Phronesis Freelance

Infonesis Issue no.3, January 2013

2013-01-03T13:22:00.000+00:00

As we move into a new year, here's a snapshot of some of the headlines in eCommerce and web marketing in the past few weeks.

In this issue:

Ecommerce: Online retail boom 'will force bricks-and-mortar closures'.
Mobile: NimbleCommerce predict 40% of purchases in 2013 will be mobile or tablet-based.
Local: Retailers target smartphone owners who are already in-store.
Broadband: Mobile broadband 'offers largest revenue growth'.
Music Marketing: How festive songs might be responsible for that 'lost' feeling during Christmas shopping.

Ecommerce

Traditional retailers in the UK are facing a growing challenge from online retail - and many could close their doors for good, according to a December 2012 report from yStats.com.

In its Europe B2C E-Commerce Report 2012, the analyst forecasts continued growth in online retail of over 10% throughout Europe as a whole, in each year until at least 2016.

In 2011, Great Britain ranked behind only Norway in terms of having the highest proportion of online shoppers among its population.

But while this is good news for virtual retailers, it is less positive for their bricks-and-mortar counterparts.

"In Great Britain, the growing popularity of B2C eCommerce is expected to force a considerable number of traditional retailers to close their businesses."

yStats.com Europe B2C E-Commerce Report 2012
December 2012

The good news for some is that businesses which previously had only land-based operations are already among some of the most successful online retailers.

Among them are Tesco and Argos who, along with the purely web-based Amazon, were the most visited online retailers of May 2012.

The challenge for others on the high street will be to emulate the online success of these big brands, and learn to adapt to the increasingly virtual nature of shopping in the UK.

Mobile

A December 17th report from NimbleCommerce predicted a rapid rise in transactions made using mobile and tablet devices.

During 2012, the company saw 90% of purchases via its own platform come from desktop PC systems (presumably including laptops and netbooks), but this figure is predicted to fall as mobile and tablet devices gain a greater market share.

By the end of 2013, the company forecasts that as many as 40% of the transactions it handles could be mobile and tablet-based.

"Mobile and tablet technology still has huge potential for e-deals and offers, and businesses need to be equipped to interact with customers through these channels in 2013."

Peter Casey
European Director, NimbleCommerce

The full report adds that more phone-based redemption of special offers and coupons is likely, along with more phone-linked loyalty schemes.

Overall, NimbleCommerce list five key trends, all of which build on the growing maturity of the mobile market, and of mobile web access where no Wi-Fi hotspot is available.

Together, these trends seem quite reasonable (although the 40% figure might be an over-estimate) and highlight the continued and growing importance of catering for a mobile eCommerce audience.

Local

As mobile web access grows in importance, so does the value of reaching local customers - including hyperlocal shoppers who are already in or just outside your store.

Edison Research reported on December 17th that parents are becoming 'smartphone Santas' for whom mobile technology is a way of reducing stress levels, and improving the shopping experience.

Citing the 2012 Deloitte Holiday Survey, Edison report that:

68% of Christmas shoppers planned to improve their experience using their smartphone (if they had one)
62% planned to use their phone to locate physical branches of retail chains
58% planned to compare prices using their smartphones
50% (or thereabouts) planned to use their smartphones to search for product information

In response, retailers are becoming more mobile-friendly even in-store, adding Wi-Fi hotspots and promotional barcodes that provide exclusive deals to smartphone owners.

"The retailer ultimately wants to keep the shopper in their store and fight against 'showrooming' - the process of browsing items on the shelf, and then going online and ordering the item for a lower price."

Melissa DeCesare
Edison Research

Perhaps the best development of all is the ability to pay for your goods via your phone - not at a till, but using an online checkout system.

In this way, a festive future without Christmas queueing is already becoming a reality for some lucky shoppers, according to Edison.

Broadband

Moving into 2013, and a January 3rd report from Ovum predicts that mobile broadband will give telecom operators the single greatest potential for revenue growth through until at least 2016.

In 2012, 60% of the global telecom operator market in terms of revenues, roughly $1.2 trillion of the $2 trillion total market, went to mobile operators.

For the coming three years, mobile broadband is singled out as the biggest growth prospect, at almost 20% each year, while public cloud services, enterprise Ethernet, IPTV, and managed and hosted VoIP are all expected to see double-digit growth too.

"Over the next 3-4 years, both fixed and mobile operators will face the same fundamental challenge: to increase new sources of revenue fast enough to offset the decline in mature services."

John Lively
Chief Forecaster, Ovum

However, mobile is not the only bright spot in terms of high-speed connectivity, and the enterprise Ethernet market mentioned above is also likely to see demand.

This gives those within the B2B market the chance to provide high-speed networking directly to corporate clients at speeds of 40-100 Gbps - and keep pace with their own competitors at the same time.

Music Marketing

In bricks-and-mortar marketing, research from Royal Holloway university in mid-December indicated how festive shoppers can be manipulated without even realising it.

Academics at the university suggested that the omnipresence of Christmas songs in the run-up to the festive period removes some of the distinction between different shops, reducing consumers' ability to choose where to shop.

"Festive jingles are force-fed to Christmas shoppers in a bid to change their mood, influence their sense of time and what sort of products they buy.

"Often we are told that we have the freedom to choose where we want to shop, but during Christmas the use of music in this way is so ubiquitous that our freedom to choose disappears."

Dr Alan Bradshaw
Senior Lecturer in Marketing, Royal Holloway

And if you're not a fan of Christmas music, you've got every right to be even more annoyed at the prospect of shops using this method of music-based marketing.

That's because research suggests, the more muzakky the song, the more effective it is as a marketing tool - putting shoppers at ease and actually encouraging them not to consciously listen to what is playing.

Dr Bradshaw recommends paying more attention to the music the next time you're in a store - although there are plenty of web marketers who'd prefer it if you simply chose to shop online instead.

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Infonesis Issue no.2, December 2012

2012-12-01T10:33:00.000+00:00

Each month, Infonesis brings you some of the SEO and ecommerce topics that have caught my attention over the past few weeks.

In this issue:

Ecommerce: 'Not Provided' keywords account for 40% of B2B analytics reports.
Mobile: Google recommends responsive web design for tablet users.
Local: Retailers' own websites are first port of call for coupons.
Broadband: Live working BT broadband connection outpaces hardware.
The Cookie Law Crumbles: Just one in eight UK websites comply with the EU e-Privacy Directive.

Ecommerce

Google's decision to move to a secure https connection for logged-in users last year came with one major problem for webmasters and SEO practitioners: keyword analytics.

The move to secure search meant that any logged-in user's queries would appear in analytics reports as 'Not Provided' - and that applies to all analytics platforms, not just Google Analytics.

A November 13th report from Optify, the digital marketing software innovators, revealed the extent to which this has affected e-commerce site analytics, particularly in the B2B sector.

Since last year, 'Not Provided' results have risen 171% in B2B website analytics reports, to account for nearly 40% of all results.

That means keyword analysis gives B2B webmasters and marketing professionals, at best, a three-fifths view of their website's total audience.

Optify found that 81% of B2B companies now see 'Not Provided' in over 30% of their results, while 64% see it in 30-50% of cases.

The analyst now warns that these figures could continue to rise until organic referring queries are almost entirely gone from analytics reports.

"This is yet another example of how the SEO practice is at the mercy of search engines, and we believe it's time for B2B marketers to focus on the data they have for creating a personalised experience for their visitors and leads."

Rob Eleveld
CEO of Optify

Mobile

In a November 12th post on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, Google finally laid rest once and for all the argument about how best to serve mobile web users - and particularly those surfing the web via a tablet.

Tablets are a totally new kind of 'screen' and fall frustratingly into the middle-ground between a desktop or laptop computer, and a low-resolution, low-bandwidth smartphone connecting via 3G.

As such, they raise the question: Are you better off serving the full desktop version of your site to tablet-based visitors, or offering them a trimmed-down mobile-specific template instead?

The answer may actually be 'no' in both cases, as Google recommends a third option - responsive web design.

I'm hearing from clients in the web design industry that responsive web design is the best way to go, but that their clients are, in some cases, proving hard to persuade.

But a clear-cut statement from Google is likely to help with the pro-responsive argument.

"Our recommendation for smartphone-optimised sites is to use responsive web design, which means you have one site to serve all devices.

"If your website uses responsive web design as recommended, be sure to test your website on a variety of tablets to make sure it serves them well too.

"Remember, just like for smartphones, there are a variety of device sizes and screen resolutions to test."

Pierre Far and Scott Main
Webmaster Trends Analyst and lead tech writer for developer.android.com
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
November 12th 2012

What is responsive web design? Well, it's about making the same content appear differently to different users.

You can do this using CSS queries based on the media format of your website visitor's device, in order to shape and display your content in a suitable form.

On a smartphone, for instance, you might adopt a largely text-focused template with small or no sidebars, to make best use of the available screen width when the phone is held upright.

Although tablets come close to the full functionality of a desktop or laptop, you might still consider trimming your site down slightly - partly in case the user is connecting via 3G, but also partly because some rich media formats are not supported by all tablet types.

For more guidance on optimising your site's layout for smartphone devices, visit Google Developer.

Local

You might think that, once a customer is actually in your bricks-and-mortar store, your website has done its job. Think again.

A November 21st Nielsen report notes the importance of retailer websites to shoppers looking for discounts and coupons - and with smartphone web access improving all the time, many of those shoppers could be inside your store when they search for you.

To my mind, this only goes to reinforce the importance of local search - not only for people searching in general for your category of goods or services in your area, but also for people searching specifically for your store.

Whether you're a franchise, part of a chain, or an individual retailer trying to thrive in a competitive market, being discoverable online is as important now as it has ever been.

To be absolutely fair, this research was carried out in the US, where the retail market is a little different, but its lessons are still valid to retailers in the UK, or anywhere else with a mature smartphone market.

The challenge for retail webmasters in the future will be how to make bricks-and-mortar stores discoverable, without compromising on any e-commerce elements that may be incorporated into their websites.

Bridge-the-gap technologies like click-and-collect offer one possibility, which would reasonably help to justify name-dropping specific store locations on a site ostensibly aimed at online shoppers.

"When it comes to seeking out deals, consumers are going to the most convenient, reliable sources.

"This creates an opportunity for retailers and 'daily deal' sites to streamline the process of gathering deals and coupons for users, ultimately increasing website and app traffic to drive sales."

John Burbank
President of Strategic Initiatives, Nielsen

Broadband

What are the limitations on the speed of a broadband connection? Available bandwidth? Distance to your nearest exchange? The number of simultaneous users?

According to BT, one of its customers is now facing the unusual situation of having a broadband connection so fast, no hardware can operate fast enough to reach its bandwidth limit.

The XGPON (Tens of Gigabits on a Passive Optical Network) connection is a real-world, working 10Gbps broadband connection in place at Arcol UK, a Cornwall-based engineering firm, thanks to a direct fibre link to BT's Truro exchange.

Its bandwidth is greater than the maximum peak load of the entire London 2012 Olympic media network, and significantly, so great that the limiting factor governing line speeds is the physical networking and computing equipment being used on the site.

"This trial shows we are thinking and ready for the future even though there are no current plans to deploy this technology.

"A lot of this project is about future-proofing - making sure that it's not just the fastest speeds today, but that we can continue to be at the cutting edge for five, ten, twenty years."

Ranulf Scarbrough
Programme Director for the Cornwall SuperFast Broadband Programme

The Cookie Law Crumbles

Research from online privacy specialists TRUSTe, published on November 15th, revealed the extent to which European webmasters have failed to comply with the Cookie Law, AKA the EU e-Privacy Directive.

The Directive means that, if your website stores cookies on a visitor's computer, you should inform them when they arrive at your site, and give them the option of leaving, or of turning cookies off, if they choose to do so.

All websites that use cookies should display a clear warning that requires user interaction to hide, with the exception of those where it is reasonable to assume that cookies must be set in order for them to work - such as sites where you are asked to log in, or certain elements of the e-commerce process like shopping baskets and checkout procedures.

Image courtesy of Surian Soosay
Are websites complying with this law? According to TRUSTe, many are not, even though a large proportion of web users know about the new law and want to see it put into effect on a widespread basis.

In a survey encompassing Great Britain, France, the Netherlands and Germany, Britons ranked second only to the Netherlands in terms of awareness of the law (N 86%, GB 81%, G 78%, F 59%).

Conversely, France - where the new legislation is least widely known - had the highest level of privacy concerns amongst web users (F 71%, GB 69%, G 62%, N 48%).

And despite the awareness and concern levels among users, most of each country's top 50 websites have failed to implement an adequate cookie warning - rising to all 50 of the biggest sites in France and Germany.

Cookie warning implementation rates:

Netherlands - 32%
Great Britain - 12%
France - 0%
Germany - 0%

"The consequences of getting this wrong for businesses are significant, with 36% in France choosing not to visit a company website due to concerns about their privacy online, and 34% in Germany not using a smartphone app due to online privacy concerns.

"Across all four countries, an average of 68% expect companies to comply with the recent EU Cookie Directive, and an average of 41% plan to only visit websites that do.

"With the top 50 websites in France and Germany having taken no action to inform visitors on their home page about cookie use and tracking on these sites, they appear to be out of step with the concerns of their users."

Danilo Labovic
EU managing director for TRUSTe
November 15th 2012

In the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office has confirmed that it is unlikely to levy financial sanctions against non-compliant sites, and more likely to offer practical help towards compliance.

However, even if you see this as a 'soft touch' approach, you should consider implementing a suitable cookie warning as an indicator of the professionalism of your site, and to assuage any user concerns about privacy.

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Infonesis Issue no.1, November 2012

2012-11-05T10:09:00.000+00:00

The web moves pretty fast - if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

Here are just a few key stats you may have missed from the past few weeks, giving a glimpse of how things stand right now.

For direct sources on any of the stats given below, click the asterisks after each named reference.

Ecommerce

Searches for 'Christmas gifts' and 'Christmas presents' roughly tripled in the UK during October (see Google Trends chart below), as the traditional seasonal rush began in earnest - is your content keyworded for Christmas?

An ICM Research poll^* for Retail Week published on October 8th revealed that:

5% of shoppers had already finished their Christmas gift buying;
12% expected to finish in October;
8% did not know when they would finish;
3% did not plan to buy any gifts this year.

That leaves a potential market of 73% of the population still buying gifts in November, due to drop by a further 36 percentage points by the end of the month - are you making the most of the Christmas market while it lasts?

UK relative search volumes in 2012, queries 'Christmas gifts' and 'Christmas presents', via Google Trends
Mobile

An October 30th report from Strategy Analytics^* found that 75% of iPhone users in Western Europe are likely to buy a new phone from Apple when they reach their time to upgrade.

This is down from 88% in 2011, while in the US the proportion has dropped from 93% to 88% in the same period.

Paul Brown, director at Strategy Analytics' User Experience Practice, cited "negative press prompted by a perceived lack of recent innovation by Apple" as a downward influence on loyalty, even among previously very loyal customers.

With Samsung still making strong in-roads into the smartphone market, and Nokia driving hard for success on its upcoming Lumia 820 and 920 models, it's coming to crunch time for Apple.

In this fast-moving smartphone market, are you keeping other platforms in mind when programming your mobile websites, or are you putting all your apples in one basket?

Local

If 75% customer loyalty sounds good to you (and most of us would be happy to see 75% repeat customers in our ecommerce analytics reports), then spare a thought for Scott Forstall.

An October 29th press release from Apple^* included the fairly innocuous line: "Scott Forstall will be leaving Apple next year and will serve as an advisor to CEO Tim Cook in the interim."

This relatively simple statement - and it's worth perhaps noting that no other mention of Scott Forstall was made in the 500-word press release - was pounced on by analysts as proof that he had been ousted for refusing to apologise for his involvement in the creation of Apple's in-house iOS Maps, the intended replacement to Google Maps in iOS 6, but which left customers unimpressed.

Wartime black-and-white aerial photographs, apocalyptic-looking 3D mapping glitches and erroneous location pinpoints - not to mention a route-planning tool with no sense of direction - made iOS Maps one of the biggest embarrassments Apple has faced in recent years.

Based on October 29th's news, it seems the only route Scott Forstall will be planning in 2013 will be a one-way route away from Apple.

Broadband

4G mobile internet launched on October 30th, using the freed-up bandwidth from the demise of analogue television broadcasting (RIP, Ceefax).

Research from network operator EE^* found 74% of UK businesses expect to adopt 4G within its first 12 months.

The protocol offers high-speed mobile internet connectivity - although notably, EE's press release did not put a precise figure on the possible top speed.

Just 11 cities had coverage from day one, with five more due to be switched on by Christmas. EE plans to cover a third of the UK population with access to 4G services by the end of the year.

Battersea Power Station pimped for the EE launch event
Smartphone web access has always been a compromise between high-speed, reliable Wi-Fi where available, and slow, buggy 3G where a wireless connection cannot be found.

Could 4G bridge the gap and finally make anywhere, anytime mobile web access a reality?

Falling Star

Finally, the beginning of November brought with it the demise of electricals retailer Comet, after a failed rescue bid by OpCapita.

Back in February, OpCapita's John Clare, former boss of Dixons, revealed his plan to rescue Comet was to "get back to its core proposition"^* by pretending the past two decades never happened.

His assertion that Comet's future lay in its past - and a return to its 1980s approach to business, when it was still successful - was bizarrely ridiculed in OpCapita's own press release.

The company quoted Adam Cochrane, retail analyst at UBS, as saying: "Online and the convenience of click-and-collect are the fastest-growing areas of electrical retailing.

"Customers want to order more cheaply and get delivery quicker. Making people choose your internet site will be the key battleground going forwards."

Deloitte were officially appointed as administrators to Comet on November 2nd^* and cited poor consumer confidence and a lack of first-time property buyers as the causes for the retailer's demise.

Neville Kahn, joint administrator and restructuring services partner at Deloitte, said: "It has become increasingly difficult for [Comet] to compete with online retailers which don't face the same overheads such as store rents and business rates."

Whether you're a pure-online operator, or have bricks-and-mortar overheads of your own to meet, Comet's tale is an indication that the two worlds of commerce are very much entwined - and you'd better make sure you're equipped to deal with shocks both within the world of ecommerce, and on the high street.

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