Thoughts on Building Web Businesses
I always like hearing how entrepreneurs have managed to launch marketplace businesses. TechCrunch recently posted this interview with Michael Karnjanaprakorn of Skillshare, a platform for online education, about how they seeded and grew their marketplace. He described two main phases in a marketplace’s journey: Phase 1: Seeding Where you “Roll up your sleeves up and [...]
PandoDaily have been running a series of articles lately on ‘ecommerce 2.0′, featuring video clips from a dinner with the CEOs of some of the top ecommerce startups: Birchbox, Warby Parker, One Kings Lane and Jack Threads. I’ve rounded up the clips from the series here as they’re worth a watch if you’re interested in [...]
iPad Share of Visits Up 23% In the month before Christmas, 13.2% of our unique visits came from iPads. In the seven days since Christmas, that has leapt to 16.2%. That’s a whopping 23% increase in a matter of weeks. I guess plenty of our customers received iPads for Christmas! Is It Just Technophiles? Who [...]
Screen Pages, a UK ecommerce agency, publish some great data on their blog. Their latest post is about Magento e-commerce checkout conversion rates. It’s interesting for a couple of reasons: It gives some useful benchmark conversion rate numbers. It shows how conversion rates can and do vary significantly between sites with checkouts that are functionally [...]
This is a great TED talk: Rory Sutherland makes an entertaining case for thinking more about psychology in the way we design and enhance things (and less about technology). One example: one of the best improvements to the London Underground in ROI terms did nothing to change the trains or how they ran. Instead, it [...]
According to an email I’ve just received from Google, they are today rolling out Google +1 Recommendations to all users. When you hover over a +1 button, you may now see a popup showing other pages on the site that your friends have recommended via +1. My account has been in the beta test for [...]
What’s a typical retention rate for a subscription commerce business? If you’re trying to model a potential new subscription box business, or just wondering how profitable an existing business is, retention rate is a key variable. What retention rate should you assume? The answer, of course, is “it depends.” But you need something to plug [...]
The latest Grovo ‘Expert Series’ video is an interesting one. Tom Critchlow is an SEO expert and talks through what you need to know about video SEO. (And he’s a Brit, too, which makes a nice change!) Here’s the video series. There are 13 snippets to go through, so it takes a while to watch. If [...]
Working out how to accept payments online is a pain. What do you need, exactly? Which payment gateway should you choose? How much will it cost? I’ve set up a few online businesses now, so I think I have a pretty good idea of it all, but I remember how confusing all this payments stuff [...]
It’s 11.38pm as I’m starting to write this, so I’ll keep it brief. The latest startup interview from Grovo came out today. It’s with David Tisch who runs the TechStars incubator in New York. David sees lots of startups from an early stage, so has an interesting vantage point on things. Here’s a quick rundown [...]
