The World Wide Web supposed to be an international network. Hence “the”  and “world” in it.  With exception of the Great Chinese firewall anybody in the world could see any information on any website. And, theoretically, anybody could buy any product from any website.

I do understand why e-shops, selling real goods like books, clothes or food make boundaries in the Internet. They need to deliver it via standard snail post. And the goods must cross old-fashioned customs.

But in case of the pure virtual digital goods, like software, digitized media, information there should be no borders. Everybody should be able to pay for a digital product and download it.

However, often the same product or service is available and priced differently in different countries. That’s not nice if you have to pay for the same number of bytes different prices via different IP-addresses. People normally don’t like it.

They try to jailbreak their iPhones because of  the limitations different local App Stores have. They try to have different PSN accounts, because Sony bids more free video-game demos via their USA store, that via the European one. Antivirus vendors also almost always have different prices in different countries.

The main reason for those inconsistencies is that the electronic commerce is but a part of the big companies business. Often it’s not the biggest part and not very important internally. It often suffers from so called “channel conflict”.

For example in order to sell a software in UK a vendor must engage a distributor to move their boxes and to deliver them to the stores around the country. Most of the revenue comes from this distributor and the vendor agrees with it on pricing, volumes and conditions. The distributor expects from the vendor to honor the terms. And not to sell the same software online cheaper than the boxed version in the stores. The price in the UK e-store must be the same as in the UK brick-and-mortar shops.

What if the same vendor tries to sell in USA the same software but with different price (Pound is currently more that 60% more expensive than dollar). In order to honor the contracts with different distributors around the world they must have different prices in different e-stores.

Well, this doesn’t seem fair for us, customers. That’s one of the reason I’ve started http://antivirusdirect.info

I’ve just updated today the price page with colorful bars, describing relative prices for the same digital products in EU, UK and USA stores. Sometimes the price difference is more than 100%. It’s your choice!

Share on Facebook

When I  started the first version of antivirusdirect.info , I tried to represent the data in the minimalistic way. The less steps user needs to perform to get all the information, required for the analysis  – the better.

One page per product sounded like a good idea. Well, I didn’t think there are so many antivirus vendors and their price-lists are so versatile.

This resulted in a table of 60×50 cells, containing numbers and > 600 URLs. It was neither minimalistic nor very smart.

Additionally Google and Bing robots simply were chocking during attempts of index those huge pages. So for 4 days there were zero presentation of my site in the search engines.

So I’ve split the long pages to several categories, like “Antivirus 1 year 1 PC” or “Total Protection  3 year 10 PC” and resubmitted the sitemap to Google and Bing.

Let’s see if it improves the SEO traffic

Share on Facebook

I’ve spend the last 4 years working for different antivirus vendors (Kaspersky and Trustport) helping consumers to buy and renew their antiviruses online.

The online sales industry of antiviruses is a bit strange. Vendors are still mostly oriented on retail market (well, they’ve build their empires based on brick-and-mortar retail sales). And online shops are basically copies of their retail ones.

But the Internet could give so much more both to vendors and to consumers, then just a virtual shelf.

As a tribute to all the time I’ve spend on antivirus industry I’ve started an information project Antivirus Direct. What are the goals of this project:

• To gather, analyze and visualize information about online sales of antivirus products
• To give customers a piece of mind about what exactly they’re buying and how exactly they’re making their choice
• (may be) to save some money to the customers

Currently I’ve found 53 active antivirus vendors with consumer e-shops,  12 vendors without normal e-shop online and numerous amounts of fake-antivirus brands.

Share on Facebook

The more I think on the subject, the more I come to the same thought. e-commerce doesn’t exist as a separate discipline.

Basically it’s just one of the parts of process called “sales” or even more abstract “business”.

If I’d try to describe, what e-commerce do for your business it would be: ” improving the information flow from you to your customers”. Keyword is “improving”, which means that the idea of the information flow must not come from the online sales department itself.

e-commerce is just a tool for selling your product. The same as “marketing”. Of course, there are some specific skills, technologies and methods you need to master (actually there is quite a lot because the industry is quite new). But the choise in application of those methods depends really on your product.

If you’re selling tea and want e-commerce to help you, first you need to define what do you want to say to your customer. And only then e-commerce could help you with delivering this information to as many people as possible in different ways.

The next logical step would be to figure out a correct way to position an e-commerce oriented company. You can not expect that an e-commerce company whold sell your tea better then you would. They’re not specialists in tea. So e-commerce as a service must either be incorporated in your business or be a part of a VAP – Value Added Partner (reseller or distributor). There should be no pure e-commerce oriented businesses.

Share on Facebook

A lot of Internet companies, dealing in Europe are trying to reduce their VAT. Opening a company in Luxembourg is a good choice, they have just 15% and they’re respectable European country, nothing like strange islands, which could be covered by occasional tide wave.

However, you have to consider a lot of additional problems, such set-up could create:

• Lux bureaucracy is very slow. If you think you can start up your e-shop in a couple of months, think again.
• Credit Card aquireres don’t like Lux start-ups much, they could ask huge amount of bank guaranty in case you default and all your credit card payments have to be charged back.
• PSPs don’t like Lux companies either, although they don’t care much, because they don’t have any financial risk. But they may also ask for additional guarantee for payments for their services. In countries like Germany or Netherlands you could just give your bank account, and this will be enough.
• You still have to somehow support European local methods, like iDeal or ELV. It’s possible by opening accounts in all those countries, but it takes time and money.

Of course, if you’re making millions with your shop 6% of additional turnover is very important.

Share on Facebook

Normally a catalog is the same as a price-list. Just  more pictures and info. You choose something from the catalog, write down the SKU and purchase it.

That’s now distribution works.

However, online the prices could be much flexible. Price is, at the end,  an instrument of marketing and online you can feel it’s power..

There are 3 products in our retail catalogue, but there are 36 differen SKU and different prices (actually even more, there is some differences in taxes for the customers in different countries).

All out-of-box e-shops I’ve seen presume standard distribution model. One product – one SKU – one price. In all those cases you have to build something on top of it in order to support flexible pricing. In most cases it means – creating more and more SKUs, but it would be nice to have a separate subsystems for catalog and pricing.

Share on Facebook

It’s very good that Netherlands has won semi-final. The whole country is busy with celebrations and the spirits are high. I’ve just send a special discount mailing to all our clients with a present for the championship.

At mininum we have 2 more days of the “orange champions” spirit, until the final game against Spain.

Of course, I really hope Dutch win, then the conversion of this mailing will be enormous!

Share on Facebook

Last couple of days I was testing the new bright and shiny e-commerce engine Magento.

The main reason why I wanted to switch from the OS:commerce-like solutions was amount of fine-tuning required. It never works perfectly out of the box. Nor should it, to be honest. It’s not a box product, it’s a basis for the further development.  Yo can not have an e-shop on it without professional php-developer standing beside.

Magento actually looked much better, judging from their website. More marketing-wise.

Hovewer, on the second day of the testing, without much poking the system crashed. The message was a typical Open Source fun, something like “Strict Notice: Only variables should be passed by reference  in …/lib/Zend/Db/Select.php on line 246”

And the solution was of course found immediately via Google, here . They suggested to go directly to the source code of the library and use your dirty hands change some construction:

Find this line in the above file:
$correlationName = current(array_keys($this->_parts[self::FROM]));

Replace the above 1 line with the following 2 lines:
$correlationName = array_keys($this->_parts[self::FROM]);
$correlationName = $correlationName[0];

It worked, of course. So much for the box product Magento , I guess once open source, forever open source.

Share on Facebook

I don’t know if there is a joke is there a word in English language for  something like “compulsory but made to appear as voluntary”. There is one in Russian. The literal translation would be  ”voluntary-compulsory”, but it doesn’t sound that funny.

Yesterday I’ve tried a test installation of free antivirus from Avira. I’ve already written about how “free” they really are. The main and only idea of these free products is to get some customer information and to persuade him to buy an extended commercial version.

So, these  free Anti-Viruses  could be absolutely bloated with e-commerce features and conversion attempts. This is an example from Avira:

It looks like the desingers of this screen get the idea of what exactly “voluntary-compulsory” means

Share on Facebook

Some people ask why it’s so easy to buy something online and why it’s so hard to perform any other operations with your money or goods. For example, cancel your purchase. Or change the dates of the purchased ticket.

Some people even think that business are doing it on purpose: making the process of taking your money as convenient as possible and the opposite process – as hard as possible. I don’t beleive it. I don’t think any business is planning any actions to decrease their quality in any aspect (may be except Apple). It’s to risky. Any decision about communication with clients is made with best intentions. The result may look horrible, but the manager, who actually made the decision, at that moment thought it was in the best interest of clients.

So why then some operations on a e-commerce website looks easy, and other – don’t. The main reason, that they’re performed by different departments. The underlying difference is enormous.

• If you click on “Buy” or “Purchase” or “Subscribe”, you’re handled by a sales department. Sales departments are the best parts of the company. They have budgets, they have perks, they get the best people. Everybody loves them and listens to their ideas.
• If you click on “Contact”, “Service” or “Questions”, you’re handled by a support department. They’re normally the ugly ducks of every business. Hairy underpaid telephone-bots. They only eat money and they’re the first to go when CEO wants to make the business more effective. Often they’re even outsourced.

Even on the same website different pages of the site could be managed by different departments. With enormous difference in quality.

Of course sometimes some people also pay attention to the support departments. Just today I had a wonderful experience with the online travel agency http://www.schipholtickets.nl/ I needed to change a date for the tickets and called their paid support line (40 cent per minute). Girl of the phone after a couple of minutes realized that my request could take time and asked if she can call me back (for free!). Was this loosing money? Hell, no! I ended up paying 600 more euro to them. Brilliant!

Share on Facebook