Posts tagged Commerce
Visa & AmEx on The Holy Grail of Digital Commerce
Oct 18th
This afternoon at Web 2.0, host John Battelle sat down with John Partridge from Visa and Dan Schulman at American Express, to talk about the future of payments. “It’s a little bit like having Coke and Pepsi up here,” Battelle said.
The unlikely duo discussed how the Web has transformed the industry. Value is shifting constantly, and new opportunities are popping up everywhere. Partridge and Shulman showed repeatedly that sometimes, payment companies are better off partnering rather than competing to create the most value. It was fitting that these two leaders from competing payment processors had such an agreeable conversation.
Sponsor
What does Web 2.0 mean to you? Comment for a chance to win a $500 home office upgrade. Brought to you by HP Input/Output.
Blurring The Digital Line
Partridge said that 16% of Visa’s payments are processed online, and Schulman said American Express was at 8-10%. But both agreed that the digital and physical distinction is actually becoming less important over time. “Distinction between online and offline is blurring,” Schulman said. The same information overlay is in front of us now whether we’re in the physical store or not. The only difference is whether we can reach out and touch the product after we look at the details on our devices.
Partridge agreed. “There’s a convergence,” he said. “That convergence is going to continue to happen.”
Primary Brands & Partner Brands
Battelle asked these representatives of the old guard credit card companies whether insurgents like Square and PayPal were stealing the spotlight from them. In the pre-Web era, the Visa and American Express brands themselves were associated directly with payments, but online, they’re increasingly in the background while these newcomers get all the credit.
Partridge didn’t seem to mind. He noted that 46% of online transactions are made with a Visa product, including PayPal, Visa’s largest online merchant. Visa and PayPal compete in some ways, but they cooperate in others. That’s just part of doing business in the digital economy. It didn’t sound like Partridge was too upset about Visa sharing the spotlight with partners.
Schulman seemed more keen to compete. He felt that traditional associations with the American Express brand translate well to the Web, connoting trust, security and responsive customer service. He said that was an asset to Serve, the new American Express direct payment platform, which has begun to move into mobile and compete with a variety of new payment processors.
Redefining The Commerce Lifestyle
“The commerce lifestyle is being redefined,” Schulman said. Partridge agreed, adding that this results in the leading companies sometimes offering similar solutions. “It’s going to come down to who can execute,” he said.
Schulman noted that it’s hard for the established companies to adjust to disruption, but it’s worth the effort. He said that digital offerings make it possible to serve younger customers who don’t want credit or have thin credit. The Web creates opportunities that traditional products haven’t been able to penetrate.
Data: The Holy Grail
Battelle noted that payment processors hold some of the most valuable user data out there. It’s a massive asset, but it’s also highly regulated. “Data is the holy grail of digital commerce,” Schulman said, which explains the barrage of daily deals and other ploys to get consumers to share their consumer preferences – and thus their data – on the Web. But those services aren’t precise enough. “Data and information has to be opt in,” Schulman said. “It has to be held private.”
Payment data is not just for tracking consumers. It has broader economic value. It helps detect fraud, it helps merchants plan stores and target products, and it also helps personalize experiences for consumers. Schulman and Partridge want their trusted payment networks to support smart, precise applications of data to create broad value. Paraphrasing Schulman, we’ll look back five years from now and laugh about the email barrages in online commerce. That was just the beginning.
Check out the Web 2.0 schedule and watch the events live here.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
The Tablet Commerce Revolution, Coming to a Site Near You
Oct 17th
A recent study from Alexander Interactive took a close look at the top 10 Internet revenue-producing retailer sites, specifically peering into the quality of their site user experience on tablets. Recent findings show that tablets and smartphones will surpass PC sales in 2015, and comScore reported that 48% of tablet owners made a purchase using their tablets last month.
Yet not one of the top 10 sites from this list (Amazon.com, Staples.com, Apple.com, Dell.com, OfficeDepot.com, Walmart.com, Sears.com, LibertyMedia.com., OfficeMax.com, CDW.com and BestBuy.com) are tablet-optimized, even though most of them have iPad or iPhone apps. As the tablet commerce revolution draws closer, it’s essential for Internet retailers to create tablet-optimized sites.
Sponsor
Amazon.com is the top revenue-producing Internet retailer, and its site is the most tablet-optimized of the list. A redesigned navigation bar, bigger buttons and the “Shop by Department” feature are clean on both a monitor and a tablet. Though the site was not built specifically for the tablet, it almost feels like it was.
Amazon is primed for the the tablet commerce revolution, which makes sense given the launch of Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet in September 2011.
The Tablet Commerce Revolution Isn’t About Apps
The tablet commerce revolution is not about a desktop site that goes mobile, or an app built for the iPad. It’s about dedicated tablet sites, which are a complete convergence of the app and the full browser version. They offer an experience that is wholly visual, featuring bigger screens that are better for the overall shopping and browser experience.
Responsive design is key for a tablet-optimized site, meaning “the site scales gracefully from the desktop experience to the tablet experience, delivering content, functionality and layout optimized for tablet screen size and capabilities.”
Four other leading factors mentioned in the report include adaptive layout (the site can easily adapt whether the screen is in portrait or landscape), appropriate content sizing (fonts and screen elements look proportionate), minimal clutter (the number of page elements is useful and appropriate) and finger-swipe support (the site is easy for finger-swiping between items). As the tablet market opens, it’s essential for online retailers to create tablet-optimized sites.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Is Facebook’s EBay Integration the Real Start of Social Commerce?
Oct 13th
At yesterday’s PayPal Innovate conference in San Francisco, EBay and Facebook announced a partnership to integrate Open Graph into EBay’s commerce platforms X.commerce, Magnto and GSI. Merchants already have the ability to set-up shop on Facebook and sell directly to people who Like their pages, but that feature – like many other social commerce ideas on Facebook – never did take off. Facebook’s EBay integration might be the tipping point for social commerce – not only will merchants be able to integrate new “want” and “own” buttons, but advertisers will soon be able to target users based on their Open Graph activity.
Sponsor
With the new EBay Facebook integration, Facebook will be able to quietly gather data on e-commerce without having actually handle transactions. In doing so, Facebook doesn’t have to announce this as yet another attempt to jump into the e-commerce market; instead, they will work behind the scenes with users who already trust the network and continue pumping information into it.
What this Means for Advertisers
Advertisers will have access to Facebook’s Open Graph, meaning that advertisements will be far more targeted. If a user says they love basketball, a sporting goods store could target ads to that user. Currently advertisers can only target users based on the Pages they Like – and we all know that the act of clicking “Like” doesn’t mean very much at all.
Plus, shopping is inherently social, said Facebook’s Director of Platform and Mobile Marketing Katie Mitic:
“Integrating Facebook Open Graph technology across EBay’s global commerce platforms represents a powerful way to bring people together across an inherently social activity – shopping.”
But just because an activity is inherently social, it doesn’t mean that people want to do it together online. Or does it?
Facebook’s Previous Social Failures
This is not the first time Facebook has jumped into the commerce space. Just last year, Delta Airlines launched a Facebook “ticket window,” which many thought would be the future of e-commerce. Instead, people continued buying tickets from the airline’s website, or through deal-finding services like Kayak.com. This proved to be a non-social activity – or, at least, Facebook hasn’t found a way to make it social online. When it came to social search, Bing tried highlighting pages that user’s Facebook friends “liked.” This feature did not take off. Facebook’s attempt at challenging Groupon through social deals closed after four months later, and Facebook’s Time Warner Facebook app for movie streaming also went down as a failed social activity.
Will EBay’s Facebook Presence Change the Social Commerce Game?
Facebook has a history of conflating the social graph with the interest graph, and the new EBay integration might fall prey to that very problem.
The social graph charts “who I know” while the interest graph shows “what I like,” and the two don’t necessarily mix. For example, what if you’re a die-hard Jean-Luc Godard film fan but your closest friends dislike French film? Or what if you have a friend that loves baking bread at home while you prefer dining out at gluten-free restaurants? You won’t necessarily start disliking Jean-Luc Godard films and loving bread just because that’s how your friends feel.
The social graph and the interest graph may overlap completely in a few key friendships with a best friend, or someone who you jokingly claim you “share the same mindscape” with. These are the relationships that Facebook is really looking for. The question is, will there be enough data available for the behemoth social network to actually find them? Or will it lean heavily on recommendations being shared between friends on social networks?
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Google Commerce Search for Mobile Finally Arrives
Oct 12th
In a blog post earlier today, Google announced the launch of Google Commerce Search for Mobile, citing research that search queries from mobile phones are on the up and up. Google Commerce launched only two years ago, just in time for the 2009 holiday season.
Sponsor
Timberland is one of Google Commerce for Mobile’s first customers. On the blog post announcing Google Commerce for Search, Chris Hardisty, director of Timberland Global eCommerce, said that “Since we launched our mobile-optimized website, we have seen mobile sales grow 20 times faster than our desktop site sales.”
Google decided to launch Google Commerce for mobile after discovering that nearly 80 percent of its biggest customers do not have a mobile-optimized website, according to an article on PCWorld.
This is just another eCommerce move from Google, after the recent launch of Google Wallet, continued expansion in Google Offers and Google AdWords’ incentives for good mobile websites.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Amazon Prepares For Tablet Commerce Revolution With Website Redesign
Sep 6th
These days, the tablet computer seems to be central to much of Amazon’s product strategy. The company is working on a substantial redesign of its website, which aims to simplify the browsing experience for users on iPads and other tablets.
The new design cleans up the site’s UI significantly, hiding the store department buttons on the left in favor of a tidy drop-down menu and doing away with many of the graphics and other UI elements that have become so familiar to Amazon shoppers. The result is a simpler layout with a bigger search box and much more whitespace.
Sponsor
The news of the redesign comes just as Amazon prepares to release its own tablet, a 7-inch, $250 device expected to launch before Christmas.
It should come as no surprise that the new design appears to drive users more deliberately toward Amazon’s digital content, such as MP3s and e-books. The expectation of selling more of that content is why the company is releasing a tablet in the first place, and presumably why they’re willing to offer it at such a low price. Rather than make a ton of money on the device itself, Amazon is hoping its new touchscreen Kindle tablet will help it sell more e-books and music, all while posing what many expect to be the first serious challenge to Apple’s dominance in the tablet space.
By redesigning its entire website, Amazon appears to be betting on the future of tablet-based commerce in general, with or without its own device. The consumer tablet space is still relatively young (and expected to explode over the next few years), but early indicators suggest that those that do own tablets like to use them for shopping. In a recent report, Forrester found that their bigger screens, portability and more engaging user experience made tablets more ideal for mobile commerce than smart phones and other devices.
As the world’s biggest online retailer, it only makes sense for Amazon to prepare for the impending tablet revolution now by making their site easier to navigate from the devices. Since simplicity tends to make for more effective website design in general, the visual overhaul will have the added benefit of improving the experience for desktop-based visitors as well.
This would be true even if Amazon wasn’t preparing its own tablet. But it is. And even though it hasn’t even been formally announced yet, the company could sell as many as 5 million of them before the year is over, Forrester predicted last week.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
12 Video SEO Tips for E-Commerce Website Product Pages – Video Commerce Consortium
Aug 19th
 Video Commerce Consortium |
12 Video SEO Tips for E-Commerce Website Product Pages
Video Commerce Consortium Yet while a lot of e-commerce business depends on product page SEO, very few retailers are taking advantage of the huge opportunity of optimizing their videos on their Websites for search results. Here I talk about the many advantages for retailers and … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Defining Social Commerce: A Tale of Three Conversations
Jul 11th
Everyone, especially Wall Street, is standing up to salute social commerce. Look at the IPO pipeline – LinkedIn, Groupon, Zynga, Living Social. But despite all this attention, the definition of social commerce is fuzzy at best. How do we know if these companies will win, if we can’t even agree on what it is?
When defining something social, it’s helpful to characterize it by the conversations that make up the experience. I’ve observed three elemental commerce-related conversations currently taking place: shopping, marketing and trading.
Sponsor
Craig Donato is the Founder and CEO of Oodle, a social marketplace that also powers Facebook Marketplace. Prior to Oodle, Donato was CEO of Grand Central Communications and a senior vice president at Excite@Home.
Social Shopping
When I’m thinking about buying something – especially something expensive or something that I simply care about a lot – I talk to people I trust. Social media makes this much easier to do. It lowers the barriers of effort and social appropriateness around having this conversation. Six months ago, I was looking for a camcorder (the video function on my phone just wasn’t cutting it for filming the school plays). While I would never have taken the time to email all my friends to ask which camcorders they liked (that would just be weird), I felt totally comfortable soliciting their thoughts on Facebook. This open conversation introduced two new elements into the commerce equation: impulse and serendipity. As people chimed in and the conversation took shape, a few friends who hadn’t really been looking for camcorders became interested in and purchased the same model I bought.
Social shopping is rooted in the overall shift we’re seeing – consumers engaging in the social discovery of everything. Rather than just searching for information, consumers are increasingly turning to Facebook and Twitter to get trusted recommendations. We already see this significantly affecting the way they’re discovering and consuming news. Moving forward, sharing trusted recommendations will only continue to grow as a huge factor in how people discover what to buy. Last year, Facebook commissioned a study by Nielsen which confirmed the obvious: trusted recommendations have a huge impact on the decision-making process. People were four times more likely to buy something when it was recommended by a friend.
It definitely worked in my case.
Social Marketing
Businesses need to talk with their customers. For millennia, this conversation occurred face-to-face in markets or in storefronts. Unfortunately, this dialogue has devolved into what is now primarily a one-way conversation: “marketing.”
Businesses need to talk with their customers. For millennia, this conversation occurred face-to-face in markets or in storefronts. Unfortunately, this dialogue has devolved into what is now primarily a one-way conversation: “marketing.”
Social media introduces a less-intrusive, more organic way to converse with customers rather than blasting them with emails or direct mail pieces. When done well, it reintroduces a two-way conversation between the business and its customers. These conversations, because they occur openly, have the opportunity to fuel word-of-mouth awareness. They also have a self-correcting feedback loop. If a business fails to engage me by sending me too much stuff or stuff I ignore, messages from that business start disappearing from my Facebook newsfeed. Similarly on Twitter, great content is retweeted; noisy accounts are easily unfollowed.
This style of two-way, conversational marketing through social media (beyond just customer support) will likely take off first with small businesses. They’ve always valued the business-growing power of marketing through their existing customers for building loyalty and fueling word-of-mouth referrals. It’s why they prioritize customer service and cultivate their reputation in the local community. It’s why they join the Rotary and sponsor Little League teams.
Social media just removes a ton of friction from this process.
Social Trading
In real life, we often engage in trading within our hyper-local communities and social circles – lending stuff to neighbors, giving away the stuff our kids have outgrown, and so forth. This kind of trading is motivated as much by the desire to do social good as it is by the prospect of monetary reward. For example, if I have extra tickets to a concert, I could take the time to sell them to the highest bidder on StubHub. But I’d rather give them to a friend or sell them at face value to someone in the office. Unfortunately, this is harder than it should be. Garage sales are total a pain in the ass to pull off, not even taking into account all the random people that you have to deal with, and there’s typically no easy way to communicate with my important local communities: friends, co-workers, classmates, neighbors.
In real life, we often engage in trading within our hyper-local communities and social circles – lending stuff to neighbors, giving away the stuff our kids have outgrown, and so forth. This kind of trading is motivated as much by the desire to do social good as it is by the prospect of monetary reward.
Of the three, this conversation is the most nascent in social media. Many trading conversations work best when they take place more broadly than just among “friends.” As real-world local communities begin to emerge in the social graph (co-workers, classmates, neighbors), social trading will really take off.
What’s makes me confident that social commerce (as defined by shopping, marketing and trading) is the real deal is that it’s based on conversations that frequent our daily lives – conversations that simply work better in social media. The inherently-human nature of these conversations was perhaps best described by Rick Levine, et al in the Cluetrain Manifesto:
“For thousands of years, we knew exactly what markets were: conversations between people who sought out others who shared the same interests. Buyers had as much to say as sellers. They spoke directly to each other without the filter of media, the artifice of positioning statements, the arrogance of advertising, or the shading of public relations.
“These were the kinds of conversations people have been having since they started to talk. Social. Based on intersecting interests. Open to many resolutions. Essentially unpredictable. Spoken from the center of the self.”
Portobello Road photo from geograph
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
A More Modern Craigslist: Real-Time Local Commerce Arrives via EggDrop’s Mobile App
Jun 28th
EggDrop is a new mobile application for buying and selling goods in real-time with those in your local community. The idea is to improve upon the mobile commerce experience by using the technology that ships on modern smartphones. The app lets you use the camera for posting photos of items for sale, filter searches by location and receive push notifications to stay informed about the items you’re watching, buying or selling.
In addition, EggDrop introduces an interesting pricing model – the “falling price auction.” This enables so-called “frictionless” transactions that work without any haggling, bargaining, deals or discounts. It’s as if eBay has been re-imagined for the mobile, social, location-based age.
Sponsor
Why EggDrop?
EggDrop comes from EggCartel, a company founded in 2010 by Dan Zheng and Brian Lynch, formerly of Google and Playdom, respectively. Zheng spent 8 years at Google working on a diverse bunch of products from AdSense to Android. Lynch was an early employee at Lil Green Patch, a popular Facebook game that was later acquired by Playdom.
The idea for EggDrop was sparked back in the summer of 2010 when they realized no one was using eBay anymore – at least in San Francisco, where they’re based. They also felt that the buying and selling experience on Craigslist was poor.
What people really needed was an easy way to buy and sell items without having to haggle on price, compete against others in a traditional auction format, and where real-time communication played a key role.
Hence, EggDrop.
How it Works
The mobile app, available on both iPhone and Android (arrives tomorrow), is a classified ads service for selling goods. Snap a photo, post a description and list your item. You can then share the listing on Facebook, Twitter – and, in a smart twist, even straight to Craigslist. A Craigslist buyer is directed to a webpage that explains that this item is available for sell within the EggDrop app, and offers links to download.
Buyers can search for items based on proximity to their current location, as determined by their phone’s GPS. Filtering options let you sort by item type, see photos, view items on a map and more.
EggDrop’s “Falling Price Auction” & Game Mechanics
The other unique idea with EggDrop is its pricing model for selling goods. A seller lists both a starting price and a minimum price, the latter hidden to potential buyers. The price falls over a period of 72 hours until someone purchases the item. This isn’t the same as eBay’s minimum price, which is used to stop a sale if bids don’t reach a certain threshold before the auction ends. Essentially, it just automates the pricing for the item for sale, letting the market dictate what a fair price should be.
To keep users engaged with the application after first download, EggDrop uses game mechanics. Buyers can “watch” an item and see how many others are watching that same item along with them. This encourages users to buy before their competition does, but they can also risk waiting to see if the price drops.
There are also “karma” badges which users can give each other depending on how things went with the sale. Good badges can reward timeliness of responses, those who went “above and beyond” – for example, someone who helped you carry the couch you bought down 3 flights of stairs – and other behaviors.
Bad badges can penalize negative behavior like “flaking” out on an appointment time or on agreed sale or selling a lemon. These badges only stay on your profile for 3 months – long enough to discourage the behavior, but not so long as to indefinitely penalize someone who was just having a bad day.
Vs. Zaarly
EggDrop isn’t the only company rethinking local commerce. Another new startup, Zaarly, launched this spring with its own mobile, real-time, location-based market. So what’s the difference? “Zaarly is a buyer-powered market,” explains Zheng. EggDrop is more seller-driven. “We want to enabled local commerce and connect local buyers and sellers,” he explains.
Download EggDrop
The mobile application is free to download and will remain free going forward. In the future, the business may offer additional services for a fee, like providing convenient drop-off locations for goods, or providing shipping services through third-parties.
But for now, EggDrop just needs to get through its launch and grow its user base. The company says it will initially focus marketing efforts over the next 3 to 6 months in large, metro markets including San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Boston.
EggDrop has received $1 million in seed funding in a round led by SV Angel and BlueRun Ventures, with participation from Trinity Ventures and Charles River Ventures. You can learn more about the app at EggDropApp.com.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Why Social Video Marketing May Eclipse Video SEO – Video Commerce Consortium
Jun 6th
 Video Commerce Consortium |
Why Social Video Marketing May Eclipse Video SEO
Video Commerce Consortium I interviewed Mark Robertson, ReelSEO publisher and featured speaker at the 2011 Video Commerce Summit August 1 st -2 nd in San Francisco, who will be presenting on “Why Video Marketing has Evolved Beyond SEO.” Mark shared with me his belief that … Links and Local Drive Next-Gen SEO Software From Covario How to Rank High for SEO in New Hampshire The Periodic Table of SEO elements |
View full post on SEO – Google News
