Transcript TOC 8 part 2

Chapter 5
Electronic Commerce:
Part 2 – Effective
Website Development
and Management
Effective Online Business:
Hosting, Marketing, and
Management Strategies
The Typical Online Customer
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Completed online transactions: 10
Online sessions per week: 6
Unique sites visited per week: 6
Average surfing session: 31 minutes
Time per site per week: 32 minutes
Time online per week: 3 hours, 8 minutes
Source: Harris Interactive, Nielson Netratings
Reasons for Shopping Online
Reason
%
Get better bargains online
61
More choice online
39
Like convenience of home delivery
51
Don’t like experience of shopping in store 19
Prefer ease of shopping from home / work 29
Feel safer shopping online
2
Source: eCommerce - 2011
Deterrents to Shopping Online
Issue
%
Poor product descriptions / images
42
Poor navigation
32
Unavailable items
28
No contact information
18
Long checkout process
16
Source: eCommerce - 2011
Reasons for Choice of Website to Shop
Reason
%
Recommendation from friends / family
72
Knowledge from brick & mortar store
46
Search engine visibility
35
Off-line advertising
21
Source: eCommerce - 2011
Miscellaneous Consumer Data
• 57% appreciate receiving advertising messages if directly beneficial, such as
receiving a discount.
• 36% say receiving an email prompts them to make an online purchase.
• 38% do not use a social profile site.
• 61% use search engines to help them in their product research leading to
purchase.
• 75% of young people (18-26) use recommendations on social sites to help
them research products prior to purchase.
• 61% expect to receive delivery notification via email.
• The lowest priority for consumers when considering purchasing a product is
the price.
Source: eCommerce - 2011
Miscellaneous Consumer Data
• The lowest priority for consumers when considering purchasing a product is
the price.
• Electronics and computing (23%) is the category most likely to be researched
online by consumers.
• 55% report a product with high rating increases likelihood of purchasing.
• 68% of consumers aged 18-26 use emailed coupons online.
• The purchase process for women tends to involve a greater range of media
than men, and to take longer.
• The age range among consumers that is most reliant on e-commerce is the 27
to 38 year-old demographic.
• People over the age of 38 are significantly less likely to use social networks to
pursue product information or seek recommendations.
Source: eCommerce - 2011
Effective Online Business: Hosting, Marketing
and Management Strategies
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Web hosting and your e-business
Marketing your Internet business
Monitoring your site’s performance
Extending business opportunities through
online exchanges / cooperatives
Client
(Browser)
Web Server
Static
Pages
Pages
Pages
Pages
Product
Database
Commerce Server
(Storefront)
Shopping
Cart
Dynamic
Secure
Transaction
Server
Getting Started: Hosting Issues
• Hosting
– Understanding what “hosting” means and your
alternatives?
• “Do-it-yourself” website services
– http://www.1and1.com
– http://www.bigstep.com/
– http://store.yahoo.com/
Getting Started: Hosting Issues
 Bandwidth
 Capabilities
 Firewall
system
 Wireless
 Buy,
and specifications
delivery
rent, or lease
 Maintenance,
equipment
upgrade, and service of the
What is Involved in
Establishing a Web Site?
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The services wanted
How much your company can
contribute to the site, from
manpower to electronic
content
Time to design your site
Time to create and program
your site
Extra fees for software
development
Fees for off-the-shelf
applications tools
The size of the site
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Training requirements
Installation and server
maintenance
Programming
On corporate site hosting vs. offsite
Secure Server for financial
transactions
Your bandwidth needs
Your server capacity needs
Location of your server at the
Web company or ISP company
location
Getting Started: Web Hosting
• Identify what you have resources and time to do
• Identify what will be done “outside” the firm
• Identify which external parties will be involved
– e.g., designer, ISP, web host? commerce provider?
• Identify how you will assess their performance
– Decision metrics – e.g., are they reliable?
– On-going performance metrics – e.g., is their “uptime” what
they claim?
Website Marketing
• Excellent customer service
• Word of mouth is the best form of advertising
• Plan a realistic monthly marketing and advertising budget
• Search engines
• Directories
• Traditional media
• Domain name should suggest your service or products
• Ex: flowers-by-kelly.com
• not kb.com or flowersbykelly.com
• The text in your website is critical to marketing
• Descriptive, accurate, concise
• Include keywords – more than once – but not too often
Website Marketing: Three Objectives
• Increase Presence  Optimize
• Drive Traffic  Publicize
• Convert Visitors  Monetize
Website Marketing
• Find out if your site is indexed
– Pages in cache
• At Google  cache:http://your-domain.com
• Try cache:http://primal-elements.com - nothing?
• Try cache:http://primalelements.com
• Number of pages indexed in domain
• At Google or Yahoo!  site:your-domain.com
• Google site:www.uhh.hawaii.edu/~kburke
Search Engine Marketing
• The way most search engines work
• Most use weighted point systems to display results
• Ex: Page ‘quality score’ = title + description + keywords + H1 tags +
number of images + ‘alt’ descriptions + page size + links
• Ex: Use a tool at Summit Media to analyze your site
• http://tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider
• Bid-for-placement marketing
• Sponsored results at search engine sites
– Ex: search Google for “bath soap”
• The power of cross-linking: Ex – search Google for kelly burke
• Linking strategies that enhance your website's position – not detract
from potential sales
Search Engine Marketing: Basic Design
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It’s all about ‘content’
Limit use of multimedia
Limit use of graphics
Use ‘Alt’ text
Make it easy to move around in site
Avoid frames
Use long descriptive link text
Spell check and edit
Search Engine Marketing: Keywords
• How they work
• Keyword analysis
• Ex: Keyword rank = meta tag placement + capitalization + font
size + word position in document relative to other words
• Meta tag example: http://mamabearssoaps.com
• Identify competitors’ keywords
• Look up synonyms
– ex: bicycle / cycle
• Use plurals and spelling mistakes
– ex: bicycles and bycycle
• Research the use of the keyword
– Go to www.overture.com
– SEO Tools term search tool
Search Engine Marketing:
Keyword Tools
• www.Adwords.Google.com
• www.Wordtracker.com
– Searches data at large webcrawlers like www.Dogpile.com
– Stores two months of searches – 300 million searches
– Number of times searched for in last 60 days
– Estimates number of searches per day
– Similar terms & common misspellings
– Comparison of number of times term is searched for and
number of pages returned for the term
• Look for term with many searches and few pages returned
Search Engine Marketing:
What They Don’t Like
• Don’t search or find difficult to search when they find:
– Frames, images, multimedia (ex: flash, animation), image
maps
• Avoid frames, images, animation unless necessary
• Move images and image maps to bottom of page
– Scripts, excessive formatting code
• Call external scripts – don’t embed in source
• Use external CSS files for formatting
– Dynamic pages – too many parameters, too many possible
pages
• Use static pages when possible
• Use one or two parameters at most
– Sites that demand cookies for site access
• Search-bots will not search
Search Engine Marketing:
Submit to the Major Engines
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AltaVista – www.altavista.com
AOL.COM Search – search.aol.com
Ask Jeeves – www.askjeeves.com
Google – www.google.com
Overture – www.overture.com
Excite – www.excite.com
Fast – www.alltheweb.com
HotBot – www.hotbot.com
Lycos – www.lycos.com
MSN Search – search.msn.com
Search Directory Marketing
• Directories are different than engines
• Index by categories rather than keywords
– So – there are far fewer categories
• Three major directories are
– Google Directory – fed by Open Directory Project
– Yahoo! Directory
• Fourteen categories – thousands of subcategories
• So may be difficult choosing a category to be listed in
• Submitting costs $$$
– Open Directory Project – www.dmoz.com
– LookSmart – www.looksmart.com
Non-Search Engine Marketing
• Advertising banners
• Are they effective?
• Buying them
• Are they right for your products or services?
• The importance of traditional advertising
• Ex: print, radio, television
• Opt-in e-mail databases
• Promotions, e-mail marketing, direct mail marketing
• Affiliate programs and promotional partnerships
– Pay to have leads sent to you (pay per-click or per-sale)
– Ex: www.myaffiliateprogram.com
• Using bonus point strategies to develop repeat business
Website Marketing
• Collecting / analyzing visitor and customer data
• Discovering your customers’ patterns, wants and desires
• Using software to analyze the data
• Ex: Yahoo! Store
• What to analyze
• How often
• ROI (Return On Investment) from advertising and marketing
• Measuring advertising effectiveness
Website Management Issues:
The Shopping Experience
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Industry research shows that up to 75 percent of shoppers abandon shopping cart before
completing checkout
Techniques for minimizing shopping cart abandonment rates:
– Provide shipping costs early in the process, so shoppers are not surprised during
final checkout.
– Show stock availability on the product page, so shoppers do not have to wait until
checkout to determine if a product is out of stock.
– When an item is placed in the shopping cart, include a link back to product page,
so shoppers can easily go back to make sure they have selected the right item.
– Make it easy to change quantities or delete items from shopping cart.
– Make it easy to select or change product values in the shopping cart (e.g., color,
size).
– Include a "Progress Indicator" (e.g., "Step 2 of 5") on each checkout page, so
shoppers always know where they are in the checkout process.
Adapted from Overture.com - 2005
Website Management Issues:
The Shopping Experience
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Techniques for minimizing shopping cart abandonment rates (continued):
– Include a prominent "Next Step" or "Continue with Checkout" button on each
checkout page, so shoppers do not get lost.
– Keep all information on one screen on each checkout page, so shoppers do not
have to frequently scroll down.
– If the billing information is the same as the shipping information, include a box
that shoppers can check to automatically fill in the same information.
– If information is missing or filled out incorrectly during checkout, give
meaningful error message that clearly describes what needs to be corrected.
– If you intend to add your customers to a list for future e-mail marketing (either
from you or a third party), make sure your customers know this and can easily
opt out.
– Make recommendations of additional items to buy based on what is already in
the shopping cart.
Adapted from Overture.com - 2005
E-Business Trend – Long Tail