WebPeel

Wyndham, Building Trust (Or Not) One Bottled Water at a Time

This is not necessarily an online user experience story, but it does describe an important lesson in building trust with your customers. On a recent trip to Atlanta I stayed at a Wyndham for 5 nights. During my stay I arrived in the hotel pretty late on several nights (i.e. past 12am). At that time of night the store (if that was what you could call it) was not staffed. The cashier that managed this kiosk of water, juice and chips from the dining room was not around so your items had to be paid for at the hotel front desk. On 3 separate nights I bought a bottled water and bag of chips to take to my room. On the first 2 nights the hotel desk clerk simply asked for my room number (and only my room number) and I proceeded upstairs. This would show on my hotel bill at checkout. On the 3rd night, there was no one immediately available at the front desk. After waiting a few minutes someone appeared and I asked to add my bag of chips and water to my hotel room. I politely gave my number and she said thank you and I proceeded to walk off. As I was two steps away from the desk, she called out, "What's the name on the room?" I immediately suspected that she thought I gave her a random room number so as to not have to pay for the items. I was slightly offended, but gave her my last name without any fuss. The number matched the last name I gave her and I proceeded upstairs. 

While this incident is not big deal, it is a perfect example of little things making a big difference. Observation 1: the first two clerks (who were different each night) both trusted me and did not ask for my last name. Whether it was lack of training or trust is hard to tell, but a consistent experience is what customers want. If I had been asked for my name and number all 3 nights I wouldn't be writing this blog. Observation 2: the clerk on the 3rd night second-guessed me. Saying okay, then stopping me as I began to walk off, did not leave a good impression which was not worth the $2.25 they would have lost if I had been lying.  I am not ready to boycott Wyndham just yet, but unfortunately, the experience is now noted in my head. 

What Goes Around... 

Wyndham ended up losing $2.25 anyway. During checkout I noticed that the clerk had mistakenly put a parking fee of $2.25 on my bill even though I took a taxi to the hotel. Now obviously this was the water and chips from the first night and he must have hit the wrong key. I could have paid it and went on my merry way, but instead I told them to remove the charge because it was filed incorrectly. They promptly did and that was that. Between the bottled water incident and their internet access being down for a day and a half, I didn't feel bad.

It Is Not Always Easy to Walk Away From Free

Consumers are interesting creatures. If we have to pay for a service and are not happy with that service, assuming other options are available, it is easy for us to walk away. But when a service is free and we're not happy with our experience, we often choose to just let the service sit indefinitely, instead of cancelling the subscription or membership thereby simplifying our lives. Consumers love free; it's the same reason why we have tons of crap in our house that we really don't need; "I really didn't need another coffee grinder, but it was free." 

I was on a recent business trip where I forgot to check my free web based email account. To my dismay, I failed my son by missing a birthday invite from the parents of one of his friends. This is an account that I don't use often, so it's not checked every day. Unfortunately, by the time I saw the email it was too late to make plans to attend. At first I was angry at the parents for not using traditional paper invites like every other student in my son's class, but I quickly realized I was just looking for excuses to not blame myself. But my attention quickly turned to my free email provider. Why was it that I used this account so infrequently? Why is it that many of us have multiple accounts. The answer is usually pretty simple; we use different accounts for different purposes and the reality was that I really wanted to use this account, but the service quite simply sucks. So why not cancel it? Well, it's free. Besides, I would have to update all the people and companies that do send mail to this address. So instead of just cutting bait, I choose to login maybe once per week. The login process and time required to download my mail is so painfully slow, I can only put myself through that torture once per week. 

So What Is The Cost of Free? 

Interestingly enough, this phenomenon happens with many services across many industries every day. The sad truth is that the cost of free can be quite expensive for both the consumer and the business providing the service. For me as the consumer, I paid the cost of a disappointed son, parents who are offended that we didn't attend their son's party, and the time cost of managing multiple email accounts because each has different benefits (while this one account is slooow, the email address is real easy for people to remember). For business owners, if the service is truly bad, but free and non-evasive, they end up with up bunch of inactive accounts on their books. An inactive account is overhead and overhead is bad. If you're running a service business online, inactive accounts are taking up space. Each account has data that must be stored and backed up, even if the person only logs in once per month. Then there is the liability of holding that person's data. In the event of your business being compromised and data stolen, you now have a pissed off customer who wants to sue you for the potential identity theft that may occur later, and they haven't added a single dime to your bottom line. LinkedIn has millions of members, but how many actively use their accounts in any given month? 

If you're a business owner looking to grow your empire with free memberships, go for the new customers that will be actively engaged. It use to be that just getting subscriptions was enough to build an ad-based business model, but even on those web sites, advertisers are demanding more and more for active eyeballs on the screen. An engaged audience usually means a happy audience. And a happy audience will bring in more customers. Just remember your product has to work to keep all of those members.  If you don't believe this strategy will work, just look at Facebook - it's free, makes people happy to keep in touch with friends they wouldn't otherwise call, and it's reliable. Now go make your billions. 

Qdoba, Building Trust is More Than Just HTTPS

If you have ever bought anything online from a major ecommerce site like Amazon.com you will probably have noticed the https:// at the beginning of the URL when you either first entered the site or when you were about to enter your credit card number. This protocol, better known as SSL allows your machine and the receiving web site to receive your data in an encrypted form so that "people with bad intentions" do not grab your personal information as it travels the web. While this is a first good step in building trust with customers, it is only the beginning when it comes to a business establishing itself as an entity that truly cares about privacy and the protection of their customers' data.

A business will never build customer loyalty without first building trust, and as the old saying goes, you can spend a lifetime building trust to only have it evaporate by doing one wrong act. In the ecommerce world, the chain of trust must extend from a company's privacy policy, through their web site login all the way to the emails that customers receive from the company in their inbox.

Last week my wife convinced me to order Qdoba for the family. Being that she is from Houston, Mexican is always at the top of her list. While Qdoba is certainly not the best we have ever tasted, considering the area of the country we live in, it will make do, when she is really having a taste for the southwest. It had been years since I had been in a Qdoba so the first thing I investigated was seeing if they had a menu online. To my glee, they not only had a menu online, but they also offered online ordering.

I am a huge fan of online ordering, because it gives customers yet another vehicle to interact with a company. For control freaks like me, online ordering means being able to control exactly what you want and not hoping a person on the other end of the phone, wrote your order down correctly; or even worse, going through the drive-thru and making bets with your family on whether they'll get the order right. Online ordering gives you a written record of exactly what you entered and while not foolproof, it takes the auditory mishaps out of the equation giving the business a better chance at fulfilling customers' needs.

In order to place my scrumptious Qdoba order I first had to register for an account and wait for an email so that I could log back in to place my order - okay, no problem, pretty standard stuff. Unfortunately, to my great dismay, when I received my Qdoba registration confirmation email, it not only had my login email address in plain text, but also the password. Sure, my credentials for Qdoba is not the same as sending my banking info via email in plain text, but I was highly disappointed in Qdoba for not truncating or hiding my password completely like most sites now do. When it comes to small businesses that I consult, I can always give them a little more slack - they didn't know, they don't have a professional web developer, they don't have the budget, etc. There are hundreds of excuses I could use to let it go for the small guys. But when I see a national player that makes this type of amateur mistake, it really makes me lose confidence in wanting to give them my credit card. While they did use SSL throughout the ordering and checkout process, the fact that anyone who intercepted my email could see my password was frustrating, even more so, because it was a password that I use for other sites I visit on the net. This is a perfect example on the vulnerability many consumers have on the web, because one site does not take the simple task of obscuring your password on your registration email.

Building trust is more than just using https and I hope Qdoba quickly changes this practice. For the record, I went back and started looking at web sites I had registered at over the past 6 months to see if I could find other violators. The video chat site ooVoo.com was another culprit. My advice to businesses - always obscure the passwords to user accounts when sending information via email; especially when it's not a password recovery situation and the person is truly locked out. My advice to consumers - when you receive an email with your username and password, don't be shy about complaining to the company and then change your password immediately; hopefully they won't send the new one via email too :-)

Someone Else Getting Your Gmail? X-Forwarded-For

If you look at the most common used applications on the Internet today, web-based email is in the top 3 along with other programs like messenger apps. Contrary to some social media pundits, Facebook and the like will never completely take the place of email; it may make a dent in some demographic groups (think younger audiences who want to broadcast everything they’re doing to everyone they know), but for 1-on-1 directive communication (think business users) there is no substitute. I have about 4 web-based email accounts along with another 2-3 aliases that direct to one of these four. The reason for this many accounts is the subject of another blog, but the simple fact is that I probably would not have this many if it wasn’t so easy to setup a new account. Plus, the real advantage is the elimination of the email client like Outlook and Eudora that people used in the 90’s. Yes, I still use Outlook today to download important files from my web based account, but when you’re on the go – checking mail from wherever you have an Internet connection is really handy.

So what’s the downside of web-based email accounts. Well, if you go with a service that is very popular like Gmail, Yahoo or Windows Live Mail you will have a hell of a time finding a username you want. But even if you get past that hurdle, the bigger problem is one that I recently discovered on my Gmail account. There are literally so many users with similar usernames, misspelling and email address by just 1-letter is bound to have your email end up in someone else’s inbox. This is fine if you’re just forwarding the latest viral video, but could be disastrous if you’re sending someone flight information, personal info, or worse – the username and password to some account you have.

There is even a bigger problem with web based apps like Gmail which allow you to forward your Gmail email to another account. What if you accidently setup the forwarding address incorrectly? Well, that is exactly what someone has done to me. From what I can gather, a girl in the California area has setup her Gmail account to forward mail to an email address that is very similar to mine. For the past 6 months I have tried to contact this person via email and regular postal mail to no avail. With so much garbage on the Internet today, she has probably looked at my notices as some type of SPAM or Internet Scam. The bad thing is that the only reason I was able to send her a snail mail is because I have received her home address many times over from all the sites she has subscribed to. I can tell you what games she plays, what she reads, what school she attends and the last 20+ songs she has downloaded from iTunes (hmmm, kinda like Google can - I digress). It makes me shiver just thinking about it. From what I gather on Gmail’s support forums this is what happened:

In checking emails that come addressed to her I can clearly see my email address in her “X-Forwarded-For” information. Apparently Gmail is not much help in resolving these types of matters, but I worry about people who may have their info fall into the wrong hands. Lucky for this girl, I have no intent of doing anything malicious with the info, but it is pretty annoying.

So what’s the lesson in all of this? When setting up a new email account, always check and double-check that you have correctly entered the right username you want plus the right forwarding information. I always send myself and close friends test messages to look at all the email headers to ensure nothing is out of whack. And when sending something important to other people that use a popular web based email account, make sure you have the right address.

Be safe!!

How Not to Create a Facebook Username URL

I don’t like Facebook! There I said it – apparently, I am the only person in the world who does not, based on how fast their membership is growing. Unfortunately, being that I am all about the Web, I am pretty much forced to have an account just so I can speak to the latest trends. The list of reasons is long for my personal gripes with the site, but the one that really annoyed me today was trying to get a short username for “hoWIWeb”. The idea is that people could go to http://www.facebook.com/howiweb and be redirected to the hoWIWeb Facebook page.

In order to get one of these highly coveted usernames you must go to http://www.facebook.com/username/ which will allow you to create your alias to redirect to your existing Facebook page. Gripe #1: Why I couldn’t see this URL in my account profile or figure out how to request a username is beyond me. I literally had to search the Internet to find out how people were doing this - apparently I am just behind the times; after all, having just a regular domain name is so 90’s, now you need the Facebook URL to match your domain name.

Gripe #2: Whether you have just a personal Facebook page or a personal, developer account and business Facebook page the Facebook UI looks pretty much the same. This is more of a usability issue for me, but I would rather see distinct tabs that clearly showed which account I was in. This and the auto login feature is what messed me up today. In my haste to create the username for hoWIWeb, I went to said URL above to request one. The default screen was actually meant to create a username for my Personal Facebook page and not the Business Facebook page. So basically, my highly coveted username was redirecting to my personal page – something I did not want.

Gripe #3: Okay, so I will just reassign the username from my personal page to my business page, right? Wrong, Facebook does not allow this. Okay, so I will just ask for the username to be deleted which will put the username back in the pool of available usernames – just how domain names work on the Internet. Sorry, strike two!! Once you remove a username from your assigned page, it cannot be picked up by anyone else, even if you want to use it on another page you own. So essentially, “hoWIWeb” is forever lost by me and anyone else.

Gripe #4: So after making up a new username for my personal page just to get rid of the business moniker, I saw the text on the setup page that allows you to create usernames for your business pages. Well, apparently my business page is not eligible to receive a username yet and I don’t know when it will be.

So long story short, I have a “not-so-great” username for my personal Facebook page now (since every obvious username was already taken), and no username for by business Facebook page – essentially a lose, lose for me today.

Am I whining, yes!! Should, I have read the directions more closely before going through the steps, yes!! I realize that all of this is totally my fault, but I guess my biggest pain with Facebook right now is their policies on things like usernames. In their effort to avoid trademark and copyright infringements they have developed some pretty bad policies in my opinion. I get it that to make everyone happy they would need a much more sophisticated way to track and manage current and past usernames plus an even bigger legal department to deal with all the people who just want to get over on other people’s names. But with the amount of money companies are pouring into Mr. Zuckerberg’s pockets, they need to solve this problem. I am sure they never intended to be a domain registrar, but in offering these shortened Facebook/username URLs they have created their own little ICANN and they seem not to have the process in place yet to manage the demand.

How Do Start Ups Make Money? Ask SeniorHomes.com

As a serial entrepreneur, I am always looking at the next great business model or web startup to come on the scene. I love new ideas, branding and the possibilities of building an empire from these foundational concepts when paired with a great business model. But after the dazzle of the cool company logo, branding images and well copy written homepage wears off, my next question is always, “How are these guys making money? How did these guys just get another round of financing with this model?” I ask this not to turn my nose up at any particular venture, but as an honest question so that I and others might learn. Niche directories is one of those areas where I continue to be amazed on how many startups enter this crowded market even with powerful decision and search engines likes Bing and Google. Back in the 90’s most people would have put their money on Yahoo to forever dominate the web directory market across every niche, but people quickly grew tired of browsing hierarchical categories that needed to be maintained by someone with a degree in library science. Yet and still, many companies enter the directory market with the intent of building hyper-niche directories and search engines for various verticals and special interests. Today, I stumbled upon one such site called SeniorHomes.com.

This site is a free resource for finding local senior homes including nursing homes, assisted living, memory care and retirement communities. They also feature articles on important senior housing topics to help people in their search. While the site offers a very comprehensive list of resources, the core feature is still getting a list of senior housing options in an area of your choosing. And while this one feature could probably be replicated by Bing in a few weeks, this bold site is thriving and honestly we hope they succeed. Nonetheless, I was intrigued by my same question, “How are they going to make money and sustain?”

Well thanks to SeniorHomes.com for creating a section on their web site that explains this very thing on the About Us page:

“We make money by helping Senior Housing Providers find residents. Our featured listings (the ones with the photos) are for Providers with whom we have a commercial relationship. Featured listings show up on more pages and are displayed more prominently.  We are compensated by our Featured Providers when we put them in touch with potential residents.”

Wow!! Clean, simple and out there for the entire world to see. I commend SeniorHomes.com for being so transparent with their business model. This may sound trivial to most, but when you start to find out how some companies like this are able to secure financing and make money on such a simple premise while doing it honestly, you wonder why others don’t succeed with seemingly “better ideas” in a less crowded space. If anything, it’s finding sites like these that always inspire me; it is simply too easy nowadays to talk oneself out of almost any business idea – oh that’s already been done, that space is too crowded, that business requires too much capital, too much legal risk, too much reliance on changing technology, too much reliance on manual process and people, blah, blah, blah. So thank you SeniorHomes.com for giving us hope.

You never know what actions will inspire others.

The Proper Way to Shop Online

This blog entry could really be titled, “How to Save Money Shopping Online,” but shopping is all about finding the best deal; let’s face it, it’s all out war between you and the retailer - there is absolutely a right way and a wrong way to go about shopping, especially online. Shopping over the web is all about saving money, avoiding the crowds and long lines, quickly comparing features, reading reviews and making the quick buy without having to visit multiple stores. Oh, and did I mention, saving money! If you are a member of hoWIWeb.com, most of this text will look familiar if you use the Coupon Module, but it bears repeating on this blog.

If you want to save the most money shopping online there are three basic things that you must leverage: 1) rebates; 2) discount codes; and 3) free shipping, preferably combining all three tactics in that order, in the same purchase.

REBATES - Since discount codes and shipping are done at the time of checkout, you should first start with launching your shopping excursion from a rebate site. Doing so locks in your rebate for that session on the site. If you want cold-hard cash, we recommend Bing Cashback. Note, it requires a Windows Live ID, but once signed-up you can shop at a number of cashback stores that offer as much as 25% back during different times of the year. If you want to save money for your child's college education then try a site like Upromise. With both of these sites, the lag time for receiving actual payment or credit to your account can range from a few weeks to a few months, so be prepared to be patient. The really good thing about both these sites is that they pretty much have partnerships with every flower company, clothing store, electronics boutique you can think of.

DISCOUNT CODES - During checkout, you will sometimes be presented a textbox that allows you to enter a discount code. These codes vary by retailer but are usually for additional money off or free shipping. HoWIWeb.com aggregates discount codes from a number of coupon sites, but you can also visit coupon sites directly or even the retailer to find discount codes. Note, using discount codes is probably the hardest thing to leverage regularly since many codes are often reserved for first time shoppers or require that you click thru a link embedded in an email to get the discount. This negates the first step in going through a rebate site. Nonetheless, it pays to do a quick search to see if you can find a few codes that work. Some sites use cookies to show different offers or stop you from using a certain discounts once you have made a visit. For that reason, I often like to browse for what I need in one browser like Firefox. I do all my research, find all my possible discount codes, and then once I am ready to make a purchase, I will switch to a completely different browser like Microsoft Internet Explorer to make the purchase.

FREE SHIPPING - I'll admit it, if shipping was free on everything, I would never step foot in another store again. Shipping charges can kill a great deal; especially on sites like eBay where you may have to pay twice as much to get a hard to find item shipped to your home. There is usually no way to know if you will get free shipping without visiting the actual site, but sites like Bing Cashback will also list which retailers in their rebate program offer free shipping (usually with certain conditions).

If you have others tips and tricks, share them with us. Happy Shopping!

How Do Netflix Movies Get Selected for Instant Watching

I am a big fan of Netflix. The days of going into Blockbuster and hoping there was a VHS tape or DVD behind the box carton was fun for awhile, but quickly lost it’s luster. I typically only watch movies on the weekend, 2 at a time, so the mail delay has never been a problem for me. But every now and then, my wife and son fall asleep early and it’s only 10pm – that’s enough time for 2 good movies!! But wait, the next films have not arrived. Enter “Instant Watching.” I have used the Netflix player in the old version and Microsoft’s Silverlight version with no problems. Although, I must admit, watching movies on the large television is much more fun, but for now I’ll watch short documentaries on my 19” monitor until I hookup the Xbox or Roku option.

So what’s not to like. Well, not all movies are available for streaming, particularly new releases, but let’s face it, there are tons of old movies you always wanted to see and just haven’t got around to it. Many of these are probably available for streaming. However, one suggestion I would have for Netflix:

Put a big submit button on the Instant Watch homepage where I can send in recommendations for movies I want streamed. No, I don’t expect Netflix to listen to my every command, but if they get enough votes, then maybe they can prioritize their queue to get my video encoded faster. Better yet, send out a poll each week and let people vote – another great way to stay connected to customers. And of course, movie companies need to get more flexible with the digital rights to their movies, but that's a whole different topic.

First Impression on AmazonFresh.com

So, I finally got around to placing my first order with AmazonFresh.com and the initial impression is very good – a solid A. I would actually give them an A+, but the only negative factor I could find with the entire service was probably price. While some may say that is a very big factor, if not the most important one (especially these days), the prices weren’t so high that it would prevent me from buying again. Like most things when it comes to shopping if you want to get the lowest price on everything you buy, you would literally need to go to 5 different stores AND be using coupons. Since times haven’t got that bad for my family, the very small increase in price on average per item is worth the convenience factor. As I added items to my cart last night around 9pm PT, every price was either the same or slightly higher than the local grocery stores in my area, but never lower. During checkout I could pick a pre-dawn delivery (before 6am) or a delivery time where I needed to be home. Since I was ordering perishables, I didn’t want to have stuff just dropped at my doorstep. So what did I like most about the service compared to Safeway:

• Every item added to my cart and listed “in stock” on the site actually showed up at my door.

• The AmazonFresh.com UI allows you to search by aisle or even brand. I also like the fact that I can see all my cart items on the right rail no matter what page I’m on.

• Groceries were delivered in paper bags (frozens in plastic). I am not a big environmental guy, but paper is just better than plastic. Your groceries don’t topple over and fall out like they do with plastic.

• My wife got free flowers. I don’t know if they do this for every delivery, but it was a nice touch.

• Amazon’s delivery windows are in increments of an hour – no waiting around for 2-3 hours trying to guess if you hear a truck outside your door.

My wife says if I want something to go away I just have to start liking it. For some reason my interests don’t match the typical demographic. I really hope other people in my zip code use the service just as much as I plan to; otherwise, like so many other cool services it may come to an end. Good luck Amazon. I am going to do my part.

Amazon Cancels Referrals from Paid Search – Party Over

In the last sign that the days of “easy money on the Internet are over,” I received an email today from Amazon.com stating that they would no longer pay referrals fee to affiliates in the United States sending traffic to their web properties from paid search. While I have never made a lot of money from Amazon’s program, which I think is one of the better ones out there, the concept of being a middle man to send traffic to the sites of well-known brands always seemed too easy. And when something is too easy, everyone comes in droves until it has to get shut down.

It used to be so simple - people would setup a web site, find a few well-known companies and register for their affiliate programs. Then head over to Google, sign-up for an AdWords account and buy trademarked terms and other keywords closely affiliated (pun intended) to the company they were representing. After all, this is the only way for a small guy’s site to ever get found, especially if you had no brand awareness or content that would drive people to your property. And guess what? It worked, it worked really well for some. People were even able to quit their real jobs and do affiliate marketing full-time. There are more than a few stories on the Net of people making several thousand dollars per month.

I can personally attest to the fact that I was making close to $1,000 per month when I was a Progressive affiliate. I bought domains like HoustonCarInsurance.com, CarInsuranceQuote.net  and others and just placed the progressive quote widget right on the homepage of those sites. The checks just rolled in each month with little effort on my part to go to the search engines and update bids and keywords a couple times a month. In a busy month, maybe I spent all of 4 hours doing this. The first nail in the coffin came when many programs started cracking down on affiliates buying trademarked words and words of their competitors. This worked for a time, but the lines kept getting blurred. Eventually, so many people caught on that when you did a search for car insurance, the first 5 results would be affiliate sites and not the actual insurance provider. I started spending so much money on bids ($3.00-$4.00 per click) that it became unprofitable. Luckily, I hadn’t quit my job.

My guess is that with the down economy, the amount of money that Amazon was paying out, and the hassle of regulating people trying to beat the system, it just wasn’t worth it to Amazon. I think affiliates programs are great for small companies especially in retail who are trying to get their name out in the market, but Amazon is so AMAZON!! They get enough traffic from their own efforts. I really can’t blame them. Unfortunately, this makes it even harder for the small time web publisher to make a buck. This blog serves as a warning that you must find ways to create value for yourself without depending on the programs offered by others. Every affiliate agreement contains some language that says they can cancel the program at anytime, and that sucks if you decide to quit your job and don’t have any other revenue coming from your site. The game has changed again; there are simply too many useless sites on the Internet that do nothing more than redirect you to another place. It was a great party, sorry to see it go in some ways, but kinda glad too.

Is AmazonFresh Better Than Safeway?

For anyone who uses my hoWIWeb.com service, it is no secret that I am a huge fan of Amazon. Buying books at first was great, but I became really sold on the company after purchasing everything from Christmas gifts to now downloadable MP3s without that damn DRM crap - which doesn’t allow me to easily transfer to the three MP3 players and four computers in my house (note to self: save DRM rant for another blog entry).

But now my dreams have come true. My family has been steady users of Safeway.com for awhile. Buying groceries with the click of a mouse and saving me the hassle of chasing my 3-year old down the cereal aisle when he sees the colored boxes was entirely worth it. However, Safeway’s program has not always been the best in terms of food availability and delivery price. We always were a little perturbed that they would be out of say a certain brand of apple juice, but the Safeway brick-and-mortar store less than 5 miles away would have bottles on their shelf. This is a distribution problem between how they fulfill online orders versus going to the physical store, but I digress. The point of this article is really about competition.

As of March 2009, if you used Safeway, you would need to buy $150 in groceries to get free delivery. Today I received an email in my box saying that AmazonFresh.com now delivers in my area, with free delivery for only $75 in groceries. And I can order as late as midnight!!

So if I am already a fan of Amazon, can reach their minimum order for free delivery much easier, what’s the probability of me ever going back to Safeway. Yeah, zero!! In fact, Amazon would probably have to screw up several times before I would give Safeway another try – stay tuned to hear how it goes. So what’s the lesson learned?

If you have demonstrated strong customer service in the past, have a loyal following, and can be just as competitive or better on price when selling a new product or service, you have a great chance at taking share from your competitors. Unfortunately, groceries are a commodity; I don’t care who delivers my Frosted Flakes if the price between retailers is within a few cents of each other. But when you throw in free delivery and more flexibility on order and delivery times, the decision gets real easy. Home delivery of groceries is not a cheap business model by any means; many companies have tried, but I’m rooting for Amazon.

Personalized Emails Should Be Personal

So today’s lovely gem comes courtesy of my local Ford dealership. Let me say that first off, I typically don’t expect much from car dealerships, especially since I’ve never owned a foreign luxury car, where they wash it for free with every service and give you a courtesy vehicle if it’s going to be in the shop awhile. The most courtesy I have ever received is a finger pointed in the direction of the nearest Enterprise Rent-A-Car.

So with that being said, I have to give some kudos to my local Ford dealership for attempting to reach out to me over the Net to ask if I was satisfied with my service. Email alerts and reminders are a great way to stay connected to your customers in between regular visits and emergencies. When you have a few customers it is rather easy to actually custom tailor the message to the individual, but any substantial database of contacts often requires using a software package to do a mail merge of names/addresses to the semi-custom message. There are a lot of opinions on how far one should go to make it appear that an email or letter was hand-written. I even read one bad article where it was suggested to add spelling mistakes on purpose so that the recipient would assume it was not done by a computer. While I certainly don’t advocate that method, if you’re going to use a semi-automated system to insert my name, you should also use that same system to insert the name of the writer, to at least make it appear that it came from a human. Well, apparently, this Ford dealership has a telephone that can also send emails. If I had the time, I would call the number and ask the person on the other end, “Can I speak to XXX-XXX-XXXX”

These guys get an A for “effort,” but a B- on the execution. In the end, the work they did on my car was good, so I can’t complain too much. At the end of the day, if you’re brick-and-mortar, “I’d rather have great service offline and a crappy website, than a high gloss web presence with no real substance when you engage with the company in person.” But, we are in 2009, it is not THAT hard to have both.

Scottrade Customer Service

So with the economic downturn, I have been really tempted to at least explore the market for “bargains” – with the Dow this low, there is got to be a lift by the time my son graduates college. Yes, that’s over 15 years away, but that’s the point – long enough to grow, but hopefully not long enough before the next major downturn comes.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, I don’t typically click on ads, but since I knew what I wanted and thought I’d help a particular site’s conversion rate, I clicked on an ad for Scottrade to sign-up for an online brokerage account. I used to have an E*Trade account many, many years ago when I traded options. I remember the process being semi-electronic. You could sign-up online, but then had to mail in your deposit or signed account agreement. In 2009, Scottrade’s sign-up process is completely online – my dream has come true!! You read all of their disclosures in PDF format, check the little box to say you have read them and off you go. Well, actually, you do need to dedicate about 15 minutes to the process depending on how fast you read, but the impressive part is how they use your social security to check your credit report and verify your identity. The typical procedure is to ask a question like, “You took out a home mortgage in 200?, that mortgage is with what bank?” They then ask you to pick a range that your monthly payment falls into. The process is not perfect, but hey, at least many sites are trying. So think twice about telling people you got a great rate with XXX mortgage company the next time someone asks. And when it’s time to fund your account, you can use the standard procedure of entering your bank routing and account numbers or entering your login credentials from your bank account site for an instant bank verification. After that, you can transfer away.

So what made me write about Scottrade? They actually have brick-and-mortar locations in many major cities around the U.S. Within 2 hours I was getting a “thank you call”from the local branch less than 5 miles away. They wanted to follow-up if I had any questions and invited me to come down. Now of course, their job is to push services on me (I know a lot of former brokers) – not in a bad way, but nonetheless I appreciated the tight integration between their web site and their local offices. It is this type of “web service” that is very easy to do, that I’d love to see more sites do. Mind you, their web user interface is not nearly as polished as E*Trade, but it was the personal touch that left me with an overall good impression; that, and $7 commissions ;-)

Update on MarketWatch

As suspected, MarketWatch had the problem corrected by the time I finished my previous blog post and uploaded it to the site. A matter of a few hours if that:

Internet Traffic on the Weekends

How often do you check your web site on the weekends? If you run a web-based business only, I hope a lot. If you’re in an industry where business picks up dramatically on the weekends, like residential real estate, I hope a lot. As a “wanna-be” day trader I often find myself visiting MarketWatch.com on Sundays to see if there is any early breaking news for the financial markets the coming week. To my surprise today, MarketWatch had a section of their web site’s content repeated on the homepage.

An article about GM and the Canadian Auto Workers was showing twice, along with several other articles including letting us know that Bill Gates was dumping some shares of shares of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRKA, BRKB). Either this was MarketWatch’s way of really trying to stick it to Bill, which isn’t too hard too imagine if you read their regular stories on Microsoft (i.e. John Dvorak) or simply an error in their content management system. My guess is the latter. I am sure this problem will be fixed by Monday morning if not sooner. However, it does raise an important question on how well we monitor our sites on Saturday and Sunday. It is not uncommon for sites to see a drop in unique visitors of 30-50% on weekends. This may not be a big deal for B2B companies or brick-and-mortar based entities, but for those relying on weekend clicks it can be a killer if your site has errors on it. Whether the perception is a site that looks unprofessional or worse, simply does not work, a lost visitor is a lost transaction. So if you are making content updates at 5pm on Friday or relying on feeds from other sites that update your web property daily, make sure you check your site at least once on the weekend. Even if there is a problem, you at least have that time to correct the situation before traffic picks up on Monday.

My Commission Junction Password

For web publishers looking to monetize their site with fancy banner ads like the big boys at Yahoo and MSN, Commission Junction is an awesome service - You sign-up for a free publisher account and then choose ads from over 2,000 advertisers to feature on your site. The advertiser ultimately decides if they want to appear on your site, so unless your generating thousands of hits per day, don’t bother completing the ad application agreement for well known companies like Discover Card, HP, H&R Block, etc. Plus, your site needs to be super specific for those companies to want their ads appearing on your pages.

Nonetheless, the program is a win-win for everyone. CJ creates a market to match buyers (advertisers) and sellers (publishers) and collects a handsome commission in the process. You get to make a little money (or a lot) on the side.

As good as this service is they are one of the few web sites I know, that do not allow you to choose your password during registration – Instead, it’s assigned. Not only does this make it difficult to login the first time (usually doing a copy/paste from the email you receive), but even worse, they created a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) entry for people to learn how to change the system generated password – because, it’s not obvious from the main screen.

If I need a FAQ to change my password, that’s a problem! Now granted this site and its service is not meant for the casual web surfer, but it still poses an unusual usability problem. I’m sure in an effort or following guidance from their security guys, they thought system generated passwords were the way to go, but sending the password through unsecured email kind of defeats the purpose. If my password is exposed in email, then I am going to want to immediately change it, without reading a FAQ.

To get an idea of the steps involved, I have posted a snippet of the change password instructions. I have blacked some parts out in case this falls into the wrong hands and someone jacks your account. After all, it was hard for me to find, let the hackers read the FAQ too.

Bring on the Dancing Girls, or Not

It is said that many top actors do not watch the films they perform in unless they are dragged to a premier movie night where they smile for the flashing lights before staring at themselves on the big screen for 2-hours. I hate seeing myself in pictures so I can imagine this being somewhat unnerving, but then again, maybe that is why I worked in digital advertising instead of taking acting lessons.

Advertising for those who work in the industry can have a similar effect. I have talked to numerous peers and friends in the industry who try to avoid advertising at all costs and never click on ads when surfing the Web. In fact, I am firmly convinced that if it were up to those in the industry to drive click thru rates, we would all be out of a job in less than a month. But somehow, somewhere around the globe there are enough people who click on the “dancing girls” to keep the industry growing.

Every month, insurance brokers, mortgage brokers, and those pushing miracle diets spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on homepage advertisements at the top web portals featuring what many consider in the industry to be the most annoying, distasteful and obtrusive ads on the Web.

Why do these companies keep pushing these banner ads? Surely they know they’re ugly. Well, the reason is very simple – these ads work!! You don’t keep throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars out the door, if you’re not getting the return you want. But somehow, the reality is that these companies generate a staggering amount of click thrus to their web sites. So my question is always, not why do they put these ads out there, but rather who the hell is clicking on them? I can’t find a single person that has clicked on one of these types of ads. So as I shake my head in disbelief I must constantly remind myself of one important lesson; know your audience and know them well. Regardless of my taste, these companies and their creative agencies know exactly what type of ads their potential customers will click on. You only get away with what works, and it is working really well for these advertisers.

However, there is a down side. What do you want your company to be known for and do you care? If money is your only goal then a do-what-it-takes approach may be fine. But, if you don’t want to be known as the company that has nothing but dancing girls in their ads, then you may have to work a little harder at driving the same click thru rates with something more acceptable to mom. Even if you’re more liberal with your advertising, you still have to think of the brand in the long run. Will your ads negatively impact your brand? I think GoDaddy is a great domain registrar but I wonder if many non-web developers think it’s a porn site from watching their Super Bowl commercials each year.

The art of balancing your brand and attracting people to your site is not easy. At the end of the day, you just have to research to know if your target audience is in enough numbers on the Web to make it worth your while. And once you know they are online, what ads will make them click. Can you live with those types of ads? Marketing can be a very personal thing, so sometimes you have to detach yourself to make your business grow. Sometimes you have to bring on the dancing girls…

Do Your Customers Know Your Emails?

So it’s become painfully obvious to me that I am now subscribed to too many email newsletters and other daily alerts that fill my inbox each week. A few months ago I subscribed to the Houston Business Journal since I like to keep a pulse on business at a local level. To BizJournal’s credit, they do an excellent job at covering business stories in most major cities that would never get coverage at a national level. While I don’t live in Houston anymore, I still like to read about the progress of certain companies and the general economy in the Bayou City.

My first complaint with HBJ was that in order to receive their news brief, you had to register for an account. You have to work a little harder than just entering an email in a text field and hitting submit. However, I like the content so it was worth my time and effort to register. Side Note: the more valuable your content/service, the more information you can require during your registration process.

Since my registration went through successfully, I simply went onto to other web activities and figured I would start receiving my newsletters in a few days. Well, a few days passed and I had long forgotten about my registration. As I was going through my deluge of emails today, I finally stopped on an item that I have seen almost every day for at least a month: “FROM: John C. Beddow, Publisher.” The subject line is always different, but never really compelling, so I just ignored the spam and never setup a filter for this. Today I finally said, “I got to see why this guy John keeps writing me; what does he have to say.” I opened the email since it looked harmless enough and to my surprise and embarrassment, it was my news digest from the Houston Business Journal. For the past month I had been ignoring these emails thinking that HBJ had never got my registration. Now, HBJ may have warned me during registration to look out for “John,” so my bad for that, but there is a lesson here for HBJ as well – Make sure your customers know it’s you every time you communicate with them. If the FROM field was “Houston Business Journal,” or “Business Journals,” I would have instantly opened these emails, but because I never made the connection, I just ignored them.

Oh well, have to run, I have over a month’s worth of Houston business news to catch up on!!

Always Check Your Homepage after Adding Content

There are many web content management systems on the market that web site managers can use to add or modify content on their web site. On the high end for enterprise users there are solutions like Vignette and Interwoven. On the lower end you have semi-customizable templates that are now offered through some domain registrars or web presence providers. No matter which path you choose it is always critical to check your web site often, especially after adding or modifying content. If you have many people updating your site, it is critical to build some type of notification into your web presence that can alert you if something is wrong.

Many enterprises use a combination of content management systems along with custom built ASP or JSP pages. Quite often, changing the underlying page code and leaving off a closing tag or uploading content too big for a given space on the web page, can leave some pretty “funky” results. In really bad cases it reveals the underlying modules, database paths and other “behind the curtain” scripts that you just don’t want users to see. As the screenshot below shows, I stumbled across Bank of America’s web site, when it wasn’t having a good day – hopefully it was fixed within the hour.

   

In a future post I’ll discuss some really cool technologies that can mimic the actions of a real user on your site to catch things before the general public does.

I Just Want To Pay for My Custom T-Shirts

So whenever I am about to launch a site, I like to get fully embedded into the site launch. I want everyone, everywhere to know about the site even if it only will receive a hundred visitors per day. Beyond the standard press release and search engine submission, I like to create t-shirts with the site’s logo. This way, when I am out in the street, standing in line or doing whatever, someone can ask me about my shirt, giving me the opportunity to talk about my business. Yeah, I know, this is probably not an effective marketing effort from a marketing cost perspective, but again, it is just a ritual I have been doing for years. Note to self – maybe my true calling is creating a clothing line.

There are a number of online printing companies that do a good job of automating the printing process. Sites like iPrint and VistaPrint are good for print jobs on paper (i.e. business cards, letterhead). They allow you to choose templates or create your own where you can change colors, fonts and upload your own graphics. But when it comes to quality printing on a t-shirt, I find screen printing is the way to go. While iPrint and VistaPrint do offer t-shirt printing, their specialty is using a heat transfer process that allows for full photo printing on not just t-shirts, but grandma’s mug for Christmas. While the process works fairly well, the end product doesn’t stand the test of time. On the shirts I ordered, the area where the imprinting occurred turns slightly yellow after many washes – similar to those old “iron on” graphics you could buy as a kid to make your own shirts at home.

Somehow I stumbled upon a screen printing company called Broken Arrow. If you have access to or know someone with a vector based graphics package like Corel Draw or Adobe Illustrator, you can upload your graphic to their servers and get your screen-printed t-shirts in about 2-3 weeks. The quality is amazing. They have a large selection of all types of t-shirts – popular styles come in as many as 70+ different colors. The logo I put on my shirt had deep colors and no bleed-through where you could see the underlying shirt color. I have even tried their embroidery service for a couple of hats (order minimum of 6) which was also top notch.

When you call their customer service you get a real live person in seconds, who can usually help you. So why did I need to call customer service? Well, the only real complaint I have with these guys is the payment process. They use PayPal to receive their payments and that system has crapped out on me several times when trying to pay for a previously placed order. So, I called my credit card number in. If their quality wasn’t so good, I would go elsewhere, simply because getting a cheap, reliable online credit card payment site integrated into your own web site is easy these days. E-commerce sites with a disjointed buying process will usually lose my business, but Broken Arrow’s customer service offline made up for it. Even Google with their checkout product is offering an almost free service to merchants who want to accept credit cards. While PayPal is highly respected and reliable, I still have not figured out why it doesn’t work consistently on BrokenArrowWear’s site. Nonetheless, because of their easy to find toll free number on many of their pages, I got over my laziness and picked up the phone.

Lesson learned here: If you don't have a rock-solid payment process, make sure you have an easy to find customer service number that is available with extended hours. Email is the second best thing, but when it comes to money and the screen goes blank after submitting your credit card, you want a toll free number NOW!!

I Got My Brochure from Nissan, But Guess What

Okay, folks. You just can't make this stuff up - In my original post, where I talked about going on Nissan's site to request a brochure on one of their SUVs, I was either expecting to not get the brochure at all or at least get it eventually when the USPS figured out the apartment number.

So today, I went to the mailbox and to my great surprise there was my shiny new brochure for their 2009 Pathfinder. The address was indeed wrong, but not due to a missing apartment number. No ladies and gentlemen, an apartment number was listed that did not even match my number. Instead of Unit P1114, the unit number listed was M1096. Go figure. Note, I did request a brochure for the Nissan Xterra as well. Who wants to bet that the person in M1096 has my other brochure? 

More Gripes About Web Forms

While we’re on the topic of web forms, another problem I see way too often is the truncation of letters in the address fields. This is even a bigger problem if the site does not provide a second address field line. For example, my street name is eleven characters long and starts with a 5-digit street number. I live in the Puget Sound Area of Washington state, where many streets also have a 2-character direction like NE for Northeast. By the time I add the street type designation and town home unit with hyphen, I’m close to 40 characters with spaces – that’s pretty damn long compared to my old home which was half the number of characters. On several e-commerce sites, my address gets cut-off at around 30-33 characters. So what’s the lesson here? If you provide only one address field, make it long – maybe 50 characters if your DBA doesn’t kill you. The other option is to use two address fields and follow my advice in my earlier blog.

Multiple Address Fields on Web Based Forms

Okay, so if you want to know one of my biggest pet peeves I see on the Web it’s got to be web forms that provide for multiple address lines that don’t actually capture all the information entered by the user. This week the culprit is Nissan USA (http://www.nissanusa.com). I think their cars are a great value for the money and their web site is very nice too, but I my joy turned to disappointment as I perused their web site between Christmas and New Year’s.

I, like most guys, like to visit numerous car sites every few months to look at cars I can’t afford. This masochistic ritual has special meaning during the holidays as you can sometimes try to convince yourself that auto dealers really are “giving away” cars between Christmas and New Years.

While I didn’t find the savings I was looking for, I decided to order a brochure online (free of charge). A nice touch that Nissan has added was the ability to download an e-brochure immediately, request one by mail, or get both (electronic and hardcopy) - kudos to them for offering such flexibility.

My appreciation of their site was further heightened when it came time to complete my registration – they not only offered two address fields, but also a separate field for an apartment number. One could argue that only a second address field or apartment field was needed, but not both; however, I was glad they took the time to realize not everyone lives in a house. We live in a town home that does have a unit number (a letter with 4-digit number), so I opted for completing “address field 1” and the apartment number text field.

My glee quickly turned to dismay when I received a confirmation page that brochures would be sent to an address that left off the apartment number.

So here is the problem from a user standpoint: 1) I can assume their database guys got it right and captured the apartment field and this will be available to their fulfillment personnel. That’s ideal, but still leaves the user wondering if they’ll get their brochures; or 2) Their database didn’t capture my apartment number and my brochures will sit in the US Postal Service abyss where I must hope the mailman matches up my name with the rest of the mail coming to my unit (I am about 50:50 when this happens, he’s a nice guy, but I can’t expect him to always take the time to do this). There is actually a worst case, my confirmation page shows the full correct address, but fulfillment gets a partial address.

Either way the point here is that fulfillment, the web designers, and the database guys need to do thorough testing on workflows such as this; otherwise, the user is left wondering, “Did they get it right.”

I’ll let you know if I get my brochures ;-)

A New Year, a New Site and a New Approach

In about 10 days I will be officially launching the beta version of hoWIWeb.com, a web site designed to help simplify my life (and hopefully yours) on the Web. I say “hopefully yours,” because it will be the first time that I have created a site with no specific intent on starting a business – i.e. creating a product or service to meet the needs of a specific market segment. While I do hope to attract users who find some useful features on my site, and maybe make a little money through ads and other means, I finally have no more illusions about creating the next Google. While even considering that I could have created a site with such success may sound somewhat naïve, reality shows that there are hundreds of people each month that launch web sites with the intent of being able to quit their job when Microsoft decides to acquire their web property for a handsome sum.

While the thought of being acquired for millions still makes me giddy when I considered all the things I could do for my family and friends with such money, the sacrifice I have made over the past 15 years has made me think that it is better to enjoy their company now while I’m still sane and have some money left in my pocket.

The technology behind the Web is wonderful in that it has allowed millions of people to get online and follow their passion. For many this has meant starting some business in their spare time with a copy of their favorite “for Dummies” book close in hand. And while the barrier for getting online is very, very low, it is this very fact that has deceived many into believing that a hobby site is the same as a site that handles hundreds of thousands of users each month.

For the 20+ web businesses I have started in the past, only one was actually sold to a “real company” and the site pretty much floundered months after I gave my baby away. The fact is, starting and maintaining a web site that will offer a useful product/service to thousands of customers for years is very, very hard to do. The technical considerations, the startup capital, and time needed to sell your idea takes an incredible amount of dedication, enough to break marriages, homes and everything else in between. After reading Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days (Recipes: a Problem-Solution Ap) it became apparent to me, that with my 11 hour workday, a wife in grad school (who works part-time) and a 3-year old that needs to be picked up from daycare everyday at 6:30pm, finding time to launch a “real startup” is something that is not in the cards for me. While I have had the entrepreneurial bug since I was in high school, I am beginning to get more comfortable with having a regular job. I don’t know if I will ever be cured, but for now, I am content just putting my latest work out there, for people to see, use and hopefully benefit from. Who knows, I may be more successful taking a more casual approach, than the years spent creating ill-conceived business strategies and marketing plans.