Articles about Retail Online

“Netconcepts took away the headache of getting the site built so I didn’t have to manage it too closely.”

In March 2008 Blair Peach, Director of Marine Electronics launched their new ecommerce website, designed and built by Netconcepts, with the aim of shaking up the recreational marine industry online.

With many marine related websites in New Zealand being a “jack of all trades” by selling everything from ropes to wrenches, Marine Electronics differs by targeting the recreational fisherman and boat owner by being a price competitive specialist in marine electronics.

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I just got back from a really great seminar series organized by e-retail consultant Cate Bryant under the auspices of the New Zealand Retailers Association. It was a great event with fantastic presentations from Grant Jennings of Ezibuy and Vikki Branagan, former CEO of Stevens. Sailesh Manga (of Optimal Usability), Cate, and myself also did some site reviews of well known Kiwi eCommerce sites as well as some on the fly assessments of sites volunteered by attendees. The event was held over three days in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch and I think was genuinely useful for all the attendees. If you are in the business of online retail I would recommend looking for the next in this series which will feature a talk by Will Hunsinger, ex VP of Gap online in the US.

A couple of takeways for me related to the use of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) in the online retail space, which was something the Ezibuy team talked to, and also the idea of Gift Giving as an online retail strategy which is what Vikki Branagan talked about. I’ll be following up with some posts reflecting on both these soon.

I was passing through our living room on my way to enjoy some afternoon summer sun outside on the deck, when I happened to glance at the telly on my way out. The sound on the TV was muted, but I did catch a quick glimpse of an advert for a web site called vouchermate.co.nz. on C4 and thought I’d better check them out.

Vouchermate is a web site where companies display downloadable vouchers for discounts on their goods and services. You can either print them off for free, or send a textcode and have a voucher sent to your phone at a cost of 50c per voucher.

So, it’s a pretty simple idea. You can’t go wrong if you want to get some discounts. My initial thoughts on this web site concept is…. are people really going to bother to go to the effort of doing this just to save a few pingers? For me personally, I probably would go to the effort if I thought I was getting a pretty good discount. So, for the sake of my curiousity and research, my search begins.

Within in my local area, I find six vouchers available. Four vouchers for Beaurepaires, two for the National Combat Simulation Centre and one 10% discount for Gr8 SHUZ Footwear. I ‘m not really interested in any of their promoted discounts. I search other areas around where I live as well, but still don’t find that much that I would be interested in. The only two vouchers that I may be currently interested in is a 10% discount on flowers from All Season Flowers and the ‘Bring a friend free of charge when you buy a Friends of the Zoo membership’. So, doing the math…. if I bought a $25 bunch of flowers (and lets be honest you can’t really get much in the way of flowers for under $25) with a 10% voucher discount, that would be a $2.50 discount on the flowers. Well, I really don’t think I would go to the effort to use that voucher, purely because I don’t think the $2.50 (minus the 50 cents if you use the text option) is that it’s that much of an amazing discount. Honestly would you really bother. I think I would go to the effort if I found a voucher for something I wanted that had a discount of 20% or more. These kind of 20% or more discounts are available from some companies on vouchermate.

Even so, I don’t know if I’m convinced that I would go out of my way to use Vouchermate. Maybe I would, if I happen to remember to check the site before I got out shopping next time, but then again maybe I won’t remember. My thoughts at the moment is that Vouchermate is a bit, well, boring. It needs more than just come check out the vouchers available. Looking at their blog, the March 12 post talks about their biggest ever surge in site traffic since their TV advertisements started on TV3 and C4. Getting people to the site is one thing, but getting people to do a repeat visit is even harder. How about some bigger incentives to revisit the site, like maybe some competitions where you can win some fancy prizes or something?

Bond & Bond has rolled out a campaign about 3 months ago on its website – “This Week’s Top 10 Killer Deals” along with a campaign site – KillerDeals.co.nz. It is a fantastic idea to engage customers and attract returning visitors to the site. For a company like Bond & Bond who has very good brand awareness in New Zealand, plus some really good deals, the campaign site should go very well. However, is it a real killer yet? Can it be even more killing? Let’s find out.

First of all, let’s look at some figures of the campaign site – www.killerdeals.co.nz.

• PageRank – 0/10
• No. of indexed pages on Google – 2
• No. of indexed pages on Yahoo! – 1
• No. of indexed pages on Live Search – 1
• External backlinks reported by Google - 0
• External backlinks reported by Yahoo! – 80 (70 of them are from Bond & Bond website)
• Blog mentions – 0
• Social bookmarks – 0

By having lots of 0s and near 0 numbers, the campaign is definitely not doing its full potential. There are huge opportunities sitting behind. What can they do to make it fly? Of course, online marketing is the answer. But I’ll dig into the solutions by looking at three important online marketing aspects – SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and SMO (Social Media Optimisation).

SEO

You may be wondering why the search engine index is so bad for killerdeals.co.nz. Simple answer, the entire site is a Flash file. There is no single live letter on the site. Search engines cannot read all other contents very well except plain text. So the site has been missing a lot of traffic opportunities from search engines. Nowadays, no one can afford to leave out the search engine traffic, cannot we?

Google can read Flash files at certain extent but very poorly. The above example is how Google reads the Flash file of killerdeal.co.nz. By having lots of “click Me” and “Buy Me” shown, it looks a little bit spammy, isn’t it?

I admit the Flash they built is kind of cool with all the mouse-over actions. But again, the whole site cannot be a single Flash. They need to change the site structure to a normal HTML site with real headings (especially H1), text copies and text links etc. They can still keep the Flash for each item instead of the normal product image, but with product descriptions in plain text.

Search engines love permanent text copy to determine the theme of the page and fresh content to keep the site live, like humans do. Each week’s top 10 is the prefect live content. An introductory copy will also be essential. They can also archive the expired specials with current prices and group them by categories and link back to Bond & Bond site. The category pages can be used as a place to introduce category level specials and/or vouchers.

From SEO’s point of view, we don’t want the campaign site to compete with the Bond & Bond site for search traffic. It will need to position itself as a heavy promotion site which is not the primary focus of the original Bond & Bond site. Good use of page titles, headings, keywords, unique content etc. will help them to achieve the goal.

You may want to argue that it’s a micro-site that doesn’t need to look and function like a normal website. It’s right, for a normal short life micro-site, we won’t need to worry much about SEO. But for a site like killerdeals.co.nz, it desires to act well and live forever. If Bond & Bond can optimise the site well, they’ll build up a real deal site and community over time and enjoy the free and unlimited search traffic day by day. Then they’ll be one step closer to be a real killer.

Of course, the real action won’t be as simple as I described above. It requires lots of detailed planning and twisting to make it shine. Feel free to leave your comments here or contact us for more discussions.

In the next posts, I’ll continue discussing the other killer weapons – SEM and SMO.