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Archive for the ‘Trevor Ginn’ Category

I’ve been doing some research into the social media uptake of major online retailers and usage is patchy to say the least.  Here is a list of the top online retailers in the UK taken from Hitwise.  If I have missed out any features, this is because they are hard to find!

I was particularly surprised at the low take up of blogs.  Don’t Argos, Tescos et al realise that blogs are great for driving traffic and connecting with customers.  Take up of twitter is high, but even sites like Debenhams and M&S who use twitter do not display it anywhere on their websites.  Tesco have a twitter account but have only tweeted once, last april.  Debenhams have a blog, twitter account and facebook page but you would never know that from their webpage.

Best in class is Top Shop with well advertised social media profiles containing quality content.

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Gentle Readers,

I would appreciate it if you could vote for my manifesto on Change this entitled The Fallacy of the Great Idea.

Please follow this link: www.changethis.com/proposals/1754

Thanks

Trevor

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Times are hard and many businesses are to tightening their belts.  However, for savvy businesses, there are several highly effective marketing techniques which require no initial outlay apart from time and effort.  Use these leaner times to experiment an innovate.

Learn Search Engine Optimisation

Attracting search traffic from Google is undoubtedly the most cost effective way of marketing a business.  Time spent learning how to optimise a website to maximise traffic from Google is time very well spent.  Fundamentally, there are two optimisation factors, the content of the website and the quality and quantity of incoming links.  Whilst getting onto page one for competitive phrases is very difficult, creating quality content and being on the look out for linking opportunities can make a significant difference to website traffic.  Remember that each visitor to a website is a potential customer.

Local Search

Local search services such as Google Maps, Yelp and Qype are free to register and can provide a steady stream of web traffic.  This traffic is particularly relevant to location based services such as shops but any business can register.  Local search results are now also appearing on Google’s main search page for location based searches.

Social Media

Social Media platforms such as blogging, Facebook and Twitter are all the rage.  If used properly these services can both generate web traffic and also position a business as a leader in its chosen field.

Blogging.  In case you have been living on Mars, a blog is a website where users can post content in a chronological order and then readers can add comments.  Blogging is highly effective form of communication for a number of reasons:

• Conversational.  Blogs create a two way conversation between a business and its customers.  It provides an easy to keeps customers up to date with and receive feedback
• Easy to update.  Blogs add a dynamic element to a website allowing a business to provide regular updates and interact with their customers.  They are typically built to be very simple to use, allowing anyone to get blogging!
• Give insight into company.  Blogs help to put a human face on a company, giving customers an insight into how the business functions.
• Search engine friendly. The major search engines such as Google give preference to frequently updated content so frequently give high search placement to blog postings.
• Syndication.  Blogs posts are published via RSS feeds which allows readers to subscribe to the content.
• Position Company as Knowledge Leader.  By posting interesting, informative posts a company can demonstrate to customers and potential customers that they are a reputable, knowledgeable supplier.

Twitter. Twitter is a microblogging platform where users can post short updates on what they have been up to. The service has recently become very popular and is a great way for business to both interact with their customers.

• Get to know customers.  By following customers you can respond to their questions and
• Keep your customers up to date.  By following your tweets, customer can keep to date with your latest news and deals.  By tweaking about your products you can drive traffic to your website and generate sales.
• Follow trends.  By following your brand name on twitter you can see what people are saying about you.

Facebook.

Businesses can create their own Facebook pages, allowing them to interact with Facebook’s massive community.  Companies can post all kinds of content about themselves on their Facebook page such as posts, forums, photos and video.  Facebook users (including your customers) can then add their own content and become a fan of your page.

Press Releases and PR

Journalists are always on the lookout for interesting stories to cover and many of these stories come directly from press releases.  Public relations firms make a business out of pitching stories to media outlets, both on and off line, however there is no need to be a professional to get coverage.  By writing a press release and submitting it to free press release sites, emailing relevant publications and posting it on the company’s blog (if available) it is possible to get a message out to the right people and available to Google search.  Another option is to use a paid for press release distribution service such as PRwire to increase distribution.

Write a White Paper

Writing white papers which provide useful information can be a very effective marketing tool. Writing a white paper demonstrates a knowledge of the subject matter and an open attitude to sharing knowledge.  Furthermore, if the white paper is good it will be distributed via email and encourage incoming web links.

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At Hello Baby we have recently launched our own iPhone app, which has been extremely successful and I’d like to share how we did it.

The Idea

My 2 year old daughter loves my iPhone and so I got the idea to develop an app specially for toddlers.  Toddlers aren’t terribly sophisticated when it comes to software and so got the idea for an app which would show a picture of an animal when it was shaken or the screen touched, and make the animals noise.

The app is free to download but branded Hello Baby with a link to the store.

Development

Being cheap I found a developer via eLance to develop the application.  In case you are not aware of it, eLance is a an international marketplace for services and I have used it in the past for blog development and link building to great success.

My developer, Qiu, lives and China and certainly knew his way round iPhone development.  My advice with offshoring work is to work out a tight spec for the product and give this to the developer along with all the collaterals.  I had some design work done in the UK by Maria Fung and used additional materials from iStock photo.

Publicity

I wrote a press release for the iPhone app which I distributed using Daryl Wilcox publishing and journalism.co.uk.  I’ve used PRWeb in the past but these two platforms (especially DWP) seem to have a network of UK journalists who actually read the press releases.  The distributed press release got us coverage on Mac world and family friendly working.  I also emailed the press release to the major baby magazines an got coverage in three of the nationals.

Results

As well as generating some great PR, the app is now contributing 80-100 unique visitors to the site a day and has had around 11,000 downloads.  Not bad for about £600 outlay.

Incidentally, field tests with the target audience (2 year olds) have been mostly positive!

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This post was originally a manifesto pitch for Change This, but they don’t seem to want to publish it

Many entrepreneurs feel that they cannot start a business without a great idea. Without one they believe it will be impossible to be successful as someone else will have cornered the market first. Only by venturing into uncharted territory can they achieve their dreams. This is the fallacy of the great idea.

In truth, most ‘great ideas’ will never make their investors a penny. True, some companies have made billions from a unique product, but close inspection of many world beating businesses reveals that their unique selling point is hard to pin down. Can anyone honestly tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi? And at the end of the day, McDonalds and Burger King both sell burgers.

The simple truth is that it is perfectly possible to create a thriving business without a big idea. In fact starting up with a tried and tested idea is very sensible. Entrepreneurs should not be embarrassed by not having a claim to be original. The real key to success is focus and brilliant execution.

Thanks to Felix Dennis for the inspiration.

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Here, in no particular order, are some pearls of wisdom for your consideration:

Beware of Marketing and Advertising Salesmen

Everyday (at least until I turned my phone onto answer phone) I get around 10 sales people trying to sell advertising and marketing services of a dubious quality.  Be careful before investing in any kind of marketing service as most of them will not be the once in a lifetime opportunity they suggest.  Particularly for online services it is reasonable to ask for a trial before spending any money.

Keep it Simple

May people think that to start a business requires an original idea.  In his book, ‘How to Get Rich’, millionaire publisher Felix Dennis calls this the fallacy of the great idea.  In reality great ideas are few and far between.  For every Google there are a thousand similar companies which had what their founders though were great ideas but have unfortunately been consigned to the dustbin of internet business history.  To be successful does not require a novel idea, just a good idea expertly executed.

Learn Search Engine Optimisation

Attracting search traffic from Google is undoubtedly the most cost effective way of marketing a business.  Time spent learning how to optimise a website to maximise traffic from Google is time very well spent.  Fundamentally, there are two optimisation factors, the content of the website and the quality and quantity of incoming links.  Whilst getting onto page one for competitive phrases is very difficult creating quality content and being on the look out for linking opportunities can make a significant difference to website traffic.  Remember that each visitor to a website is a potential customer.

Economise

As a start up, money will be tight and it really goes without saying that economies should be made wherever possible, especially in the current climate.  I saved thousands of pounds by choosing really cheap office space and outsourcing work to the far east.  Instead of employing someone in the UK, I have a full time employee in Thailand who I found through eLance.  This works out at around quarter of the cost of a UK employee.

Write letters

Sending letters the old fashioned way via snail mail is a highly effective way of getting a point across.  Unlike emails, paper letters cannot be deleted at the touch of a button; they sit around and demand action.  When writing a letter I advise going straight to the top and writing straight to the CEO.  Be polite but firm and remember that a letter of complaint does not have to be a great work of literature. In the last year I have been refunded £5000 though writing letters of complaint.

Be Assertive

When working with contractors it is important to have a good idea of the quality of the work which you want to delivered.  Do not to settle for second best.  It is in human nature to cut corners and so go though all deliverables with a tooth comb to ensure that they are up to scratch.  With web sites, for example, do not assume that the site has been properly tested, it almost certainly has not!

Watch Your Time and Get Organised

Entrepreneurs have multiple demands on their time and often there will be no one to delegate to.  It is possible to waste a huge amount of time though pointless meeting and phone calls.  Being disorganised is also the thief of time as it is much more time consuming to correct mistakes than get it right first time.  However, by learning time management techniques it is be possible to make a huge impact on personal productivity.  The two books I recommend are ‘Getting Things Done’ by David Allen and The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss (read Tim Ferris for his ideas about efficiency and in my view, avoid his ideas about business)

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Reading Free by Chris Anderson recently, I discovered that one of the first home computers was designed solely to organise receipes in the kitchen, as that was about the only task for which the engineers at Honeywell thought a computer might be useful.  To enter receipes required a working knowledge of Hex.  It is not known whether any units were sold!

Fast forward 40 years and it turns out that computes are pretty useful for collating and sharing receipes after all.  Carol Savage from MyDish recently secured funding from the famously picky Dragons of Dragons Den for her food lovers online community.  MyDish is also based in the Old Truman Brewery, where only the very business businesses are located.

Carole was nice enough to answer some of my questions.

Please give us some background on mydish.co.uk

I came up with the idea for MyDish when my husband came back from South Africa after his mother had passed away. He brought back two scraps of paper with recipes on: one for Banana Bread and another for Lemon Meringue Pie. For mu husband, the recipes were so much more than a list of ingredients, they were memories. They reminded him of being a little boy. I told this story to lots of people and everyone had a similar story.

I’d recently sold a business and was looking for a new challenge so I hit upon the idea of MyDish: the internet seemed like the perfect medium to share and store everyone’s treasured recipes.

What made you want to go on Dragon’s den?  Had you exhausted other funding roots or were you attracted by the additional publicity?

Of course, we didn’t actually know we’d get funding but we thought DD was a good way of raising cash and our profile at the same time. It’s been a very rewarding experience and we’re all looking forward to working with Deborah Meaden.

The surge in traffic, registrations and new recipes since we appeared last week has been extraordinary and much more than we expected. We’re still getting a lot of traffic thanks to iPlayer.

What was the Dragon’s Den experience like?

It was the scariest thing I’ve ever done. I’ve blogged it here: http://www.mydishblog.co.uk/

I didn’t see the programme before it aired, which meant I didn’t know what to expect. It was very nervous wracking not knowing what they would choose to show.

Any tips for building a community and driving traffic.  Do you see likes of Facebook as a big competitor or are you in an entirely different market?

One thing we’ve found to be very successful is having an authentic and honest voice. That’s why we try and keep the site personal and friendly. We can come across as a site that people want to use.

I see Facebook as a vehicle. The great big communities are obviously very popular, but I think there’s space for niche, focussed and specialist social sites out there. We successfully use blogging, forums, Facebook, Stumbleupon and Twitter to generate traffic and buzz. Twitter in particular is very good because it’s such a conversational medium. During the show and since we’ve been able to communicate directly with viewers and visitors which has been great.

What are your plans for the future.  You mentioned some interesting functionality on TV.

We have two main priorities. Developing the community and site to drive traffic. We’ve got lots of features that we want develop that we hope will be popular with members including the menu planner and a shopping planner.

Building revenue through partnerships. We’ve successfully done deals with brands like Heinz and Clover as well as linked up with Ocado and Asda, We can offer a highly engaged audience to brands which makes us a powerful aveneue for advertisier. But there has to be something in it for the members. We don’t want to bombard them with pointless, untargeted advertising.

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Dear Michelle,

Whilst aimlessly surfing the web the other day, I came across your new venture, chiconomise.  I have to confess I would have expected more from someone who made it through the gruelling self flagulation which is the apprentice.  The nation expected great things from you, Michelle, is chiconomise your magnum opus?

On the positive side it’s great to see that you have not been idle, and I am a great fan of being entrepreneurial (agency is the engine of mental development as my old lecturer used to say).  But why, oh why did you choose to launch a deals site?   I am no great expert on running sites like these but I reckon that it must be pretty hard to make a living from affiliate schemes and advertising alone.  No doubt it requires being really, really, really good at search engine optimisation and by the looks of things, you are not a scolar of the Google arts.

Having said that I think you have got some good content on the site and it’s great to see that you are making use of social media such as blogging and Twitter.  For starters, here are some suggestions for what I’d do differently:

• Landing page for each brand.  Currently most of your offers link straight to the destination website.  Check out what My Voucher codes do, they have a page where all the offers from a particular brand are located.  Bare in mind that in other ways My voucher codes are really annoying, like trying to flog me stupidly expensive advertising
• Improve your <title>s and meta data.  Get the basics right, it can only increase your traffic
• Don’t use images as blog post titles.  It may look cool, but Google can’t read them.  And incidentally how am I supposed to subscribe to your blog, there does not appear to be an RSS feed.
• Start a forum.  C’mon, you site is crying out for this

Bye for now,

Trevor

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Card payments, either directly or via eWallet services like PayPal, make up the vast majority of payments for goods online.  Consumers are well protected against fraud with the, however, merchants do not enjoy the same blanket level of protection and need to be careful when accepting online payments.

Online payments funded by a card can be subject to charge backs, where the card holder disputes the transaction up to 6 months after the sale.  Charge backs can either be because the card holder disputes that they made the transaction (i.e. it was a fraudulent transaction), or because they believe that the item they received was not as described.

Who Carries the Risk?

It is easy to assume that funds arriving in an account are cleared and legitimate payments.  However, for any online payments where the 3D secure test is not passed (see below), the merchant carries the ultimate risk of a fraud as the transaction is ‘card holder not present’.  To understand the risks associated with any transaction, merchants should understand the available security checks and other factors which can be used to filter out the good from the bad.

Card Security Checks

In my experience payment gateways make little effort to educate their customers as to the best security settings for their business and leave the merchant to create their own security settings.  However, it pays to spend some time working out the best settings for your business.  For example, if your products are all low value, you may wish to have a low security threshold as fraud is unlikely or a risk you are willing to take.  Conversely, if your products are desirable, high ticket items, then fraud settings should be high.

3D Secure

3D secure, also know as Verified by Visa or Mastercard SecureCode creates a virtual “card present” environment during internet transactions by asking the buyer to enter a password. 3D secure is only available for Visa and Mastercard transactions and as yet there are no similar initiatives for American Express, JCB or Diner’s Club.

The major benefit of this system is that a transaction that has been fully 3D Secure validated, cannot be charged-back to the merchant if subsequently found to be fraudulent. The merchant is protected by the card issuer against such charge backs because the bank themselves assume the liability.  However, charge backs are still possible as a 3D secure validated transaction will not protect in the event of the customer denying receipt of goods.

3D secure is not universally popular with some merchants complaining of reduced conversions.  Some consumers also find the extra step in the checkout process annoying.

AVS (Address Verification Service)

AVS checks the numeric values in a card holder’s address (i.e. flat or house number and numbers in the post code) given at checkout against the billing address on file for the card.  Checking that the buyer knows the right billing address is an important extra check, but by no means fool proof.  For example, a card owner can enter their address incorrectly, or a fraudster can have access to the card holder’s address.   The AVS result can be either match, partial match or mismatch.

CV2 (a.k.a CVV and CVVC)

These are the three numbers which are on the back of the card for Visa and Mastercard, or four on the front (American Express).  Their purpose is to provide some confidence that the buyer has the card in their possession as the numbers are not stored on the magnetic strip.  The system is by no means foolproof as the there are scripts available on the internet for generating the codes.

Fraud Screening

With experience humans can get a feeling for whether or not a transaction poses a risk.  However as transaction volumes grow, it is not possible to check each purchase individually.  Fraud screening services such as Third Man (www.the3rdman.co.uk) automate the analysis of each transaction by looking at various elements including name, card numbers, frequency of use, delivery address, value and IP address and produce a risk score for the transaction.  Fraud services are integrated into many payment gateways such as SagePay.

As well as using automated services, be aware of the following warning factors:

• Use of free email addresses with names unrelated to the name given
• Incomplete contact details
• Orders which are unusually large or have a strange combination of items
• Billing and delivery addresses different.  Be especially wary if the delivery address is a hotel or guest house
• Be wary of customers who ask insist on obtaining tracking number for deliveries, they could be trying to intercept the delivery.

A full list can be found here:

http://www.the3rdman.co.uk/fraud-screening-advice.php

Security of common Payment Gateways

PayPal

PayPal’s website payments standard product only provides seller protection for purchases which go to verified addresses.  All purchases which are made using the Website Payments Pro service are ineligible for seller protection.  AVS is available through PayPal but 3D secure is not supported and there is no additional fraud screening.

Google Checkout

Google provides merchants with details of whether a transaction has passed CV2 and AVS tests.  It does not support 3D secure, but does provide its own chargeback protection for eligible transactions.

SagePay

SagePay allows merchants to set their own security rules for AVS, CV2 and 3D secure.  It also provides a risk score for each transaction in conjunction with Third Man.

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If you have met Matt Rogers, you will know that he is a driven and dedicated individual with big ambitions for his start-up, Aroxo.  He is going to need all his determination to take on the big boys, amazon and eBay in the marketplace business.  I was skeptical to begin with, but having met him, I think he might just do it.  Over to you Matt.

Please tell us about Aroxo – how did you get the idea

Aroxo is a totally new and unique marketplace that helps buyers and sellers for products and services negotiate with each other. Aroxo’s model is buyer-driven.

The buyer creates what we call a Want-it Note, this tells Aroxo sellers what they want and they price they want to pay. They then receive offers from sellers and can either buy straight away, or negotiate with the seller.

For sellers we’re an entirely new channel to market enabling them to sell stock in volume, whilst allowing differential pricing to be achieved and managed on mass. We’re finding that a lot of our negotiations are affectively price matches, enabling a seller who would otherwise have lost a sale to a competitor to ship some stock and take a margin.

The potential market for the platform is huge. We are currently deliberately restricting it to consumer electronics whilst we build scale and users. Aroxo will be rolled out to wider markets once we have built traction and brand recognition.

Taking on eBay and amazon is something between difficult and impossible – discuss!

eBay and amazon are locked in a battle at the moment. eBay is fighting more and more for the fixed price business, and amazon is trying to grow its business by bringing more sellers onto their platform through their Marketplace.

In the meantime they are ignoring their users.

Both amazon and eBay are riddled with knock-off grey products from overseas. Their search basically doesn’t work (green ipod on eBay returns no Ipods, let alone anything green, and MP3 Players on amazon returns no iPods and a large proportion of Chinese knock-offs).

These are both amazing businesses, but amazon’s product catalogue is a mess and eBay’s user experience is very poor.

This is fertile ground for start-ups who can really focus on solving the needs of the customer:

1. Product discovery
2. Amazing prices
3. Easy to use
4. Ease of integration

We’re laser-like focused on these to deliver value to buyers and sellers by focussing on nothing but these.

I see integration as the key here, how do merchants upload their inventory to Aroxo

We’ve done a lot of work in this space to make it really easy for merchants to sell through us.

We do three things to make the merchant’s life easier. Firstly they can import their entire stock feed using our live feed import. We process everything in real-time and the entire catalogue is usually live within a few minutes of upload. We also support a wide range of different feed formats.

Secondly, we handle a lot of work-flow for them. We help them track payments, print address labels (if needed!), manage pre-sales and post-sale customer enquiries, feedback and manage their account. We do this using an easy-to-use “task list” that brings everything together in a clear list. Do the job on the top, and then come straight back to the list.

Finally, we’re very flexible with the payment systems which the seller can support. Any seller who accepts either Sagepay/Protx, PayPal, Google Checkout and telephone orders and take payments through Aroxo. We’re adding Worldpay support in soon too. The money goes direct into the seller’s account, and so can be passed through their own preferred fraud prevention tools.

An entirely new seller can be up and selling on Aroxo within 30 mins.

How has the service been doing so far?

Great! Since we’ve launched we’ve already won a number of awards for our technology, including:

• Winner: Techcrunch Pitch! 2009 sponsored by UKTI
• Winner: UK’s Hottest Start-up 2009, London Business School, Technology Summit
• Nominee: Techcrunch Europas. Best start-up 2009
• Finalist: The Next Web, Europe’s Most Promising Start-Up

At Aroxo we’re building out our seller base. We’ve already got tens of millions of pounds worth of stock on the site and handling plenty of sales, but we’re always on the look-out for more and more sellers.

If you drop us an email to seller@aroxo.co.uk not only can we help you get integrated, but we can throw in enough Aroxo credit for free to last you for a few months of selling on Aroxo.

Plans for the future?

We’ve got a lot of new features – for buyers and sellers – in the pipeline. The main areas we’re focused on are detailed above. The next major release you’ll see will be around making Aroxo’s product discovering stand out from the crowd, really help buyers find the right product for them.

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