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Category Archives: e-commerce
Social shopping and loyalty rewards – joining up the dots
Is this the way we will shop in the future: a mix of real world shopping (physically going into shops), social shopping (taking photos, sharing with friends) research (browsing other stores online before actually visiting, price comparison) and loyalty activity (checking in for loyalty discounts, redeeming offers etc)?A recent article in the Guardian reports how teenagers shopping for clothes are already actively using their mobile phones to photograph themselves in the changing room and share photos and price information with friends in a kind of collective shopping experience.Then Alex Horner in New Media Age asks the question "Are location-based rewards the new models for loyalty?" before deciding that we're not there yet, principally because it's too easy to 'game' the system and check in to a place without actually being there.But how long before, as Alex says, 'RFID or similar is built into phones'?
Buying and researching online: behaviour varies by product type
Before making a purchase, it's not uncommon to research the various choices on the web. Sometimes we buy offline after having researched prices online, and sometimes vice versa. An interesting recent study from IAB Europe shows that researching and buying behaviour varies according to the product type.When it comes to CDs and books, it appears that more of us buy online than research online, whereas if you're talking about domestic appliances, far more people research online than actually buy.
A few things that come to mind when I read this:
real world bookshops and record stores with no online outlet are up against it (as if they needed telling) for online booksellers, reader reviews/ratings are perhaps redundant real world sellers of domestic appliances need to put more effort into providing good quality information, advice, ratings and reviews online, not necessarily to compete with but to complement the shopping portals/price comparison sites
Simplified, perhaps, but a reminder that our use of the web continues to become more nuanced and complex, and behaviour in one sector does not necessarily translate to another.
The future is mobile
In business, mobile phones used to be good for one thing – keeping in touch with people by phone when you were on the road or working at a location other than the office. You may or may not remember car phones – I used to have one when I worked for Nike and drove 90,000 miles a year. It was attached to the car and clunky as hell, but felt very cool at the time.Then phones became truly mobile and we started being able to send and receive email, texts, and organise our diaries.
Key takeaways from Brighton SEO Conference 23-7-10
I'm so glad I made it to the second Brighton SEO conference on Friday organised by Kelvin Newman of Site Visibility. With well over a hundred SEO peeps crammed into a room on the fifth floor of Community Base, with cans of Coke and bottles of water provided and the sound of seagulls cawing and cackling outside, this was no typical conference.
For a start, it was free to attend. That's right: gratis. There were no handouts, no promotional banners and no suits – just a crowd of enthusiastic people hungry for knowledge and buzzing with the expectation that can only come from knowing you're in the right place at the right time, at the coalface of an industry so new and changeable it takes your breath away.
