Guest article on Practical eCommerce

Today, my first guest article was published on Practical eCommerce. Very excited to see the Ordoro presence on a popular ecommerce magazine such as PeC. Please give me feedback on the article either there or right here on this blog.

I also want to extend a big THANK YOU to Gary Yorke – the owner of ChildTherapyToys.com. His input was extremely valuable in writing that article.

Also, the entire Ordoro team wishes to thank all you readers for your support via RSS subscription, Facebook and Twitter.

Ordoro wins the Texas Moot Corp semi finals

Last night, we presented at the Texas Moot Corp semi-finals. We did a great job, and we are proud to announce that we advanced into the finals. Ordoro is one of the 5 finalists of the Texas Moot Corp competition.

We had an amazing time doing the 15 minute pitch of our business plan. I started the pitch focusing on the pain experienced by thousands of small business ecommerce merchants. I then introduced the Ordoro solution and talked about how excited our customers were to see the alpha version screens – our focus on usability had paid off. Naruby followed up with an overview of where Ordoro fits in the market place, and talked about all the hard work we did over the past one year to take us to where we are today. Sangram topped it all off with the financials and a discussion about the entire Ordoro team.

The response from the judges was very positive. Every one concurred that Ordoro addresses an important pain in the market and that we have the right team structure to build a great solution. They gave us great suggestions for marketing and also highlighted a couple of areas that we need to focus on. All in all, great feedback from four experienced investor/entrepreneurs.

Now on to the big event – the Texas Moot Corp Finals. Just getting into the Moot Corp Finals itself means a lot to us. We get to pitch in front of another panel of successful businessmen and women. Yet another round of constructive feedback on our business plan. And more exposure within the Austin investor community. And last but not the least, bragging rights.

The entire Ordoro team wants to thank all the small business ecommerce merchants out there who have helped us with all the market research. Thank you for all the early feedback that has helped us build a great product. I know you are waiting for our product release announcement. It is coming soon.

For now, the march is on for February 17. Come cheer for us at the Texas Moot Corp Finals.

Ahh! the creative blog spammers

This one is a bit off topic, but we wanted to share it anyway.

We have set the wordpress comments moderation option on this blog so that we get to review/approve all the comments before they are posted. Obviously, we chose this in order to weed out all the spam that gets posted as comments. This setup works fine because currently our comment volume is low. And we get to act on new comments within a couple of hours anyway.

Every day, we find new spam comments. Usually it is the garden-variety spam. The Russian gibberish, the Greek alphabets, and sometimes meaningless sentences like -

Amiable brief and this enter helped me alot in my college assignement. Thanks you on your information.

But occasionally we run into a gem, like this one below, which makes me wonder how creative these spammers are getting. They must be spending a lot of hours thinking up interesting conversations.

My friend and I were recently discussing about how involved with technology our daily lives have become. Reading this post makes me think back to that debate we had, and just how inseparable from electronics we have all become.

I don’t mean this in a bad way, of course! Societal concerns aside… I just hope that as the price of memory falls, the possibility of uploading our brains onto a digital medium becomes a true reality. It’s a fantasy that I daydream about every once in a while.

(Posted on Nintendo DS running R4 DS BB)

The cool thing is that Akismet did trap this one as spam. The cat and mouse game between spammers and the Akismet algorithm is exciting.

Update from the day after: Today this article got indexed by Google and lo and behold hell broke loose. Seeing their text show up on the blog (since I quoted it verbatim in my article), the spammers have been rushing to us like sharks smelling a drop of blood from miles away. They probably think we approved their comment to be published, and wanted to quickly cash in by adding more comments.

We had 42 spam comments in under 30 minutes. I’m really curious on how this is gonna turn out. Honestly, we were a bit concerned about Google giving us bad karma points for quoting the spammy text, but so far all looks well.

Accept payments via the iPhone

American Express Open Forum discusses three services that let small business owners accept credit card payments using an iPhone. This suggests the possibility of replacing the clunky Point-of-Sale devices with a sleek device like the newly released Apple iPad. Fast Company has a related story.

A great innovation for the small business owners – particularly for merchants who sell in exhibitions, tradeshows and farmer’s markets, and for home service providers like movers and maid services.

The three services reviewed are -

1. SquareUp
2. PAYware Mobile
3. Mophie marketplace intelligent case

How NOT to build an eCommerce iPhone app

eMarketer discusses a Zara iPhone app that fails to deliver. The app is just a catalog with pictures of products, but with no option to check the price or to buy the product.

Practical eCommerce has another article that reviews some of the popular ecommerce iPhone apps.

Like I commented on that page, I believe that these apps do not fully utilize the capabilities offered by the iPhone platform. When new technologies arrive, most people blindly copy over their existing model to fit the new platform without fully considering the potential of the new platform. iPhone, being a handheld computer, can offer much more than what a regular web-based catalog can offer.

A good example that utilizes the iPhone platform is the Tesco Wine app. With the Tesco app, you need to just take a picture of a wine bottle, and it will offer you tasting notes and other details about the wine. It’ll then let you buy a bottle via the same app from the ecommerce store.

Another good example is the Shoeboxed iPhone app from Shoeboxed.com. If you are not familiar with Shoeboxed, here is what they do. You can send them all your receipts and business cards packed in an envelope and they will scan them, organize them, and give you online access to them.

So how does their iPhone app work? You just need to photograph the receipt. The iPhone app extracts the data from the photograph and displays it on the iPhone. You can submit it to your online account on the spot.

My point is that ecommerce merchants should try to get a deep understanding of the customer’s mindset and then provide creative solutions that utilize the capabilities of the iPhone platform. That will give you better results than just porting over your current webstore into an iPhone app.

Our 10 most popular blog posts in 2009

Following are our 10 most popular blog posts from last year – based on page views. Thank you to all our readers for the continued support.

1. On free shipping, women customers, and measurement-driven-marketing : Statistics on free shipping policies for ecommerce merchants. Article also discusses the large percentage of female online shopper population.
2. Badcustomer.com – Legitimate? Appropriate? : A review of the return fraud protection service – badcustomer.com.
3. My favorite sites for small business e-commerce advice : Title is self-explanatory
4. 4 simple steps to calculate the Cost of Money for your small business : Basic financial calculations for small business owners.
5. Differentiate through product packaging – The Pangea story : Easy marketing ideas for small businesses. And a case study of Pangea Organics.
6. 4 questions to ask while deciding inventory levels : Simple ideas on deciding inventory levels for your small business.
7. How to generate $50 million in revenues selling window blinds online? : Discussion regarding blinds.com and a few ideas you can implement right away.
8. When to use an early payment discount? : Explains terms such as “2/10 net 30″. And suggests an easy interest rate calculation to make a decision regarding early payment discounts.
9. Marketing tips from successful companies : A quote from Tony Hsieh of Zappos.
10. 4 reasons why most white papers suck! : Why you should blog instead of publishing pdf white papers.

- If you like our blog, please help promote it by retweeting the link. Thank you.

My favorite sites for small business e-commerce advice

Here is a list of the small business e-commerce blogs that I regularly read. I plan to update this list often and not let this be a static blog post.

1. Practical Ecommerce – They regularly review shopping cart solutions. The site also has guest articles from e-commerce experts.
2. Small Business Trends – A wide collection of articles for small business in general. Not limited to ecommerce.
3. Lexiconn blog - Though this is specific to merchants who use Shopsite shopping cart, the blog offers good suggestions applicable to all small online merchants.
4. American Express Open Forum contains guest articles on small business management.
5. Wall Street Journal’s Small Business section is a good resource as well. But this one is behind the WSJ paywall.
6. Wall Street Journal’s How to Guide for Small Businesses. This one is NOT behind the pay wall.
7. ProBlogger.net – This one is a great resource if you are also promoting a blog as part of your marketing strategy.
8. Google Merchant Blog – This is a must read for every ecommerce owner. Has lots of tips on optimizing your webstore to get found in Google search.

Badcustomer.com – Legitimate? Appropriate?

Strangely enough, lately I’ve been getting some traffic with the google keywords “badcustomer.com scam”. Because the google index points to an article I had written a few weeks ago about fraud related chargebacks. In that article I had just highlighted how badcustomer.com can be used to detect chargeback related scams.

Naturally my first reaction was to verify whether badcustomer.com is indeed a legitimate site or not. So far, based on the following links, it seems legitimate enough.

Here is an article from AOL…

Brien Heideman, the founder and CEO of BadCustomer.com, also believes he can help take friendly fraud con artists off the Internet. He has developed a free service for merchants where, if you suspect you have a dishonest shopper, you can report them to BadCustomer.com. Retailers, meanwhile, can run their own customers through BadCustomer’s database, to see if they come up as a chargeback risk. Customers are refused service and told they’re in the database — although, interestingly enough, they can pay $99 to be removed from the list.

Another one from CNBC

Badcustomer claims that customers who’ve used chargebacks before are nine times more likely to use them again, compared to customers who resolve billing disputes directly with stores. The company provides its service free to merchants who hand over their own list of chargeback customers.

And finally from Yahoo answers

“Web of trust” lets you know is a site is safe, check it out?

Based on all the information above, I am fairly certain that badcustomer.com is a legitimate site. But is it a good service for the merchants? I am not so sure.

Why does a service like badcustomer.com exist? According to National Retail Federation, retailers lost about $11.8 billion to return fraud in 2008. During the holiday season of 2007, the return fraud was $3.6 billion. So a service to tackle this problem seems like a good idea.

Here is how badcustomer.com works. If a customer processes a charge back, the merchant can report that customer to badcustomer.com who then maintains this customer’s information in their shared database. Other merchants can use this central shared database to pre-screen their customers for charge-back risk. The customer who has been blacklisted can request badcustomer.com to remove him/her from the list by paying a $99 service fee.

The author of this Information Week article clearly is not happy with the idea that “Customers are unaware they are even being checked against the database unless they’re on the list”. However, the more important issue is that of privacy. If every transaction is to be pre-screened by badcustomer.com, they will be collecting a large amount of credit card information.

Indeed, the World Privacy Forum discussed these privacy issues related to badcustomer.com with the Federal Trade Commission on November 6, 2009. (Access the detailed report here)

… to get off the badcustomer list, consumers must supply detailed information online. How are consumers supposed to hear about every database list like this? How is badcustomers.com using the consumers’ information after receiving it? Is this company doing more than just taking people off of the bad customer list? We suggest that consumer data collection is out of control, with no balancing consumer rights orrequirements for transparency to counterweight the collection and usage activity.

Is the service legitimate? Yes. Is it appropriate? I am not so sure. Read the comment from @Erik below for another interesting perspective on this service.

4 reasons why most white papers suck!

Firstly, I hate the term “white paper”.

Secondly, I hate the idea of locking up a fancy pdf document behind a firewall, and then making the visitor provide tons of information to access that fancy pdf.

Thirdly, please don’t make your visitors fill up a form like this – ever! (Yes, this is for a webcast and not for a white paper, but you get the point)

Why should I tell you all that to read your paper?

Here is why this is a bad idea -

1. I don’t have the patience to fill out all that information you are asking for. I am most likely to give up after three fields and walk away from your webpage.
2. I know you are doing it to get my email address and contact information so that your sales people can call me / email me. But I get so much spam everyday that I am most likely to delete your email anyway. Or better, I have a separate email account to use for purposes like this. So forcing me to give you my email id is not beneficial to you in anyway.
3. If you really have something valuable to say (and don’t want to charge dollars), then you are much better off writing a blog article about it. With a blog article - the google spider will find you, I can quote you and link to your article, and you will overall generate much more traffic than having a fancy pdf behind the firewall.
4. Also, provide me with a simple “voluntary email signup” form in case I really like what you have to say and I am really interested in hearing more about you. That way, you will get a quality list of addresses to follow up with.

Marcom Ink blog discusses the case of Reachforce.com who increased their clickthrough rates by 1600% just by setting the content free: no registration forms. All they did was to highlight in their marketing emails that no registration is required to download content from their website.

So next time you have something interesting to say, just blog about it. Or publish an html on your website with free access without an idiotic sign up form. Also have an easy email signup box where people who are really interested can sign up for more information.

- If you liked this article, please help promote it by retweeting the link. Thank you.

2009 study on small business cyber security

Inc magazine has an article that discusses a 2009 study about the cyber security policies of small businesses. The study was conducted by the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) co-sponsored by Symantec

The article suggests that “when it comes to cyber security, the majority of the country’s small businesses are not adequately equipped for attacks”.

I disagree with the way some of the information is “highlighted” in this article. Please read the study report for the original survey findings.

Having a “formal security policy” is different from having “secure systems”. Small businesses are not usually sticklers for “formal policies”. But that does not mean they are ignorant. So the fact that only 28% have formal policies doesn’t mean much. Either they trust their outsourced IT provider’s policies, or they have secure in-house systems where are the policies are “not written down formally”.