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
Due to the ever growing popularity of online shopping the profit gap between Australia Post’s conventional letter service and parcel delivery business has widened more than ever before.
Chief executive Ahmed Fahour said,
“The period leading up to Christmas really highlighted a widening gulf in profitability of our letters business and our parcels business,”
“We delivered 3 million more parcels in December than we would in an ordinary month,”
You can read more over at smh.com.au
Despite a 5 percent decrease in earnings for the six months prior to December in 2011 compared to 2010 there was positive news from JB Hi-Fi on the online sales front.
The company announced an 80 percent jump in online sales for 2011.
You can read more over at crn.com.au
Technology analysis group Telsyte has released a report showing that discounting is the best way to achieve online sales.
While lowering prices is challenging for the businesses it does go some way to convincing customers to proceed with the purchase.
Telsyte senior research manager, Sam Yip has said,
”All the emerging ways to buy online are tied by a single common factor – discounts,”
Harvey Norman founder Gerry Harvey says Harvey Norman has reduced its forecasts for online sales, believing he got carried away with how big a market he could capture online.
The company was targeting 5% of turnover to be online, while the actual sales figure appears to be as low as 0.5-1%.
Mr Harvey has announced they would now target online sales to achieve 1-2% of total turnover.
The team over at smartcompany.com.au has 3 tips for Harvey Norman, but they could just as easily apply to any other online store.
They are:
To read more about these tips check out smartcompany.com.au
