Blog eCommerce

As my Twitter followers are aware, I spent an hour hanging around Birmingham International Railway Station for a train back to New Street today, which was late due to “severe delays”.

We all know and accept that things go wrong, but I think many of us are now immune to the standard-issue apologies we receive when this happens. What’s infinitely more valuable than a blank apology is a helpful suggestion: “board this train and change at New Street and continue your journey from there”.

While I was waiting, and not knowing how long I would be sitting at the station café, I started thinking about how most Websites deal with unforeseen problems.

In his book The Big Red Fez, permission marketing guru Seth Godin looks at ways we as Website owners and developers can make our users’ lives easier in the unlikely event of a loss of cabin pressure.

Rather than a 404 (page not found) error or a search that yields no results, why not say sorry and then suggest some of the most popular pages on your site? If a page stops working, why not get a quick form together than emails your Webmaster, provide a direct email link or list a telephone number?

Railway stations are good because they try not to leave you feeling helpless, but Websites do that to users all the time. You could be on the verge of converting a visit into a sale when the link between your site and the payment system fails, and their order details, along with their confidence in you, is lost.

The microblogging site Twitter is as famous now for its all-too-frequent error messages as it is for its revolutionary offering, but interestingly enough someone has done the contingency work for them. Twiddict lets you cache your tweet on their server until Twitter is ready to receive it. Brilliant!

So with Twitter having bought Summize, surely the next best move would be to acquire Twiddict, re-brand it, keep it on another server and send all over-capacity or “something is technically wrong” messages its way.

That’s a quick example for a fairly frivolous site, but the same pattern can be adopted anywhere. Your error page doesn’t have to follow the same design pattern as your main site: after all, your visitors are probably only going to click the back button again, so if you have a few sites, why not upload some contingency forms to a cheap Linux host and redirect your errors to the relevant form?

Just extending a helping hand to your visitors when things aren’t going their way - no-one cares if things aren’t going your way, sorry! - can really make a difference and once in a while it’ll bring you a conversion you otherwise might have lost.

Last year when Google Checkout was setup, eBay prohibited its use throughout its entire global network: strike one for anti-competitiveness, now it’s piloting a scheme which makes paying via PayPal mandatory. Strike two.

Now I’ve not used Google Checkout (yet) and I’m quite a fan of PayPal: I find it quick, convenient and fairly hassle-free for both buying and selling, however I have more than a few concerns with its coupling with eBay.

Primarily my issue with PayPal and its owner eBay rears its head when I want to sell my stuff, because I get charged first to list the product on eBay whether it sells or not - a policy that Amazon.co.uk Marketplace have been sensible enough to scrap - then a second time if my buyer decides to pay through PayPal; and since I can’t choose my own gateway I’m locked into the service. But at least I had the option to offer another form of payment, even if that meant eBay covered their ears and went “la la la, not listening” because I wasn’t using their toys.

Now, if the new scheme that eBay are trialling in Australia - a haven for no-nonsense and often polemical policies - goes ahead, we’ll all be locked in to PayPal and of course, no-one will lift a finger because the suits who decide who gets prosecuted for being anti-competitive will be too distracted with the Microsoft/Yahoo! debacle.

So the scheme will go ahead, Google will throw its toys out of the pram and someone in the EU might raise an eyebrow, meanwhile those lads over at eBay will be looking through auction listings for larger wallets within which to stuff their crisp new dollar bills.

Welcome to the Internet. Sit down, shut up and hand over your card details.

Social media websites need to make money to live. Facebook does it by showing you targeted ads based on keywords of interest, but Phorm, the new centre for unmitigated digital evil want to explode that model and use it across the Web so that targeted advertising follows you everywhere. The Guardian say they won’t use it, but beyond what some are referring to as an illegal invasion of privacy, could a system like this work on an opt-in basis?

Attendees of the Birmingham SXSWi brain dump discussed the merits of Amazon’s recommendations, of which I’m a big fan, and to which my bank balance has fallen prey on many occasions. So how about a single website where all the buying decisions you want to make public can be discovered by others?

What if, when you sign up for a new ecommerce website you tick a box to say “share my buying decisions with x” (where x is a cool name for such an app), and when you buy your product, the site talks to the x API which records the sale and adds it to the stuff you like? Once you’ve received and played with your new product you can return to x (or to the original site) and rate the product very simply with a thumbs up or thumbs down rating.

When you login to a social networking site (or any other kind of site where you provide your email address), that site talks to x which brings back a load of tags which the site matches against its list of ads. It displays the ads, you see something you like, you buy the product. That purchase goes back into x and the cycle continues.

There’s an idea, now go and build it!

play.com, the place for CD and DVD on the cheap has beaten Amazon.co.uk to the punch by selling DRM-free music downloads online, via the catchy URL http://www.play.com/Music/MP3-Download/6-/DigitalHome.html.

As a rule, all of their content comes without digital rights management (so no limits on burning or transferring your tracks) and there’s no horrid propriatory software to download. Once you’ve bought your tracks, you can access them again and again through your account. Brilliant!

The selection they’re offering is surprisingly good, considering they must’ve done a hell of a lot of negotiating with the Big 4 in order to secure their distribution rights. and they’re boasting quite a respectable “coming soon” list, including the superb Duffy.

Last year Apple were beaten at this game by Amazon in the US, who offered a much wider range of unprotected music than iTunes Plus, also without the need to download their hideous software, but Amazon UK have been lazy, letting Play.com take the lead.

The UK now has a third player in the market (all other files outside of iTunes came from the OD2 network and its various resellers), taking advantage of the most widely used music format, so things can only get better. Now that a free market exists, we should see competition between Amazon (when they get their arses in gear), Play and the other two - soon to become - dinosaurs.

Bring it on!