While the economic slowdown has made the majority of us increasingly cost conscious, are UK consumers really cutting back as much as the media lead us to believe?

Although 2009 is said to be one of the worst years on record for the high street, with sales expected to decline each year until 2014*, there is some light at the end of the tunnel.

I for one have not made any significant cut backs, changing the way that I shop rather than what I buy.

In the past, the traditional brick and mortar store would have been my first port of call. Now I choose to buy online.

I do not think I am alone, my friends, family and colleagues are all doing the same. Could this be one reason why online retail is set to grow by 129 per cent over the next five years?

Not only can I find products cheaper, it is also convenient. I can buy online at my time and convenience, from the comfort of my own home with some biscuits and a cuppa. And everything is delivered straight to my door.

We’re not the only ones who are benefiting from the wonders of eCommerce. Many retailers are benefiting from consumers moving online. Those with an online presence can benefit from significant cost savings, increased customer reach and extra monthly revenues.

As we ride out the economic storm, this shift in consumer behaviour can only become more pronounced and is probably going to have a big impact on the bottom line for the major retailers.

With more than a third of Britons (36 per cent) intending to do more shopping online rather than on the high street this year, I do feel that those businesses without an online presence will suffer.
*2009

In today’s strange and challenging economic times, it seems the world has firmly moved away from high street retail and is now buying online. This presents a real opportunity to any businesses that don’t currently have an online presence but also a question. If a business does have a website, how do you get more traffic there who wants to buy your stuff?

When you consider all the big brands that have gone to the wall of late, the one commonality they all share is none of them had a good online web presence.

With all this in mind I can’t help but think many businesses should take a look at the PPC (Pay per Click) advertising model. These are the ads you see on the right hand side of a Google search results page, often referred to as sponsored listings.

The beauty of PPC is that unlike traditional display advertising, as a company you only pay when a user actually clicks on your advert and shows real intent to buy. Great news! No longer do you need to pay out to get your name in front of all those lovely eyeballs, never knowing if they saw it, remembered it even or really even cared how beautifully crafted your banner was.

Better still, it’s really not that hard to do as long as you understand the basics and have a little time and energy to dedicate to it.

PPC is essentially an online auction owned and controlled by the search engine, more often than not the giant that is Google.

All you need to do is decide what you want to sell be it paperclips to printers, choose a list of keywords and phrases you think an interested customer would type in to the search bar and assign those words a bid price which is what you’d be prepared to pay to get a potential customer to your site.

After that it’s a simple case of writing yourself a short ad and away you go! Google have some great free tools to help you create your account even going as far as making suggestions for your ads, possible new keywords and the daily/weekly traffic volumes there’s likely to be for your search terms.

Don’t get me wrong there are some tricks to this which will help your campaign perform better and some pitfalls to be avoided but it really isn’t rocket science. Watch this space for some tips and pointers in the coming posts.

Products you may be interested in: eStore

In the light of the recent financial woes it would appear that eCommerce remains one of the few relatively healthy and stable retail sectors. What is more, the majority of revenue (and the majority of profit) from most eCommerce retailers is generated over the festive season. In order to maximise this once a year opportunity it is essential to get planning and think around the potential issues. So here goes with a few hints and tips to help make your eCommerce winterval a cracker :

- If your eCommerce site has been running for more than one season get in touch now with the customers you did business with then. It is likely they will remember you and offering a promotional discount code or free shipping can often secure their loyalty. They may have forgotten you. But don’t forget them. Its always easier (and often less costly) to sell to your past and existing customers.

- Plan for the best : many sites report a 30-50 fold increase in business over the festive season so be prepared. Load test your entire system from the hosting through to payments and delivery. It can be costly to expand infrastructure for just a short period, so outsourcing elements on a temporary overflow basis, or shipping products direct from the manufacturer may be a useful option.

- Think about how your site is organised for the impatient Xmas shopper : persona-based gift finders can allow your customers to search what is on offer more easily and find the right product for their loved one. Typical gift finders search by price, age and sex, but also give help to your customers to find products for the characters you know – from Gadget Freaks to Fashion Divas.

- Many online vendors are so happy that the rush is over, that they forget the advantage that they have above the high-street retailer, which is the ability to start their sale as soon as their last Xmas shipping day is finished. So this year, online retailers that ship next day could start their sale up to 5 days earlier, without cannibalising their Christmas deliveries.

- Offer Gift Wrapping : its not just a profitable additional service but can increase the conversion on key products because. Remember there are a many customers who will not see their loved ones over the Christmas period and would much rather ship items direct rather than receive, wrap and then forward them.

- Get in the spirit : Make each customers experience special; from the ordering experience, to packaging, every aspect has to exceed the consumer’s expectations. Over the festive season, most people are meeting their friends and family so there is no better time to have consumers talk about how great you are. Advocates are the best way of marketing. Throw in a free gift or voucher with their order and they won’t stop shouting about you all Christmas.

So there it is. Get down to work to ensure you make the best of it; wishing you all a prosperous e-Christmas.

Can you believe that Google have been around for 10 years already, a company who has acheived so much and made a real stamp on the world. I was reading a crime book the other day and they are referenced in there, I have heard the name many a time in films – it just goes to show how powerful a brand they are.

In celebration to their 10 years success they have launched their old browser Google have cleverly used an Internet Archive to show websites how there were then!

It is amazing to think how different things were 10 years ago, how many of us now use the web every day for so many different parts of our lives? I for one use the web every day now – at home to search for cheaper household goods, bills, childrens clothing, I use Facebook to chat with friends, join groups and see photos of my old school friends; my mobile allows me to talk, email, take, send and store photos as well as keep a diary of things coming up. At work I use the web to talk to our customers, read about new ideas, email and OCS colleagues, set up a Sharepoint site for a project joining myself up across all of our offices. How clever, but scary at the same time as to how times change and technology jumps ahead every day.

10 years ago there was no Facebook, YouTube or iTunes site you printed photos by taking your film in somewhere, not lay it on top of other images in Flickr to create new pieces of art. You could pretty much order anything to your house and work from home could you become this New Age hermit? It feels to me like I have always been able to do these things, I cannot imagine meeting a friend in town and not being able to text them if I am lost or late, I do not read maps so well anymore due to SatNav, and never pick up a reference book I check Google – how did we cope!! Can you imagine not sending a quick email rather than a letter; storing your photos in albums paper format rather than online and being able to print them out in whatever size and format you require at the time.

Where was your business 10 years ago? How did you do business or cope outside of work? Would be great to hear your thoughts on this.

Things you might be interested in: Sharepoint, Email,

Back in 2001 Thomas Davenport wrote an article which sort of changed my world. He described a new economy driven not by the ability to manufacture or deliver goods and services better than ones competitors but by the ability to garner and maintain human attention. It took a while for this to sink in but as we sit in 2008 and look at the rise and rise of eBusiness and the (now 10 years old) ‘G’ business it all seems so obvious.

The practical implications of this for small businesses are profound. The Internet has always had a habit of being a great leveler. eCommerce gave the smallest of businesses access to the largest of markets thus allowing competition with the big boys. However the eyeconomy has tended to work against this. Google’s domination of search and the ability to ‘buy’ eyeballs for your brand has stunted many an entrepreneurial web start-up. Great ideas, products and services are nothing if you can’t get them seen.

Tom Pindar OBE, Chairman of the family owned printing business where i started my career used to recite a great Yorkshire saying when persuading his customers to spend more on their printed publications. It went thus :

He who whispers down the well
About the goods he has to sell
Will never make as many dollars
As he who stands aloft and hollers

In 2008 this stands equally true and I propose a ‘remix’ version. Here goes:

He who ventures on the net
May very well be quite upset
Unless he understands statistics
Pay per click and analytics

OK, so it’s not quite as succinct or snappy; but neither is building an online business compared to a brick-built counterpart.

I talk to lots of businesses with great ambitions and amazing ideas on the net. However, the ratio of their time and money spent on building online stores to that understanding online hollering is almost always far too low. Too few realize just how plentiful information has now become. Conversely, few realise just how scarce browsers’ attention is on the net.

Anybody can build an eCommerce site, but not everybody can attract attention to it.  Online businesses who understand and manage attention will forge ahead of their competitors; they must pay attention to attention if they are to remain differentiated and competitive.

Things you might be interested in: eStore

A new web browser that’s a big enough event to make it on the radio news as I drove home last night got me wondering if we haven’t been here before? Google’s launch of the Chrome browser certainly gave the world something to think about, but listening to all the words I can’t help but feel a strong sense of déjà vu. It’s true what the news reports said: it seems to perform very well when we downloaded it this morning & tried it (remember this is a Beta version and it could cause problems on your PC).

I can remember a time when internet pages were simple and very rarely changed; in fact some would say they were boring. Now we use the internet dynamically: we upload videos to YouTube, we buy things from trading sites; we pay our car tax; we use online services such as Yahoo mail which need a high level of interaction; and what we look at is constantly changing like BBC or Sky news. The problem is that the web browsers that we use have been updated since those early days, but by adding the support for the new functionality to an old core which means that they sometimes slow down when displaying modern content. Building a new product has allowed the guys & girls who write the software to concentrate on the problems we’re getting in these days of contemporary internet use.

Our business is wrestling with the challenges as we conduct more business on-line and Google Chrome will make a big impact in supporting the types of interaction that we want as human beings. Overall I think this is big news for us and we long term will see more changes to how we present information to our users and customers as a result of this launch.

Some commentators are saying that Chrome is even bigger than a new web browser; in fact some are saying it could be a whole new computing platform to compete with the PC. The fact that Google are making the technology available free to anyone who wants it will drive other technology companies to adopt it & use it.

So should you download & use Chrome? There are some web sites that work better when you use the Microsoft Internet Explorer (“IE”) browser, so I wouldn’t throw that away just yet. After all it works well, and the automatic Microsoft security updates offer a good level of protection that serves the majority of people very well. If, like me, you use a different web browser such as Firefox, then Chrome is going to be worth taking a look at if you don’t mind having to switch back to Microsoft IE for the occasional web site.

But…(you knew there was going to be a “but”)… I don’t expect Microsoft or Mozilla (the folks who product Firefox) to take this lying down now the gauntlet has been thrown down. Firefox 3 has just been launched which provides much better performance, and Internet Explorer 8 is expected to be with us soon. I think a few software teams are going to be working hard now to compete with the new pretender. Of course, Microsoft was once the new pretender when it launched Internet Explorer and we saw Mozilla rapidly respond. As I said, Déjà vu!

The folks at Gartner have published their list of the Top 10 concerns for IT in 2008, which looks a bit like this:

1. Green IT
2. Unified Communications
3. Business Process Modelling
4. Metadata Management
5. Virtualization 2.0
6. Mashups & composite Apps
7. Web Platform & WOA
8. Fabric
9. Real World Web
10. Social Software

From our point of view, I’m not sure that we’re overly worried about Social Software yet, but when we get to employing young people who are used to Facebook then I guess we’ll need to think again.

In truth, I’m gladdened by the list as it lines up pretty much with the stuff we’re saying (or at least trying to say). Hopefully we’ll get some movement behind the plans we’re putting together.

Actually this is quite an old blog about why Web 2.0 can be dismissed as hype.

He makes some good points, especially about Wikis for documentation, but as we become increasingly agile will we have time for formulaic documentation.

To me it comes back to two things:

Firstly we need culturally to understand what we need to keep documented. Horrible as the thought is, it’s almost “If I were run over by a bus, what would anyone need to pick up and carry on what I’ve started”. If we think that way and keep the details documented then we’re well on the way

Secondly it comes back to search (yes, “Search” again!!!) – if the information is there, then a good search tool can find it.