Monthly Archives: March 2009

ASOS – very good category refining

Earlier this week I tweeted about the improvements that ASOS had made to their category refinement.
It’s impressive. ASOS customers looking for boots, for example, can easily narrow down their search by type, size, colour, price, brand, and celebrity (see below).
You only see what’s available – Cheryl Cole doesn’t appear on the list of celebrities here because [...]

What’s going on with the B&Q site ?

So B&Q have upgraded their site. Sure, it has some prettiness added to it, Scene 7, bits of AJAX here and there, overall a nice improvement in look and feel. But the overall customer experience leaves me totally confused.
The master Home Page now takes you to either the new 24-hour delivery site, or the ’standard’ [...]

Get Sales from ‘Papped’ Celebs Thanks to Pixazza!

According to Cnet News, Google has just invested in US based Pixazza, a start up company that allows retailers to tag up photos on the web with links so that customers can click and buy the products in the image!
The likes of Macy’s and Zappos in the US are already on board with this, and with [...]

How to get ahead in online marketing

Great careers advice from Dave Chaffey for marketers looking to make the transition from offline to online. Dave is spot on with his 6 top tips:

Get a digital marketing qualification
Build in digital elements to your current role
Get analytical (get up to speed on web analytics)
Start a blog/Twitter about your digital marketing experiences
Be enthusiastic about digital in [...]

Carphone Warehouse – another example of a retailer using Twitter

In January I mentioned that ASOS was using Twitter to do three things at once: manage customer service issues; engage with the customer; sell products.
Here’s another approach to Twitter from Carphone Warehouse. They have a Knowledge and Online Help Manager called Guy Stephens who has his own Twitter account – http://twitter.com/guy1067. As well as posting ideas [...]

Spot the difference: WH Smith launches entertainment site

Like econsultancy and many other people, I was surprised to see that WH Smith had launched a separate ’sister’ site for entertainment goods – www.whsmithentertainment.co.uk. It looks exactly like www.whsmith.co.uk. Why set up a new site?
It turns out that WH Smith is reviewing its product offering across all channels. Some entertainment products may not be sold [...]

Using Twitter for Reputation Management

As Gerald Ratner found out all those years ago, a company’s reputation can be the make or break of your business. But how do you manage that reputation online, when nowadays every Tom, *** and Harry has far reaching social networks at their finger tips, and the ability to say what they want about your [...]

Expandable Ads, Expandable Revenues? For Google Maybe.

Google recently announced that it is launching expandable ads on the Adsense content network. Whilst this is good news for advertisers, as we get more bang for our bucks with these new style, ‘whizzy’ ads, I’m not too sure that the site publishers who host the ads will be overly enamored with these ads expanding [...]

Netaporter offering same-day delivery, 7 days a week

Net-a-Porter is offering same-day delivery in London. It’s available 7 days a week and customers can place their orders up to 1pm on weekdays, which is very impressive.
Amazingly, it’s only £11.50 for zone 1 - their usual delivery is £10 for 1-2 day delivery.

Online Returns Report 2009 – out now

It’s here - our fourth annual report on Online Returns is now available.
Back in August we placed orders with 99 online retailers and then returned each order – some by post, some by courier, some to a store. The report summarises our findings:
The Good (from the customer’s perspective anyway):

45% of retailers covered the cost of the return [...]