July 15th, 2010 by Alex
One of the major attractions of selling online is the ability to address global markets as well as your local market. Doing this effectively means localising key content (e.g. prices) for people visiting from countries around the world. The impact on sales if this is done correctly can be extremely positive: one client saw a 300% increase in international sales since implementing geo-located pricing and delivery. Nor is this overly complex to do, thanks to widely available global payment platforms such as PayPal and geo-location tools such as MaxMind.
And so for the second in our series of technical blog posts, we are going to look at the opportunities to enhance your e-commerce site using geo-IP location. Geo-IP location sounds complicated but it is simply the process of determining where your individual website visitors are geographically located in the world; this is achieved by looking up each visitor’s IP address in a database which maps known IP addresses to individual countries or even cities.
As an online retailer, knowing where your website visitors are located allows you to provide them with a much more personalised shopping experience – for example, you could:
- Show specific contact details for your visitor’s country
- Price your product catalogue in your customer’s local currency
- Automatically calculate delivery times and costs for their order
These sorts of personalisations work in two ways to improve your bottom-line: firstly, they increase the level of confidence and trust which a visitor feels in your site by showing that you can treat them as a ‘local’. And secondly, they reduce friction in the check-out process, removing difficult steps for the user such as converting the given currency into their own money. Using these techniques can significantly increase conversions among overseas visitors, as we have seen above.
On to the technology: although there are various providers of geo-IP address databases, we use MaxMind because it is free, simple to use and regularly updated. Also note that many e-commerce packages such as Magento or Prestashop have MaxMind integrations available already for free or low cost – check online to see if your e-commerce package has one too.
For this example we will be proceed as if we are integrating MaxMind directly with a simple PHP-based online shop; we will use MaxMind to display some simple internationalised information to your site visitor. In future blog posts we will explore some more sophisticated localisation approaches, to really drive more sales.
Now on to the technical steps…
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Tags: currency, geo-IP, geo-location, i18n, internationalisation, localisation, MaxMind
Posted in Coding, E-commerce | 2 Comments »
July 7th, 2010 by Yali
The OFT commissioned the report to build their own understanding of the opportunities and challenges small and medium businesses face online. It is now being used as a springboard to seek the views of businesses either looking to or already trading online.
The report described the routes to markets for SMEs that wish to trade online, and commented on the economics of them.
The overall findings of the report are positive. Innovation, often by large players (e.g. eBay, Paypal, Amazon, Google, Twitter and Facebook) has led to significant decreases in cost barriers to small businesses setting up online.
However, small businesses can face difficulties online, for example:
- Small businesses that depend on particular providers are sensitive to system changes or loss of service,
- The levels of innovation and cost reductions that have taken place online have not always been matched in those aspects of the value chain that remain offline. (E.g. delivery of goods bought online.)
Download the report, or view the press release from the OFT.
Learn more about the research. Learn more about Plum Consulting.
Tags: economics, fulfilment, marketing, Office of Fair Trading, payment processing, transactions
Posted in E-commerce | No Comments »
July 6th, 2010 by Yali
In the first of our blog posts in the understanding product management series, we outlined the key role that product managers face turning commercial and customer needs into a compelling product. In this blog post, we’ll look at one of the most important – and underrated – tools in a product manager’s arsenal: the visual mock-up, and examine how this can be used most effectively to meet many of the typical challenges which product managers face.
What is a mock-up?
A mock-up, simply put, is a sketch of how individual screens on the digital product (be it an desktop application, mobile application, web app etc.) might look. It is a rough sketch: the point is not to indicate how the site will look graphically, but how it will work functionally. It should contain all the buttons, menus, inputs and other functionality that each screen will have.
Here is an example mockup, one of a series created for a B2B client of ours:
A single mock-up is not especially useful, but a collection of the different screens that make up an application are enormously valuable. That’s because collectively, they can be used to see how a user would step through the different workflows that make up an application. (Indeed some mock-up tools let users connect individual mock-up screens to create interactive prototypes of finished products.)
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Tags: apps, digital, mock-up, npd, product development, UI, ux, wireframing
Posted in Building digital products, Product management | No Comments »
June 17th, 2010 by Yali
In the previous post on product management, we took a high level look at the role that product managers play and the value that they provide. In this post, we go into a bit more detail, but from the point of view of companies that outsource the building of digital products (including websites, iPhone apps etc.) to digital agencies. In many (although not all) of these cases, there is no designated product manager (at either the client or the agency) and as a result, the effectiveness, popularity and commercial success of the digital product will suffer. By looking into the kind these issues in more detail, we hope to explain in more detail what it is that makes product management so critical, and also to provide an approach for companies engaging with digital agencies to avoid these pitfalls.
A typical scenario
A company that makes the vast majority of its money offline wants to do something online. Maybe they’re a retailer looking to start selling online, or a magazine publisher wanting to make their content available online. The client, unfamiliar with online, approaches a digital agency to help them. Because the client is unfamiliar with online technology, they look for a digital agency that has done similar websites for similar clients. The digital agency sits down with the client and run a series of requirements gathering workshops to understand what the client wants. They put together long requirements specification and work with the client on a graphic treatment for the site. On the basis of the images of these visuals, and the requirements specification, the agency builds the client its website.
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Tags: apps, digital, npd, product, product development, Product management, UI, ux
Posted in Building digital products, Product management | 2 Comments »
June 1st, 2010 by Yali
Never underestimate the value of getting the product right
This is the first post in a series of Keplar blog posts on the importance of product management in building and developing businesses. Product management is already a well understood discipline in the technology industry, with product managers playing key roles at both established technology firms and start-ups, on both sides of the Atlantic. But this series of posts isn’t written for these product managers – rather, the purpose is to inform people outside the technology industry, especially those who are looking to start using digital tools to drive business goals, about the importance of product management as a business discipline. It is our experience that people outside the technology industry often don’t understand the key role that product management plays, and neglect the discipline at their peril.
By way of an introductory post, we first look at the responsibilities of a product manager, before considering what value a product manager adds:
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Tags: agile, Product management, product manager, product roadmap, requirements gathering, UI, user experience
Posted in Product management | No Comments »
May 25th, 2010 by Yali
Last night’s mashup event, which looked at the Facebook / privacy debate, and how Facebook’s new “Like” functionality plays into that debate, proved both lively and thought provoking.
There was no chance of a consensus emerging amongst participants, illustrating how divided people are on this complicated issue. It did prompt me to draw a number of conclusions:
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Tags: multi-sided market, privacy, semantic web, social, social graph, social media
Posted in Future of online advertising | 1 Comment »
May 24th, 2010 by Alex
In the last post in this series we looked at how vertical search sites run by affiliate marketers are changing the shape of the purchase funnel for goods and services online. We compared this “funnel 2.0″ to the old approach, in which surfers would try to zero in on the best available product and retailer through multiple general searches. At the end of the article we introduced the idea that this new funnel threatens the AdWords model which powers Google’s search business.
In this post we want to explore further Google’s uneasy relationship with vertical search, and in particular the extent to which vertical search poses a significant threat to the business model for general search. At Keplar we believe that there’s an opportunity emerging for a new entrant to massively disrupt search as it exists today, and I discuss this in the article as well.
Google’s attitude to vertical search is a complex one. On the one hand, we continue to hear rumours that Google will spend a billion dollars buying travel search engine ITA Software, which powers Kayak.com, Orbitz and others. On the other hand, Google regularly bans affiliates from advertising their vertical search sites using Google AdWords: complaints about these mass bannings can be found all across the Web.
What’s behind this difficult relationship with vertical search? To understand the reasons, we first need to understand the commercial dynamics of general search, and understand Google’s hardening commitments to that business model.
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Tags: affiliate marketing, aggregation, Google, intelligent agent, semantic web, vertical search
Posted in Search & aggregation | 1 Comment »
May 19th, 2010 by Yali
Anyone watching TV these days can’t help but notice the proliferation of advertisements for price comparison sites. What is less widely understood is what is driving this sudden growth, and how this is changing the customer purchase funnel (in other words, the way we select products and services to buy online).
In our previous blog post in the Curated Web series, we looked at the various types of vertical search site, how they make money and where they get their search results from. We touched briefly on affiliate marketers, mentioning the affiliate networks which they belong to and the affiliate fees which they earn. In this post we dive much more deeply into affiliate marketing, to understand why retailers are spending increasing amounts on affiliate marketing, what impact these rapidly developing vertical search sites are having on buyer behaviour online, and what these changes mean for major Web companies, especially Google. But first, we will explain a little more about what affiliate marketing actually is.
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Tags: affiliate, E-commerce, ecommerce, funnel, Google, marketing outsourcing, price comparison, vertical search
Posted in Search & aggregation | 1 Comment »
April 1st, 2010 by Alex
As the Google competition issues rumble on, various commentators have been grappling with the concept of general versus vertical search. Here at Keplar we have some thoughts on the rise of vertical search and its implications for Google, but we are aware that many people out there don’t yet know what vertical search is, or why it’s important. In this blog post we aim to nail down exactly what vertical search is, so that we can comment more widely on the emerging trends in future posts.
To begin with a definition: unlike a general Web search engine like Google or Bing, a vertical search engine focuses on a specific segment of content. Users visit these vertical search sites to conduct a specialised search for a specific genre of content or category of product. The most commonly known vertical search engines are the price comparison sites, like Kayak or Moneysupermarket.com, where consumers can enter their specific requirements and find a holiday or an insurance deal or similar.
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Tags: affiliate, affiliate marketing, cpa, curation, price comparison, scraping, search, vertical search
Posted in Search & aggregation | No Comments »
