Saturday, March 25, 2006
Marketers Go Fishing for Female Web Surfers
Dozens of marketers are slathering their online sites with games, Myspace-like communities, Web romances, lessons and even artfully revamped TV shows as they try to attract more women and keep them on their sites longer. Once companies get women to the sites, the goal, of course, is to turn them into buyers by making them more familiar with and informed about the companies' products.
Marketers see online opportunity with women -- who account for US$5 trillion in purchasing power, according to marketing consultants Just Ask a Woman -- as a fast-growing Web audience. Since 2003, the number of female unique Internet users is up 19 percent vs. 12 percent for men, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. They are now 52 percent of Web users, and their time spent online grew 6 percent to an average 58 hours a month in the past year, while time spent by men grew 1 percent to 67 hours. Marketers' efforts to attract women online could spell more trouble for sellers of TV advertising: Spending on TV ads was flat last year at $22.4 billion, while marketers' spending for Internet ads rose 13 percent, to $8.3 billion, according to TNS Media Intelligence.
To buy more time with women, Dove recently launched an online series of two-minute vignettes that put "Desperate Housewives" star Felicity Huffman in scenes from a trio of vintage TV shows. It hired Hollywood heavy hitter Penny Marshall to direct the segments. Marshall, who directed "A League of Their Own," says advertisers are looking online in their 20-year battle against TV commercial-zapping.
Viewers "used to fast-forward through commercials with the VCR or Beta or whatever recorder they had," says Marshall, who also produced "Cinderella Man" and "Bewitched." "But now consumers can seek out commercials. They can go to a site and see talent and have uninterrupted viewing." Oral-B, ThermaSilk, H&R Block and USA Networks are among those using entertainment to woo women, who increasingly go online for leisure. "Women have really embraced the Internet for information, organization and communication. Now, they are at the point of engaging with entertainment," says Rob Master, Dove marketing director. ThermaSilk recently targeted teen girls in Canada with its "hitonmyhotguy" where they could create an ideal boyfriend. H&R Block's "deductabuck.com" uses a quiz show format to teach about taxes. USA Networks recently launched a community site.
Women may be online but are they buying? Marketing-to-women expert Jen Dreschler says it depends on whether marketers "have thought long and hard" about their targets. "My concern is how much are you spending to draw women to the site and are you drawing women who will use the product," says Dreschler, who advises marketers for Just Ask a Woman. Many marketers use traditional mass media to drive Web traffic. Dove, for instance, used ads on a recent episode of "Desperate Housewives" to promote the Web site. TV still reaches huge numbers in one shot, while the Web can get a narrower audience for minutes, rather than seconds.
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Marketers see online opportunity with women -- who account for US$5 trillion in purchasing power, according to marketing consultants Just Ask a Woman -- as a fast-growing Web audience. Since 2003, the number of female unique Internet users is up 19 percent vs. 12 percent for men, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. They are now 52 percent of Web users, and their time spent online grew 6 percent to an average 58 hours a month in the past year, while time spent by men grew 1 percent to 67 hours. Marketers' efforts to attract women online could spell more trouble for sellers of TV advertising: Spending on TV ads was flat last year at $22.4 billion, while marketers' spending for Internet ads rose 13 percent, to $8.3 billion, according to TNS Media Intelligence.
To buy more time with women, Dove recently launched an online series of two-minute vignettes that put "Desperate Housewives" star Felicity Huffman in scenes from a trio of vintage TV shows. It hired Hollywood heavy hitter Penny Marshall to direct the segments. Marshall, who directed "A League of Their Own," says advertisers are looking online in their 20-year battle against TV commercial-zapping.
Viewers "used to fast-forward through commercials with the VCR or Beta or whatever recorder they had," says Marshall, who also produced "Cinderella Man" and "Bewitched." "But now consumers can seek out commercials. They can go to a site and see talent and have uninterrupted viewing." Oral-B, ThermaSilk, H&R Block and USA Networks are among those using entertainment to woo women, who increasingly go online for leisure. "Women have really embraced the Internet for information, organization and communication. Now, they are at the point of engaging with entertainment," says Rob Master, Dove marketing director. ThermaSilk recently targeted teen girls in Canada with its "hitonmyhotguy" where they could create an ideal boyfriend. H&R Block's "deductabuck.com" uses a quiz show format to teach about taxes. USA Networks recently launched a community site.
Women may be online but are they buying? Marketing-to-women expert Jen Dreschler says it depends on whether marketers "have thought long and hard" about their targets. "My concern is how much are you spending to draw women to the site and are you drawing women who will use the product," says Dreschler, who advises marketers for Just Ask a Woman. Many marketers use traditional mass media to drive Web traffic. Dove, for instance, used ads on a recent episode of "Desperate Housewives" to promote the Web site. TV still reaches huge numbers in one shot, while the Web can get a narrower audience for minutes, rather than seconds.
Brought to you by Guardian eCommerce Privacy Seal Program.
PayPal Goes Mobile With Cell Phone Payment System
PayPal is going mobile. The online payments giant is gearing up to launch a service that would allow its customers to make purchases or money transfers using simple text messaging on their mobile phones. Dubbed PayPal Mobile, the service is currently only available to the eBay unit's employees for a limited trial release and does not work with all mobile operators.
PayPal customers can buy items like CDs, DVDs, books, electronics and accessories . PayPal has not yet disclosed its bricks-and-mortar partners. PayPal was not immediately available for comment. Apprently, however, the mobile service is still in the early experimental phases.
"This is very elementary right now. PayPal is testing it out from the peer-to-peer channel to see if it will work and gain consumer traction," Sucharita Mulpuru, senior analyst said. One of the first concerns about any new technological advance -- especially one that transfers money -- is security.
PayPal has outlined a security plan for the new service that is based on a PIN system. Mobile phone users activate their phone for PayPal Mobile by creating a unique PIN. The activation is complete only after PayPal calls the user back and the user enters that PIN. This method confirms that the customer actually owns the phone he or she has activated, PayPal said. Each mobile transaction is also PIN-protected to offer customers security if their phones are lost or stolen. Customers are required to confirm payment details for every transaction they make. If a person doesn't confirm when PayPal calls back, no money is sent.
"Buy it when you see it. Where you see 'Text to Buy' -- on a poster, in a magazine, at an event -- just order the item securely by text message," PayPal says in the promotional materials on its Web site . For example, customers might see: "To order this DVD, text 'DVD to 63336.'" Immediately after the customer does this, PayPal calls the customer back to confirm the order and asks the person to enter his/her PayPal Mobile PIN. Once the customer confirms, the item is shipped to the home address listed on the user's PayPal account. Just like the traditional PayPal service, PayPal Mobile makes it free to send money, though wireless carriers may charge fees for receiving text messages. If a call is dropped before payment details are complete, the user can send it again without worrying about paying twice, PayPal said. No money is sent until the user fully confirms.
PayPal's Web site has a link to Text to Buy participating retailers, but there are currently no retailers listed, leading analysts to believe that full retailer functionality may be a long time coming.
"Going into a store and paying with a cell phone is much further down the road because there are so few retailers that are currently integrated with any type of mobile payment system in the U.S.," Mulpuru said.
Could PayPal be preparing this service in light of competitive pressure from Google, GreenZap and others in this space? It is indeed a "tough competitive landscape," Mulpuru noted. Just like any business with slowing growth, PayPal may be looking to come up with new products and services to maintain value and hold onto customer interest. "PayPal has been throwing a lot of things against the wall, as have eBay and Google and Amazon. These companies are fortunate to be entrepreneurial enough to allow pretty rapid deployment of these products. PayPal will see if this sticks. If it does, then I am sure the company will move forward with this and try to figure out a way to monetize it," Mulpuru concluded.
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PayPal customers can buy items like CDs, DVDs, books, electronics and accessories . PayPal has not yet disclosed its bricks-and-mortar partners. PayPal was not immediately available for comment. Apprently, however, the mobile service is still in the early experimental phases.
"This is very elementary right now. PayPal is testing it out from the peer-to-peer channel to see if it will work and gain consumer traction," Sucharita Mulpuru, senior analyst said. One of the first concerns about any new technological advance -- especially one that transfers money -- is security.
PayPal has outlined a security plan for the new service that is based on a PIN system. Mobile phone users activate their phone for PayPal Mobile by creating a unique PIN. The activation is complete only after PayPal calls the user back and the user enters that PIN. This method confirms that the customer actually owns the phone he or she has activated, PayPal said. Each mobile transaction is also PIN-protected to offer customers security if their phones are lost or stolen. Customers are required to confirm payment details for every transaction they make. If a person doesn't confirm when PayPal calls back, no money is sent.
"Buy it when you see it. Where you see 'Text to Buy' -- on a poster, in a magazine, at an event -- just order the item securely by text message," PayPal says in the promotional materials on its Web site . For example, customers might see: "To order this DVD, text 'DVD to 63336.'" Immediately after the customer does this, PayPal calls the customer back to confirm the order and asks the person to enter his/her PayPal Mobile PIN. Once the customer confirms, the item is shipped to the home address listed on the user's PayPal account. Just like the traditional PayPal service, PayPal Mobile makes it free to send money, though wireless carriers may charge fees for receiving text messages. If a call is dropped before payment details are complete, the user can send it again without worrying about paying twice, PayPal said. No money is sent until the user fully confirms.
PayPal's Web site has a link to Text to Buy participating retailers, but there are currently no retailers listed, leading analysts to believe that full retailer functionality may be a long time coming.
"Going into a store and paying with a cell phone is much further down the road because there are so few retailers that are currently integrated with any type of mobile payment system in the U.S.," Mulpuru said.
Could PayPal be preparing this service in light of competitive pressure from Google, GreenZap and others in this space? It is indeed a "tough competitive landscape," Mulpuru noted. Just like any business with slowing growth, PayPal may be looking to come up with new products and services to maintain value and hold onto customer interest. "PayPal has been throwing a lot of things against the wall, as have eBay and Google and Amazon. These companies are fortunate to be entrepreneurial enough to allow pretty rapid deployment of these products. PayPal will see if this sticks. If it does, then I am sure the company will move forward with this and try to figure out a way to monetize it," Mulpuru concluded.
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Sunday, March 12, 2006
New Alerts Aim to Simplify Web Shopping
Looking for new ways to reach consumers, retailers like eBags, ICE.com, TowerRecords.com and others are using RSS, or "really simple syndication," to feed product alerts to Internet users who have set up personalized Web pages on Yahoo, Google, and other sites. By giving merchants another free way to reach consumers, these alerts serve as a hedge against the recent move by AOL and Yahoo to start charging for some commercial bulk e-mail deliveries. More importantly, retailers see them as a way to reach consumers who are growing weary of commercial e-mail.
"I don't know how many e-mails you get a day, but I can't keep up," said Jon Nordmark, the chief executive of eBags. "Rather than delivering a slightly relevant message to a person's mailbox, this allows us to get customers very detailed information directly." This month, consumers who visit either the company's main site or its shoe site, 6pm.com, will see RSS icons near the sites' products, with messages offering users regular updates on those products. Once a user has indicated a preference for, say, black size 11 Cole Haan shoes, he clicks on the icon telling the company to send the alerts to his personalized page, then confirms the request by signing into that page.
If the user directs eBags to deliver alerts to a My Yahoo page, eBags will send the alert typically an item description with a photo only when it has a new product or a promotion relevant to the specified items. Nordmark said RSS feeds were especially useful for Web sites like his that offer a vast array of products. eBags sells nearly 20,000 bags, while 6pm.com sells about 125,000 shoe styles. Customers might not surf through all the merchandise each time they visit. But RSS is, he said, "a way to basically position highly relevant microsites in front of consumers."
Consumers had yet to warm to the technology in meaningful numbers even though the little orange RSS boxes have sprouted like mushrooms on scores of mainstream Web sites in the past year, said Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst with the online consultancy Forrester Research. According to a Forrester survey last year, just 14 percent of Internet users even know what RSS is, and fewer than 5 percent have used it. Some consumers do not know they're using RSS. According to comScore Networks, an Internet research firm, more than 30 million people had created personalized Yahoo home pages as of December, setting up personalized stock quotes, news feeds and other information that is delivered via RSS. To make RSS more widely understood, executives and analysts agree that retailers will have to do a fair amount of hand-holding. Shoppers browsing for the latest fashions might be reluctant to click on a daunting "what is RSS?" link.
Peter Cobb, an eBags vice president, said the company would rely on its catalogs, among other things, to spread the word. Retailers with a dynamic product mix and customers who are passionate about new products are particularly well suited to RSS feeds. TowerRecords.com, for instance, allows users to sign up to hear about new music releases in a variety of genres, through its "Tower Alerts" service. Travel sites like Kayak, SideStep, Travelocity, Orbitz and others have also recently introduced RSS feeds showing good deals or destination suggestions. One of the few retail sites with enough history to gauge the effectiveness of RSS as a sales tool is Burpee.com, the Web division of the seed manufacturer W. Atlee Burpee in Warminster, Penn.
According to Ethan Holland, the company's director of e-commerce, Burpee began helping customers set up RSS feeds about products in late 2004, and now more than 10,000 receive the alerts. Holland said the company sent five RSS updates weekly that differed from Burpee's e-mail messages in that they were "more lighthearted, kind of like a blog posting which I think you can get away with since you're dealing with people who are more familiar with the casual nature of the Internet." The tool has had a marginal effect on sales, Holland said, adding, "But the investment has been almost nothing for us, so we're definitely getting money back."
Brought to you by Guardian eCommerce Privacy Seal Program.
"I don't know how many e-mails you get a day, but I can't keep up," said Jon Nordmark, the chief executive of eBags. "Rather than delivering a slightly relevant message to a person's mailbox, this allows us to get customers very detailed information directly." This month, consumers who visit either the company's main site or its shoe site, 6pm.com, will see RSS icons near the sites' products, with messages offering users regular updates on those products. Once a user has indicated a preference for, say, black size 11 Cole Haan shoes, he clicks on the icon telling the company to send the alerts to his personalized page, then confirms the request by signing into that page.
If the user directs eBags to deliver alerts to a My Yahoo page, eBags will send the alert typically an item description with a photo only when it has a new product or a promotion relevant to the specified items. Nordmark said RSS feeds were especially useful for Web sites like his that offer a vast array of products. eBags sells nearly 20,000 bags, while 6pm.com sells about 125,000 shoe styles. Customers might not surf through all the merchandise each time they visit. But RSS is, he said, "a way to basically position highly relevant microsites in front of consumers."
Consumers had yet to warm to the technology in meaningful numbers even though the little orange RSS boxes have sprouted like mushrooms on scores of mainstream Web sites in the past year, said Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst with the online consultancy Forrester Research. According to a Forrester survey last year, just 14 percent of Internet users even know what RSS is, and fewer than 5 percent have used it. Some consumers do not know they're using RSS. According to comScore Networks, an Internet research firm, more than 30 million people had created personalized Yahoo home pages as of December, setting up personalized stock quotes, news feeds and other information that is delivered via RSS. To make RSS more widely understood, executives and analysts agree that retailers will have to do a fair amount of hand-holding. Shoppers browsing for the latest fashions might be reluctant to click on a daunting "what is RSS?" link.
Peter Cobb, an eBags vice president, said the company would rely on its catalogs, among other things, to spread the word. Retailers with a dynamic product mix and customers who are passionate about new products are particularly well suited to RSS feeds. TowerRecords.com, for instance, allows users to sign up to hear about new music releases in a variety of genres, through its "Tower Alerts" service. Travel sites like Kayak, SideStep, Travelocity, Orbitz and others have also recently introduced RSS feeds showing good deals or destination suggestions. One of the few retail sites with enough history to gauge the effectiveness of RSS as a sales tool is Burpee.com, the Web division of the seed manufacturer W. Atlee Burpee in Warminster, Penn.
According to Ethan Holland, the company's director of e-commerce, Burpee began helping customers set up RSS feeds about products in late 2004, and now more than 10,000 receive the alerts. Holland said the company sent five RSS updates weekly that differed from Burpee's e-mail messages in that they were "more lighthearted, kind of like a blog posting which I think you can get away with since you're dealing with people who are more familiar with the casual nature of the Internet." The tool has had a marginal effect on sales, Holland said, adding, "But the investment has been almost nothing for us, so we're definitely getting money back."
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Saturday, March 04, 2006
Guardian eCommerce - E-Commerce News
Settlement Ends BlackBerry Dispute
Research In Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry e-mail device, Friday announced it has settled its long-running patent dispute with a small Virginia-based firm, averting a possible court-ordered shutdown of the BlackBerry system. RIM has paid NTP US$612.5 million in a "full and final settlement of all claims," the companies said. At a hearing last week, NTP had asked a federal court in Richmond, Va., for an injunction blocking the continued use of key technologies underpinning BlackBerry's wireless e-mail service.
At the hearing, Judge James R. Spencer expressed impatience with RIM and urged a settlement.
"He basically questioned the sanity of RIM, and said it wasn't acting very rationally," said Rod Thompson, patent attorney at Farella, Braun and Martel in San Francisco. "His prodding of the parties worked." The settlement is on the low end of expectations, Thompson said, especially since RIM will not have to pay any future royalties. There had also been talk of NTP receiving a stake in RIM. RIM, which is based in Waterloo, Ont., had already put away $450 million in escrow, the amount of a settlement in 2004 that later fell apart. RIM will record the additional $162.5 million in its fourth-quarter results, it said.
The settlement ends a period of anxiety for many of the more than 3 million BlackBerry users in the United States. Uncertainty over the outcome had some customers wondering whether they would experience brief outages or even a shutdown. "I'm relieved," said Matt Lattman, a management consultant in Boston. "I've had it for about a year, and at this point, I can't imagine life without it."
RIM had assured users it had developed new software to work around NTP's patents, but because few details were released, analysts and some corporations expressed concerns about the viability of the technology and the legal ramifications of adopting it.
With a settlement, RIM will be able to avoid any of the headaches associated with introducing this new technology. Even if the software worked, it, too, might have been challenged by NTP, introducing yet another twist to this complicated and long-running case. In arguing against an injunction, RIM's attorneys had stressed the public interest in keeping its service running. Government and emergency employees would be exempt from the BlackBerry ban, but sorting them from other users would prove difficult and problematic.
RIM attorneys also noted that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, in a proceeding parallel to the Virginia case, was poised to finally reject all patents at the heart of the case. Spencer first issued an injunction in 2003 but held off on its enforcement during RIM's appeals. After those efforts largely failed, the case returned to Spencer.
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At the hearing, Judge James R. Spencer expressed impatience with RIM and urged a settlement.
"He basically questioned the sanity of RIM, and said it wasn't acting very rationally," said Rod Thompson, patent attorney at Farella, Braun and Martel in San Francisco. "His prodding of the parties worked." The settlement is on the low end of expectations, Thompson said, especially since RIM will not have to pay any future royalties. There had also been talk of NTP receiving a stake in RIM. RIM, which is based in Waterloo, Ont., had already put away $450 million in escrow, the amount of a settlement in 2004 that later fell apart. RIM will record the additional $162.5 million in its fourth-quarter results, it said.
The settlement ends a period of anxiety for many of the more than 3 million BlackBerry users in the United States. Uncertainty over the outcome had some customers wondering whether they would experience brief outages or even a shutdown. "I'm relieved," said Matt Lattman, a management consultant in Boston. "I've had it for about a year, and at this point, I can't imagine life without it."
RIM had assured users it had developed new software to work around NTP's patents, but because few details were released, analysts and some corporations expressed concerns about the viability of the technology and the legal ramifications of adopting it.
With a settlement, RIM will be able to avoid any of the headaches associated with introducing this new technology. Even if the software worked, it, too, might have been challenged by NTP, introducing yet another twist to this complicated and long-running case. In arguing against an injunction, RIM's attorneys had stressed the public interest in keeping its service running. Government and emergency employees would be exempt from the BlackBerry ban, but sorting them from other users would prove difficult and problematic.
RIM attorneys also noted that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, in a proceeding parallel to the Virginia case, was poised to finally reject all patents at the heart of the case. Spencer first issued an injunction in 2003 but held off on its enforcement during RIM's appeals. After those efforts largely failed, the case returned to Spencer.
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New Tools Let E-Commerce Sites Gain Visibility Into Failings
Firms with an online presence could benefit from new application management tools designed to monitor customer transactions in real time and help them diagnose and resolve problems before they escalate. Enterprise application management specialist Wily's new Customer Experience Manager (CEM) product, version 3.0, alerts IT staff when errors occur in the transactions of packaged or custom applications, whether they are built on Java , .Net, mainframe or legacy technology, according to the firm.
CEM 3.0 defines a transaction as any unit of work a customer does on a site, whether it is to log on, complete an account summary or log off, explained general manager of Wily's Customer Experience Business Unit, Dave Chapman. The product is also integrated with the vendor's application performance management solution, Introscope, which can analyze data on transaction performance, quality, success rates and volume, and isolate the cause of the defect faster than before, Chapman added. "CEM allows Web managers to [see] not just if the site is up or down, but what the customer is experiencing on these sites," said Chapman. "It specifically understands who's executing a transaction, where there is a problem and what the business impact will be. It has the ability to take action before it's too late and the customer leaves the business."
Common problems for e-commerce sites that could be caught early on are transactions being too slow and timing out, explained Chapman, and often IT help monitors do not detect such defects. "The biggest challenge is that if customers don't complain [and call the Web managers' attention to faults] they will stop working, and customers will go to another site," he said.
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CEM 3.0 defines a transaction as any unit of work a customer does on a site, whether it is to log on, complete an account summary or log off, explained general manager of Wily's Customer Experience Business Unit, Dave Chapman. The product is also integrated with the vendor's application performance management solution, Introscope, which can analyze data on transaction performance, quality, success rates and volume, and isolate the cause of the defect faster than before, Chapman added. "CEM allows Web managers to [see] not just if the site is up or down, but what the customer is experiencing on these sites," said Chapman. "It specifically understands who's executing a transaction, where there is a problem and what the business impact will be. It has the ability to take action before it's too late and the customer leaves the business."
Common problems for e-commerce sites that could be caught early on are transactions being too slow and timing out, explained Chapman, and often IT help monitors do not detect such defects. "The biggest challenge is that if customers don't complain [and call the Web managers' attention to faults] they will stop working, and customers will go to another site," he said.
For more information on this news or to get your privacy seal, please visit GuardianeCommerce.net.
