| Ricci Street
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Sellers in any market thrive on convenience and imperfect information. That's how airlines, hotels and booksellers price their products. The Internet obliterates the companies' information advantage and hands it over to the consumer. That's what e-commerce is really about: crushing the pricing power of anyone selling a commodity product, which includes most goods and services in this country.
source: How to
Succeed in Business on the Net
by Neil Barsky in Time Digital
What do B2C marketing webs look like? What features do they have? Are there any features that they all have?
Internet.com's Building a Simple Ecommerce Web Site
Get a full storefront, free -- complete with business hosting, merchant gateway, secure shopping cart, auction tools, traffic logs, package tracker, member discount program, technical support, and e-mail.
An addition to sales, a site's features contribute to sustainable competitive advantages in one or more of five areas. You'll find more information at Port 80's Docks:
branding
and partnering
advertising and
promoting
personalizing and
customizing
community building
accessibility,
especially internationalizing
Tip | Because this is a new and rapidly changing activity, be wary of any information more than a year old.
components
that support variety of business processes
highly adaptable;
scalable
(re)used across
diverse technology and application architectures; extensible
In an April / May 2000 ClickZ series, Richard Hoy details nine Essentials a Small Business Needs on the Web.
web
hosting company
web site production
environment
merchant account and
credit card authorization solution
shopping cart
inbound email
management tools
outbound email
management tools
order management
tools
traffic analysis tool
promotional strategy
Marketers:
Learn Your Web Lessons Well
by Kim Brooks
ClickZ, November 13, 2000
Consumers love word of mouth. Design matters. Give away free samples. Be accessible. These are but a few of the lessons the web has to teach marketers working in older media. Smart marketers would do well to pay attention.
The
Buck Starts Here
by Christopher Lindquist
Darwin, November 2001
Ask the right questions now about your e-commerce infrastructure and save your company some hard lessons later.
A complete list of categories of features might look like Component Source's Internet Commerce Toolkit:
The Marketing Tools take banner advertising to new levels. Rule-driven image display and targeting enables messages to be tailored to individual site visitors. The marketing components use a database of banners, grouped into campaigns, and display the most appropriate banner, as determined by a set of rules.
The Database Management Tools enable database-driven web sites to be kept current, and protect vital customer data collected by the site. The tools enable databases maintained independently of the web server, such as might contain product and price information to be efficiently uploaded to a web server without any service interruption.
The System Management Tools provide facilities for automated system monitoring, site integrity checking and remote system control. These tools have been designed explicitly to manage and provide automated problem resolution on web servers that are located outside of an organisation's premises, for example as part of an internet service provider's server farm.
The Site Development Tools provide extensions to Internet Information Server and Active Server Pages. They consist of a number of components that can be used within ASP pages and three filters providing access control, web server error handling facilities and development diagnostic facilities.
The Order Processing Tools enable a web site developer to use an easily programmed "shopping basket" metaphor to capture orders, and securely transmit details of those orders to a central site for processing. Using these tools, an existing mail order operation to be easily extended to encompass the Internet.
The Payment Processing Pack integrates with the Order Processing Tools to ensure that funds are available prior to completing a purchase. The pack provides full support for automated payment processing using SEC-Card from SECPay.
The Cross-Selling Pack extends the capabilities of the Marketing Tools, enabling messages to be presented to site visitors based on their behaviour. Rules that drive the selection of the most appropriate banner to display to site visitors can draw on the contents of a visitors basket, and the purchases that have been made previously, to deliver highly targeted messages to potential customers.
The Web Management Pack enables certain aspects of the Internet Commerce Toolkit to be managed remotely and securely using only a web browser, reducing the need for any direct access to the web server machine.
Ricci Street's Online Store segments it this way:
content | customer service | financial | backend | interface design
Content is why people go to web sites. Content is what they're looking for. Much of it is passive content: brochureware. Brochureware is easy, static, safe. It's already on paper. It behaves sort of like paper, so the lawyers can examine and appraise it and two weeks later, it's still the same. It can be published to the Web and then the marketer, having bowed to progress, can go back to doing the familiar things in the familiar ways. It's a way of getting your feet wet on the Web, which perhaps will turn out to be a fad, after all.
Most marketing webs start as brochureware. A common tool for making it is FrontPage, which looks and feels much like Word, which is like a fancy typewriter, which is comforting.
The promise of the Web is interactive content. In this new media world, there doesn't seem to be much precedent. The lawyers warn about this world, where corporate assets like intellectual property are stolen by millions of teenagers and corporate secrets are available to competitors for the downloading. The risks and liabilities are unknown and thus potentially enormous. The Internet could eat your first-born.
This is the world where experts are trying to apply the old models but finding the experience skewed and chaotic.
Are they waiting for it to mature, to settle down, to learn to behave like old media and traditional marketing? They may wait a long while. They may retire or get fired, first.
Or are they going to develop new models and change the old ones to accommodate marketing on the Web? The lawyers will find it corporately irresponsible. The experts won't get it into their dead-tree textbooks until it has already changed again. Oh, dear.
Beyond brochureware:
you
have a lot of content on your web site
it changes often
many employees
contribute -- marketing, HR, planning
How do you manage that content?
The visitors to the web site have the clicker. Poof, and they're gone. Yahoo's home page is far and away the single most viewed page on the Web. You can make a good argument that its first screen, around 100 square inches, is the most valuable real estate on the planet. Yet the whole point of coming to Yahoo is to be able to leave as quickly as possible.
Let's generalize from that: to get people to come, make it easy for them to leave. To get people to come, give them as many ways as you can for them to leave.
I'm making such a point of it because most marketing webs do the opposite. They try to be as sticky as possible. They don't use off-site links. They try to give you interesting things to see and do.
If we can pretend for a moment that the student is the customer in higher education, then Ricci Street is a customer service web. Teaching professionals without it are high priests; they have only their hundred-dollar textbook/bibles and their oral ministrations, their lectures/sermons.
Ricci Street tears down the walls and throws away the clocks. It enables anywhere anytime education. It gives you thousands of off-site links, reasons to leave. It gives you more stuff to do than you have time for. You can post a message at the Bistro. You can test the cross-browser compatibility of your Parkside Plaza web. You can fill out a form at the Research Lab. You can get your questions answered:
Did
anyone respond to your last Bistro message?
Did your buddy add
that certain image to his Parkside Plaza web?
Did the teacher
record your recently completed assignments on the course web's Reports page?
What if the students really were the customers of higher education and the faculty really tried to serve them? What if your whole MBA curriculum were as integrated as MBA 600 / 604 and if it all were on the Web, if not at Ricci Street then at something like it. Would that be a sustainable competitive advantage for the MBA program?
That's if the students were customers, of course, and they aren't, so don't hold your breath that it might happen.
The challenge for marketing is to do all that customer service plus conduct financial transactions plus deliver physical goods. These needs are sometimes at cross-purposes with the customers' needs.
product reviews and recommendations
customer support and technical support
policy statements, especially returns
market research (online surveys)
Behind the scenes, where the customer doesn't go, are the crucial functions that make a store work. On most org charts, this is known as IT or Information Technology. Almost every business has some kind of computerized telecommunications system, if only an answering machine and PC. Most companies have far more elaborate and expensive in-house computerized systems, from accounting to inventory to e-mail. Maintaining those systems has become an increasing expense and has given rise to the CIO, the chief information officer. Only very recently as all the computers got networked and people learned to use the networks did IT start to show signs of positive ROI in terms of increased productivity.
When one of these in-house systems goes down, so does part of the internal workings of the business. It happens often and is one of the costs of doing business.
When it comes to the Web, keeping the store open 24/7 is seen as more mission-critical than keeping the accounting system up and running 24/7. Thus many companies outsource maintenance of the hardware (mostly PC's but some mainframes), operating system (Unix, Linux, Windows), and server software (Apache or Microsoft). Then there's the whole security problem. So outsourcing -- putting your intellectual property on another company's facilities -- is not a bad idea until you have to make some unfamiliar decisions, for example:
how
do the employees back at the home office regularly update the outsourced
marketing webs?
how
does the company's in-house inventory system keep the outsourced catalog
current?
The only answer is that some marketing has to be done in-house. While a smart company has IT professionals, the better that the marketers can speak geek and do for themselves, the more likely marketing, instead of IT, will drive the business model.
In addition to the site metrics reporting that keeps everyone informed and the strategic analysis that leads to sound decision making, marketers need to know about:
On the Web, the interface is where the customer meets the marketer. The look and feel of the store.
In the traditional world, the rough equivalents range across merchandizing: window dressing, product display, in-store lighting and temperature. That's for brochureware.
For a more interactive online experience, interface design includes the kind of thinking you did about the sales staff's wardrobe, firmness of handshake, twinkle of eye, friendliness of attitude, and sincerity of smile.
Gizmos, Inc.'s, Showroom: Interface Design
from better paper to new media
In my experience, these are stronger for management of brochureware content and back-end reliability. They are weaker for customer service, interactivity, and interface design.
Bigstep.com -- Step-by-Step to Success on the Web
review of Bigstep
Size Matters
by Lisa Morgan
InternetWeek, October 23, 2000
... a small business tool that's easy to use, as well as
access to resources. It's well suited to entrepreneurs and organizations that
are looking for an easy way to set up a company Web site that's not a total
embarrassment.
Bear in mind that Bigstep.com is a tool, and like any other tool, its
effectiveness will ultimately be defined by the way it is applied. Bigstep.com
can help guide you through the basic steps of setting up a Web site, but it
can't make up for poor business strategies or deplorable writing skills.
It only takes five minutes to set up an online store. We'll manage the inventory and shipping, supply products, process credit cards, provide customer service; all at absolutely no cost to you.
A simple, no-risk opportunity for anyone to quickly set up a high quality web storefront.
Create your site on our server, using nothing more than the browser you're using to read this page. Build a store and start taking orders in minutes.
Amazon's zShops
zShops offer hundreds of thousands of new, used, and hard-to-find products from specialty retailers, small businesses, and individuals--things like buffalo steaks, office furniture, used books, maternity clothes, golf clubs, second-hand CDs and videos, car parts, and time-share accommodations at resorts. More than just a collection of goods, zShops is a place where retailers and independent sellers worldwide have a presence.
We are your partner, not a "supplier." We make
money through referrals and partnerships with value-added service providers. If
you don't get traffic, we don't get traffic. If you don't make money, we don't
make money.
Other e-commerce "solutions" charge you hundreds of dollars every
month whether you sell anything or not. Where is their incentive to help you?
They are not your partners, they are your suppliers and they make their money
even if you sell nothing. With freemerchant.com™, you have a partner --
someone with an equal incentive to make your store a success.
Wired-2-Shop. Click on Demo near the bottom.
You control the look, content and language. Instead of having to use standard templates, you build your own. And you don’t need any programming experience. Our true “drag and drop” feature allows you to create sophisticated and powerful online stores with only a PC, an Internet connection, an email account, and a browser.
Easy-to-use tools, marketing and promotion assistance, and personalized support to build, market and maintain online stores. The company's BizBlast Transaction Engine and BizBlast StoreFront Wizard provide users (both sophisticated Web developers and less-technically savvy small business owners and entrepreneurs) with the power and flexibility they need to ensure the long-term success of their Internet presence.
Webmonkey's tutorials in E-Commerce and E-Storefront Options. They will help you understand what to put in the bullet-point marketing plan for your final project.
For when the boss or the professor tells you what do to instead of how to do it:
Father to son: "When Abe Lincoln was your age,
he was studying books by the light of the fireplace."
The son replied: "When Lincoln was your age, he was President."
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