Apart from its inability to provide the function it was created for, its a great little phone. Shame it is useless!

$9.3 billion spent online from November 1 through 23, a record and 17 percent higher than the $8.1 billion spent online last year

Check out the post $700mm Cyber Monday? for more details.

If you have been following our marketing series, the last post Christmas Marketing – What to do in November. you would have been ready for the Christmas Crunch time between the 23rd of November and 16th December.

So what do you get up to in December?

Check, check and re check! You still have time to tweak your marketing strategies before the 16th of December! Do you have the last shipping date displayed for your target market? If you ship internationally make sure you distinguish between the posting dates.

From the 17th of December:

Ramp down your festive keywords and marketing to avoid wasted pay per click sales. Gather and analyse your data to outline the best method of increase your sales in the next festive season.

Celebrate your success, and forget about your failures until next year when you make moves to eradicate them!

Prepare stock and website for the sales. In the UK sales start on boxing day, so you will need to get moving implementing your strategy, boasting the best prices and driving the bargain ethos. Advertise NOW that your sales start boxing day, in pay per click and on your site. Email all your customers about the fantastic bargains to be had!

Repeat the main and successful steps from your Christmas marketing. top make sure you clear old and redundant stock ready for the trends of 2008!

As well as training to be an eBay education specialist I have secured consultancy and web development in the last few weeks of December to take me though to January.

In pure on-line entrepreneurial fashion I have been building up my web business ( practising what I preach) to its highest level yet and it continues to grow. Over the Christmas period I am going to be organising an eBay January Sale. I plan to make £900 with excess materials and stock hoarded over the years!

I shall also spend the time re-designing my ebay shop!

Week 1:

You have done your research, you campaign has had 7-10 days. Pin point your successes and failures.

Ask yourself a few questions:

1. What campaigns are working?
2. Why are the successful campaigns working?
3. What campaigns are not working?
4. Why are they not working and what can we change you yield a positive result?

You need to look at your analytical data and see where your revenue stream is coming from on these campaigns, are the keywords you thought were relevant to the season and your product working for you?

Are to continuously testing the efficacy of your landing pages?

Week 2:

You need to analyse your purchase or lead generation process. You should have enough data now to see where your customers are either abandoning the shopping cart or being lost in your pages.

Check your error and web logs, has the site had a slow down due to the increased traffic? Have loading times been effected at all? Do you have any dead links on your site you forgot to get rid of in October?

These holes in your bucket need to be corked before the ‘Christmas Crunch Time’ which is typically 23rd of Nov to 16th Dec.

Crunch starts in week 3.

Week 3:

Check stock levels and product feeds for errors. Display and be realistic about your last posting days before Christmas. Evaluate your pay per click and other active return on investment advertising to increase quality of traffic. Re-evaluate your match types, campaign negative keywords, budget, position and bids to ensure the relevancy of your shoppers.

Don’t sell them something they are not looking for. If they don’t know what they are looking for make sure you are ‘suggesting ideas’ within your advertising i.e Gifts for Mum, Gifts for a music fan etc.

Make sure you campaigns are organised to separate such ‘Suggesting Campaigns’ from product specific or general campaigns. These campaigns are more specific to panic shoppers at Christmas with no idea what to buy their loved ones.

If you do run an affiliate program make sure the creative and promotions are seasonal, add Christmas bonuses.

Week 4:

Wash. Repeat.

Keep tweaking and checking your promotional presence. Keep and eye on your competitors.

Again this is not a complete guide, only suggestions to get you going for the Christmas period and hopefully be a little thought provoking when your are planning your marketing activities. Watch out for the December edition!

They also have a blog : Future Now’s Marketing Optimization Blog

If you are tired of text book internet marketing reads, this plays out like a compelling novel. I can’t put it down, suddenly it all makes sense!

You could find at least 6 different types of online shopper within your own set of friends and family. A small sized start-up online business may not be able to afford professional customer modelling, but these techniques are still important, even to the smaller player.

New to the Net:

These buyers are still getting used to the internet and the idea of e-commerce. They use the web for research purchases and start will smaller value items in safer environments. A common start off point for these shoppers is eBay, where all the sellers are rated and they can proceed with caution. At this early stage this shopper can either become addicted to the life of e-commerce or be put off by a bad or fraudulent purchase.

This buyer needs a simple interface, and a way to verify the e-commerce site. Make sure you have clear precise pictures, a simple stream line jargon free checkout and display your returns policy clearly outlining your responsibility as an online retailer. You can invest in an eBay type feedback system such as FeeFo.com which is an independent customer feedback system and also feature customer testimonials. Make sure you use well known and simple payment processing for example Paypal, Lloyds Cardnet or HSBC.

Bargain Hunters

These shoppers rely heavily on marketplaces such as eBay and shopping comparison engines. They have no real brand loyalty and are just shopping for the lowest price. You need to convince these shoppers they are getting the best deal. Make sure you products are included in shopping comparison engines and have an RRP shown so they can see the great deal they are getting. Within this group you have the impulsive bargain hunter who wants to purchase now and a competitive bargain hunter willing to bid against other shoppers for the deal. EBay is a bargain hunter’s paradise; you can almost use eBay to cater primarily for these customers, letting them battle it out for bargains and also have fixed price items for your impulsive bargain hunters.

Precise Shoppers

These shoppers have a surgical approach to online shopping. They know exactly what they want and will research until they find the best fit to their criteria. These shoppers are hard to please as it is luck of the draw that you have the product they need. You need to make sure part numbers and the true name of your product is present in the product title to allow precise optimization. Product configuration tools like the ‘Build your Porsche’ cater for these types of shopper and are great for a multitude of shopper types.
These shoppers need customer opinions to make sure the product will fit it intended purpose and also great customer support so they can seek verification for the seller about the item.

Hobby Shoppers

Shopping for these buyers is a past time. I fall straight into this category myself. It’s an addiction and I almost need to find something to buy online if I have a penny to spare. I often have to quell the urge. These shoppers purchase frequently and enthusiastically. These are the most adventurous shoppers and you need to grab their attentions by offering engaging tools to view the merchandise as well as product recommendations and incorporating social media into their purchase. These shoppers love community applications such as forums, bulletin boards and social shopping sites.

Direct Shoppers

These shoppers buy out of necessity. They do not shop around or waste time. They want the information now and to find the product within the 3 click recommended navigation. Excellent navigation and product organization is needed to cater for these shoppers. These shoppers need all the information at their finger tips in close proximity to the items, as well as quick access to customer support. Live chat appeals to these kind of shoppers, as they want answers quickly. These shoppers respond well to expert and customers opinions and testimonials.

Nervous Shoppers

My mother very much falls in this category, afraid to ‘put her credit card’ online or that she will be subject to fraud. Identity theft has risen to 1 in 4 in the UK so this is a valid concern. These shoppers start off by only using the internet to research products they mainly buy offline. To make these customers feel secure you need to clearly state your security /privacy policies and use a SSL certificate at checkout. These shoppers watch out for the little padlock at the bottom of the browser so make sure you have no non-secure items on your secure pages. Non-secure Google analytics tracking code is famous for this, they have a https version. You need to state that their information is secure and not sold or distributed. These customers also need customer support, with most of these shoppers wanting to hear from a human before they make their purchase. You need to make sure you include a phone number contact for these shoppers, and also an option that they can pay over the phone for their purchase. You might find these shoppers are only leads for your bricks and mortar or catalogue operations. These are still valid customers as most types of customers have a little bit of the nervous shopper in them.

You can not please or cater for every shopper that will land on your e-commerce site, but you do need to consider the information you need to give your customers and the shopping experience as a whole. Always consider your product type and match it with your typical customer profile. These are generalisations on shoppers, but as with the colour symbolism and psychology, every product type attracts a different set of customer profiles! You can even go as far as moulding your search engine optimisation to match what each shopper type is looking for. Intelligent search engines will deliver your products and message directly to these shopper types, Google personalised search will make this easier for you.

Next have:

• Walk in Stores
• Paper mailing catalogue (which is also present in the store to showcase the full range of products)
• Online Shop
• Call centre operations
• Affiliations with comparison shopping engines, pay per click advertising, shopping directories as well as other new media advertising.

To complete the set they should think about marketplaces such as eBay. They may be satisfied with their end of season re-sellers already on eBay.

In response to this expanse in retail channels, companies specialising in total retail solutions (such as Channeladvisor,Marketworks, Venda and Truition) have spawned from the far corners of the earth. These systems incorporate as many product to consumer channels from one platform as possible, providing a custom branded system. These systems are also available (and mostly piloted by) the smaller virtual retailer. Many of these smaller retailing business have taken such a slice from the high street that the larger players had to respond to the drop in sales.

Going MC 2.0 is about opening up your offerings to different markets as well as your products being available across all channels.

Retailers should be looking to synchronise the service level across all channels. All channels should be fully integrated with existing systems and correctly aligned across:

• Price (even though some companies have set up separate branded channels to be more competitive on-line without being detrimental to their high street trade)
• Promotions
• Gift Vouchers (should be able to be used off-line and on-line)
• Terms and Conditions
• Order process and Returns

A customer likes a single experience across the various channels.

One department should administer all channels to the consumer, as a customer does not like to be passed from pillar to post with their queries about a product or order.

And this is the end for ‘E-commerce and its MC 2.0 adventures’ for now!

Moving a service or product on line enables interactivity and customisation to engage your customers, as we know very well the impact of social media on today’s adult population, with the myspace and facebook generation.

Affiliation should not be shunned by an e-business. An organisation with rich links to other compatible companies or organisations will be able to gain a larger reach and influence.

Encouraging your customers to use on line services will reduce costs while providing a new, convenient channel for purchase and customer service. On line your customers are only a mouse click away from your competitors so you need to make sure you build last relationships with your customers. This statement can be a generalisation in some cases as customers or suppliers will generally lock themselves in after learning to use a system or website as the switching costs can be high.

Take the Marketworks and ChannelAdvisor example. Both are on line auction and e-commerce management systems. Marketworks has the poorer product, which was less reliable but high end retailers were locked in because of the cost of switching from one system to another.

This is now however not a problem for Marketworks Customers wishing to switch!

There are some limitations to your e-business and problems will arise. For example in customer service, emails need to go directly to the person concerned within your business and not just ignored. This can damage a companies reputation as your customers will share their experiences on-line in forums and message boards.

Your services are limited by bandwidth, the amount of information that can be presented to the customer at any one time. A website can become unreliable at peak traffic times, and after certain events such as the Olympics and the World Cup if you products are relevant. Your information has to be accurate and reliable, constantly updated to meet the customer needs and changes within the marketplace. No e-business can rest on its laurels.

Security and protection of customer data is an on going problem which you will have to keep on top of.

A small targeted adwords campaign (costing me £3 in clicks) made sure that I drove a bit of traffic to my new URLs ( ALL the site URLs have been changed to text URLs. I am still fearful of this as SEO efforts will be temporarily effected by this change)

Support was lightning fast. Being in customer support for the last 2 years, its nice to remember what it is like to be the other side of the fold.

I also created a new google sitemap pronto and changed all the links to individual products in the blog associated with the site. Its only a hobby site targeted at a niche market, but I feel absolved for investing the money into the site this week.

I will be very much involved in the set up of her website and helping her deliver her services with the new technologies out there. E-commerce is not just about products, its about virtual services also.

The website will be http://www.virtuassist.co.uk

I have decided to charge to cover costs on this project, as it is going to involve a lot of training also. I don’t think £20 a month for web mastering, setting up the site, marketing, script and email maintenance is asking a lot!