ETD: 778 Need Gift Card System; The Luxury Market; E-Tailers
Not Optimizing Full Online Sales Potential
E-Tailer's Digest
etd_post at gapent.com
Tue Apr 20 12:00:32 GMT 2004
E-Tailer's Digest --- Everything for the Retailer
Issue #0778 April 20, 2004
George Matyjewicz, Moderator mailto:georgem at gapent.com
Published by: GAP Enterprises, Ltd. http://www.etailersdigest.com
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CONTENTS
[1] Greetings
[2] Need Gift Card System
[3] The Luxury Market
[4] E-Tailers Not Optimizing Full Online Sales Potential
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[1] Greetings.
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Hi All:
We have some interesting material today. One of our list members is
looking for a gift card system to be used at POS. Can you help?
We have more on the luxury market from list members. Interesting
stuff. What do you think?
Jules Kaplan found an interesting piece that indicates we are not
optimizing our online sales potential. It seems to me that this is getting
more difficult, with all the spam out there today. I was away over the
weekend, and downloaded two days of e-mail and had 2,081 e-messages, of
which 2,010 were spam! How are legitimate e-tailers expected to do any
business online? What are you doing to generate online business?
Tell us about your business which will remain for posterity at
our "Members: Who Are You?" site. We just updated all those postings that
we were delinquent with the
updates. http://etailersdigest.com/resources/members/index.htm And we have
a form there for you to tell us about you. As I said when I first proposed
this idea, we have "known" each other for a long time, yet we often don't
know anything about each other. So, tell us who you are and what you do.
Now, let's get to everything for the retailer.
Sincerely
George Matyjewicz, PhD
Chief Global Strategist, GAP Enterprises, Ltd.
mailto:georgem at gapent.com
http://www.etailersdigest.com
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[2] Need Gift Card System
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Some local business owners asked me for a little advice on obtaining a
point-of-sale oriented gift card system. Essentially this would be like a
phone card scheme, except that instead of phone minutes, the cards would be
redeemable for retail products, food, coffee, etc. To make this even more
fun, they want to involve several other merchants in the area.
Generally I'd like to be useful and give them some advice, but I'm not
(particularly) interested in being directly involved, since it's a fair bit
outside my normal area.
My off-the-cuff thought is that while this wouldn't be terribly hard to
implement, likely there are several turn-key solutions out there. However,
other that googling on: "point of sale" "gift card", I don't know where
else I'd look for info.
I'd expect the hard part of this would be the end-points, i.e. integrating
it with the cash register or point-of-sale systems of the various
businesses. I suspect, for some reason, that point-of-sale systems are
likely not designed to be extended. I wouldn't be surprised to find that
some particular flavor of point-of-sale has a gift-card subsystem, but then
they'd have to get everybody switched over to that particular flavor.
The other approach that comes to mind is having a distinct hardware
component, sort of like a credit card terminal. For that matter, I'm not
sure if standard credit card terminals and protocols have any sort of
scheme to support gift cards. Again, I'd expect this to be a turn-key
solution, and it would definitely not make sense to develop one from
scratch without significant funding.
--
Steven J. Owens
puff at darksleep.com
"I'm going to make broad, sweeping generalizations and strong,
declarative statements, because otherwise I'll be here all night and
this document will be four times longer and much less fun to read.
Take it all with a grain of salt." - Me at http://darksleep.com
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[3] The Luxury Market
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Our moderator wrote...
> Then again, is the public willing to pay for true luxury? Look
> what happened to the Concorde jet. Not enough passengers, so
> they closed the doors. Yet, folks are willing to pay $5 for a
> 50 cent cup of coffee at Starbucks. Go figger.
Could we think that is there luxury and luxury?
What I mean by that is that not everyone can afford a Paris-NYC Concorde,
while almost everyone can afford a $5 for a cup of coffee, and it makes
some people feel great to feel like they are "flying high" for a short
while, even though they may have nothing to put on their dishes at night!
So maybe some people cannot experience the Cadillac in their garage of a
beautiful country-house, but they can rent it for a night and feel like
they are VIPs! I am not sure that is the case in the US, but I suspect is
becoming more and more the case over here in Italy.
Just my $0,02 worth.
Luca
Mr. Luca Meyer
consumer research advisor
http://www.lucameyer.com/en/
- One world, one human race -
+++ [Moderator's Comments] +++
You are absolutely right Luca. After I posted I realized that.
George
+++ [Next Post] +++
Jim Straw wrote...
> It ain't what it used to be.
>
> I pity the young people of today. They really have no idea what
luxury is.
>
> They buy sardine cans with a shield on the front and actually think they
> are riding in a Cadillac ... having never ridden in a "real" luxury car.
> Even the cars labeled "Luxury" have no luxury to them ... just the name.
Yea, right... I use to drive Oldsmobile Custom Cruisers. Rock solid
ride. But you know... today, you can buy a GPS unit with all the maps
you'll ever need, subscribe to services which tell where to turn right, etc.
One night driving on campus long ago, I saw some funny white things moving
on the surface of a dark road. By the time I recognized them as white
socks, it was almost too screeching late, leaving my heart pounding! One
night a couple years ago, a friend noticed some heat traces in the distance
on the heads up display of his caddy. He slowed to let the darkly clad
folks clear the road before he got there. You had to have a military
clearance for that technology in the 60's.
I had a portable computer in 1983. It turned heads everywhere I lugged
it! It had 256K of floppy storage, 128K of RAM, a 2.5" diagonal orange
screen, and ran at a whopping 4 mHz, four times faster than the humonguous
IBM 360 I use to use in the late 60's. The old obsoletium I put away a
few months ago had 20 Gig of hard drive, 256meg of RAM, a large color
screen, and ran at 133mHz. And cost less! Not to mention being a tenth
the size, having access to documents in all kinds of corporations,
universities, etc. without my having to drive or fly there. (My new one
runs ten times faster for about the same price.)
In the 70's, I use to drool over the occasional NASA photo I'd see. Today,
I get to see one every night at
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html And some are made by
amateurs using their own computer scanning CCD based telescopes no
university could afford in the 70's.
In the 70's, a neighbor contracted or a news feed, cost him a frightful
amount of money. I subscribed to newspapers from a bunch of cities around
the country, always arriving late. Finding something curious, I might
spend a day at the library trying to learn more about it and where it
happened. Today, I Google the news, getting things within the hour, and
finding related information in minutes.
My father had a heart condition he fought for forty years with medication,
exercise and his own research. Maybe five years ago, we found
http://www.PaulingTherapy.com/ which laid out a program that essentially
cured him of the worst of it in a few weeks, ending decades of
angina. (Two years later, he broke all the stress test records at the
hospital. The doctors were flabbergasted with the progress he made in a
few months of PaulingTherapy.) Now THAT is REAL Luxury!!!
In college, I had a 35mm camera, developing color slides myself, waiting
maybe three months before I saw what I got. Today, my digital camera dumps
images to the computer, where I can print it in minutes and share it with
folks around the world. The price of that "film" is low enough that I
document my car expenses by photographing the pump display and odometer.
Cell phones use to be frightfully expensive. Now, everyone has them, some
with cameras that let two people really communicate purchasing details
while walking the store isles a continent apart.
Yes. Luxury isn't what it use to be. It's so damned commonplace now!
I think the whole concept of using luxury goods to impress people is
becoming passe now that we can do more of the things we'd only been able to
dream of decades ago.
-javilk-
Today's Photo: http://www.mall-net.com/today/
------------------- IMAGINEERING --------------------
--------------- Every click, a vote. ----------------
----- Do people vote for, or against your pages? ----
-- What people want: http://www.SitePsych.com/free --
-----------------------------------------------------
+++ [Moderator's Comments] +++
Interesting comments John. Yes, advances have made many heretofore luxury
items common place. Still, luxury today isn't the grandeur extravaganza
folks knew in the old days. Plastic doesn't seem to replace solid wood in
car interior trim.
George
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[4] E-Tailers Not Optimizing Full Online Sales Potential
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In an article in Information Week last week it was reported that top
managers at 84 per cent of 300 online retailers recently surveyed by
Internet consulting group, The E-Tailing Group, are satisfied with the
return on investment from their eCommerce ventures. Eighty-seven per cent
had also integrated online sales into their core operations, with most
selling goods online and 36 per cent following a multi-channel sales
strategy. Forrester Research found online sales in the US to have risen by
38 per cent in 2003, to over USD 100 billion. At the current 20 per cent
growth rate, Forrester predicts that by 2007, online sales could account
for 10 per cent, or USD 230 billion, of total retail sales.
In light of Forrester's figures, the E-Tailing Group was surprised to find
that almost half of all e-tailers in its survey did not know their shopping
cart abandonment rates, which are a benchmark of an e-tailer's performance.
Of those that did know, 8 per cent had a 51 to 60 per cent abandonment
rate, with another 8 per cent reporting a rate of 61 to 70 per cent, and 8
per cent, again, reporting 11 to 20 per cent of their customers to abandon
carts. While 19 per cent of e-tailers surveyed did not know their buyer
conversion rate, 22 per cent said their rate was about 1 to 2 per cent, and
12 per cent, about 3 to 4 per cent.
Almost three-quarters (72 per cent) of the survey respondents had invested
in new technology during 2003, according to the E-Tailing Group. Despite
this, a massive 57 per cent had no idea of the revenue generated by
cross-selling or up-selling activities on their web sites. Over one-third
of respondents to the survey were the CEO/president/principal or vice
president of their organization, while almost 4 in 10 firms surveyed, had
annual sales volume of less than USD 20 million. Essentially, however,
e-tailers need to 'mine' customer information at their web sites to
optimize sales and the promotion of their online activities, according to
Lauren Freedman, president of The E-Tailing Group.
Yours truly
Jules Kaplan
Ez Payment Solutions INC (EZP)
Email: ezpaymentsolutions at pobox.com
Accept Payment by FAX - PHONE - E-MAIL - INTERNET
E-Commerce Solution that you have to SEE to BELIEVE
www.onlinechek.com / www.ezpaymentservices.com
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