a good battery life is perfect for watching movies, reading e-books, or browsing the internet. However, we see the real strength of the iPad somewhere else – right on the spot it solves all of the problems with handling computers by our parents, or our peers who have a bit less experience in using new technologies. No problems with drivers, with apps saved God knows where, no need to think which mouse button to use, no possibility to download a virus claiming to be an antivirus…catharsis! Such people will throw their good for nothing supermarket laptops away and are going to be finally able to take advantage of the internet stress-free, which most of us see as something natural, and what they regard as the dark side, full of dangers. It is precisely such people who will fuel the dynamic development of the internet in the years to come, by making their first steps in internet shopping and viewing ads displayed on websites. All of them will use phones or devices with the size of an iPad, operated by touch, taking advantage of the location and other functions which are a standard with modern mobile devices, but will never seriously be a part of computers dispersed in terms of their capabilities, where each producer cuts costs and offers clients the acceptable minimum of capabilities.

All of these trends are visible in some countries with a certain delay and on a smaller scale than in leading countries such as the USA, or Great Britain. In these countries, the iPhone constitutes the third most popular platform in terms of internet use. The iPad and iPod Touch are located on the 4th and 5th positions, and Android phones come shortly after. And there will be more. It’s about time to consider the strategy of reaching mobile clients. Companies which will sleep through this stage may wake up in a new world in which being a leader for clients using a computer is simply not enough to be a significant player on the whole internet market. Everyone managing an online business should take care to prepare a strategy for the development of his or her business, in the era of these revolutionary changes, which we are currently witnessing.

The vast majority of online stores is doomed to fail

2010-07-26T16:09:00.000+02:00

Image(s) romanvirdi.com

Online stores pop up like mushrooms. For some reason, there is a general opinion that starting a business on the internet is an easy recipe for success. How many beginner salesmen will end up at the economic bottom, taking clients disappointed with e-stores with them?

In the States, creating the so called bootstrapped startups, meaning young companies developed without an external investment capital, is recently viewed as the right thing to do. This approach requires a business to be extremely careful in terms of reasonably managing the limited capital and controlling money flow with a clockmaker’s precision. Due to a much more difficult access to a capital for young companies, in many countries outside of US bootstrapping is basically a standard which puts the capabilities of young investors in a positive light. However, what happens with a large portion of newly created online stores, presents an amateur approach to business and actually spoils the market.

Just a few months ago I was amused by the whining of medium-sized stores concerning the competition coming from online trifles. After all, a healthy competition is very positive for a client! However, I’ve changed my opinion after taking a closer look at a few instances of launching an online “business”.

Most newly created online stores are created by people who would never think about their own business if the conditions were different. Opening a local vegetable stand would be far beyond their capabilities. The internet has opened possibilities in front of them, which were never there before - no permanent costs, and in theory a multi-million market at their fingertips. However, the lack of any trade experience results in a shocking strategy consisting in building a business basing on: no money for an investment, no trade skills with no will to gain them, and no time to be devoted for the “company”. They do however have serious expectations towards suppliers, because after all, they constitute the only source which may result in profits for a business created in such a manner.

I’m shocked by the attitude of some sellers who can launch an online store without even changing its standard graphic design, not posting the terms and conditions or contact data, filling the store with products lacking photos or descriptions. After a few months such a store disappears from the web or transfers to a different platform because “it didn’t sell”. In the meantime, it leaves a few lost clients behind, because the products included in its offer were never really on stock, instead they were of course bought as was the need for it. So the last few clients were left with nothing. I myself see a tendency to buy at the more expensive, but well known stores, to minimize the risk related to e-shopping.

I think it’s about time to take the charm out of e-commerce and stop presenting it as an easy business. Launching a profitable online store is difficult. Much more difficult than setting up a small stationary store. With a traditional store, by selecting a good location and good products in a way you get a guarantee of a constant flow of clients, and only a minor risk that two competitive stores will be set up nearby in the next six months. Launching a store on the internet, you have the guarantee that without working on the content, without a vision how to promote the store, and without investing in acquiring traffic not a single person will visit your store. Furthermore, with a local vegetable stand you see whether the number of customers grows or decreases, and on the internet you know nothing without properly configuring the tools. Nothing stands in the way of 50 competitive stores being launched within six months. After all anybody may also feel the calling of e-commerce.

Efficiently launching an online store requires time, skills, and financial resources. Time has to be devoted to develop the sales and promotion strategies, for the calculations necessary to create the business model, and to create the website contents – the basic source powering the free traffic from search engines. Skills, and especially the awareness of their lack in some fields, should allow to decide what will we do ourselves and what are we going to commission to others. Financial resources are of course necessary to commission some tasks outside. There are no shortcuts to reasonable profits when it comes to internet trade. If you don’t work hard, you can’t count on the effects. Set some goals and define the time you will devote to develop the store. If you have no idea what to develop, then devote the time to broaden your knowledge. There are hundreds of blogs on the internet containing tips on how to run a store. It is also wise to purchase something to read in paper form, which can always be read while traveling. Trade is an activity handled by millions of people for thousands of years now, so there are so many information on the subject that you will have enough to read for the years to come. It’s especially wise to focus on books dealing with traditional sales and marketing, and to translate them, with just a little bit of knowledge and imagination, to the “language of the internet”, thus improving own business.

Making money with e-commerce - how to?

2010-04-15T11:19:00.000+02:00

Last year, a few hundred stores vanished from the internet. How many of these have been exploited to throw their money into the trash by companies offering services for online stores?

Online stores are bombarded with service offers basically from the day they are created. Before any clients appear at the store the owner receives calls from sales people hoping to sign a contract for providing services absolutely unimportant at this stage. We are also constantly contacted by companies who wish to offer business cooperation to the users of our e-commerce platform. It won’t be an overstatement to say that each day at least one phone call or e-mail constitutes an offer by a trader/telemarketer/sales manager/president, which we simply “can not ignore”, especially taking into consideration that “our profits are related to the profits of stores due to commissions”. In most cases, after having a pleasant and polite conversation, we promise to consider after receiving additional materials. The repeatability of such situations has made me decide to present directly what do I think about a great deal of the received offers.

A great example of such offers are price comparison websites. Over the last few years, thanks to the promotion efforts of companies offering stores to include their offers for a fee, it was possible to convince sellers that a store which is not included on price comparison websites has no chances on the market. Nonsense! Basing on the gathered statistics we have reasons to believe that promoting with many of them is simply unprofitable for an average store. In many cases the traffic coming from such websites is small – it’s not even 2% in comparison with the traffic coming from the Google search engine! Various hobby websites, most of which you have never heard of, each day introduce more traffic to online stores. A small banner posted as a friendly favor on a forum for guitar aficionados can generate four times more traffic for a music store than price comparison websites and can also generate much better results. At the same time, traffic from price comparison sites can have the bounce rate at more than 70% which means that 7 out of 10 visitors from it never even enter a different page at the store!!! At such traffic parameters, it should be considered that the return on investment in terms of a price comparison website must be considered from the perspective of all transactions performed by a client attracted in that manner. In simple words – investing in a price comparison advertising is not profitable if a client acquired in such a way won’t buy again without paying the mentioned website to get to the store. Do you take this into consideration in your development strategy? Price comparison websites won’t teach you that because they care to earn money with each click, regardless whether it’s the same client.

Some time ago polish price comparison site Ceneo directed a promotion at stores, in relation to introducing the PayBack loyalty programme. We’ve received signals from a few of our clients that they intend to take advantage of this “opportunity”. We’ve taken some time to analyze the details, including the contracts signed with stores. Apart from the requirement to possess exclusive rights to handle payments at the store by a service financially related to Ceneo, we’ve found a horrifying paragraph stating that if the monthly commission from transactions generated by Ceneo won’t exceed a fixed level, then a fee of double that will be charged. Taking into consideration the above mentioned traffic parameters, how many stores with a low average order value will fall victim? Half? More? Not to mention that such an entry makes it possible for Ceneo to disable the PayBack service, not doing a thing to increase store sales, and still charge a monthly fee from each store with a signed contract. A few days ago an information has been released stating that PayBack won’t be included in Ceneo for business reasons. There were surely too few willing to accept such “attractive” conditions. The costs of integrating with this new solution, or as in our case – explaining to clients that this solution makes no sense, would of course fall down on the store platforms.

Another popular service is the so called “positioning” (SEO), meaning improving the position of store links in search results (mainly Google). In this industry hunting where the “ducks” are is at full blast. The number of companies priding in their expert knowledge is so high that it is obvious that recently a lot of “ducks” came out to play. When selecting a SEO company, our clients often do not realize the scale of the scam surrounding some of them. The service provider often magnanimously offers that his or her specialists will select a keyword (understood as a search engine phrase) for the client, which is going to be positioned. Word, not wordS! At the initial stage, the seller often has no idea what wordS (because one phrase is definitely not enough) will result in attracting most clients, whereas the positioning company knows perfectly well which one is going to be the easiest to position. The money flows, the company presents excellent efficiency in positioning a phrase which doesn’t do a thing, the only thing missing is some sense in it all.

Most of such offers which reach us, are related in a larger or smaller degree to the need of introducing modifications to the store’s software. The approach of most service providers in these terms is in our opinion unfavorable, not to say more harshly - audacious. Over the phone the seller presents an idealistic vision of a fruitful cooperation, and all of the advantages for our company coming from implementing the new functionality. Rubbish! Often, the only advantage is that of the service provider at the cost of the online store which pays for useless services, and the software provider bearing the costs of integration and maintenance. Reactions to our suggestion that the costs of integration should be covered by the service provider, as the party profiting from it, start at disbelief and end with threats that a platform lacking all of those idiotic corporate salesmen ideas is doomed to fail. From the point of view of such a company, the situation is just perfect. All it takes is to make a tool available and stores will top each other’s offers to be the first to implement it.

Such practices are that much more irritating for us because they distract owners from working on the basics, and from building up their online businesses. A SEO company won’t tell you that the graphic design is awful, and a price comparison site won’t notice that product descriptions are too short and full of grammatical errors. From our point of view, many methods of promoting stores in their initial stages have no sense. The first few months after initiating sales have to be spent on learning about the clients, their needs, removing any obstacles which may stand in the way of performing a successful purchase, and on making it easier to visit the store again. Instead of that, many companies offer substitutes pushing the store into a spiral of costs, often in the form of continuous monthly fees. It is stupid to spend money when it is still unclear in what way and how much can be earned with sales. This time can be spent much better simply by working on the quality of contents posted on the website – most importantly descriptions of products and categories, but also terms and conditions, information about the company, and various materials attracting visitors, such as for example manuals for the offered products. That way SEO will “do” itself, and the search engine traffic is going to constitute a solid base for developing the business in the form of the first satisfied customers.

And what are your thoughts on this subject? What do you believe is necessary to begin a stable e-commerce activity, and what only drains the money from investors? Share your opinions.

Google ignores META KEYWORDS in searches

2009-09-23T11:04:00.000+02:00

A few days ago Google officially confirmed the information which we were giving our clients for a few months now – this company’s search engine does not take into consideration META KEYWORDS. The META KEYWORDS field has been used in the old times of prehistoric internet, to extract keywords which abbreviate the content of a website. Also today many information can be found on the internet concerning how many keywords can be entered there, or whether to divide them with a comma or a semicolon. There are still many SEO “specialists” who cheat clients to pay for useless META KEYWORDS optimization tips.

It is worth to sum up the available META indicators and their role in SEO:
- META TITLE – the website’s title, very important from the point of view of SEO as it is the first element we focus on in terms of search results.
- META DESCRIPTION – the description of the website’s content, a summary. It is worth working on it as it encourages to learn more, which is possible only after clicking on the website’s/store’s link.
- META KEYWORDS – absolutely useless. Perfecting this element is not worth the time.

Don’t get fooled by SEO “professionals” who suggest optimizing META KEYWORDS.

Two Certified Scrum Masters at G-Forces Polska

2009-09-22T10:58:00.000+02:00

We are happy to inform that two people from the G-Forces Polska team received a few weeks ago the title of a Certified Scrum Master.

Pawel Grzona and Marcin Ciunelis are with us since the very beginning of G-Forces Polska. They both have a few years of experience in working on the most technologically advanced projects executed by our company.

The received certificates confirm our interest in the professional execution of IT projects with the use of agile methodologies. Taking advantage of these methodologies results in a more seamless execution of projects and a better satisfaction of the client with the final results. We sincerely encourage you to contact us, if you are looking for a professional team to execute an IT project.

More on Scrum at Wikipedia.

Online store - buy, create, or lease?

2009-03-26T15:30:00.000+01:00

In one of its recent articles, the GetElastic blog has presented an interesting overview of options available when making a decision to open an online store or other e-commerce solutions. What is especially interesting is the comparison of various models of taking advantage of software, which I would like to quote here.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Pros:

Immediate implementation
Low initial costs
Easy to scale according to needs
Constant improvements made available with software updates
No hardware costs and low maintenance costs
No worries in terms of updates

Cons:

Retribution for success (fees depending on the income)
No possibility for self-development
Sometimes a difficult integration with external systems
No certainty as to the security of transaction data
Full dependency on the service provider

Purchasing a ready-made solution

Pros:

Rich features
Medium implementation time
Ready development tools are sometimes already available on the market
The possibility to take advantage of the supplier’s help in terms of development
The possibility to take advantage of external services provided by integrators and programmers
Software tested and verified at different stores

Cons:

Expensive solution
You may be paying for more than you need, and still not get the necessary elements
Monolithic architectures may be difficult to integrate with the existing software
The app may be difficult to handle due to the multitude of options
It is difficult to change the provider after the implementation.
Limited development possibilities
It may not fit specific requirements

Building your own solution

Pros:

A quick start when using available open source solutions
The possibility to select a precisely adjusted set of functionalities
We initially create a frame which we will develop over time
Full control over the development
Arbitrariness in selecting integrations
Access to the source code

Cons:

A long execution time in comparison to SaaS
Requires an experienced team of IT specialists
Cost

What are your thoughts? Comment below.

Methods for tracking conversion

2009-03-17T15:21:00.000+01:00

The base for the development of an online store is attracting as many clients as possible. To achieve this, store owners take advantage of various marketing actions such as:

Recommending to friends
Flyers
Advertising materials
Whisper marketing
E-mail marketing
Advertisements in such systems as AdWords
Sponsored articles
Working with bloggers

Today we'll learn how to track efficiency of various marketing methods.

Each of these methods may prove to be important, depending on the store’s trade and profile. Here, a problem often reported by our clients comes into play: how to learn what method is best, meaning which results in the best ROI (return on investment). In order for us to know how successful are we in our actions, we must initially learn where are our clients coming from and then what sources convert best. In case of a store, the preferred type of conversion is a purchase.

Online conversion tracking

I will present methods of tracking conversion online, so basing on clients who have found our store on the internet. A method which does not require any efforts from us is looking at what do the clients fill out when registering an account at our store. It's relatively easy to add a dropdown list with which new clients can provide basic information about how they found your store. My suggestion is not to make that field mandatory to avoid any detrimental effect on conversion itself. We will learn only as little or as much as the clients wants us to know, but it might lead to useful insights.

Conversion tracking with Google Analytics

Practically all online store platforms offer the option to integrate with Google Analytics. Thanks to this the information about the purchased products will reach the Analytics directly. Furthermore, we will be able to see what sources are most profitable for us.

Apart from learning the sources of your clients you will also be able to learn what keywords entered in the search engine end with a purchase. This will be helpful for example when conducting advertising campaigns in search engines with the use of the AdWords service.

Ok, but how to handle such actions as newsletters, or for example sponsored articles? Here a tool for creating links made available by Google comes in handy. It allows to create links in such a way so that the Analytics system recognizes them as separate sources of visits. Thanks to it we can include for example the following link in a newsletter: http://myexamplestore.com/?utm_source=newslleter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=TV&utm_campaign=slogan
Now after sending the newsletter we will learn how many people have received it, read it, and moreover, how many people did it encourage to perform a purchase. With this tool we can create all necessary links used for various promotions (as long as the target location for the link won’t “cut out” the parameters). Now you can follow all online marketing actions directly in one place.

Tracking offline marketing

Tracking marketing actions in the real world is not as simple. It requires more effort, but is absolutely possible! And it may tell us much about what we are doing. So how?

The easiest method is having special types of discounts for each action. You place a different code on flyers handed out at specialist facilities, than on flyers handed out on the streets to random people. Give a different code to each following batch of flyers – if the offer or its look have changed. The information about used codes will let you know what is your conversion ratio.
If this doesn’t work because your products usually require consulting or some other form of interaction, then you can for example provide different phone numbers or e-mail addresses on the flyers than on other materials. The number of e-mails will also constitute sufficient information whether your actions are efficient, and if so then to what extent.

With today’s post I absolutely do not exhaust the topic. I just wanted to outline the possibilities. And also to encourage tracking conversion in order to focus own actions where it is most profitable, thus spending money reasonably ;)

How do you track conversion in your online store? Let us know in the comments.

Photos of products at an online store - introduction

2009-02-11T14:36:00.000+01:00

One of the most important elements deciding whether a client will perform a purchase at an online store is the product’s photo. Today I’ll try to present a very basic introduction on product photos.

Let’s start with the basics. First of all you have to absolutely discard the possibility to include product photos by scanning a printed catalogue or traditional photos. Scanned pictures look awful at an online store and you surely don’t want to lose clients because of their poor quality?

Before you start investing in your own private photography studio to take photos of five products, learn whether the producers offer sellers high quality photos of their products. If so, you will save a lot of time and some money. Often, in such a manner it is possible to obtain photos taken by professional photographers, as you are probably not one yet ;).

Compact or DSLR?

Compact cameras are simple and small. Cheap digital single lens reflex (DSLR) cameras are semi-professional and possess many configuration options and vast numbers of available accessories. There are no doubts that in the hands of an experienced amateur-photographer a DSLR allows to achieve much better results. It can not be denied that its rich options sometimes allow to take photos in conditions in which compacts “lose it”. A great advantage of semi-pro cameras is the possibility to exchange lenses so it is easy to take photos of large (for example a lawn mower) or small object (for example a set of screws sold at the same store). DSLRs are also unique due to the fact that by looking through the viewer we see precisely the image that will be recorded by the camera. That is because the image in the viewer is simply the image from the lens reflected in a mirror (thus the name).

The camera’s resolution (presented in megapixels) starts to be important when taking photos. You have to understand that the photos will be converted into reasonable sizes to be included in the store and each conversion lowers the photo’s quality. Therefore, try to take photos in the best possible quality and size. If you intend to improve the quality of photos using a software, then it is important to save the photos in the RAW format. However, don’t forget to save the final file as JPEG which is supported by the store’s software.

In a situation in which good quality compact cameras have a similar price to DSLR, it’s not easy to make a choice. We lean towards DSLRs, but it is absolutely possible to take a good photo with a compact.

Tripod

A tripod is necessary to take clear photos. A camera is mounted on it, thanks to which the vibrations from the photographer’s hand don’t have an impact on the created image. If you are serious about taking product photos, then you will surely need to invest in a tripod. Be sure to check if the selected model provides the possibility to adjust the camera’s position on many axes. More advanced tripods support the camera on a mechanism similar to a bearing, thanks to which it is much easier to change the camera’s angle. However, one can not forget about the tripod’s basic role – to hold the camera motionless and the photos sharp - so such “frills” will be worth the price difference.

Automatic shutter release

If you’ve invested in a tripod then the worst thing you can do now is to press the shutter button by hand. Even though this is the natural way to take photos, it does transfer vibrations to the camera, and after all you already do know that you want to take photos as sharp as the edge of a razor. The most economic solution is using a self timer, meaning setting the camera to take the photo automatically with a few-seconds of delay. The second option is to take advantage of a special software and cables which allow to take the photo remotely using a computer. The advantage of such a solution is the possibility to assess the effects right after taking the photo. The software and cable are often included in the box, but be sure to check if that is the case – especially if you are buying a compact camera as it is not always included as a standard. Alternatively you may purchase an additional shutter cord which is connected to the camera – it is basically the camera’s shutter release button at the end of a cable, thanks to which pressing the shutter release button goes to the camera in the form of an electric impulse and not a mechanical push.

Lens

The type of products sold at the store impacts the lens choice. There is usually no option to change the lens of a digital compact camera. If you are selling jewelry or other small products, then it is very important to have the possibility to use a specialist macro lens, which can show the client all of the product’s smallest details. When the store offers large products (for example furniture), then it is wise to consider including them in sets sometimes featuring a large space, which will be much easier with a wide-angle lens. However, before you start investing in lenses, work on the photos with the lens included in the set. Usually it is a universal lens quite good for meeting the basic needs of both macro and wide-angle photography.

Lighting

The used light plays an important role in creating an aesthetic photo. Unfortunately the source of light included in most cameras (a simple flash) results in an overexposure of some parts of a photo creating strong shadows, and generally makes the photos look unappealing. The key to professional lighting is a dispersed light which gently “covers” the object, emphasizing its details. There are a few methods of achieving dispersed light. Professional photography studios use special covers for flashes which disperse the light, or the so called soft-boxes.
If the photographed products are small then it is easy to prepare an individual position with the use of a few strong lamps and for example muslin cloths which will disperse the light. If your budget still allows for spending some money on professional work environment then it’s worth considering buying a shadeless tent or table.

Composition

When taking photos of products for an online store it is worth to consider what would a potential client like to see. The client will probably be interested in a few different shots, presenting both the entire product as well as its parts. Never assume that one photo is enough. Remember that it is impossible to touch and look at a product from each angle at an online store. Also, consider how will the photo look when downsized to the size in which it is going to be presented at the store. Larger objects lose their details and become blurry. It’s better to take a few close photos allowing to see key elements. Sometimes it is better to present a fragment of the product as the main photo while the entire product may constitute an additional photo which is usually viewed enlarged – as a slide show.
Absolutely leave some free space around the product. You don’t want the photo to be “tight”.

By the way, we encourage you to read some interesting books describing issues related to photography in a more detailed manner.
Macro Photography Photo Workshop
Lighting Photo Workshop
Exposure Photo Workshop: Develop Your Digital Photography Talent
The Digital Photography Book
The Digital Photography Book, Volume 2

How to save on IT during a crisis?

2009-01-22T13:55:00.000+01:00

For a few months now, the media are full of information concerning the proceeding worldwide economic crisis, which originated in risky operations on the American mortgage market. In such a situation it is obvious that companies will limit their expenses and gather cash reserves for tough times. Due to this, I will try to present a few ideas on how to save on IT.

Take advantage of Open Source software

For a few years now Open Source software competes with commercial solutions on equal terms. In almost every field there is a free high quality alternative to paid software. In this field there is now basically the problem of too many available options rather than their lack. The professionalism of many solutions is not only equal to that of commercial ones, but often exceeds it. It won’t be an overstatement to say that basically the entire internet functions thanks to open source software. Of course it will be difficult to admit it by a seller who tries to sell us the new version of his flagship product.
The lack of technical support for such projects, sometimes pointed out, is not as severe as it used to be. Virile companies, earning by providing professional services, work with specific projects. It is also worth pointing out that finding a person to take care of an open source project is usually cheaper than employing a “professional” worker who possesses certificates confirming his or her understanding of a product. Why? Because there are simply more workers of the first type, and joining their ranks does not require an investment but only the will to work, and skills. However, it is wise to point out that when contacting a community focused around a specific project, one has to let go of the habits of a client requesting something from a software provider. In this environment it is very easy to get help from professionals possessing great experience, by either supporting the project or by offering relatively small sums for executing personal needs.

Throw the software out of the company

There are many useful tools on the web available in the SaaS model (Software as a Service). Often instead of investing in a large project for personal needs it is wise to consider an alternative – paying a small monthly fee and leaving all of the worries to an external company. Such companies can offer very competitive conditions due to the fact that sometimes they handle tens of thousands of clients. This allows them to split the software development costs between a much greater number of paying parties. Of course taking advantage of SaaS we lose our flexibility. We can not count on that our specific needs will be taken into consideration unless we get the support of a vast number of users. However, it is worth considering whether such an offer is not more attractive than the temptation to develop everything within the company. Thanks to taking advantage of greater numbers of users it is much easier to get an integrative software and to exchange data with other services acting in a similar manner.
Attractive functionality is very often offered even in the free version (Gmail may constitute an example). It’s wise to consider what are the company’s needs and whether it wouldn’t be best to let go of flexibility in favor of a significant cost reduction.

Store your data in clouds

The cloud computing model of system architectures, which recently becomes more and more popular, allows to store and process data at a very low cost, outside of the company. Does your company’s backup policy include the need to store backup data outside of the company, thus this data is each day transported to a safe location? It’s a waste of time and money. It will be cheaper and easier to automatically transfer the data for example to Amazon S3. If the security of information is important for us, the data can be encrypted before sending.
Storing data outside of the company allows also to take advantage of the computing capabilities of others to process this data. Amazon EC2 within a few minutes allows to create hundreds of virtual computers which cease to put a load on the company’s budget as soon as they stop being used. There is no more need to create a complex IT structure within the company, for the purposes of for example daily reports, which after serving its purpose becomes unused, consumes energy, and takes up space.

People interested in the details or considering taking advantage of the above mentioned solutions to optimize the structure of the company’s costs can contact G-Forces Polska. We will gladly help and implement proper solutions.

How to maintain the income after the holiday season?

2009-01-03T14:35:00.000+01:00

The holiday season is behind us. What to do for the rapid decrease of income not to cause a crash landing? Below you’ll find a few tips on how to increase sales during that period.

Refer to the buyer’s ego. After buying gifts for others, let your client do something for himself or herself ;). Prepare a promotion with slogans referring to taking care of oneself.
Promote store products which were neglected up to this point. For example, promote comfortable clothing, not necessarily suitable as a gift. Focus on those fields where clients can find basically anything. Give them the impression that they are spending money reasonably on things they need.
Prepare a newsletter for clients who have purchased at your store before the holidays. Offer them discounts. Thank them for their purchases. Show them the new offer.
Try to take advantage of the heat of post-holiday sales. Prepare attractive promotions.
Don’t forget about the upcoming carnival ;).
If you offer any beauty products, or such which improve the mood, or satisfy any other needs of your clients concerning the following holidays, summer or spring, then do not hesitate to inform the clients about it.

Do you have more interesting ideas? Share them in the comments!

Differences between SEO, SEP, and SEM

2008-11-18T14:21:00.000+01:00

Many of our new clients often ask us about the possibility to position their stores or websites created for them. They are confused when we state that we don’t offer such services. Their confusion is even bigger when we support our statement with the claim that we believe it is unprofitable for the ordering party. So why do we believe that positioning is a waste of money?

First let us define what do the three terms mentioned in the title mean:

SEO - search engine optimization – meaning precisely optimizing a website in terms of search engine results, and since Google is the most popular search engine – concerning mostly it. It consists in adjusting the website in such a manner so that it is clear and “friendly” for systems indexing the internet. As a result it is easier for clients to find us with a search engine.
SEP - search engine positioning – meaning positioning the website in search engine results. It consists in promoting the service in such a way so that it is located as high as possible in Google search results. It requires constant work on improving the ranking and creating resources which often means as many links to the website as possible.
SEM - search engine marketing – meaning advertisements displayed in the Google search engine, at Google search partners or at partner websites.

SEO is an element on which we put much emphasis already at the stage of creating our products. All of our publicly available apps are optimized in these terms. However, it has to be said that this concerns a “pure” product, because from the moment of giving the project to the client it is his or her responsibility not to ruin these optimizations and include SEO principles when adding own content.

Unlike SEO, we don’t consider SEP to be good due to the fact that it is difficult to measure its effects (especially considering the fact that they may change on a daily basis), using it often requires taking advantage of methods quite unfavorable by search engines, and an efficient positioning will surely take much time which is a serious disadvantage when introducing a product to the market urgently.

One has to remember that focusing on positioning often leads to an “arms race” with the competition. Everyone has access to the same tools, and sooner or later the temptation to use one or two low blows comes into play. It all looks great until one day we realize that, as punishment, our website falls from the first page of search results to the fiftieth and we have to start everything from the beginning. Then, the positioning company sadly admits defeat and humbly withdraws from the contract, leaving the client with the entire mess. You’ve just paid a large sum for improving the website’s ranking for two weeks and its rapid downfall for the next two years...

So what do we recommend? First of all, the best possible website has to be created. An aesthetic design and a coherent navigation will ensure that potential clients visiting the website won’t run away. Why invest in attracting clients to our website if we don’t care if they immediately leave?
What then? High quality content will allow to automatically improve the website’s ranking in search engines, and sites dealing with a similar subject may start adding links to your website which is going to improve the site’s reliability for Google even more. What is high quality content? That’s obvious – it’s something worth reading in order to learn something useful. When writing texts for the website ask yourself a few questions. Am I writing something that has sense or do I just waffle? Am I writing the text for its usefulness or to add a few keywords for Google? If I was my client would I be happy to find such a text on the website? Such an approach to a website creates solid fundaments which always pay off. Maybe they don’t give immediate results, and maybe they are not as simple as SEP folders say they are, but they always work.

After preparing the factual aspect of the website, it is worth thinking about advertising (SEM), for example, in the most popular search engine in Poland – Google.

Why?

It is a relatively cheap solution – an individual visitor costs a fraction of PLN 1,
We direct the add to people who have shown their interested by entering a given phrase into the search engine,
No other form of advertising has such possibilities to control and measure its efficiency,
You will see the effects right after launching the ad. Your ad will be visible in the search results within a few minutes after launching the campaign,
You pay for the results of advertisements (so a visit of a potential client), and not just for displaying them.

If you are now interested in the subject of SEO and advertising in search engines, and you would like to promote your store this way, then we strongly encourage experimenting. Thanks to own work it is possible to achieve remarkable results.

However, if you don’t want to spend your time in this new field, then you can always contact G-Forces Polska and commission that task to us. We will gladly tell you more about this form of increasing sales, and prepare an offer for any specific needs.

PS. Most of the Google references below can be referred to other search engines

Avoidable bad practices when creating a professional online store

2008-11-05T11:29:00.000+01:00

When creating an online store, it is easy to fall for the trap of bad practices. Below, I will describe those appearing most frequently, and give some tips how to improve.

Creating “multi-business stores”

Against popular belief, it’s not worth to create multi-business stores. Internet users most often use search engines or product comparison websites, focusing on one or a few specific products. Additionally:

Online shoppers are not looking for supermarkets where they can buy anything, but without a professional help. Creating a multi-business store you are not building the store’s trustworthiness. The users get the impression that: if the store offers everything then its employees probably don’t know much about the products and we won’t get a satisfying service.
Having many categories, you won’t avoid creating a complex structure. Thus, the client must spend more time to reach what he or she is searching for. Remember, internet users are looking for easy access to the searched products. Don’t make it difficult for them!
Think whether you are not creating a multi-business store for your own convenience. The convenience of your clients is definitely much more important. Perhaps it would be better to create a number of independent stores?
Having a specialized store you can describe your products better and allow the possibility to compare them in detail with the use of a dedicated comparison tools. Comparing a soap with a TV is much more complicated.
Here, at G-Forces Polska we believe that specialist stores work much better than “multi-business” ones. We've worked with online stores selling less than 10 products at any time and they managed to get record sales and easily beat ones with hundreds of various items on sale.

Bad practices in designing the homepage

Despite the fact that not all clients will enter your website through the homepage (results from search engines such as Google may redirect you to subpages), don’t forget that it is your greeting card and a reference for other areas of your store. That is why it is important for the main page to answer a few questions:

What website is this?
What can I do/purchase here?
What can it offer me?

That is why you should make sure that the visitor (even with his or her display resolution at 1024x768) can see what you have to offer. Hence:

First and foremost – design a logo unambiguously identifying your store and/or trade. The logo should not be too complex so that the users can easily remember it.
Correctly place the components. Each online store platform provides many possibilities to configure the design, but it's best to keep it in moderation. There are certain rules on the internet, breaking which may result in the user getting lost on your website. For example, if you’ll decide to transfer the cart from the upper right corner to a different position it may at best result in your clients getting lost, and in the worst case scenario in them leaving the store.
Take care so that the categories are correctly named. They should be clear for users and grouped in a predictable manner. A frequent mistake is to reflect the structure used internally by the company instead of a structure clear for the user. Category names should include clear, not specialist vocabulary.
Design the header. If you’ll decide to include other elements next to your logo, remember so that they won’t cover the user’s menu (links such as Log in, Help, Contact). The users will search there for these elements and in the case of not finding them they may forego the registration or be unable to get help which you have prepared for them.
Don’t get carried away with the height of the top banner (we recommend 150px maximum). As we’ve mentioned before, don’t forget to include the name of your store.
Don’t include texts unrelated to the store’s trade. Think what would you like to see or learn when entering the website. Is it necessarily the year in which the company has been established?
Take advantage of the recommended products, to present your best products or promotions.
If you are offering something special that the competition doesn’t have, show it off!
Under no circumstances should you include such texts as “under construction”, “coming soon”, “reveal 12.12.2008”. If Google indexes this text, it will be visible on the internet for longer than you would like it to be! To block the access until your website is ready you can for example not configure the domain until needed.
Also, don’t include advertisements unrelated to your offer, or even more so such elements as “a place for your advertisement” - that way you can scare off clients!
If you have partners in the form of portals, or specialist forums, inform about it!
Don’t use dark color backgrounds. Bright letters on a dark background are very difficult to read. This may constitute a reason for a potential client to leave your store. Toned-down and white colors will allow to easily browse through your website.
Remember to distinguish the links from the text so that it is easy to separate the visited links (brighter color) from the unvisited ones (a darker shade of the same color).

When building a product page remember:

Entering the page, the client searches primarily for the price. Perhaps this is a truism, but one often ignored by store owners. Contrary to popular belief, clients really don’t like it when there is no price. Why? Because they have to spend additional time to get this basic information, which often is a decisive factor.
Do your best to display the warehouse inventory in real time. An information about a long execution date is still better than no information at all.
The client searches for a complete product description. Writing detailed product descriptions always pays off. A well described product brings the client closer to a purchase and an additional result is a larger number of keywords for which Google will index your website. So don’t ignore this element of your store, because that’s what the clients expect from you.
Pictures can decide on a purchase to your advantage. Remember so that the photos represent the character of your product. If you sell food then try to make the mouth water with every picture. If it’s jewelry, let it shine. You sell tires – let the photos be dynamic, etc. If you can’t take advantage of the services of a professional photographer, try to make the best possible pictures yourself. Or make a collection of photos and send them to us, and for a small fee we’ll try to improve them for the purposes of your store.

Create trust and be transparent

Don’t hide your company’s details. Provide its address, phone number, and registered information. Don’t be afraid to post your company’s details in various places. At G-Forces we recommend providing it in a footnote, on the “Contact” and “About us” pages. Don’t forget to include your bank account details, information about the owner, and anything else which a visitor might find useful for proving you are a reliable business.
If you want your clients to rate your store after a successful purchase, include this information in the footnote of an e-mail notifying about changing the order status to “Shipped”. Satisfied clients will surely return the favor. Use it to your advantage ;)
On your website, include references by satisfied clients or friendly websites.
Always take care for the professional look of your store.
Provide your clients with professional service and, if possible, consulting.
Make sure that the clients can easily establish contact with you if needed.
Try to make the shipping costs and conditions as clear as possible.
Don’t forget to include the information concerning the possibility to return the products purchased at your store.
Whenever possible, try to acquire quality certificates for your store.

Remember that an online store does not sell a product. It sells the promise of providing a product in an unchanged form, in which it has been presented, and within a given time period, at a given price. Do your best to keep that promise ;).

10 deadly sins of amateur online stores

2008-11-01T14:37:00.000+01:00

Today, we will once again deal with errors made by online stores. How many of the below mentioned “sins” do you commit at your store? Perhaps it is time to repent?

In-store advertisements

The potential clients visiting the store constitute its most important source of income. By displaying advertisements (for example Google AdSense) you encourage the potential clients to leave the store without making a purchase. For a laughable sum you are giving away a potential long-term client, and what’s even worse – you are selling the client to your competition because the displayed ads are selected basing on the content of the site they are posted on.

"Funny” animations

All of the animations found on the internet, like “a man with a shovel” or a blinking, pink sign with the word “new”, blinking emergency lights, or hamsters running across the website… all of these are often overused on auctions and unfortunately beginner salesmen make the same mistake in online stores.

Amateur design

How many times have you came across a store looking like a piece by an abstract painter. How often do you buy at such stores? Probably rarely. Creating a professional store design requires a lot of talent, apart from access to MS Paint. Let’s be honest – most of us lack that talent. Should the store risk losing its orders because of an invalid belief that “Mrs. Smith from accounting can draw pretty well using a computer”?

The lack of a professional domain name

Many online store platforms provide default domain names for newly created stores. Thanks to this, the store is ready to be configured right after being created. Some store owners don’t plan to buy a domain (eg. .com or .co.uk or another localised version) because they believe that they already own a domain. That’s not true! A professional domain improves the store’s credibility. The cost of a few dollars per year will surely pay off.

The lack of clear information concerning the owner

If the seller wishes to stay anonymous, then there is no option to verify his or her reliability at an online store. Every reasonable client will leave the store without performing a purchase if there won’t be any essential information on the seller. Internet users are careful, and every serious internet seller should care so that the clients never have any doubts as to his or her honest intentions.

Exaggerated formatting

Overusing formatting options in product descriptions, and on pages including texts, will do more harm than good. Visitors expect simple and clear texts which are easy to browse through. Remember that the visitors very rarely read the entire text – they don’t have the time. Attacking the visitors with large texts in vivid colors makes it difficult to browse through the web. Place your bet on simplicity and try to limit the formatting styles to a few basic ones.

Grammar and punctuation

Use a dictionary before the visitor will leave the store, sick and tired of grammatical errors.

The lack of product descriptions or untrue information in the description

The only and obvious reason for the lack of product descriptions is the laziness of the person managing the store. Why would you expect someone to purchase something at a neglected store? After all, the lack of product descriptions may indicate that other store elements are also not working correctly – for example handling payments or protecting personal data. Don’t let your potential client assume that your store does not function correctly. Untrue or incorrect data in the descriptions can be easily verified and may always constitute the reason for losing the visitor’s trust.

Using a free e-mail account to contact the clients

The internet is full of offers for free e-mail accounts. Using such accounts is not generally bad, but such addresses are easily recognizable and lower the store’s credibility. Remember that using for example Google Mail you can easily configure the free account so that e-mails will be sent with the store’s own domain – that’s a big advantage.

A standard favicon

A favicon is a small image showed by the browser’s address field. Leaving a standard icon there you additionally lose the opportunity to familiarize the visitors with your brand. Just a small detail, yet worth focusing on.

A quick introduction into internet advertising

2008-10-29T14:11:00.000+01:00

After the few recent posts on internet advertising, some people pointed out the lack of information on the basics. For those beginner advertisers I have prepared a flash course introducing the basics of internet advertising, comparing it with traditional advertising. I ask professionals for their understanding concerning the lack of some details – there will be a time for them. There are two basic types of internet advertisements. The division is made basing on the method of paying for the advertising:
- PPM (Pay Per Mille) – what is paid for is the number of times the ad is viewed. Usually the cost is presented for a thousand views – thus the name.
- PPC (Pay Per Click) – what is paid for is the number of viewers who have visited our site by clicking on an ad.

CPM is the closest to traditional methods of advertising in the press and television. The number of viewers/readers is estimated and basing on that information the price for the advertisement is determined. CPM campaigns are good if one wants to popularize a brand, but their efficiency is usually worse than PPC in terms of the so called CTR (Click Through Rate, meaning the number of clicks in reference to the ad’s views). CPM campaigns are most often used combined with banners. PPC is the most popular for Google AdWords advertisements and is usually much cheaper than CPM.

The basic difference between traditional and internet advertisements is that the latter may be analyzed in detail. There are many advertisement quality indicators and a myriad of ways to improve them. At G-Forces Polska we look most favorably at PPC in Google because it is a great mechanism for low-cost advertising with efficiency control. Traditional advertising and estimating its profitability is often similar to fortune telling. In comparison, the quality of information concerning clients which can be acquired basing on internet campaigns is absolutely jaw-dropping – everything served on a silver platter. Nothing else to do but improve and increase the profits.

At an online store it is important to attract visitors to our website. Such a visitor hopefully becomes our client and we may try to convince him or her to spend some money. Therefore, our goal is making an order by filling out a form on the website. Performing a desired action by clicking on an ad (and surely going through a number of subpages) is referred to as conversion. Maximizing conversion is the basic goal of internet advertising, regardless of what that conversion is. Google AdWords advertisements provide access to a number of interesting tools which measure various indicators for the user, thanks to which it is easy to optimize advertising expenses and direct them where there is the biggest chance for the clicker to “undergo conversion”. You should also start with defining what is it that you want to achieve by attracting the visitor to your website/store. Without defining it (regardless whether advertising in papers or on the internet) you simply pay for attracting visitors, not really knowing what to do with them. You may set a few goals and assign a financial value to them in order to monitor what is more profitable (so for example a registration may be worth $5 for each registered person, a store purchase may be $30 on average, and filling out a contact form - $1).

A remarkable advantage of Google AdWords is that advertisements are displayed when someone searches with specific keywords using Google. Performing a search means that that person is a promising potential client, and has to be presented with our specific website in a straightforward manner. All Google advertisements are displayed by a specific keyword or a fragment of the searched phrase. Campaigns can be carried out quickly and easily (for example paying $10 for clicking a popular keyword ad) or persistently and relatively cheaply (taking advantage of hundreds or thousands of keywords at marginal rates, constantly optimizing the campaigns). The efficiency of a well prepared campaign is key.

The whole commotion with internet advertising concerns the fact that by optimizing campaigns great results may be achieved, and what’s even better – they may be perfected each day. As an example I can say that our a job offer - quite large, colorful, and well prepared - resulted in two people contacting us and circa 20 visiting our website. With Google AdWords, for 1/3 of the printed ad’s price, we've attracted 2200 people to our product page!

5 free and ethical methods of promoting an online store

2008-10-29T11:14:00.000+01:00

We are often asked how can a new online store be promoted and attract traffic. We usually answer that all it takes is a few (-dozen) million $/EUR for promotion and the clients will come ☺. Of course for most of those who are just starting with e-commerce it is not a really attractive solution. So if you are not sleeping in a bank’s vault then try to follow our tips concerning how to promote a store for free.

Enter links to the store at website directories. Google gives more than 250 million results for “web directory”. Each of them includes thousands of links and descriptions added to them. Thanks to this, even if we won’t include a certain keyword in our description we can still count on that it is included in our “neighbor’s” description. Diligently adding the store’s address to catalogues probably won’t result in a rapid increase in the number of visitors but will pay off in the long run - attracting one, two, or perhaps five visitors a week. Tools for automatically adding addresses to dozens or hundreds of directories can be found on the internet. Decide whether you want to diligently do this by hand or pay for a tool that will do it for you. If you will do it by hand, we advise that you add the page to the most popular catalogues – this is going to give the best results in relation to the efforts. Most catalogues are free, but some require a fee to including a link. Verify whether it is wise to pay for it by comparing the traffic in catalogues, using ahrefs.com or www.similarweb.com.

Trade blogs are places often visited by people looking for opinions on products they consider purchasing in the future. Commenting on articles or reviews may be a good method to indicate the store’s existence. However, it is necessary to be cautious and not cross the line between constructively referring to the content and spamming. In some cases, writing an article may be suggested to a blogger. A good quality text will meet a positive reception, and the author’s signature with the store’s address is once again going to generate valuable traffic. A good idea may also be to establish an own blog complementing the store. Reviews of products available in store, or information concerning upcoming product premieres will allow to gather a small group of devoted fans. Such aficionados constitute very valuable clients, and when satisfied they act as an excellent PR brigade.

Local business catalogues are a popular element of regional portals. Even if the store functions only on the internet, let us not forget that some clients value the possibility to pick up the merchandise personally and an easy return. Sometimes it is worth making it easier for such clients, even if it’s not our standard policy. In the case of a product price being similar in two different stores, we will more often go for the one closer to us. And let us not forget about the rare cases when the searched product is required immediately. In such a case finding a store in a catalogue of local companies and making a phone call to arrange a direct purchase, is the only option for a potential client. If you won’t provide your services for him or her then the competition may do so.

Forums and newsgroups serve a role similar to blogs – they allow to learn more about the searched products – but there are much more people there interested in exchanging beliefs and opinions. Some forums have hundreds or even thousands of regular readers, and even more occasional visitors who are directed there by search engines. Efforts made to become a valued member of such a community will surely pay off. Don’t forget to configure your profile in such a way so that a link to your store and its short description can always be found close to your posts.

The most convenient form of communication on the internet is still e-mail. The need for an effective communication with the client seems obvious, but owners of small stores often forget to contact potential customers. Each business e-mail should carry a non-intrusive advertising message in the form of for example a link to the store and a short description of the offer in the e-mail’s footnote. In no case should we indicate a “split personality” – use the store’s e-mail address to contact clients and a private one to contact contractors. Each e-mail recipient may someday search for products which are available at your store. If your companies are cooperating for a number of years, then this additionally increases the possibility that such a potential client will do the shopping at your store.

The main goal of all of these practices is to encode the information about your store’s existence for all of those who came across any information on it. None of these methods will revolutionize the sales, but each of them may give great results in the long run. You want internet users to exchange information about your store? If so then at first you must inform them about the store and help them with something (for example in assessing a product they are considering to purchase). Later they are going to repay you by mentioning your store to friends interested in products included in your offer. Don’t count on immediate miracles. Instead devote your time to “work on the basics”.

10 ways to increase sales at an online store

2008-10-22T10:46:00.000+02:00

During yesterday’s e-mail exchange with one of our clients, a short list of simple advices for running an online store has been created. It’s worth familiarizing oneself with it.

The key for success in e-commerce is store traffic. One may have the best offer and the cheapest products, but that doesn’t guarantee a thing if those interested in performing a purchase can’t find the store. Post on forums, run a blog, actively promote your store - simply help those who are searching to find it. However, don’t be tempted by spamming.
Avoid trashing the main page of the store. Amazon.com presents the products chosen for the client directly below the navigation bar, while some stores take half of the page to introduce themselves, the company, the history of their business, mission, and other unimportant information. After entering a website, a potential client searches for an offer. Before buying he or she will probably want to learn a thing or two about the company, but there are separate pages for that (for example About us and Contact us).The first impression after entering the store may have a decisive impact on whether you will lose a client forever. The space on the main page may be used much more efficiently by presenting special offers and sales.
One can not count on the success of a store if a potential client is unable to find the basic contact information. The online client is aware of the risks related to internet transactions, and will try to minimize that risk by not buying at questionable stores. Take advantage of the About us page.
The Bestsellers component is useful only when the store sells. Before that, an empty list results in losing trust. The client wonders whether the store has sold anything up to that point or if this element of the site does not work correctly, which may suggest that other elements are “broken” as well – for example the payment service. Include functional components after analyzing what will they say about the store.
Gathering statistics concerning store visits allows access to many useful information. Make sure your online store integrates with the free Google Analytics, and nothing stands in the way of including other statistics. Knowing your visitors is a must for improving their experience and your sales.
Don’t throw the client out of your store! Any links to external sites in navigation tabs, in the content, or in the form of advertisements, result in your client leaving your store. Will he or she return? Probably not. Focus the attention of visitors on your offer and a successful finish of the transaction. Notice that in many online stores, after going to the Checkout, all navigation elements disappear except the absolutely essential ones – that is so that the client doesn’t “run away” attracted by some unimportant element.
Content, content and once again content. Detailed product descriptions and guidelines, product comparisons, and general tips concerning your offering will make the store easier to be found in Google. Interesting content will make some external sites include links to your store, which is going to additionally improve Google’s ranking and thus the position in search results.
Fighting for the client with prices not always makes sense. There are many large stores which can surely count on better wholesale deals, thus are able to offer lower prices. Consider whether you can offer free shipping (transferring a part of the cost to the product price), create an interesting joined offer, or offer an outstanding customer service.
Optimize conversion. For each 100 people entering your store, probably 95-98 leave without performing a purchase. Someone visited the store and hasn’t bought anything? Why? What can be improved? All it takes is to convince 1-2% more visitors to make a purchase and the income may be increased at 20, 30, or even 50%, while keeping the same advertising costs! Trade leaders have their conversion rates at more than ten percent.
Consider investing in advertising. Of course it would be nice if clients constantly rushed to the store on their own, but I wouldn’t count on it. Sometimes great results may be achieved at a low cost. All it takes is to do basic calculations, monitor and improve the campaigns, optimize the website… well… perhaps it’s not that simple, but definitely worth it ☺.

A client in an online store – how to increase sales?

2008-10-08T10:34:00.000+02:00

Online stores are very similar to traditional ones in terms of their principles of operation. In both cases the base for a successful business is to attract a client to the store, present the offer in such a way so that it is interesting, and encourage the client to perform a purchase. The main difference is that in a traditional store, the key factor determining a store’s success is its location. Stores located downtown by the busy streets are more busy due to their location. The equivalent of a “good address” would be an interesting domain. However, one to believe that investing in a good domain will result in millions of clients rushing to the store, would be quite wrong. So how do the clients reach the store?

Direct traffic – the visitor enters the site by entering its address or by using a previously saved Tab/Favorites. Such traffic is the most demanded because it is free. One does not have to pay for advertising or optimize the site, all that is needed is to become the visitor’s favorite store ;-). Good customer service and an attractive product offer allow to change a visitor into a regular customer who will visit the store individually, without the need for additional costs.

Search engines, and especially Google, currently constitute the most popular method of reaching stores. They allow to find the searched product immediately but at the same time provide a multitude of results one may easily get lost in. From the point of view of the store owner, it is important to prepare the site in such a manner so that the link to the store is located as high as possible on the list of search results. Various Search Engine Optimisation (SEO in short, also referred to as Positioning) techniques are used to achieve this.

Referrals are any websites which contain links to the store. These may be the sites of satisfied customers, website catalogues on portals, blogs… A great number of external links has a positive impact on the Google ranking so it is wise to take care so that good sites post links to the store. This category includes also the price comparison websites popular in recent years. Some traffic sources from websites will be free (satisfied clients) and some not (most price comparison websites).

Having potential clients at our online store we, possess much more powerful capabilities than a typical, traditional store. Thanks to such software as Google Analytics we can analyze in detail what do the clients do at our store and why do they leave. Understanding the behavior of clients at a website is very important to increase the store’s profit, and the basic rules are very simple. Each visitor assesses the store’s usefulness in relation to his or her individual needs, and informs us about that assessment. How? By clicking on the links located on the website or by leaving it.

Each website entry constitute a chance to leave it. Only the interest in the website’s content may encourage the visitor to browse further. Sounds pessimistic, but that’s how it really is. If a hundred visitors enter the store then just a small percent will reach the end. This obvious conclusion has some very interesting effects on the Google AdWords advertising (and especially PPC advertisements). Meaning, it may be easily calculated what will be the estimate profit from investing in advertising.

The following information will be needed to perform the calculation:

Price per click
The sum of the advertising budget
Average order value
Conversion, meaning how many customers on average perform a purchase (at the lack of data it can be initially assumed that it’s 1-2%)

Possessing this data it can be easily noticed that:
income = (budget x conversion x average order) / price per click

Minimizing the advertising budget is of course important for us. The price per click is dictated by the market, and the average order value relies heavily on the client’s financial capabilities and needs. Therefore, as it can be seen, increasing conversion is key in order to create an efficient online store, because it is the only factor the store owner has a real impact on.

A few ideas on how to increase conversion:

optimizing site navigation
discarding advertisements resulting with a low conversion rate
simplifying the purchasing process (checkout)
availability of online consultants
clear and specific product descriptions
easily accessible information concerning, returns, the company, the manner of executing orders, etc.

I would like to point to the fact that the above mentioned methodology of calculating the assumed income may be used for traffic coming from any source. PPC advertisements are just the best research subjects because all of the cost-related data is known in advance and does not require additional calculations.

Thoughts after recruitment

2007-06-22T10:16:00.000+02:00

Most of those visiting the G-Forces Polska website have noticed that the last few weeks were devoted to recruitment Over the course of two weeks, we’ve conducted more than 40 interviews and browsed through a few times more applications. We hope that the candidates will agree that the interviews were carried out in a pleasant atmosphere. Taking the opportunity, we want to once again thank everyone for coming. After the interviews, we had an idea to write down our thoughts. We hope that such a short description will help those just entering their career paths to understand what are the expectations of employers.

Recruitment consists mostly in distinguishing oneself from the other candidates. Unfortunately, many people still believe that graduating from university is absolutely sufficient to start a brilliant career. Probably every student knows perfectly well that there is a lot of free time at college or university. There are also many ways to spend that time, but we won’t be analyzing that ;-). The manner of managing free time tells the employer very much about the potential employee: does he or she take the initiative to broaden own knowledge individually, does he or she have a productive hobby, does he or she devote all the available free time to entertainment, etc. Probably the worst answer one can give when asked about his or her actions outside of studies, is to say that the studies take up all of the available time. As a rule, classes deal with the field of research or practical applications only within their basic scope. Devoting all of the available time to properly learn the basics is not a good sign for the employer. Such an attitude evokes concerns as to the flexibility which is the base of action for any modern company.

Not many people do great things during their studies. The vast majority “runs” through the following years without any significant commitment, simply executing the mandatory projects and sitting in laboratories. Unfortunately, some believe that studies teach everything that is necessary to work. Then, at the end of studies, a discouragement towards programming appears, seeing it as a task for unqualified staff members. Nothing further from the truth. Programming, and similar fields, are developing very dynamically in the recent years and a good programmer is now very precious. However, to become a good programmer one has to acknowledge the fact of not being one at the moment. Questions asked during the interviews, concerning design patterns and unit tests, aimed at verifying whether the candidate has any idea as to the lacks of own knowledge. Unfortunately, these terms were quite unfamiliar to a large portion of the candidates, which did not stop them from stating just a few moments later that they know everything about programming and that it’s time to “get more serious”. We encourage all of our potential employees to learn the newest programming trends and technologies, and to ask themselves “how much more do I have to learn to become a good programmer?”. The lack of own knowledge is nothing bad, but an unjustified belief in one’s perfection can certainly be misguiding.

Of course we do understand the dilemmas of students who have to start their work somewhere. We do however strongly encourage to start from small projects outside of school, engaging in open source projects, or executing orders for which there are many offers in the field of web designs. Such an experience has a great significance during recruitment, even if no breakthrough solutions have been created. No idea for a project? Visit your local equivalent of a PHPers meetup and someone will surely come up with something just right for an ambitious beginner of programming.