Week 10 : Personalisation.

The Business Dictionary defines Web Personalisation as “Tailoring the presentation of a website’s content to match a specific user’s instructions or preferences. This custom tailoring is accomplished either by the user choosing from a menu of available alternatives or by tracking his or her behavior (such as which pages are accessed and how often) on the site.”

One of the most noted examples of web personalisation is by e-commerce giant Amazon. Amazon uses item to item collaborative filtering to match items a customer has purchased to similar items, and then compiles it into a ‘Recommendation List’. Undoubtably this practice has revolutionised the e-commerce industry, but there is two sides to every coin. Below I will compare and contrast the positives and negatives of the system, and conclude whether or not personalisation is something we can benefit from.

There are 3 obvious advantages to web personalisation, it saves time. It cuts out needlessly repetitive tasks, such as typing in personal details each time you wish to make a purchase. However, to counteract that positive, some users may prefer Anonymity. Although it undoubtably saves time, the idea of having very personal details stored by a company can be daunting. It is really down to the individual at hand and whether or not they are comfortable with this. This calls into question security issues, and whether personal details are infact kept private. How a company deals with information it is given can have a major impact on it’s reputation and relationship with customers.

A second positive for personalisation is that it saves money. The cutting out of needless repetitve tasks, essentially cuts out the middle man. In the case of Amazon, it homes in on what the user wants and recognises. It doesn’t suggest completely random unrelated items, it knows your interests and what you like, based on things you have  previously purchased. This encourages people to spend more. So not only can personalisation save money, but also makes money by bringing items you want, straight to you.

This system works very well for Amazon, because it is in itself, an established company, with a good reputation. Customers are not given a reason for not trusting them. Unfortunately this does not work as well for newer, smaller companies. People can be more reluctant to trust a name they do not know, and so personalisation can actually backfire. Again, it all depends on just how comfortable each different individual person with sharing their personal details online.

The third positive is that it provides better information. Personalisation serves to eliminate pointless irrelevant information, it focuses on interests and products it knows a specific customer is interested in. On the negative side, in some cases, a person may not want their tracks to be stored, wether the items they have purchased are a surprise gift, or something they should not be purchasing at all, illegal goods or otherwise.

Personally, I am for web Personalisation. I myself am comfortable divulging my personal details to websites I trust. It makes my internet experience, not only faster, but easier. I appreciate the cutting out of boring repetitive tasks, I don’t particularly enjoy having to type my name or address into a box one hundred times a day. So for personalisation I am thankful. Yes, there are down sides, as highlighted above, but each positive and negative are based on an individuals own feelings towards personalisation. There is no right and wrong answer, to wether web personalisation is good or bad. It is there for you to use if you so wish.

Week 9 : Customer Relationship Management

This week my quest is to construct a list of key words or phrases that best describe my chosen e-commerce business, Motel Rocks! I will try and limit my list to no more than 12 key words!

The key for small businesses with websites is to anticipate what keywords people will most likely search for when they are looking for a topic related to their business. Choosing key words for a webpage can be a complicated and lengthly task. It is certainly very important and will determine the outcome of your search engine optimization efforts! A few obvious and popular keywords may not necessarily bring you the most traffic, but infact, the use of more, but perhaps less popular keywords can actually bring in more traffic. This idea is supported by the “Long Tail” concept. “A retailing concept describing the niche strategy of selling a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities – usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities.”

To begin my quest, I plan on testing out numerous ‘word-tracking’ websites. The first website I have visited is ‘Google Adwords Keyword Tool’. My first thought is, this is a ridiculous amount of detail. We’re trying to narrow it down to 12 key words, and we’ve been given one million(dramatization may not actually be true). After reading through all the word suggestions, it’s obvious there is a key theme. Words such as ‘clothing’ ‘dresses’ ‘vintage’ ‘unique’ and ‘retro’ all appear frequently. I feel these words do create a fair description of Motel, but they are extremely common words in the fashion industry. Last weeks post revealed how unhelpful ‘googling’ the word ‘clothing’ proved to be for Motel, so I feel I should extend my search in the hopes of coming up with a more unique selling point!

click to enlarge.

The next web tool I have decided will aid my quest is ‘SEO TOOLS : Website Keyword Suggestions‘. Upon typing in the url of Motel’s E-store into the tool, the results produced are limited. And by limited I mean, there is one result; “Thronson’s General Store and Motel”. A disappointing result. Motel is a fashion brand, and unfortunately entirely unrelated to ‘Thronson’s’ General Store.

With hopes of better results, I am moving onto my next tool ‘SeoBook‘ another keyword suggester. This website required registration, but it completely free. Entering ‘motel clothing’ into their search tool reveals results very much similar to that of the ‘Google Adwords’ tool. One in particular i’m interested in is ‘UK clothing’. This phrase could prove to separate Motel from it’s american competitors.

Just as I was about to take a screenshot of my SEOBook results, the website seems to have hit a bit of a glitch, so my results are no longer visible! Which is encouraging.

Taking into consideration all the keyword web tools I have used and the “Long Tail” concept, I feel am i ready to compile my list of final key words!

Motel Rocks, Online Store, Clothing, UK,  Fashion, Retro, Vintage, Unique, Affordable, Women.

The majority of these words could be considered obvious, in regards to a clothing webstore, but i decided it would not be in Motel’s interests to completely disregard obvious search terms. The thing that differs Motel from it’s competitors IS it’s unique, vintage clothing. This explains my latter choices. These are unique search terms, and not something that would be automatically entered if searching for clothes. Motel’s major competitors produce mostly generic, standard clothing, so these terms should serve to separate Motel, or at least bring it to a more competitive level in the Google page results.

Week 8 : E-Marketing

During this post I will research how easily accessed and readily available ‘Motel Rocks’ clothing webstore is via popular search engines, such as Google, or Yahoo.  Search engines could be likened to a gate way to the internet. Simply searching for a chosen word or phrase returns, in the majority of cases, millions of ‘hits’, or links to websites relevant to your search.

Typing ‘Motel Rocks’ into Google returns 2,380,000 relevant links. Being a unique phrase, every single result on the first page is infact relevant to the clothing label. Two of the three sponsored links, or ‘paid for’ results, above and to the right side of the search engine are links to motel’s own clothing range, the third sponsered link is for ‘Lipsy’ a similar clothing line, and a direct rival of Motel. To draw a comparison, when ‘googling’ New Look, a second Motel rival, 209,000,000 results are produced, but only the first two links are actually related to the ‘New Look’ clothing store! From this we can propose that, the more unique a branding or company name, the more relevant search results search engines will return.

Now, let’s create a different scenario, say a person was browsing for new clothes, but was not aware of Motel as a label. Would Google be as helpful in producing Motel results if a vaguer phrase was entered, such as “dress” or “clothing”. Carrying out the search “clothing” produces 235,000,000 results. Alot of Motel’s major rivals appear on the front page, and even ‘New look’ has a link on the second page. Links to ‘Medieval’ clothing are shown on page 8, Motel is no where to be seen. Page 12 reveals “Clothing made from Bamboo”, but still no Motel. Eventually, 40 pages into the search, we discover a link to Motel, just one link.  Much smaller, independently run businesses are getting better publicity from Google than Motel, but why is this? What determines what page a company is shown on?

Naturally the most popular and well known clothing stores appear first on the list, and in the sponsored links. I believe Motel’s downfall is it’s lack of publicity, it has a small but dedicated following, it is visited by users who know the name of the brand, and know exactly what they’re looking for. The fastest way to increase search engine visibility for a web page, is by spreading it’s link. The more pages a link appears on, the more faster it will move up the Google page rankings. It needs to be bared in mind that Motel is still, a young website, they’ve existed in cyber space for little over a year, with time and a self promotion their search engine visability will increase.

Week 7 : E-Procurement.

Cloud computing is an evolutionary approach to delivery of software as a service, accessed and hosted through the internet. The software, or application, is owned and maintained by someone else, you do not own it. You pay a fixed subscription fee, in general meaning you pay monthly, to access something that someone else has created for you.  Essentially, you don’t have to buy anything, you pay for the amount that you choose to use, and you don’t have to maintain or operate a system. In regards to paying for what you choose to use, there is no complex routine to scale to a higher usage level, scaling is, in essence, part of the cloud approach. A built-in scalability that requires nothing but use. This scalability is what makes the cloud concept so ideal for it’s users. The fixed subscription fee can be ideal, because traditional licensed software is, more often than not, cash up front. The amount of usage is not taken into consideration, this can be  bad for users who have a very low usage level, and still have to pay a high fixed fee, but equally, it can be a positive for those with a very high usage level, and aren’t made to pay a much higher fee as a consequence.

In the case of E-Commerce, typical infrastructure investments can subtract from the total available capital of a business, adopting the cloud computing model allows a company to not only relate to a scale of use that fits them, but also be more responsive to changing market dynamics. Not only that, it allows for more rapid development to business changes and the ability to adapt, change and extend existing applications!

Week 5 : E-Business Strategy.

Porter’s 5 forces analysis is a framework for the industry analysis and business strategy development developed by Michael E. Porter of Harvard Business School in 1979. In this post I will investigate the strategic impact of my chosen case-study ‘MotelRocks.com‘ in each of these ‘five force’ areas.

In 2001, Porter published Porter, M., (2001) Strategy and the Internet, Harvard Business Review, March, pp.62-78, where the five forces model was updated to take account of the impact of the Internet. This update will allow us to take a more relevant approach upon investigating our ‘e-store’.

The first force ‘The threat of substitute products and services‘, this entails the existence of a close subsitute product, which may increase the propensity of customers to switch to alternatives. Motel’s sole product is Clothing. There are an uncountable amount of clothing web-stores online, but what makes Motel so appealing is that it uses it’s own unique designs which are, at this time, incomparable to the fashion of any other online clothing store. For this reason, I believe the integrity of Motel’s product is yet to be under major threat of a substitute, but fashion as an ever-changing medium, means it’s originality may well come under threat at any given time.

The second force is ‘The threat of the entry of new competitors‘. Essentially, a successful market will continuously draw in new firms or companies. As the amount of competing companies in a market grows, the resultant is effectively decreasing the profitability of the market. Motel itself could be described as a ‘new competitor’, until recently it relied solely on real world sales. Upon moving it’s store online, Motel has been pushed into the global market. Unlike in the ‘real world’, online stores do not need to build their reputation on hundreds of years of quality service and a name you can trust. The internet breaks down all barriers, and for this reason Motel has fast become established in the online fashion world, becomming a noted danger to it’s longer established rivals. This fast impact just would not be possible outside of the online world.

The third force is ‘The intensity of competitive rivalry‘. Industry competitiveness can be aggressive, whether through competing prices, or competing designs. In the real world, realistically, you need only compete with the firms contained in your own city. The internet is a global village. Every city, in every country around the world becomes your competitor. Although i’ve described Motel’s breakthrough into the global market as a positive, it also has a negative side. Motel has gone from having, what I would imagine as no main rivals, to coming up against every clothing store on the web. Despite having a somewhat original product design, it still needs to maintain competitive pricing, hard hitting marketing and work on developing a solid customer following, if it ever wishes to develop a firm standing in it’s industry.

The fourth force ‘The bargaining power of customers/buyers‘. In an online market the bargaining power of customers or buyers, is vastly increased to that of customers in the ‘real world’. Due to the ease of access, and competitiveness of e-stores, customers have a much wider choice, causing prices to be driven down. In the case of Motel, having a product that is described as relatively unique in the fashion world, gives them a slight edge over other competitors, most of which produce generic and widely available clothing, leaving them to be forced into aggressive industry competitiveness.  There isn’t as much demand on Motel to decrease their prices to a competitive level at this time, if customers want a Motel product, it will not be available any where else, and so customers have less bargaining power over the price.

The fifth and final force is ‘The bargaining power of suppliers‘. Outside of the internet, suppliers hold a sufficient amount of power over a company, in some cases being able to charge extortionate prices for unique resources. Similarly to the bargaining power of customers, internet suppliers are now vastly affected by the wider choice, increased commodification and competitiveness of the online world. Companies no longer need to rely on one supplier, but can choose the one best suited to their own needs.  The majority of Motel’s clothing is made from 100% cotton, this is not a rare raw material, and although we can’t be certain of Motel’s own supplier agreement, it would be safe to assume they are benefiting from the compeitiveness of online suppliers.

Week 4 : E-Environment

Over the past few weeks, I have been investigating the basic fundamentals of E-commerce, with the use of my chosen case study ‘Motel Rocks‘.  This week my task is to develop an understanding of an E-Environment.

Firstly, let’s take a look at ‘Terms and Conditions“. Whether you are purchasing an item online, or just creating a user account on a webpage, you will have likely agreed to the terms and conditions of the site.

So, what are ‘Terms and Conditions’? Wiktionary defines them as “A specification of restrictions for the use of goods or services.” Being asked to “agree” to terms and conditions has become a commonplace feature of online surfing, so much so that it can be easy to agree without thinking, in most cases, you are not signing your life away, but I would advise to always have a degree of understanding of just what you are agreeing to.

Always read the fine print!

Motel Rocks defines their own terms and conditions as “your rights and obligations in relation to this web site located at www.motelrocks.com and any goods purchased through this Site.” Although lengthy at first glance, Motel’s T&C page could be summarised into these five main points;

1) Their site and the goods sold on it are subject to change, and they reserve the right to alter or modify without prior notification.

2) By purchasing from them, they reserve the right to pass your details on to couriers and other subcontractors.

3) The situation may arise that an item displayed in their online catalogue  is unavailable for sale, if this is the case you are given the option of ordering an alternative product or receiving a full refund.

4) They are not obliged to supply goods to you until they have received confirmation of your purchase and payment in full. They may also at their own discretion rejct your order.

5) All descriptive matter and advertising on their site is approximate and not part of the terms.

Their terms and conditions are relatively straight forward, and reasonable, there is nothing uncommon or unusual that would cause major concern. If the situation arose that you wished to return a puchased item, under ‘Motel’s Policy‘ there is a detailed “Delivery & Returns Policy” explaining where and how to send your purchase if you find it to be damaged or unsatisfactory. I actually found the locating of this particular policy on their site to be quite difficult! It’s an important feature of any web-store, and should be more clear. Motel’s customer support is very good, there is many clear, straight forward options for support. They provide an email address, phone number and also an address to post inquiries to. You couldn’t ask for more in regards to customer care.

I’d like to compare all of the above to Motel’s competitor, “Newlook”. Newlooks’s T&C page is extremely lengthy, to say the absolute least. It would take the best part of an hour to read, this isn’t user friendly, few customers will take the time to cover all of these conditions. Motel’s T&C are alot easier to follow, and make me feel confident that I am not agreeing to something that may infringe my rights. Similarly to Motel, Newlook customers can get in contact via email, phone and post, but they state that “our customer services team are only able to deal with enquiries in English at present.” It’s unclear if Motel have the ability to support non-english speaking customers, but overall I feel as though they have achieved a much simpler, clearer customer support system, as well as less overwhelming terms & conditions!

The Motel registration process is much more clean cut than most registration websites, it simply asks you for your name, address and email address and lastly a password. And that’s it! It’s extremely user friendly. Once you have registered your account and confirmed your email address, you may login via any page on moterlrocks.com. You wil discover that when you type you password to login, it is encrypted. Encryption mathematically converts your password into a form that is not directly readable, this protects you and your account from being accessed by anyone but yourself, and those you have shared your password with!

When most people hear the word ‘Cookie‘ they think of a small, flat-baked treat, containing milk, flour, eggs, and sugar! But in computing terms, a Cookie is a small piece of text stored on a user’s computer by a web browser. Motel uses Cookies to remember your email address for login, as well as your home address when entering details for placing an order. It is possible to ‘turn off’ cookies via your own internet options, if you uncomfortable with your personal data being stored!

Week 3 : E-Business Infrastructure.

In my last post I explored the E-commerce fundamentals of the online fashion store Motel Rocks. In this post I plan to delve deeper into the logistics of the website and explore it’s E-Business “Infrastructure’. 

According to Compete.com and Quarkbase.com, on average, Motel Rocks receives 397 unique visitors per month. In comparison to it’s competitors, Newlook.co.uk an online fashion store we drew comparison with last week, receives 14,539 unique visits per month and another competitor, Topshop.com, recieves a staggering 140,944 unique visits per month! The graph below visualises the difference between the number of unique visits NewLook and Motel Rocks receive over a twelve month period. In the month of June 09 there is a difference of 12,000 unique vists between the two webstores. Quarkbase describes Motel Rocks’ internet traffic as ‘Minimal’, but increasing, and Newlook as ‘Moderate’ and successfully holding it up.

 

The process of purchasing from Motel’s webstore is straight forward and user friendly. You simply browse through their online catalogue, select an item you want and click ”Add to Basket” below the selected item. This then brings you to your “shopping basket”, a page which displays all the items you wish to buy. At this point, if you feel you do not want to add any more items to your basket, at the bottom of the page there are 5 different delivery options available, varying from location “Uk, Europe or Rest of the World”, or for those in the UK, how soon you want to receive your package “Uk Standard Delivery or Uk Special Delivery”. The cost of each delivery option varies, the further your distance from the UK, the higher the delivery charge, and the sooner you wish to receive your package, the higher the charge.

After selecting your desired delivery method, you may then click “Go To Checkout“. This brings you to a page that display the total price of your purchase, including VAT and selected delivery charge. You are asked to provide personal details, including name and delivery address. Once providing these and agreeing with Motel Clothing’s terms and conditions, you may click “Checkout”. This leads you to a final confirmation page, which display the delivery address, total final price of the purchase. You are asked to select your preferred payment method, the only available option is credit card. After confirming everything is correct, you may then click “Checkout” for a final time to place your order. Motel does not handle your personal card details and so clicking “Checkout” this time leads you away from motelrocks.com, to a third party website secpay.com. Secpay are a credit card authorisation online company. Once you provide your personal card details you are asked to click “Authorise“. All being well with your credit card, you are forwarded back to motelrocks.com, with a confirmation of your order and a promise your items will be with you soon.

There are numerous new channels to market e-business, one example being mobile device access, internet access from your mobile phone. The increasing availability of 3G internet on mobile phones means that the internet is available at your finger tips, anytime, anywhere. It’s possible to check your emails on the go, look at websites and even in some cases, make actual online purchases from your mobile. Any company that does not take advantage of the fact that internet on phones is now becoming a staple feature on every modern mobile, are losing out. Motel could use this technology to their advantage. They could create a mailing list, to email potential customer with sales, offers or news about the company. They could send SMS’s to let people know about the latest additions to their catalogue. The aim of successful marketing is to become more and more accessible to customers, and through the medium of mobile internet, Motel’s site traffic could go from “Minimal” to “Moderate” in a very short space of time!

Week 2 : E- Commerce Fundamentals.

Screenshot of Motel Rocks Homepage.

This week I will be investigating the E-commerce fundamentals of online clothing store Motel Rocks!

Motel Rocks is a retail ‘Web-shop’, which displays an online catalogue of it’s own brand of clothing ‘Motel’. From this catalogue customers can browse and purchase at their own leisure and payment is simple and straight forward, carried out securely with the use of credit or debit card. The web page has a basic design, with an easy to navigate user interface!

On their webpage under the section ‘about motel’, we learn that apart from their online clothing store they only have one other channel to market their clothing brand, a small store in Bristol. They have not yet developed their store into a chain, but instead have chosen to widen their target audience, and spread into different demographics, through a highly more accessible virutal store.

The yet un-established standing of ‘Motel’ in the  commercial world, means it is proving difficult to find quoted figures of their annual turnover, without actually contacting the company themselves. ‘Motel’ is a relatively new company, with very little standing in the world of commercial giants, and thus they currently cater to a very small demographic. In comparison to a much larger, more established chain store, such as ‘New Look‘, a clothing store of a similar size, and market to Motel, which has also newly expanded to an online e-store. According to New Look Careers each store in their chain typically holds 40 staff, it would be logical to assume that the size of the Motel staff force is similar but slightly smaller than that of ‘New look’. Of course, with no official figures, we can do no more than speculate!

Week 1 : Internet Usage in the UK.

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks. It provides information, resources and services to billions of people worldwide. In the modern age, internet access is possible through numerous forums, personal computers, laptops, mobile phones, even hand held games consoles. I plan on taking an in depth look at just how internet usage has advanced and increased in recent years.

A new report published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), states that in 2009, 16.5 million people , which is 63% of all UK house holds, had broadband connections, representing an increase of 6.6 million since 2006.

eMarketer estimated that the number of Internet users in the UK reached 36.8 million in 2007, and surpassed 38 million in 2008.

The Office for National Statistics report also shows that  UK internet users aged 55+, are set to overtake 35-44 year olds as the demographic age group with the largest representation online, according to Hitwise. Those aged 55+ accounted for 22% of UK visits to all categories of websites in the four weeks to 12th May 2007, up 54% since 2005 and 40% since 2006. This compares to 23.5% of internet visits from 35-44 year olds.

The graph below highlights the increase of the share of internet usage of the over 55+ age group. From little over 15% of the share in 2005, to over 22% of the share in 2007!

In 2007, eMarketer estimated that the number of Internet users in the UK reached 36.8 million, and surpassed 38 million in 2008.

Taking into account the above studies, we can conclude that over the past couple of years, the number of UK homes with internet access and internet usage in general has significantly increased. Not only this, but it’s usage has significantly increased with people aged 55+, in comparison to earlier years where internet usage by this age group was considerably minimal. This leads us to believe that the internet is not only becoming more commonplace in the average UK household, but also suggests that it’s usage is gradually becoming more popular within all age groups!