Promotion, marketing and sales of new technology and e-commerce
February 8, 2007 at 4:58 pm · Filed under eBay
eBay is a community that encourages open and honest communication among all its members. Our community is guided by five fundamental values:
We believe people are basically good.
We believe everyone has something to contribute.
We believe that an honest, open environment can bring out the best in people.
We recognise and respect everyone as a unique individual.
We encourage you to treat others the way you want to be treated.
eBay is firmly committed to these principles. And we believe that community members should also honour them—whether buying, selling, or chatting with eBay friends.
Feedback:
Feedback is made up of comments and ratings left by other eBay members you’ve bought from and sold to. These comments and ratings are valuable indicators of your reputation as a buyer or seller on eBay. They are included, along with an overall feedback score, in your Member Profile.
Always leave feedback after a transaction so that other members may benefit from your experience.
Usually, a high feedback score and high positive feedback percentage is a good sign, but you should always check your seller/buyer’s Member Profile for negative remarks.
Keep your Member Profile public–buyers may be wary of trading with someone with a private Member Profile.
Contact the seller/buyer to resolve any issues before leaving negative feedback.
You cannot remove feedback you’ve left, unless you both agree to withdraw. So be sure to make only fair and factual comments and give ratings that relate to a specific transaction
February 8, 2007 at 4:56 pm · Filed under eBay
A great book to check out is eBay Strategies by Scot Wingo!
Check some eBay vitals, gather some data about your eBay business!
Check your Gross Merchandise Sales each Week
Total Listing Fees for that week? Are they too high?
Payment System Fees
Is your average selling price increasing or decreasing? (GMS/ No. Itms Sold)
Then with this simple calculation work out your Conversion Rate for that Month
Number of Items Sold/Number of Items Listed= Conversion Rate
This will give you a percentage of how many successful items you had close in relation to how many listings.
The average CR (conversion rate) on eBay is 50%, go below this and you need to re-jig your listing strategy as you are listing too many items, or listing them to the wrong category, in the wrong format or at the wrong times. There are so many variables on eBay and you can keep a weekly check on your vital signs!
Each week check on your profit margin for positive and negative trends.
You will get a comprehensive report at the end of your month and an analysis from your account manager, but you need to check your vital signs each week to avoid pitfalls or fees spinning out of control!
February 8, 2007 at 4:55 pm · Filed under eBay
As standard, we recommend you deal with negative feedback by following the method outlined below:
1. Go to the feedback forum: http://pages.ebay.co.uk/services/forum/feedback.html
2. Go to ‘Reply to Feedback Received’ Reply to the buyers feedback using FACTUAL information to back up what caused the problem to the buyer, and give future buyers reassurance.
2. Go back to the feedback forum and click ‘Leave Feedback’, find the item and leave a negative feedback for the buyer using factual information again.
2. Email the buyer and explain (again if needs be) the cause of the problem, your resolution, and state that you would like to mutually withdraw the negative feedback.
3. Go to http://feedback.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?MFWRequest and attempt to mutually withdraw the feedback. If the buyer agrees to mutually withdraw, feedback for both you and the buyer will be removed from both accounts. (your feedback score / % will reflect this).
February 8, 2007 at 4:49 pm · Filed under Marketing and Promotion, Sales
Free basic web site optimisation tools - http://www.submitcorner.com/
If your website is not in the top search engines, how will your customers find you? Learn the techniques, tips, indexing strategies and gain the competitive edge you need in e-business. Welcome to Submit Corner. This website was developed with the goal of helping businesses and webmasters optimize their rankings to the top of search engines. We’ve created guides and web-based tools to help prepare and scan your website before submitting to search engines. Using our tools and guides, you get a full site optimization at your fingertips without costing you a penny.
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Find what are the most popular keywords related to your website in the top search engines. This search thesaurus is most beneficial for finding keywords you should use in META tags according to related searches made by users.
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META Tag Generator
Fast track creating your META tags with our advanced META tag generator. Just select the META tags you would like and let our META tag generator spit out the code for you. Takes under 30 seconds and you’ll have a complete set of META tags without needing to know anything about them.
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META Tag Scanner
Before firing off your site to search engines, make sure you verify your META tags are formatted correctly and optimized properly. Let our META Tag Scanner analyze your tags and make suggestions on how you can improve the common elements of your page(s).
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Robots Generator
Control the level of spidering, searching and indexing a search engine can do on your pages through a set of rules as defined by a Robots file or Robots META Tag. Let our Robots tool take the hassle out of creating robot rules through this easy to use wizard.
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Submit your website automatically to the top search engines with one easy and consolidated form. Our wizard takes under 30 seconds and will broadcast your submission to the top engines and provide a report for you in real-time.
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Top Keywords
Wondering what are the most popular keywords being searched on search engines? This service monitors over 30,000,000 search requests each month and compiles the most popular keywords into easy to use lists every week.
Word Tracker
The most powerful search engine keyword research tool available on the Internet is Word Tracker. This tool crawls through various search engines and compiles related keywords based on search volume, popularity and compares your keywords to your competitors. Get a 30 day free trial and a bonus subscription to our weekly publication of the search engine most active 500 keywords delivered to your email each week.
February 8, 2007 at 4:48 pm · Filed under Marketing and Promotion
1.Successful e-marketing requires a defined top-level planning process
2.Links e-marketing objectives to the various organisational elements to achieve them.
SOSTAC framework for e-marketing strategy:
Situation – Situation Analysis
Objectives – e-Marketing Objectives
Strategy – how to get there
Tactical – uses marketing mix etc
Action – do it
Control – assess & monitor (Paul Smith in Chaffey, Ch 
Situation Analysis
Aim – understand current & future environments to set realistic objectives
Examine following elements:
Immediate (operating) environment
customers, competitors, suppliers, intermediaries
External (wider macro) environment
Internal audit – capability to deliver
People, resources, processes, technology
Demand Analysis
Current & projected use of each channel
Internet Access Web Site Users Sufficient Income Web Site Buyers Off-Line Buyers.
Competitor Analysis
Monitoring and Benchmarking
Current Capability Analysis
Marketing effectiveness
Internet effectiveness
Objective Setting
Increase Market Share
Reduce Costs
Increase Sales
Should be SMART
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Timed
Increase On-Line Revenue Contribution!
Strategy Formulation
How the e-marketing objectives are met:
Usually an iterative process (draws heavily on previous strategy formulation topics)
Penetration into a particular market
Market Development – expand the market (Lucozade)
Product Development – modify the product (cereal bars)
Market Segmentation
understand specific needs of new and existing markets & develop strategy to exploit
Tactics, Action & Control
Tactics
Based around elements of the marketing mix
Action
Identify investment levels, training, responsibilities, changes etc.
Just do it
Control
Monitor and obtain feedback through market research and management information
Advertising
What’s different about the web?
“will slowly discover that nothing less than an entirely new publishing and advertising economy is taking shape in this information-based terrain.†(Schwartz 1996)
Questions are:
1.How can marketing content best be delivered to consumers?
2.Will advertising techniques used in print and electronic broadcast media work on the web?
3.Will standard methods used to track the success of advertising in these media work on the web?
Dominant Advertising Principles:
1.Direction of the advertising message is reversed
2.In traditional advertising, the message is imposed on the consumer, who is passive
3.The customer is delivered over to the advertiser in a one-to-many model of marketing communications
4.On the web, the consumer:
Chooses to view an advertisement on a site
Takes actions to uncover the information the advertiser wishes to deliver
Enters the “clickstream†(taking further action)
5.Content regains core of advertising effort
6.Traditional advertising uses brief distilled messages to catch and hold our attention
7.It depends on repetition to deliver the message
8.Content is minimized and simplified to fit the time constraints of media or the size constraints of the page
9.Packing the maximum amount of meaning into the minimum amount of content is critical
Internet Advertisements
1.Banner Ads
an image or banner of varying size on the web page which has the following objectives
2.Click- through: industry average is 0.4%
Branding: you want them to know who you are
Good design enhances click-through & size does matter
3.Interstitial ads
A way of placing full page messages between the current and destination page
Like TV commercials make viewers a captive of the message
Typically last ten seconds or less where the viewer is (hopefully) doing nothing but looking at the ad
February 8, 2007 at 4:47 pm · Filed under Marketing and Promotion
A solid internet marketing strategy can provide your company with an important advantage over competitors and can include e-mailing, advertising, promotions and public relations.
Keeping user profiles, recording visits and analysing promotional and advertising result and key to measuring the effectivness of your marketing campaign
Brand is typically defined as a name, logo or symbol that help one identify a companies’ product or service.
A company’s customers’ experience can be considered as part of its brand and include the quality of customers interatcions with a company and its product or service.
Businesses that already have a strong brand may may find it easier to transfer this to the web, while internet only businesses must strive to develop a brand that customers trust and value.
Uniformity of the brand as it is used across all channels of customer contact will increase brand recognition.
The internet provides an opportunity for further branding for a company and its products. However the internet makes it difficult to protect a company’s brand from misuse and complaint spamming.
Web sites should be designed with customers preferances in mind and NOT those of the company.
Email is a fast, cheap and far reaching marketing tool.
By discovering your target market, you increase visits, responses and possible purchases.
Marketing reasearch can be preformed over the internet, giving marketers a new, faster option for finding and analysing industry, customers and competitor information.
Internet marketing should be used wth traditional marketing to enhance your strategy.
Organisations that plan to hit a global market must have the ability to send emails translated into the appropriate language , demonstrating your value to international customers. You can use altavista babelfish as a basic translating tool, but there are web based email marketing services that WILL provide this service.
Outsourcing servuces should be used when email marketing gets to difficult to manage, because of volume and inadequate staff or technical support.
Determining a goal for your campaign includes defining the reach, or the span of people you would like to target, incliuding geographical locations and demographic profiles. Determining the level of personalisation of the campaign is also improtant.
Use your ‘opt’ in mailing list for existing customers on a monthly basis, there are customers who are confident in your service and product and should be kept informed of new products/services. Word of mouth is also a forgotten aspect to marketing. A satisfied customer with recommend a brand and also buy again.
Traditional and direct marketing includes sending information by mail and using telemarketing, this should be used with email to reach more people.
Direct mailing is often more expensive, more difficult to analyse and has a lower response rate.
To allow people to view your company infomration, add your contact details to a list of companies or organisations related to your field of business.
Placing a direct email link on your website is a great idea but you will need to have the resporce to handle the anticipated volume.
Spamming, mass emailing to customers who have NOT expressed interest in receiving these email can refect badly on your company.
Offering something extra when your customers buy using promotional scheme or points systems can increase brand loyalty.
Placing a discount in your advertising in magazines, newspaper or direct email can bring new and repeat customers.
If you are providing a service offer a free trial so your customers can feel confident with the service before buying.
Your company can place coupons on sites that specialise in online coupons to bring in traffic.
Publising you URL on all marketing and business cards, place links on other companies websites and register with search engines and directories as a means to increase site traffic.
Continually strenthen your branding. Your brand should be unique, recognisable and easy to remember. make sure your main email address and URL are not to lengthy, sales@blah.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or support@blah.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it are short and easy to remember.
Test out using banner ads. The benefits of banner advertising include increased brand recognition and exposure.
Be weary of using pop up ads. Most interent users now have pop up blockers and are increasingly annoyed at these kind of ads.
Use minimal adveretising click throughs on your OWN site, for example from google. This can increase your revenue.
Search Engine Ranking is improtant to bringing customers to your site. This is acheived using meta tags.
Know your key words! Good key words are essential to search engines and auction sites
February 8, 2007 at 4:43 pm · Filed under Marketing and Promotion
Already have your google base feed set up? Great, it’s a free site. You can also register with dealtime.co.uk (shopping.com) to bring in more traffic. Google ‘adwords’ are a useful and cheap option to pull more traffic into your site!
Also..have you submitted your site to all the search engines? Using the Sitemap Beta Program you can register your website with Google, and with Yahoo you can submit your URL. Your domain name provider may offer you this service for nothing or a small fee. Try to go through and register with as many search engines as possible. Most are free! My domain provider registered my URL with 10 top search engines free.
Overture is a company by yahoo, which has the same facilities as Google adwords. There minimum is £1 a day, so be prepared to spend £30 a month of advertising with them.
It works on a pre-pay system so be prepared to invest around £70 initially.
You need to choose your keywords effectively and review them on a regular basis. If a program is NOT working for you then KILL IT! Give it a month to prove its worth, and if it is not performing then don’t waste any more money.
Remember that eBay is your main advertising tool, don’t forget to keep listing and always have a few items in your eBay shop!
Soak up all the free advertising, and if you can attempt search engine optimization yourself then do so. There are various guides on the web.
When going for a pay per click scheme use ‘KEYWORD’ targeted instead of ‘SITE’ targeted, site targeted is when your advert is displayed on relevant sites, you have to choose these but if you can’t see any decent sites to host your ad, then refrain. It is more expensive than key word targeted, and for example with Google I had about 150 clicks in a week from keyword costing around £5, but for the same £5 I only had 8 clicks for site targeted.
Be prepared to try out alternative advertising, but don’t leave it unattended. It is not a guarenteed success, so always monitor each scheme. Give everything a month, but be ruthless. More money spent of advertising the less money you have to list on eBay and invest in product!
February 8, 2007 at 4:41 pm · Filed under News
Great for bulk resizing of images! - http://picasa.google.com/index.html
A free software download from Google.
Picasa is software that helps you instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC. Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual albums organised by date with folder names you will recognise. You can drag and drop to arrange your albums and make labels to create new groups. Picasa makes sure your pictures are always organised.
Picasa also makes advanced editing simple by putting one-click fixes and powerful effects at your fingertips. And Picasa makes it a snap to share your pictures – you can email, print photos home, make gift CDs, and even post pictures on your own blog.
February 8, 2007 at 4:40 pm · Filed under External News
Free HTML editor for auction descriptions and website content! http://www.coffeecup.com/free-editor/
The CoffeeCup Free HTML Editor is a drag and drop HTML Editor with Built-in FTP uploading. It has wizards for tables, frames, forms and fonts and comes with all HTML 4.0 and XHTML tags. The Free version also includes wizards for images, links and a Quickstart so you can create web pages fast.
February 8, 2007 at 4:39 pm · Filed under Marketing and Promotion
Legal Issues:
1. Hierarchy of legal jurisdictions (UK)
a. Standards & Codes of practice (UK bodies)
b. UK statute & common law
c. EU directives to governments
d. International agreements
2. Concerns are global
a. Domain names & trademarks, advertising, defamation, IPR, privacy, taxation of e-commerce
UK statutes:
1. Consumer Credit Act 1974
2. Health & Safety at Work Act 1975
3. Data Protection Acts 1984 & 1998
4. Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988
5. Computer Misuse Act 1990
6. Electronic Communications Act 2000
7. Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000
8. Law of contract, sale of goods, etc.
EU Directives:
1. Must be enacted into UK law
a. Often done through statutory instruments
b. Basis for privacy, H&S laws
2. Try to look at Europe-wide standards
a. Can conflict with basis of national law
3. Many changes due through this route
a. E.g. Harmonisation of aspects of copyright, taxation of sales
Protecting Privacy:
1. Privacy
a. The right to be left alone and the right to be free of unreasonable personal intrusions
2. Information Privacy
a. The claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, and to what extent, information about them is communicated to others
How is Private Information Collected?
1. By individuals providing data during registration, searching, purchase
2. From Internet Directories
3. By making your browser record information about you
4. Server logs of what you browse
5. From e-mail monitoring
Five principles of e-commerce privacy:
1. Notice/Awareness – Notice to make informed decisions.
2. Choice/Consent – on use of personal information. Consent may be granted through ‘opt-in’ clauses requiring steps.
3. Access/Participation – Must be able to access their personal information and challenge its validity.
4. Integrity/security – Must be assured that data is secure and accurate.
5. Enforcement/Redress – methods should exist. Alternatives are self-regulation, legislation for private remedies, government intervention.
Company Guidelines:
1. UK - the relevant legislation is Data Protection Act 1998
2. USA - few laws directly controlling use of personal data
a. Privacy Act 1974 - regulates Federal record keeping
b. 1997 ‘Framework for Global e-Commerce’ from Clinton Admin. - recommended self-regulation
c. Federal Trade Commission Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (from 21/4/2000) - before collecting personal information from a child under 13, must have consent of parent.
Web Site Registration:
1. Much information can be gathered
2. Presents problems for sender & recipient:
a. Who will receive the data?
b. How will the data be used - business planning, sale to a third party, appropriately?
c. Is the data correct?
d. Who really sent it?
99.99% of statistics are made up on the spot:
1. 10th User Survey by GVU suggests:
a. 40% of all users have falsified information when registering online
b. 66% of all U.S. and European respondents don’t register as they don’t know how the information is going to be used
c. 63% don’t feel that registration is worthwhile considering the content of the sites
d. 58% don’t trust the sites collecting this information from them
2. http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/user_surveys/
Protecting Intellectual Property:
1. Copyright - Copyright Design & Patents Act, 1988 gives protection for literature, including :
i. Derived works - translations, adaptations);
ii. Art (inc. applied art - jewelry, furniture etc.);
iii. Computer programs
b. Copy; distribute; record; perform; broadcast;
i. Lawful only with authorisation of copyright owner
c. Case: Shetland Times v. Wills (i.e. ‘Times’-v- ‘News’)
i. Court decreed that headlines had copyright protection, and hence could not be linked without authorisation
2. New EU directive on copyright harmonisation due soon.
Trade Marks:
1. A sign (words, pictures, colours etc.) - a means of identifying a business capability for particular goods/services
a. Protection through registration
2. E-commerce problems for trademarks:
a. Domain name problems - misuse; cybersquatting & selling; character string problems (e.g. CANDYLAND case - Hasbro v. IEG Ltd. 1995)
b. Deep linking (e.g. case: Ticketmaster v. Microsoft, 1997; Ticketmaster 2001)
c. Metatagging (e.g. case: Playboy v. Calvin DL, 1997)
More Intellectual Property Issues:
1. Trade Secret
a. Intellectual work such as a business plan, which is a company secret and is not based on public information.
b. Corporate espionage via internet technologies is said to be a problem.
2. Patent
a. A document that grants the holder exclusive rights on an invention for some years.
b. Case: Amazon v. Barnes & Noble (1999) for 1-click purchasing.
Public Key Infrastructure:
1. Aim: secure and trusted environment for the conduct of electronic commerce.
2. Digital Signatures authenticate the identity of the sender and give assurance of message integrity, and thus can provide a system of non-repudiation.
3. Smart Cards - implements PKI in hardware rather than merely in software, for greater security.
a. Card can contain PKI chip containing user’s private key, which can only be used by someone with physical possession of the card (WHAT YOU HAVE), and knowledge of a secret pass phrase (WHAT YOU KNOW) plus perhaps a biometric identifier (WHO YOU ARE).
b. Time/date-stamping - by third party
Implications for business internet usage:
1. Specify the rules of electronic contracting and jurisdiction prevailing when buyers, brokers, and sellers are in different countries
a. Establish whether encryption, e-certs required
2. Have a policy to ensure compliance with law (esp. in UK – e.g. Data Protection Act 1998)
3. Ensure that sites do not breach copyright (including within intranets)
4. Be aware of infringing laws (e.g. on data handling, content, trading) of other nations if scope is beyond own national boundaries. < Prev
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