If you sell software online, you’ve come to the right place. We’ve been keeping our eyes open for relevant ecommerce information for ecommerce professionals. Take the time to read these articles, take notes on them, and try to apply them to your business. If you do, you’ll come away with lessons about A/B testing, pricing strategies, your relationship with resellers, new UK cookie laws, new payment methods, and social media vs. search engines.
Post in the comment section to help us understand your perspective on any or all of these topics. We’ll be sure to respond.
Wired | The A/B Test: Inside the Technology That’s Changing the Rules of Business: “Only in the digital realm is it possible to be two different things at the same time.” In this fascinating look into the world of A/B testing, Brian Christian shows us the ways in which traditional business mindsets are disrupted by split testing elements of web pages. He also makes us consider the benefits and dangers of this disruption.
On the one hand companies can choose to test everything and the data’s judgement is final. But does over reliance on data restrain the vision of out of the box thinkers? Do we really need to get bogged down in the question of whether a border should be three or four pixels wide?
Use the comment section below to give us your opinion on split testing and how much we should rely on its results.
Ars Technica | Nintendo’s odd attempt to bridge the digital/retail sales divide: This article says that Sony and Microsoft lower prices on games they distribute digitally, while Nintendo sets identical prices on its packaged and digital games. Why doesn’t Nintendo factor reduced distribution and warehousing costs into a lower price for consumers?
Here’s another question to ponder: What’s the best way to reward retailers for exposing larger markets to your product? Do they prefer affiliate commissions or would they rather purchase products wholesale and price them however they please? Again, Sony and Microsoft differ with Nintendo. Where Sony and Microsoft pay brick and mortar retailers commission for selling digital downloads in store, Nintendo offers retailers the downloads at wholesale prices, allowing retailers to price the products at any point they deem proper.
Which model do you think is more appropriate for digital downloads sold in brick and mortar stores?
eMarketer | As UK Cookie Regulation Looms, Many Users Shrug: The UK recently passed regulation requiring websites and ad networks to obtain consent from users before dropping cookies on their browsers. It’s not surprising to find ambivalence surrounding the dropping of cookies. They save us the trouble of retyping our login information for frequently visited sites, but they also track our behavior across websites to display targeted ads which unnerves many people. Either way, global ecommerce companies better pay attention to these new cookie regulations: Websites that break the rule can be fined as much as £500,000.
PYMNTS | Discover Finally Opens Up about Emerging Payments: There’s a wonderful story at the end of this interview with two payment executives from Discover Financial Services. The story is about the ice industry in the Midwest before the refrigerator was invented. These major ice distribution companies were excellent at delivering ice to your house and made lots of money doing so. But in 1929 someone invented the refrigerator. Instead of building refrigerators, the ice companies kept trying to improve the old model. They all forgot to embrace the fact that anyone can make ice in their own home now.
The corollary lesson is to understand that the payment industry is evolving and new models of partnerships are emerging. As software vendors, we need to to know how to get information and money from point A to point B in a way that brings value to consumers and merchants; and how to do so in a secure and frictionless manner.
Mashable | Why ‘The Atlantic’ No Longer Cares About SEO: Read this piece to find out why The Atlantic took down its pay-wall, drove ad revenue up, and focused on creating excellent content to be shared through social media. It’s interesting to consider that media companies design content that is appreciated by humans over content that is easily discovered by algorithms, but software manufacturers?
Leave a comment to share your preference for agency or wholesale pricing, or if you rely on social media over search engines
“Instead of building refrigerators, the ice companies kept trying to improve the old model. They all forgot to embrace the fact that anyone can make ice in their own home now.” is a really good analogy to so many things I hear on conversations each day around technology, CRM especially.
NetSuite has done a remarkable job over the past decade of reinventing what they do to match the times.
If you look at their newest PR you will see they are tackling a problem I hear each day with typical CRMs clients use yet can’t understand why their CRM doesn’t have the features needed to run their business today.
http://www.netsuite.com/portal/press/releases/nlpr05-15-12f.shtml
~Clint
@cazoomi
ps.I am going to steal your analogy on my next call when this comes up.