Why not? Holographic technology continues to advance at a staggering rate. If you doubt it, just look at Hatsune Miku, the first Japanese holographic singer, whose many fans turn this technological and audiovisual phenomenon into an idol to follow and pay tickets to watch her, paying no heed to the fact that she’s not real.

This technological resource is already used in advertising to promote brands. For example, this type of campaign is already quite common in China, although not in mass campaigns, as this continues to be a field under development.

But just imagine that you are in an online store, browsing the various items or looking for something specific. Then you click on the button to “view” a product, and a device generates a hologram which you can turn, move, and see in other colours and shapes.  There is even the possibility of smelling it, for even though holograms are based on 3D technology, 4D technology is already being developed. This would allow users not only to see a product, but also feeling and experiencing it as if it was the real thing.

If a hologram is attractive and more visual than a mere photograph or video, it will provide more information and generate more interest in the item, and be more helpful to persuade users to buy it.

This is not a sci-fi film: holographic technology that allows user interaction already exists, and there is nothing crazy about assuming that one day it will be implemented in computers, mobile devices, and iPads. That is, if by then these are still the main devices.

There is usually a clear distinction between structured data (usually CRM and ERP databases) and non-structured data, such as monitoring of user behaviour, 2.0 components such as comments or likes, and even data that are external to the store (email, tweets, likes on Facebook, etc.) Even though integration and analysis of such diverse data is challenging, the potential applications of this process can bring great benefits to a business, such as the following:

• Web analytics: web analytics in e-commerce can mainly help in the optimisation of purchase processes and conversion rates, but it can also help to perform a monitoring that helps to acquire better knowledge of customer profiles. In this sense, behaviour can be analysed on any level that is beneficial for business. Some examples are navigation patterns, logins, pre-purchase behaviour, and promotion acceptance. Most stores blindly trust A/B tests that are badly designed or which simply ignore crucial variables, when the data for decision-making are readily available.

• Stock optimisation: the date on acceptance of some products as opposed to others, together with the performance analysis of cross-selling and up-selling strategies combined with storage and supplier costs, can provide extremely important insights into the amounts of products to be held as stock. These data come from various sources and must be integrated and analysed, but benefits for business are undeniable.

• Personalised offer: individualised website adaptation to each user starts to be required for optimisation of any online store. Product recommendations adapted to user behaviour should go beyond mere criteria based on catalogue features (similar category, etc.), and the data volume available is not always sufficient to immediately establish relationships between products (they are usually bought together, etc.) In addition to personalised product offers, website behaviour can be changed for each user on the basis of his or her interests. Potential action types to be carried out can range from emails to new users to reminding about the products in an abandoned shopping cart and offering a discount. This kind of technique is known as behavioural targeting, and its depth hugely benefits from analysis techniques associated with Big Data.

In addition to these applications, there are other, more tangential applications that are nonetheless related to business improvement, such as logistics optimisation or purchase analysis, although this kind of analysis may only be available to large corporations. However, we shouldn’t lose track of the possibilities of data which are increasingly available and easy to store.

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Sources::

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/3945-4-Ways-Big-Data-Can-Help-Ecommerce-Merchants-

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/3876-Understanding-Big-Data-For-Ecommerce

http://www.bigdatalandscape.com/news/why-big-data-is-a-must-in-ecommerce

*Imagen bajo licencia cc por http://www.flickr.com/photos/pnnl

1. You should be careful when you download a mobile application, and all the more so if you have Android, the most widespread mobile OS due to its easy integration with practically any hardware, except for Apple terminals. Many mobile developers complain that the App Store has exhaustive, restrictive controls, but this makes iOS the safest mobile OS (at least theoretically), even if you can always get a “bad apple” (like this one). If you go into Google Play and search “angry birds”, you’ll get more than 100 results, no more than 5 of which will be official apps of the game. And the rest? Probably more than 50% will be malicious apps that will try to access your personal data. “Sure, but I’ve got nothing to hide, I don’t care if they steal my address book or personal data”. It’s the old story: what if I tell you that malicious developers could steal your data, pretend to be you, and harass children? Still not worried? You’ve got a problem.

2. When we install a Facebook app, we normally don’t pay attention to the permissions requested before accepting the installation. Most times they ask for access to our Facebook address book and our email address, as well as to be able to publish on our wall. Imagine if that app executes a malicious code in the browser that infects your system: right there and then, you have become a “mule” that can distribute malware anywhere, as some of your friends will also install the app (thanks to the spam that it will send) and become in turn new “mules” that will distribute malware to their friends.

3. To the increase in sales of Macs should be added the increase in viruses and malware specifically created for this platform. The number of users with OSX at home/work is starting to boom, and cybercriminals are interested in doing as much damage as possible. So they use their advanced programming skills to infect as many Macs as possible and cause a global collapse. Effective Mac antiviruses are starting to be developed, such as Virusbarrier by Intego and the ESET antivirus, so I encourage you to give them a try and let me know what you think.

4. A free antivirus can offer you the security you need if you are someone who has common sense when sitting in front of your PC. However, some of us tend to be chaotic by nature and download everything we see due to our nature as software hoarders, so a slightly more professional application is preferable. As regards Ransomware viruses, such as the famous police virus, they are relatively easy to remove if you have some idea of how Windows works.

5. DNS Spoofing is a technique by which an attacker replaces the original website by another one, extremely similar, so that we enter our data believing that it’s the original website. Once we do this, the attacker has access to our account in the original website. It’s a bit more complicated, but this is the simplest explanation I can give: DNS servers help us to translate page names into their original IP addresses – otherwise we would have to enter webpage IPs directly http://108.162.201.84 instead of their names http://www.brainsins.com. That’s where this technique comes into play, as attackers deceive our computer by telling it that they are DNS servers, so that they can give us any IP they like.

I recommend not clicking on the links in suspect emails, and when you want to visit critical websites such as your email account, bank website, etc. enter the URL directly into the browser bar or use Google.

6. To decrease the risk of being infected by malware via your browser, I recommend using extensions that prevent the execution of webpage scripts, or at least ask for permission before executing them. For Chrome, you can use Scriptsafe, and NoScript for Firefox.

7. If you really want to know if your computer is infected by rootkits or undetectable viruses, which turn us into a part of massive botnets, you should carefully examine your computer’s communications. Modern antiviruses are really very good, but there are always things they can miss.  [High level ON] If you want to inspect what’s going on between your PC and the web, you should use a tool called Wireshark [High level OFF].

Hope you liked it. Talk again soon! 

On the basis of our general recommendation strategy

An aspect to be taken into account when it comes to choosing the recommendation strategy for your online store is the store’s general strategy. That is, if you have defined a strategy to increase the average value of orders by taking business needs into account, you should also include this general consideration when it comes to choosing the recommenders to be used in each page.

It seems obvious, but it’s often hard to focus on general goals. You can apply different strategies in different pages to improve micro-conversion or secondary goals, and thus you lose sight of the fact that the goals of integrating these recommendation strategies do not match the goals you seek.

The recommendation strategies most frequently used in product pages

In our previous post we talked about the most widely used general recommendation strategies, which enable us to have an idea of which strategies can be applied. Contextualising the product page, we can see the most typical strategies related to the general strategies in order to provide a number of basic guidelines or initial ideas. You should take into account that, given that every online business has specific needs, these strategies can and should be adapted to the specific needs of each online store.

Alternative products

One of the main goals for product recommendations, at the business level, is to increase the website’s global conversion rate. So, when we talk about the product page, we seek in increase the “look to book” rate, or the conversion rate as regards individual products.

One of the most successful strategies to increase the “look to book” ratio is displaying alternative products. In this way, when a user views the information for a specific product, if he or she is not sure about the specific product, navigation options towards similar products that may suit his or her needs are given. In the following example you can see how Trekkinn, one of the online stores of the TradeInn group, shows recommendations for alternative products that promote this browsing, and thus the increase in the website’s global conversion rate.

Example of how Trekkinn displays alternative products

Recommended products

Another main challenge for an online store is increasing the average value of orders. To do so, you must use cross-selling strategies in the different pages of the online store. These strategies, as well as enabling us to increase the average value of the shopping cart by showing products that complement the purchase of the product being viewed, allow us to increase global conversion rates. If the user is not 100% sure about the product being viewed, he or she may buy some of the complementary products recommended.Complementary products

The next example shows how SantaFixie, an online store of fixed-gear bicycles, makes use of cross-selling by displaying products which other users purchased together with the product that is being viewed.

Santa Fixie cross-selling strategy

Fashion looks

Other factors should be taken into account in fashion websites, such as the full looks that allow users to view the pieces of clothing that aesthetically match the clothes they are viewing. This is a critical aspect that most recommendation systems cannot provide, as they only take user behaviour into account, not the features of each piece of clothing. In the case of BrainSINS, thanks to our Smart Fashion solution, we can provide recommendations for full looks that can be perfectly integrated in any online fashion store.

Let us take a look at El Ganso, one of our customers, which shows full looks for each piece of clothing, including different kinds of matching clothes (to create a 4-product look) that make it easier for users to buy a set of clothes which can be worn at the same time.

Recommended full looks in El Ganso

Mixed approaches

Even though there are many more recommendation strategies for product pages, the ones we have reviewed so far as the most widely used general strategies for product pages. Then you should be able to combine several recommendation strategies in the same webpage to advance towards different business-level goals. This is the case, for example, of PhoneHouse, where some product information pages display both recommendations for alternative products and recommendations for complementary products, thus making it possible to increase the website conversion rate and the look to book rate, as well as the average shopping cart value.

Phonehouse uses two strategies on the same page: alternative products and cross-selling

Knowing the origin or source of visits is an important piece of information for any website, at least to begin with, as it allows us to a have an idea of which channels are being adequately dealt with. However, taking into account only the traffic volume generated by each source can lead us take to wrong or misinformed decisions. As we saw in the previous post, having more traffic doesn’t mean having more sales, so we should take one step further in this analysis.

Analytics in e-commerce?

But before going on, there are some aspects which should be clarified. First of all, you should be able to have clear goals linked to each channel, as, even though your ultimate goal is sales, sometimes some campaigns or channels can be used as parallel goals such as branding. If your goal is branding, or being able to stand out as a voice to be taken into account in certain topics, then the traffic volume from the sources related to those goals becomes more valuable, as it serves to measure your impact in this respect. This aspect, which is so important, is sometimes neglected, and there is a certain degree of non-coordination between the people in charge of creating the campaigns or generating contents and the person in charge of the e-commerce analytics.

Secondly, if you use a channel to generate sales or at least to strengthen them, then you should avoid measuring only the traffic volume from those sources and focus on the conversions generated by them.

If you use Google Analytics, you can easily measure the impact of your traffic sources. Access Conversions > Goal Flow, and you will see a funnel that shows the traffic sources leading to the start of the sale process and then to the sale goal.

Google Analytics view that enables you to see conversions by traffic source

Overall view of the Google Analytics Multi-Channel FunnelThis view provides more adequate information about how each traffic source is helping you to sell in your online store. You should dig a bit deeper, given that, as we will now see, some traffic channels don’t generate a high sale volume directly, but do contribute to the conversions which require several user visits. To do so, Google Analytics provides the MultiChannel Funnel view. Access Multi-Channel Funnels > Overview, and you can get an idea of what each channel contributes and how channels interact:

Another view which you should take into account is Multi-Channel Funnels > Conversion Paths, which offers greater details about how the different channels interact to generate sales:

Google Analytics view of the main conversion paths

This information will give you a more accurate view of what each of the channels that generate traffic for your website contributes, and thus you will have quality information about what each of your traffic sources contributes to your online store.

So, even though I agree that offline commerce can learn a lot from its online version, we shouldn’t lose sight of everything that the online channel can or should learn from offline commerce. In the next posts we will delve deeper into the most critical aspects in which e-commerce can learn from traditional commerce, but these are some points where e-commerce has much to learn.

Experiences, not only products

Shopping, (particularly for those) who enjoy it, doesn’t only mean buying products, but rather it’s also a leisure experience. For the time being, online shopping does not provide the same level of satisfaction or leisure, but rather it focus on convenience and practicality. We have a long way to go to be able to offer fuller experiences that are closer to the offline shopping experience.

Being where and when the user wants to buy

Even though geographic location restricts the potential number of buyers, having a well-chosen physical location allows retailers to be at the right place and the right time, when users are willing to buy. When we try to capture users for our online store, we use advertising mechanisms, trying to have an impact on users who we believe might be interested in buying, but we often make that impact offering irrelevant products or promotions, or in contexts where they are not willing to buy.

Immediacy

Even though a lot of work is being currently done and one-day delivery is practically here, offline shopping gives us something that will never be reproduced offline: total immediacy. Leaving the shop with the book, CD, or piece of clothing we wanted under our arm is part of the experience, and it also has an undeniable value that makes many consumers continue to prefer to buy in physical shops.

Sensation-based

Traditional commerce is based on sensations. From carefully decorated shop windows to have the greatest visual impact, to the sensory experience of touching a product and seeing it up close.  Even though taking adequate care of the photographs in our online store can help to close this gap, for some types of products this lack can never be really made up for, even by promoting showrooming.

Personalised customer service

Even though I have recently tended to buy practically everything online, I must say that my best shopping experiences always took place in small specialist shops. I can still remember how I would walk once a month into Arise, a small record shop specialising in heavy metal. I would walk through the door and the sales assistant would take out new records which he knew I would like, play them, and let me stay in for hours listening to new music I enjoyed. This always made me leave the shop with a bag full of CDs and vinyl records and go home smiling.  Luckily, we can improve this point a lot by using new personalisation tools that allow us to automatically find products of interest for each of our users.

Google Shopping at the forefront

For those of you who are not very familiar with this Google product, here’s a short summary. This application, which can be found on the left hand side of the search engine, is meant to simplify the product search process even more, so that users can compare the best offers for a product just by clicking. The options given by Google Shopping include the possibility of searching and filtering products by price, searching for products with free delivery, by establishment, etc.

Achieving organic positioning is becoming increasingly difficult, but let’s not lose hope. Google wants its users to have a ranking of the best and worst online stores, but based on their own criteria, or at least on the basis of their own needs and what they are looking for. To do so, a rating will be established with a crucial indicator: customer reviews. In the end, ”the customer’s the boss”, and buyers’ reviews are essential for the e-commerce sector. Online stores with positive comments will get better positions. What’s interesting about it is that the recommendation systems will be included in online stores and make the sector really grow and become even more professionalised.

It is expected that the algorithm will also take other variables into account, such as the time which a certain product stays in an online store. Nothing has been confirmed so far in this sense, so we can only speculate observing Google’s usual behaviour. As always, we are expectant, looking forwards to seeing what happens next.

The idea, however, will very probably be based on the same premises as Google Shopping.  Google will probably want to promote its fledgling Shopping service while gaining greater approval from e-commerce professionals.

Google + and its relationship to other products

It wouldn’t surprise me if Google +, the social network which hasn’t really taken off and which some people call “the graveyard” is also a key factor. Sharing contents in Google + ensures gradually getting a better position in the search ranking, and you can also comment on it. If you want to make your online store relevant, I would recommend getting started with Google +.

A warning to seafarers

Google is in a way abusing its market leadership in Spain, but if it continues to do so, it’s very likely that other search engines will take advantage and offer attractive services to users. We are not stupid, and if I’m looking for a product, I don’t want to be shown the products in Shopping, but more objective results. Being realistic, don’t you think that if everything is based on review systems, paid reviews will become more and more frequent? Just food for thought.

According to Kevin Hillstrom, from Mine That Data, there are several e-commerce models depending on your relationship with your customers:

• Acquisition model: if less than 40% of buyers last year will buy again this year, your business should focus on customer acquisition. In this mode, customer loyalty programmes will not be profitable, and so all efforts should focus on acquisition. According to Kevin, 70% of e-commerce businesses fall into this category when they are in a mature stage. Online stores that sell materials for complex hobbies, such as diving or mountain climbing, usually fall in this category, as most customers buy material once but finally abandon the hobby due to a lack of time or experience. If you are in this situation, you’d better focus your effort on getting your buyers to bring new customers, instead of trying to make them buy again in the future.

• Hybrid model: if between 40 and 60% of last-year buyers will buy again this year, you have a hybrid model. In this case, you should focus 50% of your effort on acquisition and 50% on increasing purchase frequency. Zappos, with an average of between 2 and 2.5 purchases per year, falls clearly in this category.

• Loyalty model: if more than 60% of last-year buyers will buy again this year, you should focus on your customer loyalty strategy. This is the case of Amazon, and only 10% of e-commerce businesses enter this stage once they are mature.

Being clear about what your e-commerce model is will enable you to adequately guide your marketing strategy on all levels. From the type of actions to product pricing, through what to focus on. There was much talk recently at eComm&Beers about the fact that the key factor in sectors such as the food sector is recurrence, and money is not really made until the third purchase. If your e-commerce is in acquisition mode, you cannot afford this, and your margins should be enough to make a minimum profit from the very first purchase, discounting all costs, including the customer acquisition cost.

Richard Bartle, Pilar Jericó (Be-Up), Andrzej Marczewski (Cagemini), Sergio Jiménez (Gamkt), Berni Melero (Canal+), Mónica Esteban (Juegaterapia), Arturo Castelló (Jugo), Victor Moreno (Bimbo) and José Carlos Cortizo (BrainSINS), are some of the confirmed speakers that will bring to the Gamification community their vision, research and experience about using game mechanics to achieve business goals and user engagement.

Be quick to buy your tickets so you can get an early bird discount.

In a previous post on the product page we already talked about the attention, capture, and decision-making processes that guide users in a page towards conversion (sale). The category page is no exception, and should cover these stages. Even though the decision-making stage is not crucial for the category page, the category page plays a key role in the attention stage and a significant role in the capture stage.

E-Commerce:  the perfect category page

• Attention:  a user arrives at the category list from a search engine or from within the website. At this point, the goal of the page is to retain the user in the list, i.e. the user should not decide that you cannot offer what he or she is looking for and leave your website.

• Capture: if you have managed to retain the user’s attention, you must guide him or her towards the next step: looking at specific products which he or she might buy.

• Decision: making: once the user has displayed a strong interest in one or several products, you must pave the way for the sale.

We will now take a closer look at which parts of the category page help in each stage, and how the category page relates to other pages, such as the product page, the shopping cart page, and the checkout page.

This is the Zacratus category page, which we think is an example to follow.

Attention

Most often, users landing on the category page come from two main sources: by clicking in an internal link in your website, or from an external search engine (Google). If possible, it is useful to distinguish between these two cases, given that, as we will see, they can lead to slightly different initial conditions. To achieve this goal, you can use behavioural targeting tools, defining rules on the basis of the user’s provenance.

• Landing from Google: the customer reaches your store via a Google search. Usually, this search will be related to the category name. Given that the category page will be the customer’s first contact with your store, you should deploy all your weapons to capture his or her attention. To do so, and assuming that you have no prior information on this user, you can offer a selection of products in the category visited. For example, you can display the bestselling products in the category or a selection of deals.

• Landing from an internal link: the customer arrives at the link from your website, and the fact that he or she has clicked on a link in your store to reach the category page already displays a certain degree of interest. If fact, the user has probably already visited the store, in which case you can offer a personalised selection of products, always within the category in question. These are products which have been viewed or added to the shopping cart in previous visits, or, if you know that the user has made recurring purchases in your store, the products bought in previous sessions.

It is important to point out that when we talk about “displaying a selection of products” we are not talking about invading the list. Generally speaking, the selection can be displayed before the list, and should not be too long, so that the user doesn’t confuse the selection with the real list.

Capture

Once the user has arrived at your category page and has decided not to leave it, it’s crucial to facilitate, as far as possible, the task of finding the products which might be of his or her interest (and which the user might want to buy). In many cases, category pages include many products, which can often run in the hundreds or even thousands. For technical reasons, this list should be “paged”, in such a way that the user can access a limited number of products, and, in order to obtain more, must perform some action (usually, clicking on the link that leads to the following list page, or scrolling down to the last product). You cannot expect users to make such an effort, so the best option is to make users go through a list, allowing them to delimit and order the products:

• Filter by subcategory: you may be displaying a more general category than what the user is looking for. For example, in a fashion store, you can display “women’s” products when the user is looking for a “dress”. For this reason, you can use a category tree to make it possible to go to the specific category in a single click.

• Filter by attributes: it allows us to discard from the list all the products that don’t meet certain conditions desired by the customer. This is no doubt one of the most powerful filtering tools. In a mobile phone list, for example, you can select filters such as Android, more than 4’’, and a capacity of more than 16GB, thus paring the list down.

• Ordering: even after the list has been delimited as much as possible, the product list may continue to be too large. In this case, the customer should be able to choose the attributes which he or she rates more highly, including in this case price as an attribute, and yielding an (ascending or descending) order based on this attribute. This doesn’t decrease the size of the list, but it makes it possible to display the products which might be most interesting for the customer at the top of the list and, more importantly, on the first page.

It should be pointed out that, insofar as possible, it is always advisable (in most cases) to use partial page loading techniques such as AJAX to handle all the changes in the category page resulting from the user’s actions, always providing the user with feedback.

category page, which, in addition to having a great design, includes recommendations to guide the purchase.

Decision-making

In the usual process by which customers become increasingly interested in your store products, it can be expected that, once those products have been located in the category page, users will want to find out more about them and click to obtain more information in the product page. And this will often be the case, but not always. Maybe the user already knew the product, or the information displayed will be enough. In this case, you can skip a step and make the sale directly. To do so, you must find a balance between the information to be displayed in each product box in the category list: firstly, you will want to display all the product information possible, and secondly you will want to save space so as to display as many products as possible on the screen. The items to be shown will depend to a large extent on the type of store, but, as a general rule, you can display:

• Basic information: main photograph, name, and price. The photograph should be large enough to see the product details, but small enough so as not to take up too much space. The name and price should be easy to identify taking a quick glance down the list. In the case of a discounted product, you can display a small stamp and the previous price crossed out. You can also use stamps to indicate key product factors, such as the fact that it is new in the store. If you display products that cannot be bought because, for example, there is no stock, this information should also be given.

• Additional information: depending on the type of store, you might want to show the product brand or some of its main features. For example, you can show the size of a television screen.

• Purchase button: as we have seen, the purchase can end on the category page. A button to buy or add to the shopping cart is perfect for this.

As regards additional information, you can create a mini product info sheet and display it dynamically in the list. This can be beneficial as you can have some of the advantages of the product page without leaving the category page. However, you should be careful with this technique, because, although it can be very useful, it can significantly decrease traffic towards the category page, where, with more space available, you can deploy more tools to close the sale.