Posts tagged e-commerce
Why ‘Small Business Saturday’ would make no sense
Dec 1st
If Canadian small and medium-sized businesses really think that having a day dedicated to them will boost sales, they must worry about competing with Santa Claus for revenue, too.
Shane Schick, editor-in-chief, IT World Canada
The hysteria around Black Friday, one of the biggest shopping periods in the U.S. calendar, has been rivaled only the increased attention paid to so-called Cyber Monday, when online retail also reaches an American Thanksgiving-induced fever pitch. In both cases, it’s the Wal-marts and other giants of the shopping industry that seem to benefit the most. SMBs, often independently operated and unable to compete with the steep margin discounts offered by the big box stores, don’t necessarily see this particular rising tide as lifting all boats. That’s the rationale for “Small Business Saturday,” one of the more desperate marketing ploys I’ve come across in a long time. Read the rest of this entry »
Two online legal services that are changing the game
Aug 25th
By Monica Goyal
Two startups recently came to my attention that offers creative solutions to help people resolve legal disputes.
Their methods include online reputation shaming, game theory tactics, and settlement negotiation, all in the hope of achieving better, faster settlements for far less expense than more traditional ‘in-person’ methods. The two online dispute resolution services I’m referring to are PeopleClaim and Fair Outcomes.
Monica Goyal
Shame on You
PeopleClaim’s service speeds resolutions along by putting the reputations of complaint targets on the line. For a small fee of $7.96, PeopleClaim will send a complainant’s (sender) complaint to its target (receiver), allowing the receiver an opportunity to negotiate a settlement directly with the sender or to send PeopleClaim a rebuttal. Read the rest of this entry »
QR Code Security – Are we ready to discuss the risks?
Aug 29th
The Quick Response codes we see on everything from movie posters to business cards are becoming the ubiquitous contact links of an entire new generation of mobile devices and the people who use them. Originally invented in Asia at the end of the last millennium (circa 1994 Japan, actually), these matrix or 2D (two-dimensional) barcodes are now enjoying broad adoption in North America.
Claudiu Popa
Playing on their coolness factor, their practicality is fully realized when we’re out and about, with only a couple of seconds to take in snippets of information on billboards or posters. From our perspective as users, it’s an intriguing way to exchange contact details and access a wealth of information about different products by simply scanning a digital coffee stain.
Should your business be on eBay?
Jul 28th
Lately a lot’s being said about businesses needing to stake their claim on the social media arena.
But does your business need to have presence on an online auction site such as eBay as well?
Nestor Arellano
If you’re selling something or looking to buy something, the answer could be yes. eBay is no longer just a place where kids hock their tired Nikes of adventurous souls like Canadian Kyle MacDonald try to trade up a single red paperclip for a house.
Over the years, start-ups and big businesses alike have found buying and selling on eBay both profitable and affordable.
Imagine the potential market. Canadians now buy more than $1 billion worth of goods on eBay every year and sell more than one million items each month on the site, according to the company. Read the rest of this entry »
POS, supply chain systems top Canadian retailers’ IT purchase choices for 2010
Jul 20th
Majority of Canadian retailers prefer sticking to the tried and true when it comes to software purchases, according to a recent survey of the industry.
In a poll of 34-mid-to-large sized retailers, the Retail Council of Canada (RCA) also found that these businesses may be embracing social media technologies but are still wary of cloud computing.
Nestor Arellano
Here’s some data collected by the RCA which might be helpful to tech vendors and service providers who have set their sights on Canadian stores.
Car buyers chose function over flash in auto Web sites
May 27th
What makes a great auto maker Web site?
Flashy car pictures? Videos of speeding cars or SUVs truckin’ along mud covered rought roads? Hardly. According a recent survey conducted by J.D. Power and Associates Canada.
Nestor Arellano
The survey company found a definite link between online experience satisfcation and people heading to the auto showrooms for a test drive. However, in my story Savvy Web sites drive buyers into auto showrooms, Ryan Robinson, the company’s industry practice leader, reveals that a lot of car makers have their Web strategy all wrong.
“Of course buyers want to see beautiful Web sites. But the main reason the visit the sites is to get information that will help them make a purchasing decision,” he said. In other words: Flash is fine but we want functionality.
4 tips on making it big on eBay
May 19th
Huge online traffic generated by eBay caught the eye of Henry’s decision makers back in 2000.
“We taught it would be a great channel for our hard-to-sell items and potentially an additional revenue stream,” according to Max Payne, director of marketing at Henry’s.
Nestor Arellano
The company never expected the move would become so big that it would open the 100-year-old Canadian photo supply store to a whole new group of American customers. Read the rest of this entry »
Mobile payment needs more than an iPhone Bump to get going
Mar 19th
I’d like to apologize to Darrell MacMichael of PayPal Canada for costing him all of $8 while we were filming a demo of his company’s new Send Money Version 2.0 application for the iPhone.
Send Money is an app that enables smart phone users to access their PayPal accounts with their mobile device. The new version works with the Bump app on the iPhone which allows people to exchange information on their phone by just touching (or bumping) their iPhones together.
iPad will revolutionize publishing – someday
Jan 29th
v1.0 shows platform still a work in progress
By now, even my disconnected mother sitting on a beach in Florida has heard about the iPad. And while geeks debate the name, whine about its lack of a memory card slot and USB port and slice Apple a new one for once again handing AT&T a golden egg, I find myself thinking about my mom, and whether her world changed a bit yesterday.
See, she reads books. Lots of them. She’s also a technophobe who views her laptop with a curious mixture of fear and indifference. 
Publishers tend to appreciate folks like my mom because she drives demand for their wares. Unfortunately, printing books is a complex, expensive and often messy business. As the record industry discovered in the 1990s, the Internet is changing the way we consume this content, and the industry would like – indeed needs – to transition my mom and everyone like her into an electronically distributed reality.
But in the absence of a realistically usable device or form factor – no, she’ll never read a book on her Byzantine-for-her laptop – that simply wasn’t going to happen. Amazon’s Kindle showed us the possibilities, but despite its pioneering success in defining the e-book reader market, it’s failed to break out beyond a niche product for cash-flush book lovers. It isn’t, and probably will never be, the reader for the rest of us. Read the rest of this entry »
How are your users surfing?
Jan 21st
It is no secret that I believe that a company’s web presence is a direct reflection on the quality of their brand and by extension their products or service offerings. Is it fair that consumers judge a company by the quality of their web interaction? Probably not, but it happens millions of times a day all over the world. 
The difficulty in producing a good user experience on the web lies in the fact that there are so many components that go into making a “good” web site or web application. There are the content providers, the information architects, the graphic designers, the web developers and potentially many others. Sometimes, in small organizations, these roles are each fulfilled by the same person. Sometimes, in larger organizations, the people that fulfill these roles might never meet. Regardless of the development dynamic, a lot of effort is expended on many different levels in order to produce a web site or web app. Read the rest of this entry »
