Google Chrome WebStore – Just Another App Platform?

App’s are everywhere these days any why not? The majority of applications extend existing platforms beyond the wildest imaginations of the original developers, just take the iPhone App store or the Android market place as examples, so finally there is a App store for Google Chrome.

Now this for me is quite interesting, as we move forwards with technology, there are chasing platforms, one of which is my favourite web browser, Google Chrome. For me it was a pure speed thing, running Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome next to each other, even hitting return on IE, then FF and then Chrome, Chrome would load pages faster, noting this is the person that has 50Mb broadband and anything that takes more than 1 second to load is classed as ‘laggy’.

The Introduction Video

This is from Google themselves:

Getting Users to Pay

Now this is an interesting concept, I have to date never bought an application solely for a web browser. But considering I spend some 75% using one, I suspect the chances are extremely high, especially when you consider the likes of http://www.tweetdeck.com/ have a free app and there is hundreds of them to choose from.

Take a browse today through the Chrome WebStore and see what you can find.

As Big as Big Boys – How Appear to be Big on a Shoe String

Looking BigLooking big is really quite easy on the internet, all it takes is some time, some cunning and a nudge in the right direction. Follow this step by step guide and you’re look like an established or corporate business in next to no time.

Here are some key page names you need to create and add to your site, ideally linked from your footer area on all pages (except the checkout if possible):

  • Press Office
  • Affiliates
  • Meet the Team
  • Careers, Recruitment or Join the Team at Company Ltd
  • Partners
  • Store Locator (if you have a trade or customer collections site)

Even if you do not have a press office, affiliate network set up, a team (other than the parents & pet cat), partners or a store. Get these pages up.

Get the Email Addresses Sorted
First off, with any decent hosting account you get a load of email boxes or forwarders, create a selection of email addresses, press@, affiliates@, careers@, store@ and forward them all to your main email address. It doesn’t matter that these go to the same email address, its the message they convey.

Press Office
For the press office, write a little blurb, here is a great example, minus the link to the PR company, make the contacts name up or even copy Donna’s name.  70% of that page is one fat image, do the same.

Affiliate Network
Even if you don’t have an affiliate network set up, lob a page up offering 2.5-8% of sales to affiliates, you never know you might be approached before you go looking to join an affiliate network.

Meet the Team
A personal favourite of mine, get some half decent pictures taken, I didn’t say pay for them, you’d be amazed what  you can do with a phone and the grey scale setting in photoshop, just check my about me page. That was me taking the pee in Tesco’s sporting a pack of ‘spam slices’.

Talk you friend, mum and dad to get in as well, a short bio, although if you don’t want to go the ‘family’ route you may want to alter their surnames.

If you’ve got any accreditations, lob them on. I used my MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional) logos for my eBay stuff, although for the best part it was pretty much unrelated, but looked FAB!

Careers, Recruitment or Join the Team at Company Ltd
More of a personal preference here, if the company you wish to create has a more relaxed feel, go for the ‘Join the Team @ Company Ltd’ , otherwise name it careers or recruitment.

You know the drill, we’ve all looked at sites we’d like to work for, google them and copy/paste and edit a few lines.

Partners
Always a firm favourite, if you shift, sorry I mean market branded goods, then include a few logos and make the impression that you work with these companies, even if there is someone in the middle (a few times probably). If they’re unbranded, brand them and knock up a logo in paint.

Store Locator
If you have premises, then this is a shocker for both the website and any marketing materials, if the buyer has no intention of visiting, a picture of a shop, office, warehouse or tent will reassure the customer, you’re real. Oh and include a google map, they’re free or just screen shot and paste the image in.

A big tip here is include the phone number and email address in clear sight, customers will normally always phone or email rather getting off their butts to come in.

So your website should have a cracking footer line up now, the above should take no more than 15 minutes per page (thats 5 min’s googling, 5 min’s pasting, 5 min’s editing).

Press | Affiliates | Meet the Team | Careers | Partners | Store Locator

It looks swish doesn’t, almost a ‘real’ professional company that you always were. You’ve now paved the way to these departments in you business structure, all in an hour or two. What its says to the customer, ‘is these people are real’. Get over that hurdle, the rest is easy.

Show Our Age
Talking of easy, thats not the end yet, here is a quality chestnut, under you logo, do just have some cheesy by line, include the date the business was established.

Ask yourself, which sounds better?

  • I Love My Feet
  • I Love My Feet | Trading Since 2006

Thought so, do it. It adds an immediate age to the company and puts the browser at ease, this is a defo a tick if using right under the logo placed in the top right hand corner, no fancy text, just plain Arial or similar font face.

Facebook & Twitter
Include these pages ONLY and ONLY after you beefed it up, spoken to the entire pub and got Aunt Bessie to hit the like button too, get at least 100 likes before trying to promote it to people you do not know.

You’ve seen the pages & invites, ‘come see my Facebook page’, its got 1 fan and some ‘hello’ post, watch the dust balls ride on by, they’re clicking the back button. You want something to model for this, see MyProtein’s facebook page, its got some FB guru company beefing that one.

Warehouse or Store Picture
Take a look here on Google for some ‘warehouse‘ pictures, pick one and include it in your listing, about pages or on the site footer. If you actually have a warehouse and even a team of staff, ike em out and take a picture. Only takes a few mins and the staff get to see daylight.

I’ll stop here, I hope you’ve taken on board the point of this blog post, if you are to be big in business, then you need to give the impression that you are big in business, even if you’re not.

Tesco Taking on Amazon, Great Choice!

Tesco Logo

Update: This article has been expanded upon further, see Part 1: Battle of The Giants – Tesco V’s Amazon – Who Will Win?

The PR wheels have been turning for the past few days on the news that Tesco is to take on Amazon. It was interesting reading the comments left by users on the article posted on Tamebay, as they had a distinct eBay feel to them.

Amazon in many ways is almost the perfect model to follow, its core differences between its  marketplace and eBay are reason for its huge success year on year.

The Marketplace Differences

eBay UK LogoeBay facilitates transactions between buyers and sellers, but does not sell or create product to sell on its own marketplace (like a ‘farmer’ hosting a ‘carboot sale’), where as Amazon is its main (note not sole) selling platform which ‘allows’ other sellers to sell along side ‘it’ and to use the Amazon umbrella.

Another huge differences is the way inventory is handled, eBay is still a free-for-all, although a few categories like Sat Nav and DVD’s are moving towards single listings, multiple sellers, but for the best part, its a mess of same items all designed and displayed differently [this is both a positive and a negative] in vast amounts of listings.

Amazon UK

Hey look, Amazon!

Where-as Amazon’s structure is quite different, this is a true single record > multiple sellers environment and its a fight based upon ‘mainly’ price. So instead of creating a listing per seller, its one listing per multiple sellers.

This is not without its complexities over duplicate records and damn annoying duplicate barcodes especially in the media categories (sold a book when it was supposed to be some fancy dress item, grrrr) but generally the system works, if its to work then Tesco need a backend system that can cope with the creation of new records, a way of verifying them on multiple criteria and allow edits to them to maximum inventory creation potential.

Seller Thrashings

Another fundamental difference between the marketplaces is that you can generally talk around eBay and cover up miss-haps. If you piss-off Amazon, then you are screwed. Its their marketplace and if you let their customers down, then you better have a damn good contact list to start bailing on, its extremely rare for sellers to get back on. I know of only perhaps just three in almost 10 years.

OoO Wait, What About Play.com?

play.comIts worth noting here that no-where I have seen has anyone mentioned Play.com, not I think this has a potential in itself. Again for those new to the different platforms, Play.com offer something called PlayTrade and PlayTrade Pro, which allow sellers to sell on their platform along side their existing stock.

Now the biggest limiter (by their own design I hasten to add) is that Play.com have chosen to the stance that ‘if its not in our database you cannot sell it’, which in many ways keeps things cleaner, but also seriously stunts their growth when compared directly to Amazon.

Yes you can ask Play to create new records, but the data better be squeaky clean and its not a fast process by any means as from I know if its checked manually [poor Chris B!].

Processing the Sales Data

The other no-brainer for Tesco is that they can pull an Amazon style javari.co.uk on the data they pull. Again for those who don’t know this, remember you are selling on Amazon’s platform, they sell there too, its their platform. So when they spot a sweet spot, like footwear, don’t be supprised if they do a javari.co.uk or an endless.com with this data. If I was Tesco, I’d be gunning for this data, data that says what sells, when, how and who for, its utter insane when you think that Amazon have been doing this for years and haven’t even started to monetize their data to sub sites.

On a side note, checkout javari.co.uk and endless.com they are super slick and not a patch on what Amazon have released in the Amazon Webstore platform for merchants.

Integrate, Integrate, Integrate!

Now if Tesco is going to open its doors to other sellers, then it better have some ‘common’ tools at its disposal to enable sellers to port data (coff, just like Play.com did) from existing marketplaces (Amazon) and enable its use on their own site.

A few common sense things, like keeping condition codes the same as thats used on Amazon (coff Play.com) and file formats would be a good start. One thing that Amazon lacks on in direct comparison to eBay is that its API isn’t that great. eBay’s API has to be one of, if not the the best documented & thorough API there is.

Working with 3rd party tools like eSellerPro , Channel Advisor, AManPro etc is going to be key to the marketplaces success, I really do not see such a channel taking off if no-one can list data there quickly, especially the businesses that already have great data sat there waiting to be deployed.

Fulfillment By Tesco?

Infact I don’t even want to contemplate this right now, but thinking about it for a few movements, if Tesco are smart enough to take a swipe at Amazon, why not go for the jugular and take some FBT (Fulfillment By Tesco) as well? Buy up a third party like ProFS, bingo instant fulfillment network to take on Amazon’s. See crazy stuff! My head hurts on the sheer potential they have here.

Tesco Affiliates, Amazon Style

Another topic that I have seen absolutely no-one mention and that is affiliates. For those who have never heard of this concept, its simple, you transfer a customer that converts, you get a commission (its what I have been hiding away doing for the past few months on a larger scale).

My point is, Amazon have BOAT LOADS OF AFFILIATES and the crazy thing about their affiliate program is that they offer 24hr cookie where the rest of the industry is around 30 days, but Amazon converts like crazy, times this by thousands and an astore product that is simple to use for community sites and can be deployed in minutes.

Its like an army of sales staff working for you, its crazy.

Note to self, need to find out the figures quoted for Amazon affiliates, I am sure they account/contribute for a massive amount of the total sales revenue of Amazon.

So Matt Your Point Is…

Tesco would be insane to try and copy eBay, by-god thats a dirty marketplace when you compare it to Amazon. I have no idea how this is going to pan out, a new site or a bolt on module to their existing Tesco Direct site at http://direct.tesco.com/ (which again for those did not know it has a proportion of an amalgamation of supplier feeds branded as Tesco, well and some Tesco owned items too I suspect).

If its going to work, they’re[Tesco] are going to have to push their brand name to the limits of what can be pushed. That Amazon logo instills a sense of comfort & trust that just isn’t found elsewhere on the Internet and is going to be extremely hard to get anywhere near to it, regardless of their starting base.

They’re not going to need luck, they’re going to need some damn gifted management heads, every single corporate based tool at their disposal and some fairy dust for good measure.

Exciting times ahead for all of us, be sure of that.

Possibly The Worst Customer Service Experienced Ever? MobilePhonesDirect.co.uk

MobilePhonesDirect

MobilePhonesDirect

What is to follow is exactly how you should not deal with your customers and probably not how you should deal with being a customer either.

Let’s Set the Scenario.

I finally decide that I need a new mobile phone, I had already decided that I did not want an iPhone, but a Android based phone. So I go through the classic buying phases, research(involves lots of Google and asking friends), home in on a brand or few handsets (happened to be HTC), research some more, then flop the wallet out and buy.

Now literally 10 minutes before I stopped haunting the four or so major phone sites, I got an email from Which? saying that HTC had just released two new HTC Desire phones, the HTC Desire HD and the HTC Desire Z. Now the Z has a flip out keyboard like that old Nokia lump, nice, but I was dazzled by the 8Mp camera, 4.3 Screen and HD recording. I have two young children and my previous phone coupled as the family camera and thus these attributes stamped SOLD on my head immediately.

Here is the promo video for the phone, I personally love this style of storyboarding:

Soo now I have the big phat SOLD sign dangling from my head, its down to network, price and data usage. After scouring the net I finally settle on a 24 month contract from T-Mobile called ‘T-Mobile £30 Mobile Internet’ which had a decent amount of minutes (900), some texts (500) and for me crucially 1Gb of net transfer.

While I don’t actually anticipate that I would clear an entire Gig in a month, I would not put it past me and yes I know most places I got have wifi, but still I wanted 1Gb of transfer.

Anyway, I settle on a company called mobilephonesdirect.co.uk, I do my usual checks (ok I suffer from web paranoia), whois check on the domain, phone a store, use their live chat (which is now gone, you’ll find out why soon) and verify their other two stores on Google maps. OK I am comfortable.

Now a secondary clincher was this, noting that its still on thier website almost two months later:

We are an HTC ultimate partner and are receiving stock weekly during November and will supply Desire HD on a first ordered first delivered basis. Order Now and receive a Free 8GB memory card.

Bingo, this phone was not to be released for another week or so, they’re a premium partner, I’ll be one of the first. O-Happy-Days, or soo I thought.

Then Things Started to Go Wrong

I contacted them using their live chat, which was offline, but left a message and shortly afterwards I receive a reply that the phones have not been delivered yet, but would be notified when they had more information.

Now knowing this is a new phone and they’re reliant upon the manufacturer (HTC) to deliver, I wasn’t really concerned, hey they are[?], as they still quote:

We are an HTC ultimate partner

Another week passes, so I email, no response, I email again the next day, no response and again the next day, yep you guessed it no response.

So I phone. After five minutes of waiting, ‘Sarah’ answers the phone and to be honest I felt sorry for the girl, I am not the best customer as I ask bloody awkward questions and can be very blunt when rattled by poor customer service. The up shot from the call that the Manager (who would not talk to me) would be emailing ‘The Customers’ the next day.

From her tone, you could tell that she had obviously been beaten up several other times that morning and feeling sorry for her for verbal onslaught I had just given her (that sounds bad, I am always polite honest!), so left it to wait and see what happens in the email.

So I get the email, another week. Another week passes, another email, another week. WTF (remember what this means?) I thought these were:

We are an HTC ultimate partner

Ok, now I’m getting narked, after no reply for two days since I replied to their email saying it was not in stock for an indeterminate amount of time (yep its their standard address webshop@) I decide to ring.

At 6.37 , I get the message to email (no chance) or use the live support.

Now interestingly, I noticed two weeks prior to that, that the live chat was removed from their website. I am sure this probably to do with the number of customers that have been chasing their HTC Desire orders because they quote:

We are an HTC ultimate partner

I ring again and again and again, this is going no where. I ring the stores, no answer. I flip.

You WILL Answer me

Up until now I have been quite relaxed, but now, when I flip, I get noticed and I get results no matter the cost in time. Trust me, you really do not want me as an angry, paranoid, scared customer, you’ll find out why next.

Enter iMacros

I use iMacros for everything, I have plans to document this amazing tool at some stage, but for now, understand the following:

Anything you do in a web browser can be scripted

So with that in mind and the new knowledge that I iMacro almost everything, I put this to good use.

Here is my first proper published YouTube Video:

I think you’ll understand from my tone in the video how pissed I was at the time, I look at it now a day later and laugh at it. I amaze myself at times.

Yep thats right, I set it to send 1000 times.

Now if this had not yielded results, I would have driven to the stores, or used companies house to find the directors and knocked on their doors at 8:30 on a Saturday morning (after ringing them before of course, they might be miles away). Do you get a sniff of the idea of the psychopathic eBay buyers that are out there yet?

Enter Awful Customer Service Part 2

Now I am only guessing here, but they have an auto responder script that looks for the word ‘cancel’ and sends the following back.

MobilePhonesDirect Auto Responder

MobilePhonesDirect Auto Responder

Your reading that right, this company has such a fundamental customer services issue, it needs to respond with lies.

You’ll see from the snap-shot of my email box this was an auto responder and it was sent numerous times, to the point that I got this too:

MobilePhonesDirect Recall Request

MobilePhonesDirect Recall Request

Ok, this is getting somewhere (remembering that I had minimised the browser that is still set to loop 1000 times), so I reply with:

Hello,

I strongly doubt that this order has been despatched, as if it had been it would not be in its current status, nor if it had left the building you would not be readily able to stop the order.

Sick to death of no replies, cancel it as the mail suggests.

Kind regards,

Matthew Ogborne

More Insulting Customer Service

I face-palmed when I read this, they’re blatantly lying:

Mobilephonesdirect Insulting Customer Services

Mobilephonesdirect Insulting Customer Services

YAY Humans at Mobilephonesdirect

I’ve hit the jackpot, Mobilephonesdirect have humans working for them. There is a cheer from the ‘Matt Ogborne’ camp. Ore at its beauty:

MobilePhonesDirect Have Real Staff!

MobilePhonesDirect Have Real Staff!

Now, after composing myself, because at this point I have gone from one end of frustration, to practical answers and now to potential resolution.  I think about this whole experience for a few moments.

MobilePhonesDirect said and still say that they are:

We are an HTC ultimate partner and are receiving stock weekly during November and will supply Desire HD on a first ordered first delivered basis. Order Now and receive a Free 8GB memory card.

But now they ‘magically’ offering me a the phone. Do I really want to deal with this company? What if it breaks? What if I have a service issue? Why the bloody hell was it not delivered to me before, this order had been outstanding since the 5th October?

I really do not like (as your customers similarly do not like either):

  1. To not be informed regularly on their order, especially if its a pre-order item
  2. To be address by name, explicitly not as ‘The Customers’
  3. To be insulted by still failing to deliver the item though still showing it for sale
  4. To be lied to
  5. To be automatically lied to.
  6. To be bullshitted by customer support staff.

So The Reply Was?

Polite, but clear, I’ll let you relish in a well formed reply:

Hi Phil,

I appreciate the response and you must also appreciate the nightmare that I have had trying to contact you over the past few weeks.

Being referred to as ‘The Customers’, not being answered to when calling, unhelpful when I do and no answers to previous email is not good for customer service.

I am really tempted to say I would like the phone, but unfortunately I am gravely concerned at what the outcome may be if I ever had an issue with the phone, contract or yourselves in the future, as spamming contact forms is hardly an appropriate method of provoking communication (the same as your awful auto response emails) and are amazed that you actually have these (even if just one) in stock and not fulfilled my order, sadly I regret I have to decline the offer.

Shortly afterwards, I get three emails and the order has been despatched, returned and refunded.

What awful customer service experience that was. I only hope that your customer services are nothing like these muppets.

Warning, Your Customers Are Empowered

I only used iMacros to spam a contact form, but you must be extremely aware that like never before your customers are empowered with some deadly tools at their disposal, its called social marketing. If just one customer is pissed with your service and they are smart, they will cause untold damage.

I’ll leave it here,  make your own decision on the company in this article, a customer should never have to result to the extremes that I had to go to to provoke a response & I only hope you learn how not to deal with customers from this article.

Why I’m feeling Rather Smug – 65% Website Speed Increase

I can’t remember the exact facts this, although I am sure Google will easily spill the beans on them, but for something like for a 100ms speed lag in page load times, you loose a 1% conversion on a website (believe this was a Amazon quote).

The point is simple, slow sites suck (and cost viewers) and fast sites rule.

This has been amplified by Google now taking page load speeds into account when ranking websites, see here an idol of mine, Matt Cutt’s blog post on this and also in the Google Webmasters Blog, I strongly suggest you read both of these articles before continuing here.

So why am I feeling smug?

I went from a whopping +7 seconds page load time, to a mere 2.5 seconds. Yup thats a 65% increase in speed. I was most impressed and the beautiful thing is, I could get more out of this as well!

Lets look at the tests before and after, to drool at the results in all their glory.

Before Optimising

Website Speed Starting at 7 Seconds

Website Speed Starting at 7 Seconds

The full report can be seen here: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/101105_AQ18/

After Optimising

Website Speed Under 5 Seconds

Here are two links, just to show there is a decrease http://www.webpagetest.org/result/101105_AQ28/http://www.webpagetest.org/result/101105_AQ2Z/

What Do I do?

Well, I ditched the wp-cache plugin and chose something a little ‘meater’, W3 Total Cache. I chose this plugin because of the excellent reviews from industry guru’s and because I am intending to add a true CDN (Content Delivery Network) shortly (rather than using a cheat subdomain).

But this was only half the story, when looking at the details the testing site gave, it was horrifying to spot that the wp-polls plugin was adding a massive 2 second lag on one of the tests, so that really had to go, adding in several other tweaks, setting in the cdn on a subdomain, totalled a heafty page speed saving.

The biggest bonus of all, I can still improve, even after just 20 minutes of work, the images used are not optimised fully and I am sure I could squeeze a 0.5 second saving at least from focusing on them, let alone minimising css usage, code and so on… But to save time, I’m only going to focus on the new images I add and do my best to not compromise quality over the page-load speed influence.

The Question is…

How badly does your e-commerce site or blog lag? Have you even checked? How many customers are you loosing because of this? And… what are you going to do about it?

Dan Wilson: What are your nuggets of eBay selling advice?

Online Business Forum eBay

Online Business Forum eBay

An interesting question came up in the LinkedIn ‘The Online Business Forum powered by eBay‘ group by Dan Wilson and I think I am only one probably prepared to spill anything of any substance (I might be wrong by the time this is released), here is the question in full:

What are your nuggets of eBay selling advice?

I was asked last week for some advice regarding online selling by a journalist. The hack in question wanted little known tips for an article he was writing. Needless to say, I had a view. Here’s what I said:

Don’t sweat the small stuff.
Dealing with trouble customers and problems takes time and time is money. Sometimes quibbling over a few pounds is just not time or money efficiently spent. And when it comes to customers, there really are just some people who can never be satisfied, so save your energy and don’t try. Refund and move on. Finance this by making sure you build up a notional fund for such situations. The size of that will depend on what you sell online, but a small levy on everything you sell soon adds up because most customers really are lovely.

Are you getting the best deal on fees?
On eBay, there are several ways of getting better, lower fees. The first is an eBay Shop. Just by paying a subscription, you can get preferential treatment on the fees for BINs in particular and that can significantly lower your outlay if you want to expand the inventory you have available in the marketplace. And don’t forget PayPal. The merchant rate offers lower PayPal fees if you’re taking a lot of money through the system. But you do have to ask!

What’s your best little nugget of online selling advice? Or is it too good to be shared?

After writing what was a hefty reply, I decided it would be worth beefing it out and including it here for all to see. I’ll keep to my two points I could go on a blogging-bender quite easily.

Point 1: Do not devote 100% of your business to eBay

Amazon UK

Hey Look Amazon!

Its a mistake I made a long time ago and will not let clients make the same one. If eBay is taking up more than 40% of your over-all business turnover then you have a *critical business issue* and need to diversify your marketplaces, FAST.

I’ve said for a very long time that I am sure that sure that eBay does what it can to cause maximum impact to sellers to keep them ‘entertained’ with the eBay marketplace. The entire selling process could be a lot simpler and dare I say it less ‘unique’ to each buyer. eBay selling can-and-will hog your time, you need to be wise to this and look for ‘tools’ to aid you to diversify into other channels.

I’ll come back to viable actions for this point later in this post.

Point 2: My other tip is risk Aversion.

The point here is to not rely solely upon a single eBay ID. This could mean breaking ‘eBay policy’ to some, but I see each eBay ID as a ‘business’ in its own right and if done well it acts like one too.

To list on eBay has never been so cheap for pretty much ALL eBay sites, yes ALL sites, not just the eBay UK site. By spreading the risk of selling on eBay into two or more (20 plus is not unheard of now) eBay ID’s that have specific persona’s and product cross overs can be done from well managed backend systems.

Once you have created your inventory in a backend management tool (Channel Advisor ‘loosely’ fills this spot, eSellerPro is suggested [yes I used to work there, hell there is not one part that I didn’t influence. blah blah blah its ace]). The point is that to prepare the data for a second eBay ID is a fraction of the work, to prepare it for many eBay IDs (including on multiple sites) is again ‘a fraction’ of the initial work.

By spreading your inventory groups over more than one eBay ID, loosens the reliance upon a single point of income which in my eyes is a bad thing. It also allows you to focus each business (eBay ID) on to its core role. This does need to be done well and its a whole topic for another day on how to do it well (if I ever decide to divulge this info publicly, actually I doubt it).

Expanding Upon These Points – Real Life Tips

Now here some real life tips you can action really easily if you have the right tools.

Here is a no brainier, did you know that the vast majority of the eBay US categories are exactly the same as the eBay UK ones? That means porting your eBay UK data to a eBay US eBay ID is really quite easy, especially now that both sites are using custom item specifics for almost all categories? The same goes for nearly all the other sites too, they all have a common base, just with a few tweaks here and there.

Settle for the ‘Other Category’ if you have too, if its a decision between actually getting listed and getting the categories right, screw the cats, get the items on. You can sort out the re-categorisation (not mess as I first typed) later.

Also remember that America is massive, buyers are used to orders taking over 10 days to arrive for non expedited services and guess how long it normally takes for a UK parcel to arrive in the US? Yep you got it, about 10 days!

The second is a set of two questions:

  • Do students really cost that much?
  • Does outsourcing your language translation requirements sound really that scary?

Now leading on… eBay Germany [DE] is bigger than eBay UK and they will pay by PayPal (used to be a big issue, as those Germans love bank transfers). Yes thats right eBay Germany is BIGGER than the UK, let that sink in for a moment.

* let the dust roll by *

Sunk in? Here’s an idea for you, use Google Translate on your top 10 products, now search on eBay.de for them, making an excel spreadsheet as you go, then use xe.com to get the latest rate, the numbers work? If you have a Terapeak account, pay the extra and research the foreign eBay sites, I guarantee you, you’ll start feeling sick.

I Need Help Now!

I’d love to, but cannot commit to anything before the new year due to prior commitments. My content creation team is working literally 24/7 currently and its time I start looking at a VA (Virtual Assistant) again. Hey at least I’m admitting my flaws! Are You?

Anyway, its the reason why I have published this in front of the other posts that were due to be released, at least I can help you go in the right direction.

Oh Come on… You got to be Serious Right?

Checking the spam box earlier, I notice a mail from Internet Retailing and a webinair entitled ‘The 5 Best Techniques for Recovering Abandoned Shopping Carts with Email and Social Media‘.  Here is the opening line:

Have you measured your shopping cart or web form abandonment rate recently?
Recovering abandoned shopping carts and web forms is a lucrative business. On average 70 percent of shopping carts and 62 percent of web forms are abandoned before completion.

Have you seen the form they want you to fill out? Seriously, how can you suggest that your company is an ‘expert’ at tackling cart abandonment when the ‘tool’ you’re using does think there is a world out side of the USA.

Recovering Abandoned Shopping Carts Form

Recovering Abandoned Shopping Carts Form

I wonder what the abandonment rate is for this form & how much ‘crap’ data people enter into it? There was two comment boxes, neither particularly clear, you can bet I left a comment.

I’m hoping their content will be a lot better than their first impressions….

Google SEO Starter Guide Updated

GoogleBot

GoogleBot

Google has updated their SEO starter guide which they first released two years ago. Not surprisingly they reiterate that any optimisation decisions should first and foremost be what’s best for the visitors of the site.

Visitors are real users of the website and are using search engines to find your work. If you’re creating quality, unique content (like this post for example), then any changes are likely to small and in the report they make another good point that its the collection of lots of small changes put together over time, that give good results.

Its broken down into these six sections:

  1. SEO Basics
    This section covers creating unique, accurate page titles and  how to make use of the “description” meta tag on your site(s).
  2. Improving Site Structure
    How to improve the structure of your URLs and how to make make your site easier to navigate for humans & search engines.
  3. Optimizing Content
    This section covers the offering quality content and services, how to write better anchor text, optimisation of images and how to use heading tags appropriate manner.
  4. Dealing with Crawlers
    How to make effective use of robots.txt and to be aware of rel=”nofollow” for links that you use.
  5. SEO for Mobile Phones
    A new section for mobile devices has been added, which shows how to n
    otify Google of mobile sites & how to guide mobile users accurately.
  6. Promotions and Analysis
    How to promote your website in the right manner and to make use of free webmaster tools.

You can read the full report here and I’m humble enough to recognise great guidance and will be adding a breadcrumb trail to this site in the forth coming days (page 10).

What a Silly Design Flaw – Missguided.co.uk

Missguided.co.ukI’m not sure who designed this site, but I do know it was only very recently redesigned. They’ve managed to make a very common and very silly error in their design structure, they’ve got a wealth of text, hidden in images.

Take a look here or in any of their top level categories, a screen shot is below, clearly highlighting the issue:

Missguided Lost Keywords

Missguided Lost Keywords Hidden in Images

That’s right the following text is lost, because search engines cannot read images, even worse they’ve just loosely labled the image with a title & alt tag of ‘Accessories’. So instead of seeing this:

Scarves, bangles and bows… charms, belts and bags- add delightful details, luxurious lockets and perfect pearls to complete any outfit! See below for our full range of bags, belts, bangles, bracelets, eyelashes, necklaces, headbands, scrunches, watches and sunglasses.

Which is 38 words, search engines see ‘Accessories’. Doh!

Don’t you make such a silly mistake too with your website, use text descriptions for your categories. Of course, by all means use images of models and perhaps in this example, put the peace, heart, ampersand & accessories in an image for style. But never, ever sell yourself short.

Yoast WordPress Breadcrumbs Plugin

Yoast.comTaking the advice from yesterdays post ‘Google SEO Starter Guide Updated’ on adding a breadcrumb to the sites theme, I remembered seeing a plugin from Yoast.com a few days back.

Installation was done in seconds, almost like every other WordPress plugin, unfortunately the auto insert option did not work, however within a few pastes in the files page.php, search.php and single.php it was in and working.

If you’re an avid blogger and the theme you are using does not come with breadcrumbs by default, this plugin was sooo easily added, even at code editor level, its worth adding and as a bonus its free.

Yoast.com also has a collection of other plugins for WordPress, you can see them here.

Google Does Not Use The Meta Keywords Tag

Amazon Meta Keywords HTML Tag

Amazon Meta Keywords HTML Tag

Myth, hear-say or Truth?

Truth! Google does not use the meta Keywords tag. Contrary to popular belief usage of this tag for anything meaningful was lost years ago when it got spammed & stuffed by everyone and his dog.

Offsite ‘factors’ were not being taken into account and pages were judged by search engines only on their content. Seems crazy now looking back.

Here is a YouTube video from Matt Cutts, a personal idol of mine [for his relaxed presentation style and the way he conveys his personal interest in the subject matter] on this very topic:

Although other search engines out there (no there really are) which do take the meta keywords into consideration. If your website solution already makes these automatically from other data fields, great, if not, I’d not suggest you loose any sleep what-so-ever. Spend the time on writing better content, site promotion or sipping G & T’s as the sun sets (sunrises and G&T are just wrong).

That said, if I asked myself the question “do I use the meta keywords tag?” the answer would be…
Yes, the day Amazon stops using them, I will do too. No G&T’s for me :(

Revamp of Link Reports In Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster IconGoogles Webmasters blog has announced that they have updated the link reports shown in thier Webmaster tools.

Google Webmaster Tools allow users to check up and analyse lots of different information that Google house on your authentication domain names and best of all its free. If you’re not using the Google Webmaster Tools, see here and sign up today.

With the new reports, they show you three new things as a general overview:

  • The top domains that are linking to your site.
  • Samples of anchor text used by external sites as they link to your site.
  • Which pages have the most links.

You can read the full article on the Google Webmaster Central Blog