The World Wide Web supposed to be an international network. Hence “the”  and “world” in it.  With exception of the Great Chinese firewall anybody in the world could see any information on any website. And, theoretically, anybody could buy any product from any website.

I do understand why e-shops, selling real goods like books, clothes or food make boundaries in the Internet. They need to deliver it via standard snail post. And the goods must cross old-fashioned customs.

But in case of the pure virtual digital goods, like software, digitized media, information there should be no borders. Everybody should be able to pay for a digital product and download it.

However, often the same product or service is available and priced differently in different countries. That’s not nice if you have to pay for the same number of bytes different prices via different IP-addresses. People normally don’t like it.

They try to jailbreak their iPhones because of  the limitations different local App Stores have. They try to have different PSN accounts, because Sony bids more free video-game demos via their USA store, that via the European one. Antivirus vendors also almost always have different prices in different countries.

The main reason for those inconsistencies is that the electronic commerce is but a part of the big companies business. Often it’s not the biggest part and not very important internally. It often suffers from so called “channel conflict”.

For example in order to sell a software in UK a vendor must engage a distributor to move their boxes and to deliver them to the stores around the country. Most of the revenue comes from this distributor and the vendor agrees with it on pricing, volumes and conditions. The distributor expects from the vendor to honor the terms. And not to sell the same software online cheaper than the boxed version in the stores. The price in the UK e-store must be the same as in the UK brick-and-mortar shops.

What if the same vendor tries to sell in USA the same software but with different price (Pound is currently more that 60% more expensive than dollar). In order to honor the contracts with different distributors around the world they must have different prices in different e-stores.

Well, this doesn’t seem fair for us, customers. That’s one of the reason I’ve started http://antivirusdirect.info

I’ve just updated today the price page with colorful bars, describing relative prices for the same digital products in EU, UK and USA stores. Sometimes the price difference is more than 100%. It’s your choice!

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When I  started the first version of antivirusdirect.info , I tried to represent the data in the minimalistic way. The less steps user needs to perform to get all the information, required for the analysis  – the better.

One page per product sounded like a good idea. Well, I didn’t think there are so many antivirus vendors and their price-lists are so versatile.

This resulted in a table of 60×50 cells, containing numbers and > 600 URLs. It was neither minimalistic nor very smart.

Additionally Google and Bing robots simply were chocking during attempts of index those huge pages. So for 4 days there were zero presentation of my site in the search engines.

So I’ve split the long pages to several categories, like “Antivirus 1 year 1 PC” or “Total Protection  3 year 10 PC” and resubmitted the sitemap to Google and Bing.

Let’s see if it improves the SEO traffic

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I’ve spend the last 4 years working for different antivirus vendors (Kaspersky and Trustport) helping consumers to buy and renew their antiviruses online.

The online sales industry of antiviruses is a bit strange. Vendors are still mostly oriented on retail market (well, they’ve build their empires based on brick-and-mortar retail sales). And online shops are basically copies of their retail ones.

But the Internet could give so much more both to vendors and to consumers, then just a virtual shelf.

As a tribute to all the time I’ve spend on antivirus industry I’ve started an information project Antivirus Direct. What are the goals of this project:

• To gather, analyze and visualize information about online sales of antivirus products
• To give customers a piece of mind about what exactly they’re buying and how exactly they’re making their choice
• (may be) to save some money to the customers

Currently I’ve found 53 active antivirus vendors with consumer e-shops,  12 vendors without normal e-shop online and numerous amounts of fake-antivirus brands.

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I’ve written many times about how insecure the credit cards are. They’re stolen by thousands and often merchants are those, who have to pay the price. But credit cards are still the e-payment number one in the world.

So, what are the current (2011) trends in making the electronic payments safer?

1. Hardening the credit card transactions security.
   • Some intelligent controls for the merchant self. Payment Service Providers help with dosens of different smart filters, like IP-address, credit cards issue data, etc.
   • Help from PSPs. They keep black/white lists of credit card numbers and trying to react on stolen cards faster then issuing organizations
   • Help from Credit Card issuing banks – 3D secure. This helps merchants to shift their financial responsibilities a little
2. Alternative payments, like iDeal or mobile payments. They’re much more secure technically. Additionaly credit cards are SO much simplier to steal that thiefs don’t care about cracking cryptho on Maestro-style devices yet.
3. A combination of a credit card and a e-banking cryptho-authenticator, check this one out http://scobleizer.com/2011/02/23/credit-card-of-the-future/ Nice one from France!

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The more I think on the subject, the more I come to the same thought. e-commerce doesn’t exist as a separate discipline.

Basically it’s just one of the parts of process called “sales” or even more abstract “business”.

If I’d try to describe, what e-commerce do for your business it would be: ” improving the information flow from you to your customers”. Keyword is “improving”, which means that the idea of the information flow must not come from the online sales department itself.

e-commerce is just a tool for selling your product. The same as “marketing”. Of course, there are some specific skills, technologies and methods you need to master (actually there is quite a lot because the industry is quite new). But the choise in application of those methods depends really on your product.

If you’re selling tea and want e-commerce to help you, first you need to define what do you want to say to your customer. And only then e-commerce could help you with delivering this information to as many people as possible in different ways.

The next logical step would be to figure out a correct way to position an e-commerce oriented company. You can not expect that an e-commerce company whold sell your tea better then you would. They’re not specialists in tea. So e-commerce as a service must either be incorporated in your business or be a part of a VAP – Value Added Partner (reseller or distributor). There should be no pure e-commerce oriented businesses.

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Duma key is one of the latest horror novels by Stephen King.  I liked old Stephen King of 80s –  Salem’s lot, Pet Cemetery and others are the best examples of smart honest horror novels.

Normally tt’s very easy to scary your by using typical strong images: just cut a limb from a child or a lover – and that’s it! Problem solved, everybody is scared and disgusted. Cheap and effective, like  Saw movies.

But sometimes a writer builds a sophisticated scene from normal day-to-day events and objects and makes you realize how scary it could become. That’s what I called “honest” in this context. Duma Key is definitely very honest and very scary.

Additionally there is a known fact – the best books are those, where the author describes himself and his own life. Stephen King, like the character of the book, suffered a body-crushing car accident and long recovery. And he’s a talented writer.

Injury, disability and pain combined with creativity could create monsters. That’s what this book is about. A typical down-to-earth businessmen Edgar Freemantle is in huge pain after a construction accident, which cost him his arm and some parts of his personality. But he receives a gift instead – he starts to paint beautiful pictures. However, it looks like the power was not for free and somebody is going to claim the price.

The book is long but it’s absolutely impossible to stop reading when you start.

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It looks like the credit card payments in the Internet are immediate. You pay and the money are coming from your credit card to the bank account of the e-shop. Well, it’s only partially true. The credit card “cloud” promises that the money will come directly, but in reality this process is not that fast.

Let’s see how the process looks like from prospective of e-merchant, using Ogone as PSP.

4.jan.2011 around 14.05
- a customer buys something in the e-shop.
- via Ogone service the credit card information is send to an acquirer and the acquirer “authorizes” the payment. However Ogone doesn’t send the actual command to transfer the money

5.jan. 2011 after midnight

- scripts from Ogone are connecting to the acquirers and start the transactions from the day before:

As you can see the actual payment happened 1 day later.

10.jan.2011

According to our contract with the acquirer the money are coming to our account once per week every Monday. So the real money from this transaction will be transferred to the bank account of the e-shop only on 10 January. So much for the “direct Internet payments”

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Several days ago a Russian-dutch Payment Service Provider Chronopay had some security issues.

It is not 100% clear what happened, but a number of credit cards were compromised. Apparently they’ve missed payment on their domain name, which allowed criminals to create a fake payment page and collect some credit card numbers.

May be it’s true, may be not, but I wanted to focus on the situation from prospective of a e-shop customer. What did Chronopay problem could mean for an average credit card user?

First of all, who is the Chronopay and why do they have the credit card information anyway?  People buy products from e-shops, not from Chronopay. It’s actually a bit ironic, but the role of PSP is to manage the operation and security of the credit card operations for the e-stores, so the latter could focus on selling their products – books, CDs, TVs, etc.

If you bought a CD in an e-shop, in most cases the e-shop had never seen your credit card number, it was managed only by Chronopay (or other PSP).

So, when you heard the news about one of the PSP loosing some credit card numbers, how to find out if you should block your card at your bank? How do you know, if your card was managed by Chronopay?

Well, this depend on the e-shops, you’ve used your credit card with. And any of them could have two different contracts with their PSPs:

• “umbrella contract”, where the PSP is managing everything for a e-shop and transferring the real money just once per month to the merchant bank account. In this situation “Chronopay” should be clearly visible on the credit card statement.
• “normal contract”, suitable for advanced e-stores,  where the PSP is providing the technology and all the financial operations are performed directly with e-shop’s account by it’s acquirer. In this situation only the name of e-shop will be visible on the credit card statement. You should go to the e-shop itself and try to find any information about which PSP do they use. In most cases it’s clearly stated and even promoted.

Have a save payments and good year 2011!

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A couple of months ago I got a training in speed reading. Surprisingly It was quite hard (much harder then speed typing)

There are a number of courses available via the Internet. Most of them start with promising “incredible increase of the reading pace”. They talk about 2000-3000, sometimes even 10000 words per minute.

I’ve got one, called EyeQ Bin-n-Cue (I’m not sure this product even exist anymore).

After a couple of weeks I’ve reached  800 words per minute. And then stuck. Another 3 weeks and I was still at the same speed.  Something was wrong. Every time I’ve tried to read faster, I’ve started to skip words or the whole sentences and lost the meaning of the whole text.

Well, after some research in the same Internet I found that for average person 800 wpm is the actual limit of reading speed with comprehensing. Any course, which claims to give you more is not very honest.

Anyway, did it actually increase my reading speed in general? I think so, although not very sure. I don’t read much books anymore, but mostly listen to them in the car.

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The whole range of available Content Management Systems (CMSes) could be spread between two different poles:

• CMSes with  WYSIWYG-editor
• CMSes with just simple HTML-editors.

This division mostly defines how flexible you are in the updates of your content. Free CMSes like Joomla mostly just handle header, footer and menu system and let you anything you want in the content. You have to know some HTML in order to publish in this type of CMS. When I was talking about 3 steps of website management I meant exactly this one.

Most corporate CMSes as well as systems, specifically made for some content, like phpbb (forum engine) or wordpress (blog engine) take care about everything. You just need to enter plain text and pictures and the CMS will do everything for you. It sounds better, then the first type, but be careful! You have to have a strictly defined design, full functioning content department with strict policies and special team of web-developers, doing technical updates to this CMS. If you are talking about start-up, it’s Utopian to think you will be able to use WYSIWYG-style CMS.

Well, if you’re having a website building start-up, then yes, this may be the best solution.

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