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!

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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.

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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

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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!

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I was checking today for a good e-commerce platforms for the development of your own web-shop.

There is a nice list http://blog.templatemonster.com/2010/05/25/how-to-choose-ecommerce-platform/ of 9 most popular. This one http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/top-16-open-source-e-commerce-applications/ is a bit longer, but basically it boils down to 3 options:

1. osCommerce and it’s relatives
2. Magento
3. non-LAMP solutions, based on ASP.NET, Rubi or Joomla

Magento looks like most professional at this moment (after couple of hours of googling). But I also need an affiliate solution, linked to it. I found two biggest and most known:

1. Post Affiliate Pro
2. iDev Affiliate

Next time I should have a closer look at those two.

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Let’s look one step further in our way to track users (continuing from http://alleko.com/2010/01/07/tracking-users-or-traffic/ )

How else you can track customers of your site:

• web analytics (they normally use cookies and URL parameters)
• e-commerce engine (user must in most cases create login for buying something, but even without logins the e-shop software could use cookies to track customers)
• user account, you can ask user identify hiself somehow, for example giving email address before downloading a trial. Normally user is identified by email

But all those methods could work in parallel! Let’s consider a following scenario of a person, who wishes to find and buy some software:

1. He’s using Google to search for a brand name and find a nice article on a MEGA IT-site about the software. He clicks on it, reads the review and clicks on “Buy now” affiliate link. (At this moment affiliate network system is registering this guy as user, coming from an affiliate partner MEGA-IT)
2. The guy is having second thoughts, opens a Google window and searching for best deal on the software. He clicks then on the first link, which is direct link to the customer e-shop. (Smart e-shop software should remember him as a client of MEGA-IT, of course, but Google Analytics script doesn’t know that and can think that this guy came from Google)
3. The guy suddenly sees a button “Free 30-days trial” on the e-shop and decides to profit from it. He fills his email, downloads the software and after a couple of days buys it, using direct link in the software itself. (The e-shop system registers him as converted trial user)

So, who was responsible for this user – Affiliate MEGA-IT, Google or trial? It’s very hard to find out, because the whole system of managing sales is not streamlined. There is no feedback from user to the vendor, only clicks via different web-sites. The possible solution could be the model of Steam. After the first click we should somehow made user install the agent software, which will track user activities, from trial to purchase. Then we’ll know for sure, where this guy came from.

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Counting clicks

Web analytic tools can combine clicks to “visits”  very easily

Counting unique “visitors”

• daily unique visitor (all visits from the same person in one day are counted as the same visitor)
• weekly unique visitor (all visits in one week are counted as the same visitor)
• monthly unique visitor ( the same, but in the whole month)

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A couple of days ago Microsoft came with a new free Anti-Virus product – Microsoft Security Essentials

I will not comment on Microsoft ability to create security products, my opinion could be based of course. I’d like to write a bit about the whole idea of those Free Anti-Virus.

Currently it’s not just a GNU-like projects, made by open source enthusiasts to make world better. Big serious companies are making those product and distributing millions of copies. Here are the leaders:

• AVG
• Avast!
• Avira
• PCTools Anti-Virus

Their marketshare is huge (although it’s very hard to measure. Most market share measuring technologies measure products, something which is bought and sold). They’re very high in Organic google resutls for the best keywords, like “antivirus”. They’re also spending hundreds of thousands on paid google campaigns and download seeding via affiliate networks. Why all of those? Just to deliver you a nice present?

Of course not. Their business model is  - first get a huge portion of market, get very strong recognition from home users around the globe. And then sell them something.

You can visit their sites and see their business models. It’s mostly Online Sales, so everything is open, no hidden distribution agreement or union contracts. You’re told that “Just Anti-Virus is not enough” to protect your computer and then they ask you to buy “full Internet Security version” where normally you can find firewall, anti-spam and a lot of different components.

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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

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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.

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