Death of Money Money is changing fast and so too must online merchants. It's possible to see a "closed box" in the not too distant future where transactions happen thanks to a series of chatbots, blockchain, and Bitcoin. If nothing in that previous sentence makes any sense start by reading this article about Bitcoin and money.
Also check out our Curagami on Flipboard where we curate posts about chatbots, blockchain and the death of money (a.k.a. Bitcoin et al). https://flipboard.com/@curagami/curagami-ros0t46qy
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Confused by the death of money? Read this excellent Mashable summary of what the heck is going on and why you need to care.
Stealing From Video Game Developers Video games can teach e-commerce merchants many lessons. Video game developers can teach even more valuable lessons. This Curagami post shares five tips online merchants should steal today including:
- Create Great Products
- Develop Community and then Listen, Learn, and Change
- Give customers chances to collaborate
- Forge badges, banners, and other rewards
- Define how rewards are earned but don’t forget serendipity and surprise
With such great marketing is there any wonder why Blizzard Entertainment has more than thirty million Overwatch players? Doomfist is a new brilliantly named Overwatch character and gamers are talking about little else this summer. Doomfist is more important than Game of Thrones to gamers.
Stealing the community, gamification, and engagement tips from video game developers will help any online merchant move from "website" to "platform" and from "us" and "them" to we: http://www.curagami.com/e-commerce-lessons-doomfist/
Martin (Marty) Smith:
This Curagami post continues a conversation about appropriating video game developer's brilliant marketing ideas, strategies, and tactics to online commerce.
Other Retailers Take Prime Day Shots
Finally, other e-commerce retailers are getting it. They aren't allowing Amazon to create a "Christmas in summer" event all by themselves.
Better late than never, many major e-retailers are willing to compete for the first time this summer by offering competitive deals and similar "Prime Days" campaigns.
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Amazon Prime isn't just for Amazon anymore.
Code School Problems This Curagami post shares five problems we experienced at The Iron Yard coding school in Durham, North Carolina. The post places code schools in the context of problems we would have had hiring a graduate when we ran an e-commerce web design shop. Problems such as:
- They teach “academic” not business coding
- No Student Vetting or Skills-Based Placement
- Value/Benefits Proposition is Off
- Can't Keep Great Teachers
- More Than Ten Year Discrepancy Is Almost Impossible to Overcome
In our class of more than twenty students, we doubt more than five are working in a web design shop today. So more than $100,000 was spent, tuition then was $10K for twelve weeks of class, with little return, chance to change the student's career or provide value $1.50 in late fees from the library or other online classes couldn't provide.
Read our warnings about code schools before you buy their promises: http://www.curagami.com/code-schools-will-they-change-your-life/
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Our Curagami post summarizing problems we experienced during our tenure at The Iron Yard in Durham, North Carolina. Hopefully, you read our code school problems piece before paying for the broken promises most will receive.
9 Actionable E-commerce SEO Tips We like the straightforward simplicity of this list of e-commerce SEO tips. Writing better product descriptions seems obvious, but you'd be surprised how many online merchants walk by the obvious. Nothing in SEO is complicated as these 9 tips show despite their "advanced" claim. Tips such as the create "versus" posts will occur to anyone who sees what controversy does to visits (it increases them). Visiting isn't conversion and many new to-e-commerce make that simple mistake.
Our advice is not to do that.
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Good list of SEO tips for e-commerce though not as "advanced" as they make out.
E-Com's Future is MAYA In 5 Inescapable Trends
MAYA is influential designer Raymond Loewy's Most Advanced Yet Acceptable idea. If there is a better description for the future of online commerce and web design we don't know it (and would like to learn it so please share).
The Made To Stick rules says too new is BAD. Sell the new from versioning the old and that is what MAYA is all about as we share in this Curagami post: http://www.curagami.com/maya-five-inescapable-web-marketing-trends/
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Raymond Loewy's ideas live on. If there is a better description for the future of web design and development than MAYA we don't know what it is. What do you think?
Holiday Shipping Tables
Successful e-commerce is about 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. We use the old cliche for a reason. To win in a crowded world you need to have some cool ideas, but you also need to pay attention to the basics.
Things like creating an easy to understand Holiday Shipping Calendar is e-commerce gold. Whenever you share a feedback lop you collaborate with visitors who may become customers since you clearly CARE.
Amazon will beat you on price, but you can beat them on CARING and, unless you sell highly commoditized things, caring matters. This Curagami post shares a tips likely to anger some of our readers and clients, but just because Amazon is a vampire doesn't mean they don't have something for Small to Medium Sized Merchants. See if you don't agree with our contingency and multi-channel ideas.
http://www.curagami.com/e-commerce-gold-holiday-shipping-tables/
E-commerce Themes
Many of these themes feel more like portfolio themes than online stores, but we like the Bronx theme enough we may steal from it for our Holiday set ups.
Symphony of Feeds
One trend that feels clear but confusing is the future of content and e-commerce. Clear that merchants will need more content. Unclear and confusing because no merchant can afford to create enough quality content despite what Mark Schaefer says in Content Shock.
We agree and disagree with Schaefer's math too. Content Shock is about using content as advertising and we agree those days are gone. We disagree because content is still KING for merchants.
Without content traffic doesn't convert. And no conversions means you are a nonprofit and didn't know it. Feeds and content curation are the answer.
We wrote that last sentence like we know what the future holds. No such luck, but we know merchants can't create all the content they need. We also know content curation creates more awareness and engagement faster than anything else we know about, so ipso facto content is important and we must curate it faster, better and with ever lowering not escalating costs.
And that all sounds likes feeds and Anthony Musselwhite's tool to us. What do you think?
The New E-commerce Game The new e-commerce game shares a video, haiku deck and 5 of our favorite online marketing tools all ahead of a keynote address at a FedEx sponsored conference in Raleigh, North Carolina today.
http://www.curagami.com/e-commerce-game/
E-commerce is not for the faint hearted. Want to get natural links to your product pages? Try e-commerce content marketing!
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Going to riff a long post on these e-commerce content ideas on Curagami.
Hacking Happens - 5 Security Measures shares the death, taxes & websites get hacked as life's new certainties or maybe not if you do these 5 steps today.
Simple E-commerce Stories - How To Tell Them shares storytelling secrets such as how details create trust & why a little romance in About copy is good.
VR Inside The Dali Store
Watching Goodby Silverstein & Partners’ brilliant retelling of the Salvador Dali experience via virtual reality (VR) should have every e-commerce team reading this email sitting up, paying more attention and wondering what is it for them to start thinking about vr, experiences and the future of a new kind of online commerce.
E-commerce Bounce Rate Calculator
Bounces are frustrating. When a website visitor leaves after viewing a single page (doesn’t have to be your home page) and without engagement (clicking, subscribing or buying) they “bounce” and your SEO goes straight to HELL.
If you are prepared to feel real pain when you see the sizable website out there in the cloud, the visitors you are bouncing away, strong drink is recommended. We used an example of a $3M website with a 55% bounce rate. For every 20 points recovered the site would gain $1M in sales.
Another way to state that statistic is for every 20 points the site would grow more than 30%. Did you need to create an amazing campaign to grow 30%? Nope, but you do have to change your thinking and that is always the hardest thing to do (lol).
Attempt to use our calculator without strong drink and we can't be held responsible if you jump off a tall building after seeing the ghost site you could be managing. Just saying :). Marty
Dumping WooCommerce
The DIY don't need to know code to build a great and scaleable online store may be mostly myth. Like all bell curves there may be one or two highly profitable Shopify, Volusion or Big Commerce sites but those few "rich getting richer" sites stand on the shoulders of many little guys just scaping by.
If that sound like a rigged game we agree. We shared all the reasons we dumped WooCommerce including our own idiocy in this mythbusting Curagami post:
http://www.curagami.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/curagami-logowide.png
There may be hundreds of tactics that you could consider content marketing. So the six content marketing tactics briefly described here are certainly not an exhaustive list. But this short list does, perhaps, represent some of the best, easiest to understand, and most common content marketing options for small and mid-sized ecommerce businesses.
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Commerce - Community & Content rubicons Are CSF's
No way you win online these days without crossing one of the toughest rivers in my Director of Ecommerce tenure -- making content, commerce and community sing happily around the campfire. Good tips here and I will weigh in soon.
New E-commerce
New E-Commerce and a Video Game Steal says e-commerce merchants should steal customization, collaboration and community from video game developers and explains how.
Content Curation is the "new marketing" & this post shares 6 reasons curating content should be your online marketing's elephant.
Finding the need to curate content acute as we develop HackHeadphones on Shopify. Why create new content when everything we need can be curated from sources such branded websites (using videos from Shure.com), Amazon and other "portal" sites.
We are making sure to give credit where it is due and someone might throw a flag, but bet we can negotiate mutually beneficial terms since using content with attribution is closest thing we have to advertising these days.
Is E-commerce Stuck In The Mud? After our first Holiday Ecommies Review of 30+ top online retailers (@Ecommies is a new ecommerce ratings, review and award site coming soon). It’s clear e-retailers are stuck in the mud.
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Fun writing this post for @ janlgordon new Editors of Chaos http://www.curatti.com. Conclusion after our first Ecommie Awards for Holiday 2013 is YES e-commerce is stuck in mud of its own making.
Online retailers seem stuck fighting battles that are all but over such as the adoption of free shipping out and back, deal-of-the-day and Buy More, Save More. The ocean runs red as competitors face off with each other with little regard to the unique characteristics of selling online.
There were bright spots in the more than 30 top e-retailers reviewed including REI.com and Williams-Sonoma, but even well established brands such as L. L. Bean seem to struggle this holiday selling season.
Not hard to see WHY ecom is in a rut. Mobile is changing everything though few seem to realize the magnititude or sweep of the change. In addition to the Ecommies Report card we created a Social Media Analysis showing most e-retailers follow less than 1% of their followers.
Clearly the conversational nature of the new web is as perplexing to retailers as mobile. The combination of these two big misses, mobile and social, made holiday 2013 lackluster and stuck in the mud. This Curatti.com post shares ideas for how to fix not least of which would be embracing social media marketing and joining a mobile marketing revolution that has little to do with phones.
How your inbox is becoming an app. The final conversion of the old internet's last holdout.
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Great post here by John Herman for BuzzFeed (@jwherrman). Email made more money than any other marketing channel when I was a Director of Ecommerce by a full ten points so its evolution is a CSF (Critical Success Factor) for e-commerce shops.
John's intelligent response to WHAT IS NEXT is worth a CAREFUL read for anyone who depends on email marketing to pay the bills. Do I think we are THERE yet (i.e. where John is), no but we are trending in that direction.
If John is a vanguard we Internet marketers need to form up around his ideas. What I would NEVER argue with is how the ubiquitous mobile web is changing email. We know many customers use mobile devices to curate their lives (and throw away non-interesting or poorly designed emails).
The problem with John's future is email is the list that protected the kingdom. Google doesn't own your email list as they do your organic and PPC destiny. How to continue to diversify your Internet marketing profits and portfolio is going to be a challenge.
Holiday Ecommerce 20 Questions
If your Internet marketing team can answer YES to the 20 content marketing, social marketing, email marketing and cause marketing questions then wax up your board and hit the beach.
Better to SURF now with solid plans in place than even think about time off once the October tsunami hits. This time of year it took 2.4 visits to make a sale when I was an Ecom Director. In October it took 1.3 visits and in November and December a little over one.
Those numbers mean NOW is the time to test and create plans so you don't have to THEN. Plan now, DO THEN :).
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Common Ecom SEO Mistakes
It is easy to take one step forward and two back with your online store's SEO. Here are 5 common mistakes to avoid.
5 Common E-Commerce SEO Mistakes
1. Poor Titles. 2. Slow Pages.
3. No UNIQUE titles across all pages.
4. No use of Canonical URLS to prevent dupe content. 5. Poor keyword density in navigation.
Titles and H1s matter a lot in these post Panda and Penguin days, so research them. Always start with who is winning top positions now. Also remember you must use a tool like Mike's Keyword Checker to know the absolute position of your pages or your competitors on a keyword phrase due to the Google float.
If you have video or large graphics give some thought to a Content Delivery Network (CDN). CDNs are TRICKY, so treat them with care and try to keep your pages LIGHT in code and graphics. CDNs cache your images and so can speed up your page loads, but nothing can help dense, heavy pages with lots of code and multiple layers of Javascript.
Titles MUST be unique. You can use business rules to generate titles, but make sure those rules NEVER create the same title over and over. Remember 80% of your revenue will come from 20% of your pages, so you don't have to get 1M page titles perfect. Make sure the pages that MATTER have great titles and you should be fine.
Canonical URLS identify MASTER pages, the pages you want in Google and OTHER pages that shouldn't be included. Duplicating content from outside or inside your site can cause penalties and damage so use canonical urls to stay in Google's good graces (btw it is VERY easy to duplicate content without meaning to spam, so BE CAREFUL).
If your navigation says, "Services" you are nuts. Do you want your website to rank for "services" or Internet Marketing, Email Marketing and SEO? Use keywords in your nav because your nav sits in <a href LINK> tags the most.
DON'T use keywords that aren't appropriate for the category or pages, but be sure KEYWORDS are in your nav
Brandchannel - always branding. always on. (Crystal Light Launches Own E-Commerce Site #ecommerce #online #retail http://t.co/rcKrIIVc5t)
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Add BrandRooming To Showrooming Pity the poor brick and mortar retailer. They've been battling showrooming and now Kraft launches their own ecommerce website.
Once major brands launch their own e-commerce platforms the end of the beginning is upon us. What about channel conflict? How will the Walmarts and Targets of the world feel about competing with Krafts ShopCrystalLight.com?
How will big box retailers take to "brandrooming"?
If I were Walmart.com I would take Crystal Light off my website and, depending on the profits, off store shelves. I think the reason Kraft isn't worried about this is they must have run this idea by their key accounts first.
The backroom agreement is probably to keep the price of Crystal higher on their platform than through its distribution partners. That is a deal I would have done if I was Kraft too since Crystal Light calls out for contests, gamification and User Generated Content (UGC(.
With the right contests and gamification layer Kraft's ecom customers won't care about price as long as the price is in striking distances of the discounters.
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