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http://www.flowinteractive.com

www.thewholesaleforums.co.uk

www.thetrader.co.uk

www.alibaba.com

www.esources.co.uk

www.mlinternational.com

www.stockshifters.com

www.whatafind.com

www.trade-secret.co.uk

www.secretsales.com

www.kudos.com

www.brandalley.co.uk

Joulesclothing.com
Lifestyle brand – offer advice how to rear chickens
Example of how to encourage customers to interact with the retailer (without having to part with cash – ie. less offputting)

Jojomamanbebe.co.uk
Profiting well – 11% increase in like-for-like sales in the year to date.
Next month, they are opening their website up to other currencies to increase trade from Eurpoe – which will allow them to take advantage of the weaker pound. If this is a success, they will look to open shops abroad.

Homebase
Customers order or reserve online/ by phone – makes up 45% of their business.
Allowing customers to reserve items online for instore pick up is working well for retailers, with Homebase and Argos posting impressive improvements in multichannel revenues.

John Lewis
Good online/offline like they way you can order online and pick up instore or return instore – very flexible.
Not sure about mobile but I did buy off my mobile on John Lewis at the weekend!

Argos
Prob known as one of the best multi-channel retailers, flexibilty in ordering/delivery/pick up etc.
Allowing customers to reserve items online for instore pick up is working well for retailers, with Homebase and Argos posting impressive improvements in multichannel revenues.
While overall profits for both retailers were relatively unchanged, Argos increased its multichannel revenues, accounting for 42% of sales in the last quarter. up from 26% in the year to February. Its Click and Reserve service was responsible for 17% of all sales, growing by 45%.

Thewhitecompany.com
Effective catalogue, stores and then online. All very on brand.

Boden
Good at catalogue and online and cross selling in between.
Every package beautifully branded with catal/online offers. I don’t know how successful their stores are.

Very.co.uk
Shop Direct Group is to rebrand Littlewoods Direct as it seeks to develop its appeal to a younger online customer base. Littlewoods Direct will be renamed Very, with a new website Very.co.uk. Aimed at shoppers aged between 25 and 45, and particularly younger families, the Barclay Brothers-owned group expects that 80 per cent of the business will be online. A smaller, 350-page directory featuring 70 per cent of the range will also be produced, as will a magazine, which will be mailed to 700,000 customers. The brand, which will launch on July 5, will focus on three main product sectors: fashion, mother and baby, and home and technology. It will offer 10,000 products – with lines added every week – and between 1.4 million and 1.5 million customers on the group’s database will be moved over to the brand.

Shop Direct trading director David Inglis said that the aim was to offer a more social shopping experience for online shoppers. “Our customers have been telling us they would like a different kind of online shopping experience. They miss the social aspect of shopping on the high street and with Very they will be able to influence what we do. It will be more of a shared shopping experience.” Inglis said this would be achieved through a network of customer, buyer and celebrity insiders who would interact with customers on the site and discuss and review products on sale. Inglis declined to name the celebrities lined up for the launch.

He emphasised that Littlewoods, which remains Shop Direct’s biggest brand, remains key to the group. Its main difference from Littlewoods Direct is that it retains the company’s traditional “all-in” weekly payment method, as opposed to the Direct business’s more typical payment model. While the benefits of using the same brand in, for example, advertising, will be lost, Inglis said it was time to split the brands due to the emergence of a new breed of online customer in the Direct business. “A year ago would have been too soon but if we’d left it a year hence we’d have missed the boat.”

Shop Direct has also bought the Woolworths brand and plans to relaunch it as on online business.

Research and Collect
Allowing customers to reserve items online for instore pick up is working well for retailers, with both Argos and Halfords posting impressive improvements in multichannel revenues. In both cases, reserve and collect services were responsible for driving significant numbers of offline sales.

While overall profits for both retailers were relatively unchanged, Argos increased its multichannel revenues, accounting for 42% of sales in the last quarter. up from 26% in the year to February. Its Click and Reserve service was responsible for 17% of all sales, growing by 45%. Halfords, which only introduced its Reserve and Collect service just over a year ago, reported a 90% growth in multichannel revenues in the 12 months up to April.

These collect in store services offer users the chance to browse online with a view to but at a local store. It can save the customer a wasted journey by allowing them to check local product inventory levels. It also gets around customer concerns about delivery charges, and as well as appealing to shoppers who may be not be able to stay at home and wait for deliveries.

There is the challenge for retailers of integrating online and offline channels so that product inventory levels are kept up to date, but the benefits in terms of driving offline sales have been worth the effort for Halfords, Argos and others. It’s not enough just to offer these services though; they must be made as usable as possible for customers. Here are a few recommendations:

Don’t charge for delivery to stores
One of the reasons that customers will choose to reserve and collect is to avoid delivery costs, so there shouldn’t be any extra charge for this. Unless you spend over £25, Boots will charge £2.89 to collect items from your local store, which must deter a few customers.

Allow shoppers to check inventory before checkout
Save customers the bother of adding products to their basket and registering before finding that products are out of stock at the local store by allowing them to check stock levels on the product pages. This is what Halfords and Argos both do. In the example below, Argos advises that just 4 items are available at the local store, which is a good incentive for customers to make the purchase:

Offer to deliver items to local stores
In cases where the local store is sold out of a particular product, offering customers the option of having the product delivered there may be enough to save the sale.

Suggest alternatives that are available in store
If a particular product is unavailable in the nearest store, offering an alternative, similar, item is the next best option.

Promote collect in store offers in emails
If you offer the reserve and collect option, then promoting this in your email marketing can help drive offline as well as online sales.

Mult-Channel vs Pureplay
Multi-channel retailers are mounting a challenge to the online dominance of their pure-play rivals despite tending to offer a lower level of site functionality, according to research.

The study, by eDigitalResearch, which uses mystery shoppers to rate UK shopping websites, found Play.com and Amazon.com continued to generate the best overall response from consumers. However, multi-channel players like Tesco, John Lewis and M&S were seen to have stronger customer service. The firm said its findings showed “delivery and customer service performance is just as important as the look, search and product range available online”.

It added that online retailers needed to…“attain a far greater understanding into the consumer’s true perception of the entire online purchase experience from first impressions through product search, payment, delivery and customer service.”

The study focuses on a range of issues:

* Play.com was the top site for ‘first impressions’ – site performance, ease-of-use etc – followed by Kays and Tesco, which gained a positive reaction from shoppers to its new home page. The study said sites had improved significantly in this area over the last few years and pointed to the adoption of ‘Vista’ style tabs in sites that shoppers liked using.

* Carphone Warehouse was seen to have the best shopping basket navigation, although the study found multi-channel retailers tended to struggle to deliver in that area.

* Multi-channel retailers, however, delivered better customer service, especially over the telephone, “with Waitrose, M&S and Next demonstrating an excellent support infrastructure”. But none of the sites the firm surveyed met consumer expectations when it came to email based customer services.

* Their site search facilities also tended to frustrate users that have become used to the efficiency of Google and are starting to become more sophisticated in their use of search tools. Interestingly, the mystery shoppers thought Amazon was “in danger of over complicating the site offer” – a point echoed recently by Jesse James Garrett in a recent interview for our weekly newsletter.

* Sites that provided stock availability information up front to be especially popular, while those that only revealed goods to be out of stock at the checkout were not. These types of issues also came to the fore in our recent Travel Website Benchmarks Report.

* Figleaves was top for delivery – the report said it tended to meet delivery expectations, as well as excelling at product presentation.

* Four sites came equal top for a ‘would you shop here again’ measure – Amazon, Play.com, John Lewis and Boots.

Phorm
Phorm’s Open Internet Exchange (OIX) helps advertisers reach their target audience with greater precision, eliminating irrelevant ads

Placecast
Placecast uses proprietary algorithms to weave together dozens of audience data points, revealing unique audience insights. Our technology utilizes this type of location information together with other publicly available information to paint a clear picture of audiences, without any risk of privacy intrusion. No personally identifiable information is ever collected. This methodology is unique to Placecast, and means for the first time advertisers can develop valuable, customized ad units that achieve outstanding results with highly sought-after audiences.

Right now, many local businesses benefit from Google without even knowing it. When someone does a search on Google proper or Google Maps, Google will, where appropriate, provide listings for local businesses. These listings typically contain a business’ address, website (if one exists) and any details, reviews and photos that are available.

But out of all the businesses that benefit from these business listings, few businesses take full advantage of them. By claiming a business listing on Google and using Google’s new Local Business Center dashboard, local business owners will be able to see first-hand how much activity their listings are seeing and how users are finding them.

The dashboard is sort of like Google Analytics for business listings. Data that is being made available through the dashboard includes:

* Impressions.
* Actions (a measurement of how users engaged with the listing).
* Top search queries.
* Zip codes responsible for Google Maps direction requests.

Needless to say, this type of data can be very valuable for business owners. And Google is offering it completely free to those who claim their business listing.

What’s Google get out of it? If it can attract and educate more local business owners, it may be able to acquire more AdWords customers. Using the data the Local Business Center dashboard provides, such as top search queries, local businesses can potentially create more effective AdWords campaigns.

The question is whether Google will succeed in reaching this large but difficult-to-target market of local business owners. If you own or work for a business that has a Google listing, be sure to check out the Local Business Center.

google view
There are currently about 3.2 billion mobile subscribers in the world, and that number is expected to grow by at least a billion in the next few years. Today, mobile phones are more prevalent than cars (about 800 million registered vehicles in the world) and credit cards (only 1.4 billion of those). While it took 100 years for landline phones to spread to more than 80% of the countries in the world, their wireless descendants did it in 16. And fewer teens are wearing watches now because they use their phones to tell time instead (somewhere Chester Gould is wondering how he got it backwards).

The phone that you have in your pocket, pack, or handbag is probably ten times more powerful than the PC you had on your desk only 8 or 9 years ago. It has a range of sensors that would do a martian lander proud: a clock, power sensor (how low is that battery?), thermometer (because batteries charge poorly at low temperatures), and light meter (to determine screen backlighting) on the more basic phones; a location sensor, accelerometer (detects vector and velocity of motion), and maybe even a compass on more advanced ones. And most importantly, it is by its very nature always connected.

Project out these trends another ten years. You will be carrying with you, 24×7 (a recent study of Chinese mobile customers showed that the majority of them sleep within a meter of their phones), a very powerful, always connected, sensor-rich device. And the cool thing is, so will everyone else. So what are you going to do with it that you aren’t doing now? Here are some possibilities:

Smart alerts: Your phone will be smart about your situation and alert you when something needs your attention. This is already happening today — eBay can text you when you’ve been outbid, and alert services (such as Google News) can deliver news, sports, or stock updates to you. In the future these applications will get smarter, patiently monitoring your personalized preferences (which will be stored in the network cloud) and delivering only the information you desire. One very useful scenario: your phone knows that you are heading downtown for dinner, and alerts you of transit conditions or the best places to park.

Augmented reality: Your phone uses its arsenal of sensors to understand your situation and provide you information that might be useful. For example, do you really want to know how much is that doggy in the window? Your phone, with its GPS and compass, knows what you are looking at, so it can tell you before you even ask. Plus, what breed it is and the best way to train him.

Crowd sourcing goes mainstream: Your phone is your omnipresent microphone to the world, a way to publish pictures, emails, texts, Twitters, and blog entries. When everyone else is doing the same, you have a world where people from every corner of the planet are covering their experiences in real-time. That massive amount of content gets archived, sorted, and re-deployed to other people in new and interesting ways. Ask the web for the most interesting sites in your vicinity, and your phone shows you reviews and pictures that people have uploaded of nearby attractions. Like what you see? It will send you directions on how to get there.

Sensors everywhere: Your phone knows a lot about the world around you. If you take that intelligence and combine it in the cloud with that of every other phone, we have an incredible snapshot of what is going on in the world right now. Weather updates can be based on not hundreds of sensors, but hundreds of millions. Traffic reports can be based not on helicopters and road sensors, but on the density, speed, and direction of the phones (and people) stuck in the traffic jams.

Tool for development: Your phone may be more than just a convenience, it may be your livelihood. Already, this is true for people in many parts of the world: in southern India, fishermen use text messaging to find the best markets for their daily catch, in South Africa, sugar farmers can receive text messages advising them on how much to irrigate their crops, and throughout sub-Saharan Africa entrepreneurs with mobile phones become phone operators, bringing communications to their villages. These innovations will only increase in the future, as mobile phones become the linchpin for greater economic development.

The future-proof device: Your phone will open up, as the Internet already has, so it will be easy for developers to create or improve applications and content. The ones that you care about get automatically installed on your phone. Let’s say you have a piece of software on your phone to improve power management (and therefore battery life). Let’s say a developer makes an improvement to the software. The update gets automatically installed on your phone, without you lifting a finger. Your phone actually gets better over time.

Safer software through trust and verification: Your phone will provide tools and information to empower you to decide what to download, what to see, and what to share. Trust is the most important currency in the always connected world, and your phone will help you stay in control of your information. You may choose to share nothing at all (the default mode), or just share certain things with certain people — your circle of trusted friends and family. You’ll make these decisions based on information you get from the service and software providers, and the collective ratings of the community as well. Your phone is like your trusted valet: it knows a lot about you, and won’t disclose an iota of it without your OK.

eConsultancy, retailers and mobile
While mobile commerce seems to be taking hold in other markets, especially Japan, the UK’s retailers seem to be slow so far to anticipate this trend, with very few having launched transactional mobile sites.

Looking at a US article on mobile commerce usability today from GetElastic, I was struck by how many of the big name retailers in the States are already catering for customers on mobiles.

Sears, BestBuy, Ralph Lauren, Barnes and Noble, Amazon and others all have m-commerce sites, yet I can think of very few in the UK.

There are a handful of retailers who’ve taken the lead and developed mobile sites. Some are good, some are great, all are better than a non-optimized version.

If you have an iPhone or some other smartphone with internet access, it is possible to shop online from a standard e-commerce site, but it is a usability nightmare, and only to be attempted in desperation. What retailers need is a dedicated m-commerce site that provides mobile shoppers with a stripped-down, usable version of the main website.

Retailers unsure of the potential for mobile commerce should look at the example of Japan where, according to this report, up to 25% of a retailer’s sales can come via mobiles.

If mobile users want to buy from your site, why not make it easy for them? Especially if, like Interflora, you have a product that would be useful for people on the move.

So which retailers have transactional mobile sites in the UK?

Amazon: This is about the best of the bunch, providing a more basic version of the main Amazon.co.uk website, yet still keeping many of the better features.

This means that you can still search though the entire product range, read reviews, and purchase through your mobile. If you already have an Amazon account with saved payment details, it’s even easier.

eBay: As well as a mobile version of the website, eBay UK also has an iPhone app which allows you to bid and keep an eye on your buying and selling activity. While both the mobile site and app have their faults, you can at least bid and buy from your phone.

Interflora: The flowers and gifts retailer recently launched a transactional mobile site, which offers a limited range of flowers and gifts on a stripped down version of the site.

And that’s as many as I can find so far. There are some decent mobile shopping comparison sites, such as Sccope and Reevoo, but having found your product, you then have to go to a site that has not been optimised for mobile to complete the transaction.

Trends in mobile.
1) The threat and possibilities of the Discount Mobile Service Providers,
2) Falling profit margins on basic mobile services (voice, SMS) as a result of competition,
3) The use of outsourcing – to minimize OPEX,
4) Controlled investment in infrastructure – to reduce CAPEX,
5) The use of micro-segmentation (Mobile operators will use sub-brands and producers of mobile terminals will introduce a wide range of different terminal models),
6) Higher marketing expenses – partly because of the use of micro-segmentation,
7) Stock Rotation Risk – the result of the terminal producers larger product portfolio,
New business models in the mobile value chain – the existing business models are an impediment on economic growth,
9) A more complex value chain – a growing number of different players seek the place in the mobile value chain,
10) Mobile penetration vs. SIM-penetration – there is an important difference.

google synch
Synchronize the built-in calendar and contacts on your iPhone with your Google account.

google latitude
See your friends’ locations and status messages and share yours with them. Not yet on iphone.

iPointer
The iPointer® empowers users to explore the world around them, pointing and learning based on geographic location and orientation. US firm iST (Intelligent Spatial Technologies) has developed an app called iPointer that will enable a mobile user to retrieve detailed information about a building simply by pointing their phone at it. IST’s plan is to deploy the app with network operators as a paid local search service. So if you aimed your iPointer-equipped phone at two restaurants, it would return basic information for the one that had not paid to advertise, and much richer information for the one that had.

taptu.com
Taptu (www.taptu.com) is a new search engine for mobile devices that brings a unique proposition to the market: “mobile search mad…

Analytical reasoning (all about the data)
Communication skills
Willingness to experiment
Playing in a team
Passion and leadership