Are affiliates e-commerce 2.0?
Jun/090
With more and more products available online, and more and more people trying to sell, some have figured out that you don’t actually need to have your own products, nor ship them to your clients in order to make some cash. Simply connect a buyer with a seller and you’ll make a few percentiles on the sale. Do that over, and over, and over … and you could be making an awful lot of money.
The difficulty is of course to find these buyers, and to get them to purchase with your seller. There are different techniques and strategies to achieve this. Check out Quidco. It’s a cashback website, which means if you create an account with them, and purchase from their range of websites, you’ll get a bit of cash back on your purchases. It’s actually a website which is affiliated with many different merchants. Their unique selling point is they give you back some of their margin, which is a win-win situation. The merchants they list get more customers, the customers are happy as they get a small discount, and Quidco keeps the change.
Trust Models
Jun/090
Ok, it’s time for a slightly longer post and today we’re going to look at the trust models available. We even have pictures!
Trust can increase customer’s intent to stay on a website and in turn increase the intent to purchase (Kim and Tadisina 2007). This report acknowledges there are other aspects that increase intent to transact, such as mandatory use of a website, however this report is focusing on initial reaction.
Tagged!
Jun/090
I’ve just spent the weekend (well four days) at Rockness and it makes me laugh the number of people who will be de-tagging themselves in Facebook photos!
I even started to get annoyed at the number of photographs that were being taken. It only takes one person to say photo and before you know it, everyone is getting their cameras out and snapping like snaphappiers.
Anyway, it’s a given that Facebook is a fantastic marketing tool and if used correctly, a free fantastic marketing tool. My latest marketing idea came from watching a very drunk man wandering around in a mankini. Apart from the obvious outburst of laughter, i quickly noticed that everyone was looking at him (literally thousands of people).
More importantly, he was being stopped every 5 meters to have his picture taken with random people. Now this will be a ’sticky photo’ which people will come back to again and again to laugh at.
Just think how many Facebook pages this crazy man will be on! What would happen if you have a logo on? Or a web address? or even a Facebook name, followed by ‘Tag Me’?
Apart from the total embarrassment, it could be a free way to create a lot of grass root publicity. Obviously you wouldn’t want to do this if you sell into bluechip companies, but for consumer facing businesses where festival goers are you target market, it’s the best marketing stunt I can think of!
Anyway, just a thought.
Initial Reaction and Intent to Transact
Jun/090
Here is a quick post on the connection between initial reaction and intent to transact. There will be more on this topic in the future. This is a main theme of the thesis.
Lindgaard et al (2006) provided a comprehensive study on the time a consumer takes to get an impression. They calculated this to be 50 milliseconds, whereas Rosen and Purinton (2002) allow for ten seconds.
Lingaard et al (2006) concluded that their data suggested design layout, colour and other factors contributed to visual appeal and intention through initial reaction. Chen and Barnes (2006 pp. 31) state that trust through initial reaction is important as
“transactions are impersonal and anonymous”
and purchase decisions are made on initial trust perceptions.
Koufaris and Hampton-Sosa (2003) developed their Six trust factors, the foundation of this report, on initial trust rather than the relationship of trust built up over a period of time.
Trust and intent to transact
Jun/090
The first step is to understand and develop the link between trust and intention to purchase. This link will provide the foundation for understanding the more complex issues regarding tangible web design increasing intention to purchase upon initial reaction.
Initial Trust
Jun/090
Continuing on our theme of trust and web design, this chapter looks at the initial trust a consumer places on a company prior to formal interactions.
Initial Trust
According to commentators such as Corbitt et al (2003), Kim et al (2004) and Koufaris and Hampton-Sosa (2004), initial trust has been taken to mean the trust that is placed on a company prior to purchase, which often includes allowing the test subjects to browse through a website for as long as they wish to develop an insight into the company. Chen and Barnes (2007), for example asked for the subjects to search for a book within an online bookshop, Corbitt et al (2003) concentrated on trust and consumer perceptions around the transactional processes of a website and Kim et al (2004) concentrated on the difference of potential and returning customers trust.
Introduction to Ecommerce and Trust
Jun/090
Current internet usage statistics estimate the current number of internet users at a staggering 1,319,872,109 (Internet World Stats, 2008). With more people, towns, cities and countries accessing internet connection technology, this figure is predicted to reach 1.8bn internet users globally by 2010 (Computer Industry Almanac 2008).
According to eMarketer (2006), a reputable online statistics portal, the online e-commerce market size in Europe reached £84bn in 2006 with predicted growth of 25% annually (Annual Report 2006). In the UK this growth has been realised as shown by the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG), who estimate online sales for 2007 at £53.3bn and Attwood (2007) estimate £42bn, an increase of 75% from the previous year, with similar growth rates predicted for 2008 (The financial Times 2008).
Web Design and Trust
Jun/090
As part of one of ecommo’s founder’s final year at university, he studied in-depth the relationship between trust and web design.
Over the course of the next few weeks, we have decided to publish the interesting parts of the report starting with the abstract today.
We hope that it will be useful and so, in the words of Tina Seelig, without further a do, here it is:
Part One
The e-commerce market has realised double digit growth year on year with no sign of slowing. In addition, the growth in e-commerce websites and e-consumers’ internet proficiency is also continually increasing.
An e-consumer will only be willing to purchase online if they trust with the seller. Trust, in a web context, is often linked with security and reputation; herein lies the challenge for e-commerce sites. How can a website portray an image of trustworthiness if the consumer has had no previous contact?
This paper aimed to determine and evaluate the aspects that build up trust within the design of a website and specifically within the initial trust time frame. To test this aim, this paper developed a two stage approach. The first stage involved the development and application of a benchmarking framework in order to select 20 websites for use within the data collection. The second stage was designed to test data collected through an advanced online automated program using a mixture of distance correlations and linear regression analysis.
The results show security, in terms of web design, as having the highest causal relationship with trust whilst the relationship between security and the simplicity of a website has a very high positive causal link.
This paper recommends developing a website to increase simplicity of design and minimise complexity will increase trust and may increase sales, customer retention and return on investment.
The rise of e-commerce
Jun/090
Whilst some internet businesses such as eBay are feeling the recession, sometimes for the first time since they were founded, e-commerce in general is on the rise. The UK remains UK’s biggest e-commerce market in Europe. It grew 13% last year (Financial Times, January 3rd, 2009), and is taking on more business from high street retailers as ever.
Businesses who have not yet made the move to the online marketplace are loosing their marketshare day after day. There are several reasons why many businesses don’t make the move. For some it’s a complex change of their business model. For others, it is simply an investment they are not willing to make. Those reasons are generally not justified, as many e-commerce platforms have been launched over the past few years. The competition is fierce, and prices have been driven down. Low cost solutions are available such as Ebay, but is certainly not ideal for most companies, as the highly competitive marketplace drives businesses margins to a minimal. Furthermore, the platform pretty much forces businesses to use eBay’s acquired payment platform: PayPal, which many will agree can be a pain in the neck.
Ecommo is an e-commerce for small and medium businesses who wish to sell their products or services online, on a website with its own domain name. It has a professional look, it is simple to launch as it does not require any technical knowledge. Most of the Searh Engine Optimisation (SEO) is done automatically, and the team behind it is approachable.
Ecommerce expansion
Dec/080
Over the last few days, major papers have published articles on the increase use of e-commerce this year for Christmas. They expect e-commerce to become more and more part of our everyday life, taking business from high street retail and other casual commercial transactions. Ecommo provides an e-commerce solution to small and medium businesses who wish to start selling online without investing a large amount of time and money into a complex solution, without compromising a professional look, and security. Our team is dedicated to support entrepreneurs and businesses in their first steps on the web.