I am currently on ‘Garden leave’ so I have plenty of time to train up before the end of the year.

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.

Week 1

Gather Data – Make sure you have the necessary data from last year October to December including your pay per click campaign statistics from last year. This has to include your website statistics, ROI, traffic sources, best keywords Google Analytics’s can provide this basic data if installed correctly, including basically what made your revenue.

Review Product Launch Dates – Many companies schedule launch of products in time for the Christmas season, especially consumer electronics. Make sure you advertising picks up on these trends if your product is relevant.

Gather Competitive Intelligence – know your enemy in the battle for Christmas! What paid campaigns did they use last year? What keywords are they ‘buying’ now? Does your paid search campaign match up?

Prepare a calendar of events – make sure you and your advertising/website team know what’s going to happen and when.

Week 2

Prepare your website for the new season – evaluate the ease of navigation, can your item be found in 3 clicks? Is your shipping information clear and above the fold? (above the bottom of your browser window, on initial viewing of the page)

Determine your up-sell opportunities, you will have related products to your main Christmas sellers.

Have you tried setting up on eBay to increase your reach?

Test your seasonal landing pages.

Re organise your product inventory, make sure there is room for your seasonal items. Taking off your lower selling items during this period to squeeze in more popular items is OK. Most catalogue companies do this to make way for Christmas. Put keywords like ‘Christmas gifts’ and ‘gifts for her’ within the HTML and keywords of your site. Remember gifts is what its all about now.

Week 3

Prepare for launch! Once Halloween is over its time for Christmas so you need to make sure you can flick on your advertising methods, be it standard advertising, marketplaces or pay per click quickly. Test your campaigns intensively and monitor your competitors for change. Test your website, and remove any dead links or fix broken pages. Set budgets wisely. You supposed to be making more money at Christmas not loosing it on excessive advertising!
Week 4

Launch your campaign. You will need to make sure the search engines know what’s going on so have you updated your sitemaps? Once November hits is all about Christmas, you need to make sure your Christmas and gift keywords have been indexed. Once your campaign has been running for a week you will be able to fine tune it in the first week of November.

November Edition Posted

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.

If you have a site under 500 links, try: Create your Google Sitemap Online – XML Sitemaps

but if you want more links, try: GSiteCrawler which is an application to download for windows. It is also free (you can kindly donate) and you can also export as a google base file for a product based site.

I have now practised what I preach, and changed the Hairfreax URL’s to text based URL’s and I am now writing individual HTML titles and meta for each category. It has been a long time coming, and will take a long time to do. Translation of the site will also take time!

Since your search privacy settings are set to “Everyone,” you now have a public search listing. This means that friends who aren’t yet on Facebook will be able to search for you by name from our Welcome page. Public Search Listings may only include names and profile pictures.
In a few weeks, these public search listings can be found by search engines like Google. No privacy rules are changing; anyone who discovers your public search listing must register and log in to contact you via Facebook.

This means facebook will now become a social site that will have to be ‘reputation managed’ on par with services such as linkedin as they can be listed high in the search rankings for your name and company. Did you think about that when joining facebook or indeed myspace? Social connecting is becoming big business and being raped for its search engine rankings for marketing purposes. Maybe the social community do not want to be marketed at from ALL angles and the reason facebook took over as the popular choice was the fact that is was NOT a marketing tool like myspace quickly became?

Facebook will now become just one of many marketing tools for companies in the Web 2.0 bedroom.

Goodbye facebook. What we had was sweet while it lasted.

This was brought to my attention by SearchEngineWatch

see this post for more details :

eBay Trust and Safety Get Serious – neutrals are now negatives!

Kidsontalks Widgetbox Shenanigans

Checkout the translate this page widget underneath my RSS feeds. Keeping myself international!

P.S If you are looking for eBay bulk listing tools or total solutions try:

ChannelAdvisor (great for £25K+ GMS per month businesses)
Marketworks (Small to Medium size Businesses, less monthly fixed fee than channeladvisor but higher transactional fees – they did have reliability issues around a year ago so check on the uptime guarantee)

Those are the only real players in the UK marketplace at the moment for eBay automation. But if anyone wants to email any others for me to look at I’d love to see what they have got!

Bad Web Companies are plenty, and it can be hard to sort the wheat from the chaff but there are a few rules I have learned from my customers to stop the micky being taken by any web company – good or bad:

1. Always ask for a live demo of the functionality you require or have been promised.Take the words ‘its currently in development’ as ‘ it might never happen’. If this functionality is essential to the deal. Don’t do it yet.

2. Ask for a trial period, even if its just a few hours to see if the thing crashes every 5 mins or has hideous loading times.

3. Make sure that ANY domain names purchased for you are in your name, and don’t hand over or transfer any of your existing domain names. Control you own emails if you can. Gmail is best as you can get your domain emails too all to one account. Most domain name providers have an email POP3 mailbox service.

4. Make sure you can export all your data for an easy getaway.

5. Make sure the cancellation terms are clear.

6. Make sure you define the roles of you the client and the Webmaster/creator of said website to avoid confusion.

7. Make sure that in case of a web-mergancy or dispute, you can get hold of your Webbie.

8. Make sure you have a copy of your design and graphics, if this has been done for you.

Point one might sound a bit harsh but I have heard it over and over again. Plus development takes time, and if it is something you need don’t let it close the sale for you. The software/website you are buying must have the basic functionality you need (and the twiddley fancy stuff too if it be the edge you need) or you might be stuck a year down the line finding that the deal was not all that and you will have to shell out again.

If you can get an independent opinion on the software/website company that’s even better, and searching blogs is a good way to do that. The time might save you a hideous mistake later, or you might find a gem.