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Alive and Clicking

February 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment

alive and clicking

 

 

I had a great day on the 13th January at the Eagle in Barrow talking to about 70 local business people about e-commerce. The talk was centred around what I believe to be the two greatest misconceptions about launching and growing an e-commerce business today.

1. If I Buy It It Will Sell

2. If I Build It They Will Come

Clearly both statements are Rubbish !

1. I explained about how to merchandise your stock for a website based around actual forecast visor numbers and conversion rates. As a former Burton Group Merchandiser I know a little about how to merchandise for retail. In Department stores its often done by fixed footage, working out the space you have been allocated and the density, (£’s per square foot) to establish average stock holdings required and therefore open to buy.  In multiple retailers where departments can flex its usually done by category sales and weeks cover. With websites it is a combination of conversion and weeks cover.

This is how you work out the stock levels needed  linked so many other factors such as lead time, price and desirability.

2. The second part focused on the premise that 2012 is going to be a tough year and online retailers need to use every trick in the book to increase visitor numbers from the right demographic to maximise conversions and turnover. I gave ’10 ways to supercharge your online business in 2012′!

I’d like to thank Harvey Mason for inviting me to talk at the event.

Some photos of the event – the main page is here: Aliveandclicking

Alive and clicking

Alive and Clicking Audience

 

Alive and Clicking Nigel carr

Making a Point! :)

 

The next event is on March 23 – Alive and Clicking

If you would like me to speak at your event please email me – nigel@shoes.co.uk

 

 

 

Filed Under: Blog, News, Speaking Tagged With: , ,

Johnson and Johnson Kitchens

February 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Wow! what a day – I thought most companies had a good feel for customer service these days but I came across one today who did not care about their customers, they left me so incensed I walked out!

I went to Trafford Park with my wife to see Johnson & Johnson Kitchens. She had been there the previous Friday with my daughter and met with one of the sales people/designers. She phoned him today at 1.30 and they made a plan to meet at 3.30, sounds simple eh?

We arrived on time and the very pleasant girl on the desk said she would inform the salesman/designer. He was with another couple so we had a wander round and waited and waited and …………..waited.

After 35 minutes, ( we were reading old copies of Cheshire Life at this stage), a young guy who had been watching football on his iPad sauntered over and asked if we wanted anything! we explained how long we had waited already and he said it wouldn’t be much longer. Anyway after another 10 minutes we left.

That was 45 minutes waiting for a man who had made an appointment and who wouldn’t even lift his head up to acknowledge a woman he had already met!

Now I accept that it is tricky when you have a customer in front of you and another arrives, but we had made an appointment with him. There was no acknowledgement, no apology, no offer of a cup of coffee or even a glass of water! seemingly we were just expected to wait. When I asked what time they closed, the young guy said, ‘don’t worry ‘xxx’  has a key’! so no thought of how long were had been kept waiting, we just being told that the salesman wouldn’t mind if we, WE, kept him late! priceless!

Needless to say we will not be buying a Kitchen from Johnson &  Johnson!  and… Oh I have emailed him/them to vent my frustration but in my experience people like this actually believe they are in the right, so we will see!

 

Filed Under: Blog, News Tagged With: ,

How Google Panda Farmer Update has Hit Comparison and Article Sites

April 14, 2011 By 3 Comments

Google rolled out its Panda/Farmer update on February the 24th in the US and many ‘content farms’ such as Ezine and Hubpages were hit hard. The update also hit some very large comparison sites such as Shopzilla and Shopping.com.

If you are using any of these sites to place content then you need to be aware that the back links generated from article ‘farms’ have been severely downgraded in an attempt to stop large sites manipulating postions with Google search. Furthermore if you are using comparison sites such as Shopzilla then with their huge drops in traffic it will be much harder to make conversions from these sites.

I would advise anyone suffering to concentrate on the on page SEO of your own site and add content to internal blogs or blogs controlled by you. This is a real wakeup call to lazy site owners who though they could manipulate Google.

Read More Here: http://searchengineland.com/google-rolls-out-its-panda-update-internationally-and-begins-incorporating-searcher-blocking-data-72497

From the article – on April 13th Sistrex reported on the biggest losers – the top ten are listed below.

#
Domain
 Change SISTRIX (before) SISTRIX (after) # KWs (before) # KWs (after)
1 ehow.co.uk -84% 218,37 35,43 381.271 139.687
2 ezinearticles.com -78% 118,45 25,65 267.785 116.644
3 twenga.co.uk -79% 98,96 20,96 153.106 72.996
4 shopzilla.co.uk -77% 99,92 23,40 156.630 89.611
5 hubpages.com -72% 96,35 26,99 206.290 95.460
6 ciao.co.uk -81% 81,01 15,43 125.173 61.286
7 suite101.com -79% 70,98 14,85 175.632 70.548
8 associatedcontent.com -82% 51,16 9,41 186.020 85.507
9 dooyoo.co.uk -80% 50,64 10,38 94.310 40.864
10 comparestoreprices.co.uk -78% 37,68 8,19 66.862 39.633
Filed Under: News, On Page SEO, SEO Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Sports Shoes And Barefoot Running

February 2, 2011 By 1 Comment

There’s an interesting article on the BBC website about how scientists have discovered that Running Shoes may have actually changed the way we run. Well not all of us go running, I would rather swim, far less damage to the knees!

But seriously this opens up a huge can of worms!, can you imagine the amount of money that companies like Nike, Adidas and Puma spend on research to create the perfect running shoe? It is well documented that certain runners prefer to run barefoot, take Zola Budd for example. So do they know something that we don’t?

According to Nature magazine, barefoot runners strike the ground with their fore foot or mid foot whilst runners wearing shoes strike the ground with their cushioned heels. This send shockwaves up the leg that can lead to repetetive stress injury, whereas barefoot runners have developed their own way of running to lesson the pain on impact. I think this research opens up a very big discussion over running shoe design in the future and could lead to some remarkable developments.

When was learning Karate as a kid, we used to run barefoot round the streets in Sale, Cheshire – imagine 25 Karate kids in full outfits plodding along the pavement! I remember well, it was the leader runners  job to inform the rest of the pack of any ‘obstacles’ in the way….it went something like….   ‘Kerb’……………’Glass’…………’Dog Sh*t’……….!

I won’t be running barefoot any time soon :)

Have a great week – read the full article here

Nigel

Filed Under: News Tagged With: , ,