As online shopping has become more and more popular, we are demanding to shop safely and conveniently. But how safe are you being when shopping online? Have you kept yourself open to fraudsters?

The article below by PCMag.com provides great advice for consumers. Below is a snippet of the article, for the full article follow the link below.

How To Shop Safely Online

Online shopping is wonderfully convenient, but if you’re not careful you can fall victim to frauds, scams, or identity theft. Follow these tips to stay safe while shopping online.

Shopping online is so much more pleasant than going out to the mall. You don’t have to change out of your pyjamas, don’t have to fight traffic, and don’t have to wrangle with other shoppers at the sale table. Be careful, though, or you might become a commodity for sale. Here are some tips to keep your online shopping worry-free.

Don’t Get Lazy

Many shopping sites invite you to set up an account so you won’t have to re-enter your payment information next time. It does seem convenient, but you’re much better off filling in the details each time. Otherwise, if your shopping site gets hacked like Zappos did, the bad guys will have all your personal details—maybe even your credit card number. You might expect the merchant would encrypt this sensitive data, or at least the credit card numbers. You might be wrong.

Clearly you have to give the merchant your address; otherwise they won’t know where to send the merchandise. But do leave any non-required fields blank. And if the order form asks for too-personal information like your SSN or bank account number, navigate away immediately. There’s no reason an honest e-tailer would need that information. While you’re at it, opt out of all communication other than what’s necessary to track and complete your order.

Read the full article via “How To Shop Safely Online | PCMag.com”.

Here’s an interesting article written by Gemma McKenna (Harpers) reporting on how online alcohol sales are currently outperforming the market as much as 16%, according to IMRG. Great things happening in the online alcoholic drinks sector!

Online sales of wines, spirits and beer grew by 20% in 2011, outperforming overall market growth of 16%, according to IMRG Capgemini. The IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index showed the average online spend for alcohol has grown significantly over recent years, from an average of £91 in 2009 to £148 last year.

The latest results reveal BWS sector grew 9% year-on-year in February, on the back of very strong growth in February 2011 when sales were up 37% year-on-year.

IMRG predicts the UK online retail sector will grow by 13% in 2012, but given recent figures for the alcoholic drinks sector, it anticipates this sector will see growth of over 15%.

Read the full article here: via Online wine sales outperforming the market, says IMRG.

U.K eCommerce spending increases 10% in February – The growth rate for web-only retailers was 13%.

Some fab stats released here which are encouraging for the industry, especially followingmy previous blog stating the UK has the largest internet economy in World. Things are finally looking up.

Online shoppers in the United Kingdom spent 5.4 billion pounds (US$8.56 billion) in February, up 10% from the same month last year, according to according to e-commerce spending estimates released today by the Interactive Media in Retail Group, an e-retail trade group commonly known at IMRG, and Capgemini, a consultancy.

In February 2011, however, year-over-year spending growth was 20%, the groups say, and last month’s 10% growth marks the slowest growth rate since January 2011. “Although growth in e-retail sales was lower than expected in February … double-digit growth is still a positive result,” says Tina Spooner, chief information officer at IMRG.

In February, web-only retailers posted year-on-year growth of 13%, more than the 8% growth for retailers with both online and physical stores, the report says. February was the second consecutive month that web-only retailers outpaced those multichannel retailers

via U.K e-commerce spending increases 10% in February – Internet Retailer.

Here’s an interesting article by Fashion United on how UK has the largest internet economy in world. Also a great quote by Dan Cobley, Managing Director of Google UK. Thought we’d share this with all our blog readers.

The UK has the largest ‘internet economy’ of any country in the world and will remain ahead of other nations over the next few years, a new report has revealed.

 

Online business contributed £121 billion to the overall UK economy in 2010, representing 8.3 per cent of GDP, and is expected to rise to a contribution of £225 billion by 2016. Paul Zwillenberg, BCG partner & co-author of the report, said: “The internet economy offers one of the world’s few unfettered growth stories. “Policymakers often cite GDP growth rates of around ten per cent per year in the developing markets, but they look past similar rates close to home.”

 

Dan Cobley, Managing Director of Google UK, commented on the research: “This report is massively encouraging and shows that the UK Internet is leading the world in eCommerce.

 

“At a time of financial uncertainty, the UK Internet economy continues to grow at an incredible rate, creating thousands of new businesses and jobs.”

via UK largest internet economy in world – Fashion-United-news.

It’s been another exciting week for us at PrismaStar as we released our latest new product – PrismaStar Product Specification Tools – to our release teams.

The vast majority of the work has been done – design, development, QA, and Beta testing – it’s now just a matter of the release teams packaging the product up so we can sell to customers (and we’ve already pre-sold it to a couple based on the results from the Beta testing).

PrismaStar Product Specification Tools (or PST for short), replaces the eTailer’s product specification data on a product page with PrismaStar’s data. With just a couple of lines of code (that can be applied site-wide) PST effectively takes over the usual “Technical Specification” tab on a product detail page and supplies all the information that would go into this tab.

PST provides eTailers several benefits:

1. The product specification data is complete (no gaps) and accurate increasing sales by giving the consumer greater trust and confidence in the product he is buying
2. The eTailer saves cost by not having to have teams of people do the laborious job of updating product specification data on a website (usually manually through a CMS) with all the manual data entry mistakes that can be made
3. PST of course seamlessly integrates with the site providing a consistent look and feel, and as mentioned above can literally be implemented with two lines of code

Full product details for PST will be published shortly – watch this space!

“Shopping Basket Abandonment” By Srini G.

A combination of factors can lead to shopping cart abandonment on an eCommerce site. Despite the focus on online customer experience and conversion optimisation, a recent study revealed that deal seeking behaviour of potential online buyers contributed to rise in shopping cart abandonment [1]; the shopping cart abandonment rate reached all-time high of 72% in 2011 [2].

Site trust and economic uncertainty have previously been cited as two of the main reasons for a cautious approach by customers. In the last few years, marketers invested hugely in SEO, targeted email marketing campaigns, and affiliate marketing to increase traffic to their site. Furthermore checkout processes have been simplified with additional security seals, more payment methods, and a host of other conversion rate optimisation tweaks. However recent study by Forrester concluded that the top five causes of shopping cart abandonment were all price related [3]:

1. Shipping and handling costs were too high – 44%
2. I was not ready to purchase the product – 41%
3. I wanted to compare prices on other sites – 27%
4. Product price was higher than I was willing to pay – 25%
5. Just wanted to save products in my cart for later consideration – 24%

Taking these into consideration, online managers need to spend more time on refining the overall shopping experience and presenting pricing information to buyers before they add products to shopping cart. Some buyers may still abandon shopping carts as they find inconsistent product data during the shopping journey. Though shopping cart abandonment can never be completely curtailed, it can be reduced through targeted banners, enriched product data specification, product page pop ups with consistent labelling of sale price and shipping cost.

As online buyers are increasingly looking for more informed decisions, options to compare multiple products, displaying relevant search results with consistent product labelling/data will definitely help in improving customer experience and reducing shopping cart abandonment. This is where PrismaStar can really make significant impact on user experience.

Our data augmentation, data enrichment and our latest solution – Product Specification Tools – offer an enhanced user experience through 100% filled and structured product data and consistent product labelling. Site visitors will be able to make informed decisions as they don’t need to look and compare multiple websites for product specification data.

Here are some mind-blowing stats we found on mobile marketing post Mobile World Congress 2012 event that took place in Barcelona last week. Clearly mCommerce is the way forward and these result speak for themselves.

IMRG Capgemini has released figures showing impressive growth in both visits to retail websites via mobile and mobile sales.

In the final quarter of 2009 mobile sales accounted for just 0.4% of e-retail sales. IMRG Capgemini’s latest Quarter Benchmarking Index reveals massive growth with mobile sales accounting for 5.3% of e-retail sales in the fourth quarter of 2011 – a rise of 1,320% in two years and up from 3.9% in Q3 2012.

Visits to retail sites through mobile devices also experienced impressive growth, exceeding 10% for the first time. In Q3 2011, 8.2% of visits were through a mobile device rising to 11.6% in Q4.

To read the full article visit Sales via mobile up 1,320% – Mobile Marketing – BizReport.

It’s been an hectic week for us, attending the absurdly busy Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and meeting up with some of our customers and partners.

The Mobile World Congress also coincided with the latest data and analysis we’ve had from the use of the PrismaStar Selector on some of our mobile customer’s sites and we are very proud of the results!

For one of our customers we demonstrated an average of 99% online conversion uplift over a five month period (compared to their base level conversion rates), peaking at 133% for one month. That’s a great result for both them and us. We’re currently writing a case study on this together with them at the moment which we will of course make available as soon as its completed.

Watch this space!