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Affiliate Selling

June 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

eCommerce for beginners

Affiliate selling programs have been described as ‘making money whilst you’re asleep’. You join a scheme – free of charge – run by a major e-Commerce retailer. Then you put links on your website to their products – and when visitors to your site click through to theirs, you get a commission. It’s as simple as that. This might seem too good to be true – but the logic is quite simple. You are being paid a bonus for sending customers to somebody else’s site. Some pay a small commission [$0.01] just for passing on the visitor, others pay more [15% of the price] if the visitor actually makes a purchase.

Affiliate SellingSome people make a living from this new type of enterprise, but the majority are happy to make modest commissions which pay for their online overheads. Helmstetter and Vetivier start with a very upbeat account of web developments in the last few years, the amazing rate of change, and the fairly safe prediction that these rates will continue increasing. One of their most powerful apercues, it seemed to me, was that the rate of interconnectivity is likely to increase – and this is good news for subscribers to affiliate programs. For instance, did you know that some search engines now rate your site’s value by how many others have links to it?

Helmstetter (who seems to be lead author) outlines the different types of affiliate programs, and helpfully lists both the advantages and disadvantages of each. This will be very useful for beginners who are in the process of setting up in this new form of business.

The system works best if your site and the parent company are well matched – though it’s true that some people have constructed successful sites that are nothing more than a collection of links to various paymasters – and you can have more than one.

The good thing about the advice given here is that it explains all the options – from low-commission links, through auctions, to multi-level portals. You should have no difficulty working out which is the best one for you.

They explain very carefully how to make the best choice, point out the hidden problems, and list a huge range of resources and web sites dealing with affiliate programs. They even show you how to start up an affiliates program even if you don’t have a web site.

How can this be done? Well, you either use email, ready-made web page templates, or assemble collections of clips (recommended URLs, containing your code) which you offer for others to use. You can also establish a ‘virtual storefront’. These are ready-made web sites which will set you up in e-Commerce within a few minutes. Basically, you customise the pages with products and advertising of your own choosing – though the companies which promote these services will even provide you with sample products.

What makes this book so good is that the sort of people it is aimed at will surely welcome this hands-on, step-by-step approach, with a minimum of technicalities and jargon. There is even a chapter on how and where to position items on a page in order to maximise click-through rate, and like the rest it is offered in a non-dogmatic manner. In fact they repeatedly encourage affiliates to ‘stop fretting, and give things a try’ – on the basis that you should experiment and test before committing to a major strategy.

This is certainly the most thorough and comprehensive book on the subject of affiliate programmes I have seen to date. Read it, spend no more than a couple of hours at the keyboard following their advice – and you could launch yourself into successful e-commerce.

© Roy Johnson 2002

Affiliate Selling   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Affiliate Selling   Buy the book at Amazon US


Greg Helmstetter and Pamela Metivier, Affiliate Selling: Building Revenue on the Web, New York/London: John Wiley, 2000, pp.346, ISBN: 0471381861


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Filed Under: e-Commerce Tagged With: Affiliate selling, Business, e-Commerce

Amazon Hacks

May 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools

This book tells you how to get information from Amazon; how to contribute reviews, recommendation lists, and product advice; how to sell stuff; how to make money as an affiliate; and how to harness the power of Amazon’s enormous database using tools they will provide – all for free! There are now lots of opportunities to sell, auction, and broker goods at Amazon. It’s like being in eCommerce with all the headaches taken out.

Amazon Hacks Paul Bausch tells you how to do it – using Amazon’s marketplace and Zshops systems. The first part is about how to use and make contributions to the ‘Amazon community’ – how to submit book reviews, make reading suggestion lists, and send gifts to your friends. All of this can be done straight away, with no waiting or steep learning curves. The second part is how to sell through Amazon – which you can do by marketing what you have, or finding out what other people want. And this is either by straight sales or by auctions.

Next comes the affiliates programme, whereby you get a commission for every customer you send to Amazon – so long as they make a purchase. Some people have established full time jobs on the strength of this scheme. It’s fairly simple, and all the steps are explained.

The last part of the book is an account of Amazon Web Services. These are free advanced tools and programs they offer for data recovery – XML, PHP, XSLT, databases, and SOAP. All the coding necessary for embracing these hacks is included.

Because Amazon lists everything about you – the books, CDs, or whatever you have bought or wish to sell – and because they allow you access to this information – you can even call up listings of products onto your own web site. This includes both what you want to sell, but it can also include lists of what other people want to buy.

Amazon are exploring innovations in eCommerce, even making their databases available to potential competitors. I suspect that anyone who follows all the opportunities offered here could make profits from these new departures.

If there is one small drawback, it’s that he doesn’t discuss the criticisms which many affiliates level against Amazon. They seem to offer more and more opportunities, yet squeeze the bonuses tighter and tighter. It’s a cat and mouse world where clever entrepreneurs have to stay one step ahead of the game. But at least you can try it all out for free!

This is a book which will appeal to Amazon users, anyone who deals in books, music, and all the other products which Amazon retails – and in particular those who would like to join Amazon affiliates and need help in getting set up.

© Roy Johnson 2003

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Paul Bausch, Amazon Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools, Sebastapol CA: O’Reilly, 2003, pp.280, ISBN: 0596005423


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Filed Under: e-Commerce, Technology Tagged With: Affiliate selling, Amazon, Business, e-Commerce, Technology

Associate and Affiliate Programs

June 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

practical guide to ‘making money whilst you’re asleep’

Associate and affiliate programs are a new form of e-commerce in which you don’t have to sell anything. How does it work then? Well, you put links on your website which send visitors to the site of a major player such as Amazon, Fatbrain, or CD-NOW. If the visitor buys something, you get a small percentage – between five and twenty percent. As Daniel Gray puts it in this cheap and cheerful guide to the subject – ‘Affiliate marketing is a way to be paid for wearing a T-shirt with a logo’.

Associate and Affiliate ProgramsBut although most affiliate programs pay only a small percentage, it’s a quick and easy way to put some hard cash in your pocket with a little effort and no risk at all. Dan Gray even makes money from a site which specialises in DIY garden sheds! This quirkiness is reflected in the way he writes – jumping from one metaphor to another. But he knows his stuff on how the schemes work.

He offers sound advice on the technicalities of submitting to search engines and interpreting log files. I expected him to say a little more on the issue of how much comes in each month, but he does reveal that books are the best sellers; conversion rates of one percent are normal; and he offers an analysis of sites which have blossomed using affiliate programs – CD-NOW, Amazon, BarnesandNoble, and the BabyCenter.

The latter part of the book is devoted to what he calls the Top100 Directory. This is a very useful listing all those companies operating an affiliates program, with full details of how to contact them, what conditions apply, and how much they pay out. On some programs you can even buy through your own links. If you are going to buy that CD anyway, why not get another 20% off the discounted price? But beware! Amazon for instance don’t allow this and might kick you off its list for infringements.

This isn’t an in-depth view of associate programs, but there’s enough information here to get you started. Click through to Amazon now and order this book – then you can see how the system works 🙂

© Roy Johnson 2001

Associate and Affiliate Programs   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Associate and Affiliate Programs   Buy the book at Amazon US


Daniel Gray, Associate and Affiliate Programs on the Net: turning clicks into cash, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000, pp.227, ISBN: 0071353100


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Filed Under: e-Commerce Tagged With: Affiliate selling, Amazon, Associate and Affiliate Programs, Business, e-Commerce

Blown to Bits

June 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

business strategies and the new technology

This book seeks to explain how technological developments are impacting in the world of eCommerce. We’ve all heard about the IT revolution, but where is it actually having an effect? Evans and Wurster start with the cautionary tale of Encyclopedia Britannica, whose business model was wrong-footed when Encarta was launched on CD. A strategy almost two hundred years old was overturned in the space of five years. You can now buy Britannica on disk for the price of a paperback book. The lesson is that it’s suicide to rest on your laurels when faced with new technology. Their second major point is what they call the playoff between ‘richness’ and ‘reach’.

Blown to BitsYou can either deliver information-rich data to a few people, or lightweight general ads to many. These appear to be mutually exclusive strategies – though Amazon manage to do both at the same time. They are essentially IT optimists, because they believe that access to information will promote more efficient competition. “the emergence of universal, open standards will … accelerate the demise of hierarchical structures and their proprietary information systems”. Whether this is true or not is still a matter for e-Commerce conjecture.

In the era of the IT revolution, the knowledge we need to enrich information is available to us all – free of charge. Therefore, as they argue, “Shifting the trade-off between richness and reach melts the informational glue that bonds business relationships”.

As you can see, you have to be prepared for a mode of expression which combines abstractions and the jargon of business and management studies:

This shaped the horizontally integrated multidivisional corporation, held together by a logic that transcended the business unit.

I’ve read that statement several times, but I still don’t know what it means. It’s hard to stick with this kind of opaque and abstract language. But if you can, it’s worth it – because they do deal with important general principles – though it’s a great relief when they occasionally come to discuss a practical example.

They look at newspapers and banking as examples of business models which are now vulnerable to the new technology. For instance, those people who use personal banking systems are small in percentage terms, but they are the richest, and account for 75% of banking profits. What does this mean? It means that banking is vulnerable to changes brought about by software engineering.

They explore that buzzword of the new e-Commerce – ‘disintermediation’ (the removal of the middle man) using the example of online shopping. Yet no sooner has the middleman gone than he comes back again as the ‘navigator’ – that is, somebody who acts as a guide and as an advisor amidst the plethora of choices available to the consumer.

The general lesson boils down to this. Access to information and the transforming power of new technology puts traditional business methods under threat: yet at the same time it opens up new possibilities for those wishing to take them.

This book has become a set text on an Open University technology course that I teach. The students find it hard going, but all of them in my group have grasped the ideas behind it – and finished the course with successful Web essays outlining eCommerce plans.

© Roy Johnson 2000

eCommerce   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Philip Evans and Thomas S. Wurster, Blown to Bits: How the New Economics of Information Transforms Strategy, Boston (MA): Harvard Business School Press, 2000, pp.259, ISBN: 087584877X


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Filed Under: e-Commerce, Techno-history Tagged With: Blown to Bits, e-Commerce, Techno-history, Technology

Content: Copyright and DRM

December 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future

Cory Doctorow is a young Canadian freelance writer and web entrepreneur who lives in London. He’s an editor of Boing-Boing and former director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; he writes science fiction novels, and he gives his work away free of charge – yet makes a living from his writing. How can it be done? That’s one of the things he explains here. Content: Copyright and DRM is a collection of speeches, essays, and articles he has produced in the last few years, proselytising in favour of open source software, against digital rights management (DRM) systems, against censorship, on copyright, and in favour of the free exchange of information, unhindered by state controls or commercial prohibitions.

Content: Copyright and DRMAt their most fervent, his arguments come across like those of a students’ union activist – but he’s brave. He speaks against Digital Rights Management (DRM) to an audience at Microsoft. The reason he’s a successful journalist is that he understands new media technology, and he has a gift for wrapping up his arguments in a vivid and succinct manner:

Books are good at being paperwhite, high-resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it into your IM session or turn it into a page-a-day mailing list.

He has a racy and amusing journalistic style. He writes in short, almost epigrammatic statements with a no-holds-barred attitude to any potential opposition.

As Paris Hilton, the Church of Scientology, and the King of Thailand have discovered, taking a piece of [embarrassing] information off the Internet is like getting food colouring out of a swimming pool. Good luck with that.

Some of the items are quite short – quick reprints of web pages from the Guardian technology section – but they are all pertinent to the issues of creativity and new media. Why for example does the best eCommerce site in the world (Amazon) want to control what you do with your Kindle downloads? Doctorow argues that these are short-sighted policies which prevent the spread of information and the creation of new developments.

He’s gung-ho about the business of eBooks and eCommerce. He makes his books available free as downloads on the Internet, confident that this will result in more sales of the printed book. There’s no actual proof that it results in more sales – but he’s happy with the results, and so is his publisher, and the publicity gives him income from other sources, such as journalism and speaking engagements.

Having said that, more than 300,000 copies of his first novel were downloaded for free, resulting in 10,000 printed books sold. As he argues, that’s like thirty people picking up the book and looking at it in a bookstore for every one who made a purchase. But the thirty pickups cost almost nothing, and I think many authors would be very happy with sales of ten thousand.

[It should be remembered that the average full time writer makes approximately £3,000-5,000 a year – and if you look at that in terms of a forty hour week, it’s less than £2.50 per hour.]

The sheer range of his subjects is truly impressive. There’s a chilling insider report from a committee discussing DRM, an essay on a sub-genre of science fiction writing called fanfic, and even a satirical piece calling into question the limitations of meta-data.

He’s at his strongest on the subject of copyright – and that includes the rights of the person who buys the book, the film, or the MP3 music file. The author has the right to be paid for selling it to you, but you have the right to do with it (almost) whatever you wish.

He has any number of interesting things to say about the nature of eBooks – from their apparent problems, their multiple formats, and their malleability, to the issues surrounding copyright. And the encouraging thing is that he writes not just in theory but as a working writer who is exploring the eBook business and what it can do – for both authors and readers.

If you want to know what’s happening at the sharp end of digital publication and new ideas about the relationships between authors and their readers – do yourself a favour and listen to what he has to say. You might not agree with it all, but it will give you plenty to be thinking about.

copyright   Buy the book at Amazon UK

copyright   Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2009


Cory Doctorow, Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future, San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2008, pp.213, ISBN: 1892391813


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Filed Under: e-Commerce, Journalism, Media, Open Sources, Publishing, Theory Tagged With: Business, Copyright, Digital Rights Management, DRM, e-Commerce, Media, Open Sources, Publishing

Creating eBooks

May 31, 2009 by Roy Johnson

complete guide to e-book publishing – on a budget

Creating eBooks offers distinct advantages to writers. You can publish whatever you wish; it doesn’t cost much; you can start small; there are no printing, storage, or postage costs; and you can control the whole process from your back bedroom. It’s true that there are also problems of which format to choose and what to do about copying, but technical solutions to these problems are emerging rapidly. Chris Van Buren and Jeff Cogswell address all these issues, and provide you with all the information you need to make a start.

Creating eBooksThey include a survey of the e-publishing business; planning and creating an e-book; getting the book published; finance and copyright; and a selection of personal success stories. The variety of e-book readers and file formats is explored fully, giving a reasonably even-handed account of the advantages and drawbacks of each one. They cover GlassBook, Acrobat, Rocketbook, and Softbook, as well as Microsoft’s Reader which has caught up after a late start.

They also discuss print on demand (POD) in a lot of detail, pointing out that some authors even give away their e-books, calculating that it will create a demand for sales of the print version. En passant they point out that despite all the obvious novelties in e-books, the most commercially successful business models are those which are gradually merging with traditional book publishing.

They also give a detailed account of how the new e-publishing industry works, and how important it is for authors and publishers to know about such things as digital object identifiers (DOI) and meta-data descriptions. The importance of XML becomes apparent at this point. Describing data in a general, universal language makes it more useable, re-useable, and transferable from one form to another.

Why is XML important? Because this is the manner in which electronic books will be described in the future. The truth is that writing e-books is relatively easy. This part of the process involves skills many people already possess. It’s the promotion and marketing of them which is difficult – and will be new to most folk.

They describe all the options and methods of copyright, encryption-protection, and digital rights – then they suggest that we wait and see. Their argument is that we are more frightened of people swapping free copies than we need to be.

One of the more interesting features of the advice they give is that it’s suitable either for individuals with just one book to market, or for people who might wish to set up as publishers, ready to promote several titles (which they argue can be done almost as easily as one).

You will also learn a lot about the economics and business practices of the traditional book publishing trade – on which so much of the e-book world is based. There are also in-depth tutorials on copyright and the small print of writer-publisher contracts.

As usual with the excellent Topfloor ‘Poor Richard’ series, every chapter is packed with recommendations for online resources – many of which are low-budget or free.

There’s also a useful list of e-book publishers and the literary genres they handle. Anybody who is interested in the e-book phenomenon – whether as writer, publisher, or both – needs to understand the issues discussed here.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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Chris Van Buren and Jeff Cogswell, Poor Richard’s Creating E-Books, Lakewood (CO): Topfloor Publishing, 2001, pp.317, ISBN: 1930082029


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Designing Web Usability

July 12, 2009 by Roy Johnson

provocative and radical examination of good web design

Jakob Nielsen is the number one guru of ‘Web usability’ – mainly because he invented the term. What this expression means in a general sense is the degree to which web sites have been designed with the needs of users in mind – as distinct from those of the designer or the site owner. Nielsen is former distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems, and he has been writing on hypertext, navigation, and Internet engineering for the last decade. Designing Web Usability is part one of a two-volume major statement of his theories on web design.

Designing Web UsabilityHe expresses his views in a blunt and uncompromising manner. This is a bracing, indeed challenging book to read – but it is packed with reflections, principles, tips, and design theory on just about every possible aspect of web site design. He backs up his theory with the results of ‘usability testing’ and plenty of well illustrated, closely analysed real life examples, in many of which major companies have their sites held up for rigorous criticism.

His main priority is the creation of fast downloading pages (‘speed must be the overriding design criterion’) on the basis that people simply will not wait. Ten seconds is the average maximum, it would seem. To this end page size should be kept below 35K, and he’s severely critical of big graphics. (‘Remove graphic; increase traffic. It’s that simple’.) Similarly, he’s quite firm on the question of using frames: ‘Just say No’.

There are good arguments to back up all these assertions – but also occasional puzzles. He seems to take a radical and scientific line when he argues that a page is inefficient because only sixty percent of the screen is devoted to product and navigation. But then in the next breath he admits that good design might include ‘white space’ – that is, unused screen real estate. There is no explanation of where one consideration ends and the other begins. He also makes the radical claim that HTML Standard 1.0 should be the web author’s common denominator, but he is quite happy to discuss Cascading Style Sheets [supported only by version 4.0 browsers and above]. But these are minor problems: most of the time I was swept along by his infectious sense of intellectual exhilaration.

He argues for well-annotated outbound links, on the basis that each pointer towards useful information adds quality to your site. There are also interesting tips on links, such as not trying to link everybody to your home page. There’s a strong temptation to do this – because you would naturally prefer every visitor to explore your site in full. But there is no reason why they should tolerate searching your site when they have been referred on the promise of something specific.

On writing for the web he favours brevity, content chunking [short paragraphs] and accuracy – on the basis that Content is King. As he puts it in his idiosyncratic prose style, we should ‘write for scannability’. For someone whose message is to design for maximum usability, his language is occasionally a little opaque. He uses terms such as ‘instantiated’, ‘best-fit regression line’, ‘optimal user experience’ and ‘hedonic wage model’. But once again, this quirkiness is vastly outweighed by the density of good advice packed into every page.

Advanced web site designers will be interested in what he has to say about the use of audio, video, animation, and even 3D effects – yet he also has insightful things to say about some of the smallest and apparently mundane elements of a web page. It’s amazing what subtle nuances he wrings from his meditation on the choice of words for a page title for instance – something I imagine most people hardly give a second thought.

Beginners will appreciate his advice on matters such as creating good domain names for new businesses, whilst advanced users are catered for in sections which discuss the integration of your site with a search engine and the techniques for creating dynamic pages which change their content in response to customer demand.

He is unremittingly on the side of the user rather than the site owner or designer. In this sense he’s the very opposite of design and graphics guru David Siegel – arguing extreme functionality over aesthetic form.

We still need more sites to base their information architecture on the customer’s needs instead of the company’s own internal thinking.

On large scale sites, he has some interesting points to make regarding the distinctions between intranets and extranets, and he deals comprehensively with issues of designing for international audiences, for users with disabilities, and for Web TV. He ends with some predictions on likely trends over the next few years, reminding us that despite any increases in audience and bandwidth, the vast majority will be low-end users for whom the prime concern is download time.

There have recently been criticisms in some design circles that Jakob Nielsen is too dogmatic and that his theories are based on the commercial demands of the Internet. Some of this may well be true, but anybody who has the slightest interest in web pages, site design, and information architecture should read this book. I feel quite confident that it is destined to become a classic, and personally, I look forward to the next volume, which is going to tell us ‘How To Do It’. He’s even got a provisional title – Ensuring Web Usability – and lists it for us in his section of recommended reading.

© Roy Johnson 2002

Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Jakob Nielsen, Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, Indianapolis, Ind: New Riders, 2000, pp.420, ISBN: 156205810X


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E-Commerce User Experience

July 12, 2009 by Roy Johnson

guide to making eCommerce sites more efficient

Web guru Jakob Nielsen teamed up with design maven Donald Norman to form a consultancy which now dominates the business of Web ‘usability’. E-Commerce User Experience is a company report they have produced which offers guidelines on how to make e-commerce sites more efficient. The suggestions they make are based on findings from detailed studies of twenty e-commerce sites, with users in the United States and Europe. The sites tested are typical e-Commerce sites – clothes, flowers, books, furniture, toys, and CDs. Companies range from Boo, Sears, Disney, and eToys, to Herman Miller. The main issues covered include how to sell goods and services, how to build trust with customers, and how to display product information.

E-Commerce User ExperienceOther important issues include trading across national boundaries, and making the ordering transaction as smooth as possible. The testing methodology is meticulously documented, and in line with current thinking on quality testing, the emphasis is on small groups carefully watched – not mass numbers. It throws down the gauntlet to his critics. What he’s saying is – ‘This is what users actually do and want. Can you prove otherwise?’

Nielsen even gives you advice on how to do your own usability testing – and how to cut corners to make it cheaper than the very service he offers. In other words, he follows his own principles of ‘show the customer what’s available’. This is an approach which inspires confidence in the user – and it does the same for his readers.

He deals with issues which are very basic, and yet which can be difficult to do properly – such as how to categorise topics on a site. Do CD-ROMs belong under ‘entertainment’ or ‘electronics’ – or both? How to classify information requires that you have analysed your bank of data closely, and conceptualised the connections between its items.

On some of his recommendations you might be tempted to think ‘But that’s common sense’. For instance – ‘Make it clear how much products cost’. But when he examines the sample sites, it’s interesting how they often don’t deliver this information. Prices are often concealed until late in the checkout process.

He’s very thorough on how search results should be displayed – and in particular ‘failed results’. Any eBusiness which carries a lot of different stock items needs to think this issue through carefully. There’s also a detailed examination of the heart of any eCommerce site – the shopping basket. Every click, box, and link is examined for its relevance and efficiency.

He follows the policy of comparing eCommerce sites with physical bricks and mortar stores – which is reasonable, because these are the real competition. Some people are bound to complain that Nielsen’s paradigm is entirely commercial, arguing that there are Web sites where the ‘experience’ is paramount. His reply will be to point to his title – this is e-Commerce. But in fact the lessons we can learn from this can meaningfully inform designers of all kinds of sites.

Nielsen’s approach forces you to consider every smallest detail of the on-screen experience from the user’s point of view. This means clear labelling and navigation, intelligent page design, and thoughtful information architecture. Show graphics of your products – close-up pictures giving details. Arrange shopping carts so that the customer choices on colour, size, and other variables is made before the actual check out.

Don’t be surprised by the high price tag. What you’re paying for here is an industrial strength professional business report. Anybody working in eCommerce will profit from its recommendations. It’s packed with first-hand experience, well illustrated with real-life examples, and the advice offered is based on rigorous testing.

As one of his enthusiastic reviewers at Amazon says – ‘Anybody contemplating a serious e-Commerce site will find their investment in this report repaid ten times within the first year’s trading’. I think that might also be said for any serious Web designers or design studios.

© Roy Johnson 2002

E-Commerce User Experience   Buy the book at Amazon UK

E-Commerce User Experience   Buy the book at Amazon US


Jakob Nielsen et al, E-Commerce User Experience, Fremont (CA): Nielsen Norman Group, 2001, pp.389, ISBN: 0970607202


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Filed Under: e-Commerce Tagged With: Business, e-Commerce, E-Commerce User Experience, Jakob Nielsen, Online selling, Usability, Web design

E-mail Publishing

July 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

complete guide to electronic publishing on a budget

Lots of people now have websites, but are they reaching lots of customers? In the main – no. And the reason? Well, how does anybody know a site exists? Why should they go there when there are lots of others doing the same thing? And who’s got the time anyway? Chris Pirillo argues that e-mail can be a more effective way of reaching customers than the Web. And he might be right. Many people pin all their hopes on a few HTML pages stuck up on a server (which he describes as being like opening a hamburger stand in a dead-end street). On the other hand, almost everybody reads their e-mail, so why not use it as a vehicle for publishing instead?

E-mail PublishingSome of the more popular e-mail newsletters have 200-400,000 regular subscribers. He outlines the possibilities – discussion groups, bulletins, and announcement lists – but it’s the free e-mail newsletter which is at the heart of this book. He takes you through all the technicalities of how to run one. ISP registration; mailing programs; list management software [it’s still possible to do most of this free, by the way] subscribing and unsubscribing; and how to deal with bounced messages and address changes. The approach is direct, there’s a reassuring tone, and his advice is based on first-hand experience – which follows the very practical approach of these guides from TopFloor.

This is most definitely not a get-rich-quick manual. In fact many of the successful ventures he describes don’t make any money from their newsletters – though they might from associated activity, such as consultancies and advertising. In fact the odd thing, as he observes, is that there might be a case for creating a website which compliments a newsletter.

The latter part of the book is a series of essays by other successful newsletter entrepreneurs: Peter Kent, founder of TopFloor publishing; Adam Boettiger who describes running a discussion list; Fred Langa who bravely reveals the nightmare of running a list during a series of recursive mailbounce loops; and Randy Cassingham, who made his newsletter This Is True into a full time job:

Everybody thought I was crazy; they didn’t see how I could make money by giving my column away for free over the Internet. I replied that I ought to be able to quit my day job in two years, and then went home that night an expanded my notes into a business plan. That plan has remained virtually unchanged and, virtually two years to the day later, I quit my day job, moved to Colorado, and went to work full time on This is True.

There are also several useful appendices: list service providers (Lyris is the current favourite); mailing list software (LISTSERV, Majordomo); resources for electronic publishing; e-mail programs; mailing list e-mail commands (such as unsubscribing and requesting a weekly digest of messages); and fifty golden tips for e-mail publishers.

He’s gung-ho, but doesn’t hide the fact that it’s all a lot of hard work. However, if you follow his instructions, you could be up and running in a few days. But what happens if your newsletter is so successful that the technical management of it becomes a pain? Answer – subscribe to a list management service. He gives a comprehensive list of questions a potential subscriber should be prepared to ask in making a selection.

So although the book appears to be targeted on a small audience, it is one which might expand rapidly as soon as people wake up to the fact that e-mail is what he calls the ‘undiscovered form of electronic commerce’. This is an excellent addition to the best-selling series of TopFloor’s ‘Poor Richard’ guides to digital enterprise.

© Roy Johnson 2000

E-mail Publishing   Buy the book at Amazon UK

E-mail Publishing   Buy the book at Amazon US


Chris Pirillo, Poor Richard’s E-mail Publishing: Creating Newsletters, Bulletins, Discussion Groups, and Other Powerful Communication Tools, Colorado: TopFloor, 1999, pp.334, ISBN: 0966103254


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Filed Under: e-Commerce, Publishing Tagged With: e-Commerce, E-mail Publishing, Email, Newsletters, Publishing

E-volve-or-Die.com

July 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

eBusiness techniques and strategies for success

Mitchell Levy preaches the simple message of all eCommerce books – “At the most basic level, online customers expect service, speed, and easy access”. In fact the overall message of E-volve-or-Die.com is that the customer must come first. He certainly explains how eCommerce works at a practical level, with lots of real life examples. It’s a world of constant experimentation, collaborating with the right partners, and keeping the customer at he centre of every decision. Part one deals with the transition from the industrial to the digital age; part two is how to form and implement a business plan; part three deals with marketing; and part four is about shifting markets, surviving, and e-volving into the future.

E-volve-or-Die.comIt’s all expressed in an upbeat, gung-ho style which sometimes slips over into enthusiastic cliche – ‘E-commerce is here to stay’ and ‘Thinking outside the box’ – but on the whole his writing is clear and vigorous. Yet it does seem rather perverse to insist that eCommerce be called ‘a holistic Internet-enabled entity’. He deals mainly with big businesses such as eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo! (all of them one time risky start-ups) but the principles are the same even for small businesses.

What most people will not be aware of in eCommerce is how heavily it relies on partnerships, affiliate programmes, and all sorts of new intermediary trading – as well as the new business opportunities created by payment mechanisms, reminder services, portals, and traffic monitoring.

Some of his larger management strategies make big business sound a bit like some form of economic Boy Scout utopia, with everyone on the payroll pulling together with no such thing as friction or rivalry in sight. The rest is sensible advice, and his proposals are backed up with evidence.

For the most ambitious readers, he outlines the issues and opportunities of establishing a global presence, and he shows how to make the important decisions in focussing on your core business abilities and ‘outsourcing the rest’.

At the sharp end of serving the customer is establishing a customer database – to which all employees should have access. The other element which is both new and yet a constant of eCommerce is change.

Don’t make a five year but a one year business plan – and be prepared to revise it after six months. Nothing stays still on the Net.

People with small business sites will be glad to know that he offers plenty of tips on how to make your site more effective – all of which is elaborated on the book’s own web site at www.ECnow.com – and he ends with a series of real life case studies of companies who have successfully embraced the new opportunities.

This book will be of interest to students and teachers of business studies, commercial site managers, and anybody who wants to take a look at the practical consequences of launching into eCommerce.

© Roy Johnson 2001

E-volve-or-Die.com   Buy the book at Amazon UK

E-volve-or-Die.com   Buy the book at Amazon US


Mitchell Levy, E-volve-or-Die.com, Indianapolis (IA) New Riders, 2001, pp.324, ISBN: 07357102871


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Filed Under: e-Commerce Tagged With: Business, e-Commerce, E-volve-or-Die.com, Online selling

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