How to Keep Your Customers Happy

What Customers Really Want is a 4-tip article giving your advice on customer service.

1. Under promise, over deliver
2. Hire the right people.
3. Proactive communication.
4. When you make a mistake, apologize.

It’s a small but very useful article.

August 31, 2003 | Tags: | Leave a Comment 

Dressing down sends productivity up

Interesting to read that dressing down sends productivity up. An UK survey has found out that dressing down can send productivity high up. 53 per cent said that dressing down was very good for productivity. Who do you want to show this to?

August 22, 2003 | Tags: | Leave a Comment 

Blogstakes

A new weblog marketing tool called is now available. Blogstakes is a new type of contest where there are 2 winners. The usual contest winner and the referer. So there are always two prizes!

The site started with two contests. One is The Clip-n-Seal Fresh Party Pack which a wonderful engineered product very useful to seal all your daily cereals and other packages.

The product development and maketing was made by texturadesign as an experiment described is this weblog.
Blogstakes will be launching new contests soon.

August 20, 2003 | Tags: | Leave a Comment 

The myth of discoverability

The myth of discoverability is a very nice article which uses real world situations to explain how the Web might work.

August 17, 2003 | Tags: | Leave a Comment 

Users Matter the Most to Ebay

And should matter to you too! According to an article in this week’s Fortune magazine Ebay’s CEO, Meg Whitman, the women behind the largest auction site in the world is doing a hell of a job by investing in the site’s biggest asset, it’s users. Ebay has introduced such strong features has Ebay’s University (so they educate users) to launching new and desirable utilities. It’s 28 million (and growing!) active US users (61 million registered users) and billions of transactions a year make the company more valuable than McDonalds or Boing.

It structure is very simple. With only 5000 employees (1000 in technology)Ebay manages and collects fees in billions of transactions made on it’s site. It’s a simple services company with no inventory, no manufacturing, only service. Yet is 8th in the Fastest 100 companies in the US. Just like Amazon, ebay is trying to grow overseas where only 30% of it’s revenue comes from.

According to the article ebay is supercompetitive because it fine tunes it’s categories and it’s 35.000 sub-categories doing specialized marketing in almost all it’s niches competing in this way with every possible specialized auction site in the world. It competes at low and high-level but has no strong opposition since the contenders have been trying to capture market elsewhere: Amazon has focused it’s auction on books and Yahoo is catching the Japanese market. For me the questions are: What lessons can we learn from ebays community building? and How can ebay’s business model be applied elsewhere?
One lesson we can learn is how giving power to the user has built one of the biggest and most profitable businesses in the world.

August 16, 2003 | Tags: | Leave a Comment 

Making Money From Your Website

Ben Hammersley has written a nice article on how can a website owner make money from it’s popularity or content. It talks about how micropayments are a solution to the selling content problem. How another good choice are blogads or AdSense that allow you to run context-driven text ads. CafePress is also mentioned because of it’s new book publishing service that will allow anyone to publish a book and selling it to everyone without going through publishers. Let’s see how they control the copyright problem since it’s next to impossible to compare each and every word in a text.

August 15, 2003 | Tags: | Leave a Comment 

Open Source Ideas

idea a day is a mighty cool site! The site will publish a fresh new idea each day for you own pleasure. The ideas published are even copyright-free. This is Open Source Ideas which you can freely use, distribute or change at your own need. Do you have any ideas?

August 15, 2003 | Tags: | Leave a Comment 

From Market to Fridge with a Mouse Click

The US grocery market is worth $400 million. That’s a lot of cash! Despite early failures new ventures are taking the online market one step further. Specialists estimate that 3% to 6% of grocery shoppers will do it online.

We know there?s a small percentage of the overall shopper population that wants the convenience of online shopping and are willing to pay a delivery fee for that convenience

But What makes a winning Net grocer? Freshdirect seems to know the answer and has already captured part of the NY market anxious for quality food and on-time delivery. The article From Market to Fridge with a Mouse Click concludes:

We know there?s a small percentage of the overall shopper population that wants the convenience of online shopping and are willing to pay a delivery fee for that convenience.

This times grocery online is here to stay. It’s not going to be as big as brick-and-mortar just yet but it does have a lot of clients now and will continue to grow in future generations.

August 14, 2003 | Tags: | 1 Comment 

Business is about people

I read an article by Dirk Knemeyer that talks about the most important business asset: People.

It is really pretty simple: you must understand people to design and brand a successful product. You must understand people to create a healthy organization that inspires loyalty and productivity. In order to create revenue you must understand people. In order to operate an effective organization with low costs you must understand people. People are the common denominator

It’s seems so easy to follow these simple ideas yet companies do not apply them. Besides that we can again conclude that we have to keep learning not only about technology but about people. Sociology works very well side by side with technology. Together they are a strong competitive advantage. Use them.

August 11, 2003 | Tags: | Leave a Comment 

10 (of 20) Tips to Minimize Shopping Cart Abandonment

Bryan Eisenberg writes the first of a 2-part article and gives us some tips on avoiding shopping cart abandonment:

1. How many steps are in your checkout process?
2. Include a progress indicator on each checkout page.
3. Provide a link back to the product.
4. Add pictures inside the basket.
5. Provide shipping costs early in the process.
6. Show stock availability on the product page
7. Make it obvious what to click next.
8. Make editing the shopping cart easy.
9. Make it your fault.
10. Show them you’re a real entity.

Small steps. Big ROI.

August 11, 2003 | Tags: | Leave a Comment