Archive for March, 2012

How to create an e-empire

Thursday, March 29th, 2012

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.

You can read more over at SMH.com.au

Getting the most out of your webpages

Thursday, March 22nd, 2012

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

Social Media Helps Build Strong Brands

Thursday, March 22nd, 2012

More and more websites feature links to an associated social media page, most commonly Facebook and Twitter. The benefits of using social media to help interact with your users is endless.

baselinemag.com has 6 pointers on how to use social media to build a stronger brand.

Here are the top 3:

  1. Identify interested customers to encourage brand loyalty.
  2. Build a community to communicate with customers and improve service.
  3. Create viral videos and engage with consumers to promote new products and brands.

Check out of the rest of the tips over at baselinemag.com

 

Australia Post builds on online shopping

Tuesday, March 13th, 2012

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

JB Hi-Fi announces impressive 80 percent jump in online sales for 2011

Tuesday, March 13th, 2012

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

Discounts drive online business models

Tuesday, March 6th, 2012

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,”

You can read more over at smh.com.au

SmartCompany offers 3 tips to improve your online sales

Tuesday, March 6th, 2012

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:

  1. Emphasise your deals
  2. Reduce the shipping times
  3. Give the website a redesign

To read more about these tips check out smartcompany.com.au