Serguei Alleko Blog

What are the characteristics, you can use to measure your e-commerce activity (except just turnover). Most of the sales and communications are direct, so you can not measure it by the number of partners/resellers/distributors.

Here are examples for the software e-shop:

• Revenue source split
  • Direct sales
  • After trial
  • Affiliate network
  • SEM
  • Email marketing
  • Shareware
  • Banners
  • Other
• Type of clients
  • new
  • returning client (+ percentage of the happy clients, who buy again)
• Products (which products do you sell)
• Affiliate/Online partners parameters
  • Gross turnover
  • Affiliate commission
  • Network commission
  • Marketing agencies commission
• Google SEM parameters
  • Gross sales
  • keywords cost
  • agency cost
  • Total visitors/orders
  • cost per visitor/order
  • ROI (Return on investment)
• Website parameters
  • Total visitors/conversion
  • e-shop visitors/conversion
  • Trial section visitors/conversion
• e-shop and electronic payment parameters
  • Total orders
  • paid orders
  • never paid orders
  • Refunds
  • Charge-backs

I don’t go too deep in the website analytics, this can have another couple of dozen parameters. From mentioned parameters you can get a good idea how your e-commerce is performing. And don’t try to compare those values with other e-shop or “industry averages”. e-shops are too unique, each and every parameter could mean either success or failure of your business in general. Don’t think that high conversion or low google keyword costs immediately mean revenue growth.

Always compare your parameters with your own, but a year/month later

I’m an old fun of e-Book readers. I still own “always the best” REB-1100, cult product form a now deceased company RCA. Long time after the production was stopped, you still could see them on e-Bay.

After Sony issued the first e-book readers with e-ink, I of course immediately bought one, PRS-500, via American e-bay. It was not possible to buy it in Netherlands, despite on fact that e-ink was developed by Philips. I’ve read enormous amount of books via this device and got a lot of attention from different people in the trains. Everybody wanted to see what is its.

Although the idea is quite old, the market of e-book readers doesn’t look booming. I don’t know, may be because young generations prefer richer media formats, like video/audio. May be because it’s not very clear, where to buy the latest books officially. Amazon Kindle didn’t make a revolution yet, may be it will come.

Anyway, after 3 years my old PRS-500 has died (I guess battery, but I couldn’t send it to support, I was bought it non-officially in the USA), so I was looking for a new device. There are lot of names in the Dutch market, there is the current list on Dutch price comparison site Tweakers. I didn’t know any of them, may be with exception of very advanced and overpriced monsters from iRex Technologies, so I chose  Sony again.

The new reader PRS-600 looks a lot like old PRS-500.

(notice how the old one, on the right, got screwed up. e-Ink is passive, the battery is only used to change the image on the page. This book still shows the last image from more that a year ago)

It’s a bit lighter and the design is more logical. The biggest differences are touch-screen menu (very basic and clean), ability to recharge battery from mini-USB port even from level zero (it was a big disadvantage of PRS-500) and a bit better support of graphics.

You still have to make books via BookDesigner 4.0 and import them via horrible eBook Library program from Sony. But, that’s the price you pay to use non-commodity programs.

OK, I’ve loaded a couple of new books before going to 2-days conference of Kaspersky Online Sales Managers in Ingolstadt, Germany. Can’t wait to test it.

A lot of people are asking this questions: I’ve used this credit card many times successfully , but why I can not pay in this particular e-shop?

Your payment could be filtered at 2 stages:

1. Credit Card Issuers

Mastercard or Visa are checking the following data from your credit card:

• credit card number
• expiration date
• Name on the credit card
• CSV-code
• whether you have enough credit for your purchase

Normally this should be enough, I’m authenticated and I’ve authorized this payment. A credit card can not give you more. But the amount of credit card fraud  in the Inthernet is so enormously big, so almost all the e-shops make additional checks.

2. E-shop itself

E-shop has much more data, then just your credit card information. Your registration data, your IP-address, your purchases, etc. They can control a number of different things:

• is your IP is in the same country as your reported home address?
• is your IP in the same country as your credit card has been issued in?
• do you order too many products, than normal user (or strange combinations of products. For example most of the vendors provide discounts on big amount of software licenses. So any user, who’s spending a lot of money on full price licenses in the shop is suspicious)?
• have you bought something in this e-shop before
• is your credit card number, IP, email address, phone, name or address are marked as “blacklisted” buy your Payment Service Provider?

and many more things could be checked automatically when you buy something in a e-shop.

Then it’s up to e-shop and you to try to have business together. For example last week bol.com (the biggest media-site in Netherlands) has rejected my payment. Most probably because I’ve done in from Belgium with Belgian credit card, but specified delivery address in Netherlands. Bol.com asked to send prove of my identity (scan of the passport) for the clarification. In this situation I’ve just bought what I wanted (new Sony eBook Reader PRS-600) from another e-shop and they’ve lost me.

But I don’t blame them of course. As I also have the same problems in my e-shop, I understand: it’s nothing personal, just business.

Just got a 1 hour webex training from Omniture about one of their solutions – Search Center. Basically it’s a framework, that uses different SEM-engines, like Google Adwords, Bing Paid Search, etc.

It allows to synchronize data from all those different systems and perform a couple of nice operations:

• Portfolio Manager (you just give him your money and he’ll made a lot of suggestions on your investments)
• Bid Rules (oh, I’m going to like this one. It’s a small IF-THEN language, allowing to program small changes with your SEM-campaigns.
• True click (I didn’t get this one, I think it’s just a sophisticated report tool)

I’m looking forward to compare it’s job with the job of our SEM-agency.

After a sad summer with only occasional “Defying Gravity” episode we’ve again in September. The shows I’ll be following closely:

• LOST Season 6 and last (everybody must watch LOST, no questions, no options)
• Fringe Season 2(1st episode was aired, “This time it’s WAR!!!”, funny show from the creators of LOST)
• Big Bang Theory Season 3 (for all the geek.. sorry engineers) Has everybody seen Sheldon with beard?
• House M.D. Season 6 (Everybody wants to be like House, even in a mental institution!)
• Caprica Season 1 (Pilot was interesting, I really hope they’ll make it in the style of Battlestar Galactica)
• Californication Season 3 (1st and 2nd episodes were already aired, very, very nice)

Those I hope to follow occasionally:

• Lie to Me (like House-2, which is good, nice show to relax)
• Dexter Season 4 (1 and 2nd episodes were already pre-released, looks promising, better than season 3)
• Dollhouse Season 2 (first one looked promising, nice geek show)
• Grey’s Anatomy Season 6 (for the wife, I can’t believe they’re already Season 6!)
• Desperate housewives Season 6 (for the wife, I can’t believe they’re already Season 6!)
• Nip/Tuck Season 6 (for the wife, I can’t believe they’re already Season 6!)
• 30 Rock Season 3 ( nice Comedy about New York, good to watch with Mad Men)
• Mad Men Season 3 (nice Drama about New York, good to watch with 30 Rock)

Hm, I think I’m fully hooked now.

After some extensive screening of credit card information in our e-shop I still could see from time to time people buying licenses in big amounts (which usually indicates fraud).

A week ago I’ve decided to use proactive tactics. For every order, which looks like fraud, I’m sending an email:

————————-

Dear Sir/Madame,

Unfortunately we’ve found problems with your order of Kaspersky products. There is a possibility that credit card, used to pay for the purchase, was stolen or misused.

We’ve blocked your Kaspersky licenses and send information about this purchase to anti-fraud department of the credit card issuer.

If you are the owner of this credit card, please make contact with us as soon as possible.

Sorry for inconvenience!

Best regards,

————————-

This actually helped (at least for some time). I don’t see any big cases of fraud payments sins then. Now it’s just a matter of following this daily procedure.

Just posted an article on the site of Dmitry “Goblin” Puchkov with some pictures and story about 60-km cycling trip along the North Sea.

Link to the article (in russian)

Google map shows >37.000 hits in just 2 days, wow!

Although a number of comments was not that huge. I should add more controversial topics next time.

These are the pictures from the flickr

What is the difference between an activation code and a serial number. The biggest one is:

One of them costs money and could be a product for your e-shop and another doesn’t cost anything.

Activation codes are secret numbers, which are used to activate some software. Normally it happens online. The generation of activation codes could be pretty secure. For example as far as I know, pirates could not make a tool which generates activation codes for Kaspersky Anti-Virus software. All “generators” which you can download from pirate sites have 20-30 fixed stolen  licenses in it and give them to you in random.

Even if you manage to get the right code, the activation procedure means you have to connect to a server of the software vendor and try to get permission from them to use the software. At this point vendor could try to perform a “face control”. If the code was stolen in China and already used 500 times, I bet they just simply block it.

Normally crackers prefer to disable the control of the activation status in the software itself, not trying to beat the activation protocol.

After software is activated, it normally gets a serial number. It’s just a number identifying your copy, it could even be sequential. It can not be used in another copy of the software and can not be sold.

What could be easy then apply a 20% discount to your product in the e-shop! Nothing!

Ok, lets check it out from prospective of accounting. We have 1 product, that cost € 79.50. Let’s look at the order with 20% discount and Dutch VAT

Ok, the amount you need to book in your accounting is €53,45 you always work without VAT with your accountant. Which is a good deal because normal price €66,81

So, if you ask your accountant, how much discount you’ve got (if you’re a reseller, it means how much margin did you get on reselling this product – the answer would be € 66,81 – €53,45  = € 13,36

But I’ve just seen the discount being €15,90 Who’ve stolen €2,54!!!

I hope I’ve got everybody lost by now. So it’s not very easy to apply the discount. If you want to do it correctly, you should try to follow the rules:

• do ALL operations such as discounts only with amounts BEFORE applying VAT.
• Application of VAT must be always the last step in your operations.

So, that’s how the information order above should look like

Now I ope it’s a bit clearer.