In his first public appearance since the Facebook’s IPO Mark Zuckerburg has indicated Facebook is planning in future to add an ability to search for information on the website.
Queries like “Which restaurant have my friends been to recently and liked?” will be possible.
Google dominates the search engine market, so it will be interesting to see how Facebook fares, particularly as queries such as the above are not possible on engines such as Google.
You can read more over at smh.com.au
The Australian Federal Government has committed to studying Australians’ online retail spending habits by providing funding of $2.1 million dollars over 4 years to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).
The study will track Australians’ online retail spending habits, and how online sales might be affecting bricks and mortar stores.
You can read more at CRN.com.au
The Australian Retailers Association has recommended the Australian Bureau of Statistics disclose more detail on the ‘other’ retail sales category to show the speed in growth of online sales.
The ABS current splits retailing into a number of different categories, such as clothing and household goods. However it does not specifically categorise online sales with the existing groups.
“Online retailing is in the ‘other’ retailing area, so you don’t know what percentage of that ‘other’ retailing is the online,” said Australian Retailers Association executive director Russell Zimmerman.
You can read more at smh.com.au
Online sales in the retail sector increased in the month of February indicating growth in consumers willingness to spend online.
Figures showed the National Australia Bank Online retail sales index jumped 26 per cent in the year to February, increasing from the 19 per cent pace in the year to January.
“This increase was particularly notable given that February 2010 and 2011 recorded little to no growth when compared with the preceding month of January,” said NAB chief economist Alan Oster.
Gerry Harvey of Harvey Norman said last month that people will not buy furniture online.
SmartCompany spoke to two entries from the Smart50 who disagree with Gerry, Milan Direct and Fidarsi Furniture. Both have revenue in the millions of dollars.
“speaking to these two companies, it’s obvious people are buying furniture online and they’re doing so because the sites go out of their way to show as much of the product as possible.
This is where high quality photography, demonstration video and interactive features are critical. Shoppers want to take away as many variables as they can. High quality photography and other features go a long way to ensuring the purchase is a successful one.”
One common critcism of buying bulky products online from consumers is that they can’t touch or feel, for instance. However if you put a lot of effort in to your product as described above you can certainly sell bulky products online.
You can read more over at smartcompany.com.au
Roomorama.com has announced a merger with lofty.com, a short-term rental website. Roomorama has secured US$2.1 million in seed funding to assist with growth.
The online travel start-up was launched in 2009, offering a service to handle short-term rental transactions.
With an average gross booking of $1330 in 2011 and present booking numbers at approximately 200,000 nights to date it’s yet another case of the success of launching a business online.
Featuring more than 2000 Australian properties, Australia was it’s second most frequent user base in 2011.
You can read more over at smartcompany.com.au
The Sydney Morning Herald has written a success story on the web’s first luxury fashion store, Net-a-Porter.
Launched in 2000, and attracting many doubters who didn’t believe women would purchase luxury items online, it has been so successful that it was sold in 2010 for 350 million pounds.
George Wright of the Sydney Morning Herald has written an article examining the content of web pages. In layman’s terms, he’s talking about how webpages are primarily designed for human users to read & understand however webpages are becoming increasingly read by programs and as such should be designed to take that into account.
For example, if you were using a program that read this webpage aloud to you it wouldn’t know which part of the page to start reading from. If there was some information within the webpage that told the program to only read this blog post it would be much more efficient at working out what part of the webpage is relevant.
You can read more over at smh.com.au
