written by Cathy
This does not include only online ecommerce sellers, this involves everyone who is involved in social networking. Make time to read this report, that was released last month, On the Leakage of Personally Identifiable Information Via Online Social Networks.
Over half a billion people are on various Online Social Networks (OSNs) and have made available a vast amount of personal information on these OSNs. OSN users make movements around the Internet can now be tracked not just as an IP address, but be associated with the unique identifier used to store information about users on an OSN. This OSN identifier is a pointer to PII about the user. Cookies and other tracking mechanisms on the Internet have been prevalent for a long time. The general claim of aggregators is that they create profiles of users based on their Internet behavior, but do not gather or record PII. Although we do not know that aggregators are recording PII, we demonstrate with this work that it is undeniable that information is available to them. Aggregators do not have to take any action to receive this information. As part of requests, they receive OSN identifiers with pointers to the PII or in some cases, directly receive pieces of PII. This PII information can be joined with information from tracking cookies obtained from the user’s traversal to any site that triggers a visit to the same aggregator. The ability to link information across traversals on the Internet coupled with the wide range of daily actions performed by hundreds of millions of users on the Internet raises privacy issues, particularly to the extent users may not understand the consequences of having their PII information available to aggregators.
While most social networks do have a policy that state that they do provide non-identifiable information to third parties for advertisers, but what they dont tell you is that with the advanced technology, they can now allow third parties to access your user name, birth date, sex, social security numbers, etc. and other linable personable identifiable information that can identify the user. Is this violating their private policies? Be cautious of what private information you put about yourself and your business.
October 9th, 2009
written by Cathy
Can we agree that there is 24 hours in a day. And lets hope that we get at least 6 hours of sleep and we work a minimum 8 hours a day. That leaves us 10 hours a day to spend with family & friends, get dinner, run errands and the other fun stuff that is required of an adult.
As an online seller, an online retailer, how many hours a day are you being social? How many hours a day are you spending on the Internet Merchants Association forum?
Ok, I admit, I am not on Facebook yet (though I have to get this done, I need to keep an eye on Burne who is very dear to me and who I highly respect). And I am not twittering, tweeting, twit, twat… whatever the lingo is. Why? Because I heard that this new social media is addictive. I understand that it is important for my business and will focus on this first, but socially, with your friends, how many hours a day do you spend chatting, not on your e-commerce business?
I am not judging, just curious…
October 4th, 2009
written by Cathy
I was talking to a friend tonight and she mentioned that she had a very high cart abandonment on her website. Experts say that ‘high’ is anything over 20% and if your shopping cart is higher, it would be to your financial interest to figure out why.
So I did a little research and found the reasons for consumer cart abandonment. But the number 1 reason is because of high shipping charges.
Other reasons consumers abandon e-commerce shopping carts are because they want to:
compare shopping with other internet shopping sites
lack of money to spend
research for coupons for your site
shop offline
you don’t offer their choice of payment
out of stock at checkout
you do not offer support
concern of credit card security
Because this is such a wide discussion, today I am only going to talk about high shipping charges. So how do you fix this issue? Well the obvious solution is to adjust your shipping charges. Can you revisit your costs and negotiate a better rate with your shipping company. Crunch your numbers folks, get your shipping charges in line with your competitors. This is a very important step to online selling.
Another idea is not to surprise your customer with the charges and have an ‘estimate your shipping charges’ program on your main site, so your customer does not go through the troubles of checking out and then realize that the shipping charges are to high. There are programs (or you can have one written), that shows you who left their shopping cart and you can see if you can save the sale with a phone call or email. Check your shopping cart software to see if they offer either option. I have also seen with companies that have pop up boxes that you can offer a % discount after they bail on your site, just to sway the possible customer come back and complete the sale.
Is FREE shipping expected to consumers? In this economy, it doesnt hurt. Online consumers are not expecting free shipping on every product but they are expecting reasonable shipping charges. You don’t have to offer free shipping for every sale, put a dollar value on it and watch your sales increase.
Because your e-commerce site is so important to you, have outsiders (family, IMA members, customers) go through your checkout process and let them be brutally honest with what their opinion is, as a consumer, and let them tell you what is wrong. It can only help.
September 29th, 2009
Submitted by Pat Pepe
A Perfect Example of “What Not To Do” in Social Networking….
…And The ‘Painful’ Truth of ‘Anti-Social’ Behavior in the Business World
I was reading a recent blog post from Matt Cutts. For the uninitiated, Matt is a well-respected google employee who maintains a widely read blog where he shares his insights on google, search spam and many other topics related to e-commerce, search and business.
The post I was reading had to do with his frustration over a bad experience with US Airways Dividend Miles . Normally I might have skimmed right over that post, but since I too have a ton of US Airways Dividend Miles, I took a look.
The story was very interesting. Matt had a bunch of unused miles that were expiring. Instead of using them to fly, he decided to cash them in for some magazine subscriptions. To make a long story short – none of the 8 magazine subscriptions were filled and he lost his 15,000 Dividend Miles.
Ouch.
Good job, US Airways. Way to take care of your most valuable asset – your repeat customers.
I have an interest in social networking as it relates to businesses and reputation management, so I was curious to see if his blog post had been mentioned anywhere on Twitter. It had – Matt tweeted when he published his blog post and it was re-tweeted about 8 more times.
Then I checked to see how US Airways responded on Twitter to that post and the subsequent Re-tweets.
…..crickets……
Nothing. No response about ANYTHING from US Airways.
US Airways doesn’t have a presence on Twitter. OK, that’s not completely accurate. They have a presence, but it’s a pretty ‘anti-social’ presence. In fact, since US
Airways secured their name on Twitter, they’ve tweeted a total of 3 times. All on the same day which was more than 6 months ago when a US Airways plane landed in the Hudson River in NY. Remember that day?
Once again out of curiosity, I checked to see how many tweets have mentioned US Airways (in a good or bad light) in the last 24 hours. I counted about 40 tweets directed @usairways and an additional 400 or so that mentioned US Airways.
Most were news stories like these:
Some were positive mentions:
(Perfect time 4 yr honeymoon or wedding in the Caribbean. Jetblue, American, USairways gr8 rates)
But most of the ones that were sent to @usairways were negative:
(USAirways is sucky pooh. stuck in Philly on my way to Newark, flight delayed 3hours no reason given, clear skies above)
Not one response from a US Airways employee.
Can I tell you how much they are missing out on here? Where do I even begin? The opportunities to connect with their customers are endless. The chances to right a wrong are being handed to them on a silver platter. But no sign of US Airways. Their employees must be off somewhere munching on all the tasty goodies they always pass out to their customers in Coach.
So now here is where the story gets REALLY GOOD….or EVEN WORSE, if you’re US Airways.
Take a look at US Airways Facebook Fan Page. Apparently, US Airways employees might be in need of some immediate help in the social networking space.
One response from a US Airways staffer to a customer complaint:
Sofia, Im sorry you had to go through that but…. this IS a U.S Airways FAN PAGE and your negative comments aren’t welcome here.. this page is for fans of US Airways and is NOT to be used as a complaint hotline.If you feel so strongly against… us perhaps stay in Canada and fly your local airlines…… THANX.
June 2, 2008 at 8:12am
O….M….G
Can you imagine someone in your company publicly responding to a customer comment like that? And that remark has been left up on that page for over one solid year. I am outraged, and I’m not even related to Doug Parker, CEO of US Airways.
For the record, that ‘don’t let the door hit you on the way out’ remark is one of only 4 comments ever posted by US Airways on their Facebook Fan Page in response to dozens of comments left for them.
Do you get the feeling that US Airways has forgotten to join the rest of the world in the 21st century? Customers are out there talking. They’re talking about businesses. They are probably talking about YOUR business. It is incumbent on businesses to respond (…in a civil manner…) and make every effort to manage (…not destroy…) their reputation.
The employee that responded to that Facebook comment? They should be removed from their position. STAT.
US Airways, repeat after me: We COMMUNICATE with our customers. We DIALOGUE WITH THEM on social networking sites. We DON’T SLAM customers in public; we ACKNOWLEDGE OUR MISTAKES AND CORRECT them. And, above all, we don’t leave our mistakes up on Facebook for the world to see.
Ouch.
September 17th, 2009
The Internet Merchants Association has announced their conference agenda for 2009 in Las Vegas, NV in conjunction with the ASD/AMD Trade Show. There is still plenty of time to register, so be sure to go to www.imalasvegas.com right now and get signed up. You do not want to miss this conference packed full of information for increasing your online sales!
AGENDA: Updated 3/11/09
NOTE – The IMA is still adding more speakers, so times and speakers are subject to change. In addition to the agenda below, there will be a Networking Suite open at Bally’s on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights where you can meet the speakers and ask more questions!
March 16-18 Internet Merchants Assn. Las Vegas register @ , www.imamerchant.org & www.imalasvegas.com Don’t miss out – Register TODAY!
Continue Reading March 5th, 2009
The eBay message boards are filled with posts by sellers about how eBay’s new Best Match has taken seller’s items and made them nearly invisible to buyers. The result, of course, is a decrease in sales.
Trying to adapt to Best Match is a challenge for sellers and although time and energy should be put into maximizing Best Match results another essential course of action for eBay sellers is to rely less on eBay driving buyers to your listings and figuring out ways to drive buyers to your listings yourself.
I have compiled a list of ways to drive buyers to your listings to supplement Best Match. If any readers have any additional methods, please add them to the list.
Google Base Store Connector
Use Google Base Store Connector to get your listings indexed in Google Search results. Here is a link to the free program that will send your eBay listing info to Google: http://base.google.com/base/storeconnector/index.html
Alt Img Tags
This is a little bit of HTML code that you add to the photos that you have within your eBay listing. Search engines can only read text. If you add this little bit of descriptive HTML code to your images, your images have a descriptive text attached to them and this can possibly aid in increasing your listing’s search engine ranking and Google Image Search ranking.
Continue Reading January 26th, 2009
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