Pod1 Blog

Research from TNS Worldpanel suggest that online retailers could outstrip the popularity of high street giants if current trends continue.

In an annual top 10 list of the favourite retailers in the UK, Amazon came a close second to supermarket chain Tesco, and eBay made it in at number 10.

Analyst TNS Worldpanel, which produced the league, said if the surge in internet shopping continues, online retailers would become more popular than established high street names.

Research manager for TNS Worldpanel Elaine Giles said: “It’s clear from the trends that we’re seeing that online retailers are increasing really rapidly in popularity. Amazon being the number two overall favourite retailer sets a precedent for other retailers to make the same move, and if the current trends continue we will see a lot more online retailers overtake more traditional high street retailers.

“A lot of the retailers who have suffered as a result of the recession have been traditional bricks and mortar retailers and those which have an offering online have fared a bit better.”

eBay shot from 42nd place among Britons’ favourite retailers in 2006, 15th in 2007 and 10th in 2008. Amazon was 21st three years ago, then fifth in 2007 and 2nd in 2008.

Internet shopping is particularly popular among younger men, with just over a fifth of men under 35 (22%) choosing Amazon as their favourite place to shop.

Online retailers performed particularly strongly in electrical goods and entertainment, but consumers preferred to stick to familiar names for groceries and clothing.

Ms Giles added: “The speed at which online retailers’ popularity is rising is surprising, especially in light of the heavy discounting we’ve seen on the high street in recent months. But it does spell good news for old high street favourites such as Woolworths and Zavvi, both of whom are planning to re-launch as online brands.”

TNS polled 15,000 people during the 52 weeks to January 4, 2009. The top 10 retailers from one to 10 were: Tesco, Amazon, Asda, Marks & Spencer, John Lewis, Argos, Sainsbury’s, Debenhams, Morrisons, eBay.

A youtube mashup project by Kutiman has created one of the first youtube bands out there. Each track is composed by mixing and matching components of various youtube videos, check them out!

more here

Pod1’s Fadi Shuman is now the resident eCommerce blogger for Revolution magazine.

The new blog, entitled eCommerce Kung Fu, is part of a site-wide revamp of the off-line magazine’s website. Other resident bloggers include Tom Bazeley from LMFM and Caroline McGuckian from LBI. Check it out for the latest strategies in eCommerce and for some juicy tactics to help you sell more online.

Visit Revolution magazine’s new website here.

Subscribe to the blog

Bit slow to load but worth it.
I like the interactivity, shame we won’t know the conversions.

Take a look

But why the annoying music?

Volontaire is a small agency from Stockholm, Sweden.
They have done something very clever, slightly crazy, but has generated some pretty incredible publicity. They have given three INTERNS a task:

1. Pitch on Adidas worldwide.
2. Win the account.
3. Within three weeks.

Why?
Because according to Adidas, impossible is nothing.

The site details their activities, you can follow them on pretty every social platform going.

I am loving it! Take a look

What do you think?

Top 5 tips for eCommerce sites in a recession

After years of explosive growth (25% YOY) we are now in a time where very quickly we will see who is hot and who is not. Where in the past everyone could have a piece of the pie, now retailers need to go to greater length than just emailing a campaign image out and see the conversion rate climb. If you want to stay ahead, read the 5 tips below and you’re well set…

Tip 1: Focus on your customer

Your customer is the most important part of your business. It is not the CEO and not the design departments urge to make everything in Flash to get the brand across, it is the customer. Bricks& Mortar retailers practice this every day but it is strangely absent on most eCommerce websites. People are still bombarded with branding and Marketing speak and the Splash page seems to celebrate an unholy revival
To find out about your customer use a quick customer satisfaction survey. 4Q for example does these for FREE! There is absolutely no excuse why you shouldn’t do this.

Tip 2: Segment your Email database

Segmentation is the first step to pushing relevant content to your customers. Sending product emails aimed at females to men is certainly not doing you any good. If you haven’t got a segmented database, launch a questionnaire with a few simple questions. Send this to your database and they will do the segmentation for you. This way you can clean out cold leads as well. Email this list again in 3 months time and ask them if they still want the newsletter. If they don’t respond now, freeze them for a year and email them again. Remove everyone who does not respond now.

Tip 3: Optimise your landing pages

You can easily extract what your landing pages are, that includes your homepage, and how they perform in a tool such as Google Analytics. Once you have done this check the ones with a really high bounce rate and check the keywords, natural and PPC, and how the bounce rate develops over time. Once you have identified the culprits, you can do two things. Either stop bidding on them or get your landing page up to scratch with what people come for. If they search for “Children Seats” and you direct them to a page where they see car stereos it’s no wonder they leave you instantly. You might see that this is going towards creating hundreds of landing pages.

Tip 4: Test your site

Testing is free! You can do this on your conversion funnel pages or on the above mentioned landing pages. The other good thing about testing is that you can test everything. The CEO’s wifes opinion is just as valid as yours but now you can proof which one is better.
Use Google Website Optimizer to setup you’re A/B or Multivariate tests and see how the individual variations perform. Continue testing the winning combination. You can test round buttons vs. square buttons and then round yellow buttons vs. round blue buttons…

Tip 5: Act on your findings

Sounds obvious but all too often we see people collecting vast amounts of data but then letting the reports set on dust. A figure reported and not acted on is a dead figure. From all the above you have to drive change and that might be tougher than you think. But if you execute the recommendations above thoroughly and then act on them you will automatically do better than before.

Why not contact Amanda and find out how you can benefit from Pod1s experience in website optimisation and testing.

Great blog post from Smashing Magazine:

‘When was the last time you called customer support because you were having problems checking out online? Probably never! Cart abandonment rate is at around 60%, and most of it happens before the user even begins the checkout process. Sometimes, convincing your customers to trust you is your biggest challenge.

There is no “Consumer Trust for Dummies,” but as eCommerce designers, we need to focus on some fundamentals. The following topics may seem as obvious as walking into a seven-foot Wookie, but rest assured you will find plenty of websites with a mouth full of fur.’

Read the full article ‘5 Universal Principles For Successful eCommerce-Sites’

Everyone has been talking about Twitter for some time now but the big question has always been how to monetize it? Well it looks like they’ve figured it out, it wasn’t that much of a leap really. Twitter executives say that it will soon offer paid-for “commercial” accounts to give businesses additional features unavailable to casual Tweeters.

More details on the econsultancy blog

Drapers today released a preview of some of the new collection that will be released through 200 H&M’s stores end of April. The range, designed by Matthew Williamson will be available in all 1400 stores by May 16th.

You can read the full article here.

Pod1 recently launched a new website for Matthew Williamson to showcase the collections and was timed to coincide the opening of the new york store. This was the first project to come out of the Pod1/Matthew Williamson account with another website launch due end of April. Watch this space….