Online retail landscape looks bright:

And this trend is set not just to continue but to grow. Bain & Co. forecast that by 2020, 95% of music and 75% of books will be sold online. And even luxury goods, reticient at first to embrace the internet given the lack of advice from trained sales staff they could give to customers, are now enjoying significant sales growth derived from online transactions. A greater proportion of luxury fashion is sold over the internet than mass-market clothing, which is testament to just how much mindsets in the luxury goods industry have shifted.

Multichannel results in greater value transactions:

This is all achieved without mentioning m-commerce. Mobile phones are increasingly being used to research purchases before consumers hand over cash in stores or online. About 20% of sales in 2010 were classed as multichannel, meaning that orders were picked up in store or goods were ordered online after research in a traditional shop or showroom. Deloitte recently published research showing that multichannel customers spent an average £143 per transaction compared with £57 for traditional store customers.

So for those retailers vulnerable to online competition, the future does not look particularly bright. Moreover, research has shown that the more consumers shop online, the harder it is to sell at a healthy premium. This explains much of the trouble for the likes of HMV, and retailers of electrical goods such as Comet and BestBuy.

Some are so used to e-commerce, that they are reluctant to embrace f-commerce fully. In fact, that out of most major retailers, there are only 10% or so, that are generating decent sales via Facebook.

But interest is starting to grow both from retailers and users alike. Consumers have more trust in Facebook, and are therefore seen as more likely to use it as a buying channel. Moreover, the introduction of Facebook’s only currency; Facebook credits; and the enthusiasm of Facebook to make it more widespread, is making transactions easier too.

Facebook is already seen as a great source for online discounts and deals. Companies are incentivising their followers in a variety of ways to acquire that all important Facebook endorsement; a “like”!

If you as a retailer, can make the prospect of buying on Facebook attractive, then you will do well. It just simplifies a process by eliminating a funnel or link in the chain. Followers see a deal, and they can click on the Facebook shop page of the relevant retailer and buy more easily. And buyers live simplicity a lot. If you can attract conversions without users having to leave Facebook, your sales and return on investment will go up significantly.

Magento provides e-commerce platforms to small and medium sized businesses. The reason I am discussing it in this blog, is that we have a number of clients, for whom we have built Magento e-commerce sites. Some of Magento’s most prestigious clients include Ford and Swatch.

The idea behind eBay’s decision is that they want to merge Magento with the company’s own open source, online retailing platform X.Commerce. Precisely how X.Commerce will work, and what part Magento has to play in it will only be revealed in October during eBay’s X.Commerce Innovate Conference.

As far as we are concerned, we think eBay’s reasoning is sound. By buying Magento, eBay can marry this up with previous acquisitions such as Paypal, to offer a turnkey ecommerce solution, from hosting to payment processing to mobile. Mobile is a large growth area, and the leading players are staking a lot on it’s potential.

eBay now has a strong suite of enterprise-class ecommerce developer tools, through which they could offer large retailers help with building their own storefronts along with mobile and social commerce.

So two weeks ago at the Shrewsbury e-commerce expo, we were given an excellent opportunity to share our ideas and thoughts with customers and interested parties across the region. Our MD David opened up with a talk on SEO, and then David and Paul spoke later on in the day on effective SEO and social media strategies for companies.

Although, the seminars were short, we appreciate these opportunities to meet new people and to share our thoughts face-to-face. Of course, its a great selling tool for us, as it enables us to forge new relationships, in a way that social media advocates would approve. Human to human.Thanks to 7video for their great work on preparing these videos for us.

Spring has most definitely sprung..wishing you all a very pleasant weekend.

To make money through social media, firstly you have to set up campaigns that can be measured. And I mean measurement bordering upon the obsessive nature..not merely number of followers or unique page views. Leads generated, prospects converted, profits realised..all of these are essential.This is tracking in relation to Return on Investment (ROI) – doing this successfully will soon enable you to see what’s profitable and what’s not in terms of your social media activity.

Some use Social Media simply as a branding tool. YouTube has been successfully deployed by a number of companies. Videos not engage potential customers through interesting and innovative content, but they encourage “viral” marketing – you catch this wave and literally thousands of people can be viewing your content within hours.

If you are an e-commerce business, do what Dell does.1.5million DellOutlet followers on Twitter and 50 purchases per Tweet Dell makes. Take a computer price of £300, then you are looking at £15,000 per tweet. Good work if you can get it!

Social media has also been successfully used as a Research tool. Starbucks are masters at this; with their web site: mystarbucksidea.com When visitors land on the site, they’re asked to provide new ideas to Starbucks on ways to improve the brand. Visitors can share ideas, vote on which ideas they like the best, discuss the ideas that have been submitted, and even see the results of their suggestions in action. You can employ this tactic successfully simply by inviting your blog readers to post comments, or include polls or surveys on your newsletter. Encourage “engagement” from your community. They don’t bite; and 9 times out of 10, you will be pleasantly surprised, by just how much interest there is out there in your business.

Customer retention: There is an old saying that goes something like this: it costs three to five times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to keep an existing one.So with that in mind, dazzle your customers with real-time customer service via Twitter and Facebook.

Invest in a good lead generation strategy. By establishing a reputation as an established authority in your area, you can drive sales that way. And it is not just the main tools that we all know about (Facebook, Twitter, Linked In) that attracts potential customers, be a little adventurous through creating ebooks, training modules, YouTube videos, and regular blog posts- use a “Hub and Spoke” system to cast the net as broadly as you can.

And remember..measure everything you do. This will help you make the gradual improvements that will generate consistent ROI through social media over time.

• Why Sell on Facebook: A: 500M+ users, 50% log on every day, web’s most visited site.  FB users spend more on consumer products than non FB users, more likely to recommend products, and more likely to continue using them

• Options For Social Commerce? A: Three forms of social commerce that either i) promote brand loyalty (propensity to repurchase), ii) drive traffic to main e-commerce site, or iii) reshape the buying experience. Disadvantage of ii) (store-fronts) is that consumers need to leave FB to complete the transaction.

• Why Social Commerce Is Not About Selling: FB is primarily a conversational platform, not a commerce/shopping platform so vendors should adapt to the conversational context – and seek to be social and interactive - using good social merchandising manners (such as posting to engage with fans, making commerce secondary, pacing postings, and rewarding fans with exclusive offers) to educate, inform and entertain, rather making the hard sales pitch.

• Unique Dynamics About Selling Within Facebook? i) Social Product Catalogue (Contextual Shopping) – using social graph data to offer a store that adapts to shopper tastes and behavior. ii) Social Merchandising – using Wall conversations to initiate dialogue, promote products and reward participation – as a means of getting shoppers to the shopping cart. iii) Secure Order Processing – the convenience of completing the purchase within Facebook in a way that deals with Facebook privacy and security concerns (i.e. credit card details only given at payment gateway).

Three things we’d add in answer to Why Sell on Facebook, and Options for Social Commerce, are

• The opportunity to use Facebook as an e-commerce sandbox or lab to experiment and test new retail concepts (flash sales, group-buy, e-commerce personalization) in a low cost environment that does not necessitate messing with the e-commerce mothership.  This is especially useful for both established retailers and brands with little or no e-commerce experience – who want to minimize risk, avoid political battles, and keep costs down.
• As a conversational medium, Facebook commerce is ideal for stimulating word of mouth around new products and services. Levi’s is an examples of using Facebook commerce for doing word of mouth marketing – and building brand advocacy.
• A further rational for social commerce is that it allows retailers to monetize their social media investment – allowing for real social media ROI.  Is it worth investing time, energy and money in social media? Unless you stick a checkout till in the experience, you’ll never really know…

The concept of leveraging on existing customers and advocates to drive online retail sales has been explored extensively in the application of recommendation/cross-selling algorithms, social media sharing tools, onsite consumer reviews, and wish-lists as well as recent innovations, such as the Facebook’s Like button. With cross-selling specifically, shoppers can gain access to starting points or suggested items for consideration, removing some cognitive costs and mental barriers-to-buy. Introducing the “social” aspect into cross-selling provides a credible basis for the cross-sell and thus creates trust, in that the source of endorsement is people within the shoppers’ social circle.

Prior to the introduction of open social network APIs (application programming interfaces), to leverage on an existing customer base’s personal identities to drive sales has been difficult, involving painful registration processes and additional headaches about remembering yet another username and password. However, Facebook’s introduction of its Open Graph API has now enabled online retailers and content publishers on the web to socialize their offerings with simple integrations, which, on the consumer’s end, means one-click functionalities (the Like button being the most prominent).

Companies have been exploring the possibilities of taking portable social identities to the next level with deep two-way integration with Facebook, social cross-selling features, and facilitating product and brand conversations that drive conversions. Social cross-selling is the overarching objective  – a new paradigm that centers on creating conversations to optimize the sales funnel and accelerate sales cycles, instead of the traditional social media paradigm of using conversations to create “engagement” or “brand awareness.” Below are some suggestions on how you can leverage Facebook’s new API to create dramatically-enhanced shopping experiences using instant personalization:

1. Leverage on product recommendations
Putting social media sharing buttons on a product page and then hoping for healthy, sustainable word-of-mouth marketing activity to happen is negligent at best. With Facebook’s Open Graph API, the opportunity to capture these product recommendations, as well as the valuable comments and advice attached to the recommendations, and display them on the storefront is increasingly obvious. Archiving user-generated content for mass consumption is one of the easiest ways to provide social proof; besides, the more content is accumulated on the retail store, the more SEO and research/purchase planning value said retail store holds.

2. Encourage social purchase sharing
Attaching buyer identities to specific products is powerful, because a purchase is unequivocal in conveying social endorsement: the buyer has actually paid money for the product. Furthermore, the purchaser is more likely to have first-hand knowledge about the product than a non-purchaser. In a way, purchase sharing holds greater substance than mere product recommendations or Likes. The limitations of social purchase sharing are two-fold: privacy and the critical mass issue. Most consumers are unlikely to want to share their purchases, and, even if they do, possibly none of the people in our social circle (the people whose references we trust) happens to have shopped in a given online store, resulting in a dearth of data. However, with social media norms going mainstream, it is expected that consumers will be more open to sharing their purchases and shopping destinations, which in turn would attract their friends to said destinations to make and share their own purchases.

3. Enable solicited social reviews
Ratings and reviews are first-generation social commerce tools that are used to provide social proof and credibility for a certain product or online store. The opportunity offered by Facebook’s Open Graph API is to infuse greater trust, targeting, and contextual relevance into the process: allowing reviews to be requested for from someone known and trusted, instead of showing random reviews from anonymous writers whose knowledge, background, and motive are likely to be questionable. Requesting a review from within one’s social graph also solves the contextual relevance and targeting issue. Unsolicited product reviews are likely to be seen as obtrusive or abrupt, especially on social networks where the prevailing purpose is to socialize.

Of course, these social cross-selling suggestions should be applied in the context of ordinary cross-selling good practices. With social media going mainstream and becoming increasingly open, online retailers can expect that the opportunities to socialize the storefront to increase over time. Notable merchants are already taking bold steps in socializing their stores (here and here), so what are the rest of us waiting for?

Delta Airlines recently announced that it had launched a Facebook store application, enabling users to search, book and pay for flights, without having to leave the social networking site; a smart move for an airline that market itself as being ‘the world’s largest Wi-Fi equipped fleet.’ We think that it will only be a matter of time before other brands follow suit and the checkout is brought to the customers as opposed to the customers going to the checkout.

SeeWhy carried out a poll on the subject, finding that 78% of marketers plan to use Facebook for social commerce and 26% plan to build an e-commerce application on Facebook itself. Although these figures suggest that brands are already acknowledging f-commerce as being the next significant step to take, very few are seizing the opportunity.

F-commerce certainly has its advantages for a brand. It is currently difficult to decipher the exact link between social media and sales because a sizable following, regular updates and interesting engagement does not necessarily translate into sales. Integrating sales mechanics into social media platforms will enable brands to better gauge the success of their social media outreach.

Now that a substantial number of brands have a social media presence, it’s time for them to start taking the next steps, ensuring their bottom line benefits from these groups of prospective customers. Allowing fans to purchase the products or services that they’re discussing within the same network could result in certain brands standing head and shoulders above competitors. F-commerce should be seen as a chance to offer fans exclusive discounts and incentives and, if done correctly, opening a Facebook store is likely to enhance a brand’s fan acquisition, therefore increasing exposure to potential customers.

First, we have to ask the question, how do you take the seemingly limitless social media conversations and turn them into actionable insights?  Also, how can you understand what is being said and the context of those conversations?

Social media in any context offers incredibly good (and free) feedback on a variety of goods and services.  Online Retailers need to use this information to their advantage.  Using it to your advantage means using both the good and bad comments.  Here are some practical tips we can take a look at.  Most importantly, keep the conversation going and make sure your social media content is relevant and current.  Do remember that the end goal is product sales and customer connections.  Also, rekindle the passion for your brand consistently using social media methods.  For example, if you a leading e-commerce website and you are involved in a social media forum, why not hold weekly or bi-weekly chat sessions about the experiences with ordering product via your site?  You will get invaluable responses from doing something like this.

It is also very important to constantly think about the audience you are trying to go after, consider your age demographics, race, and gender as well.  Who are the most likely people to purchase your products and who do you want to expand to?  These are key points to remember when considering your marketplace.

It is really no surprise that online e-commerce businesses were one of the first groups to use social media to make their brand more social.  They enabled customers to find out what their peers were thinking and provided valuable insight that could be viewed in “real time”.

Building a truly interactive social media community within an e-commerce platform is important as it creates a more efficient retail environment where customer opinions, relevant content and product information are freely distributed. It is only then that “social commerce” can happen.

To accomplish this, retailers must be able to integrate social media elements, such as social networking features and user generated platforms directly into their commerce environments.
As a result of this, online retailers can create and own a unique social experience that would encompass the entire customer lifecycle.  Customers can than enjoy a more integrated shopping experience and retailers will see an increase in unique visitors to their online store that are “predisposed” to their marketing messages.  This will streamline marketing efforts and lead to increased profits and decreased costs.
Social media allows empowering customers by enabling them to establish user profiles that pull in data and relationships to online stores.  At this point customers can interact and provide you (the online retailer) invaluable customer feedback, and bring in potential new customers.

By building and maintaining vibrant communities that address the passion of the retailer’s core audience, and then spreading that passion to the larger social web, retailers will attract loyal and engaged customers, and will achieve better business results.

Social media is absolutely crucial to an online retailer’s success today.  Social media allows you to engage a customer, get new business, and most importantly elicit invaluable customer feedback that will turn into increased sales.

Online sales grew by 18% in the month compared with a year earlier, the biggest jump since 2007, IMRG said.

UK shoppers spent £5bn online in July, more than in any other month this year, it added.

Figures published on Thursday showed total UK retail sales rising much faster than expected in July.

Sales volumes jumped 1.1% compared with June, the Office for National Statistics said, with almost all non-food sectors showing strong growth.

World Cup dip

The average UK shopper spent £81 online in July, with promotions and discounts also boosting spending.

Travel sales rose by a third compared with a year earlier, as people looked to escape the rain and head for sunnier climes, said IMRG, the industry body for global internet retailing.

This more than offset a fall in alcohol sales, caused perhaps by England’s disappointing performance in the football World Cup, the group said.

“Although online retail sales survived the recession more convincingly than High Street sales, the last two years or so have no doubt been shaky at times,” said Chris Webster, head of retail consulting and technology at Capgemini, which publishes the online sales index with IMRG.

“It is really encouraging to see growth levels returning to those seen pre-2007 and before consumer confidence was knocked by the financial crisis and the recession.”

The IMRG Capgemini Index tracks online sales at more than 100 retailers across the UK.