With the increase of online shopping, competition is getting more fierce by the day. There is no doubt that offering the best customer service will put your company one step ahead of the competition.
After the huge success of Zappos.com, many internet startups are trying to follow the “best service” rule. But, is it really that easy?
By working with many ecommerce companies along with my own company, I have witnessed in first hand, how hard and costly it can be to try to run a company with great service.
Business planning and forecasting is the key before implementing an important service decision. Most of the business owners are pretty good at forecasting. Before implementing a new service option such as free overnight shipping or a 365 days return policy, it is not rocket science to come up with all the variables, and forecast how this new policy will impact your business both financially and from other aspects of the business.
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Today is Sunday, August 10th 2009 and I am at Affiliate Summit East in New York City.
This year, instead of taking offline notes, I have decided to take all of my notes right here at kirtok.com. This is going to be my first live blogging event. Let’s see how this will go. (I will be adding pictures and videos later on).
It’s 12.08pm, and the first session of Affiliate Summit is starting in a minute.
Mike Allen, President of Shopping-Bargains.com will be presenting, and I believe Kris Jones of Pepperjam will be managing the session.
Dynamic Shopping Session Has Started
After opening remarks by Kris Jones, Mike Allen has taken the stage.
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Do you read the customer reviews of a specific product before purchasing it? Do negative reviews affect your purchasing decision? Negative customer reviews is a widely discussed topic for e-commerce, let’s take a look at how we can create some great value from negative customer reviews.
Amazon is the e-commerce leader for a reason. When Amazon started promoting customer reviews heavily, many e-commerce authorities started discussing the topic back in the years. Main discussion was about the negative customer reviews.
Amazon has been doing usability tests to its customer reviews section to make it useful for prospective customers.
Many small online retailers still don’t think like Amazon. In some specific cases, they are right. What if you are a small online retailer, and one of your best seller products only has 1 review and it is negative? Would you approve it or not?
Fake customer reviews are another issue in e-commerce world. Even some big names still encourage fake customer reviews, even pay for them. And there are authors hiring an army of freelancers to write positive reviews for their books at Amazon.
Who should the consumers trust?
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There are tens of social internet startups launching everyday. It’s sometimes hard to track all of them. But once in a while some great social internet startups are born and they make us happy.
What is the big question everybody is trying to answer nowadays?
How to integrate social interaction (web 2.0) and ecommerce.
That’s exactly what ShopTogether is trying to do. Bring social interaction to online shopping.
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