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Which? Awards 2008 - the best products and services

Philip Wilkinson on Jun 17, 2008, in E-Commerce, Products

Update:

Winners announced:

• Best Audio/Visual Brand - Panasonic


• Best Domestic Appliance Brand - Miele


• Best carmaker - Mazda


• Best Broadband Provider - Zen Internet


• Best Airline - Singapore Airlines

Tonight at the British Museum, there is an event called the Which? Awards going on, to help find the ‘best of the best’ in products and services.

Apart from all the boring fluff leading up to it, the 1:45pm (a whole afternoon jolly) kicks of with:

• Best Domestic Appliance Brand


• Best Audio Visual Brand


• Best Broadband Provider


• Best Credit Card Provider


• Best Current Account Provider


• Best Carmaker

We’re going to send some guys over to cover it and hopefully have the results for tomorrow.

On a final note, sometimes people confuse us as competing with Which? where as we’re actually a research hub that brings the best reviewers and publishers together in one space - including, hopefully, some of the great content they have over there. Oh - and we don’t charge for it

Crowdstorm awards anyone?

Google Merchant Search - is the end for price comparison sites?

Philip Wilkinson on Jun 03, 2008, in E-Commerce

It had to happen eventually - Google begins moves into the price comparison arena, starting with financial services through it’s new Google Merchant Search feature:

Today, if you type in phrases such as “compare loans”, “cheap credit cards”, and so forth, you get a range of comparison sites from the likes of MoneySupermarket and GoCompare who have spent years getting high rankings in the natural search results or paying a premium for the paid advertising.

Now, Google can’t remove them but it can take a massive piece of the action. Imagine typing those phrases in now and actually getting “google merchant search” results at the top first, in the same way blog and news results currently appear!

It doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to see how this can also apply to utilities, cars, flights, and generic shopping categories like consumer electronics (a la Kelkoo). This is huge! I’ll do a follow up post on this shortly - just wanted to get some first-hand comments and feedback first..

Is Online Retail Growth Slowing?

Philip Wilkinson on May 28, 2008, in E-Commerce

Well, if it’s true it was bound to happen but I think the statistics are skewed somewhat. Firstly, let’s take a look at the report from e-marketer that originally spawned off my post:

According to the chart, the US growth of online retail will slow between 1.5 and 2% each year from now on hitting 8.9% in 2012. This of course is natural in any type of market and online retail will definitely be maturing by then.

What it doesn’t take into account is that this varies completely by the category you look at, and they even say themselves that the chart does not include travel. For example, check out a chart from Jupiter which shows categories such as apparel including things like footwear and outdoor clothing growing 400% from 2004 - 2010.

Anyway - what do you reckon? Have they got it wrong or is e-commerce finally maturing? At least it’s going to stay ahead of off-line retail in a credit-crunch environment

Google lied? - PPC trademark restrictions NOT lifted in UK?

Philip Wilkinson on May 16, 2008, in E-Commerce

So, I’m been hearing a few things around the grapevine about Google not actually having lifted keyword trademark descriptions on quite a few brands even though they made a big song and dance about it in the UK, in fact saying:

“Please note we have made a policy revision that applies to complaints we receive regarding trademarks in the UK and Ireland. Beginning May 5th, 2008, we will no longer review a term corresponding to the trademarked term as a keyword trigger. However, we will continue to perform a limited courtesy investigation of complaints regarding ad text purported to be in violation of a trademark.”

So, can anyone tell me why a ton of brand names are still being protected by the Google Adwords system either when you try and write the ads or a day letter when an email arrives from them saying “ad disallowed due to trademark reasons”?

For some evidence, check out this campaign running on the outdoor clothing site Webtogs.co.uk (noting the banned phrases in red and dated today):

Taking this a bit further I thought of trying out a few more major brands and came across some inconsistencies (click on the image to see it enlarged):

See how Disney, Yahoo, eBay, and Virgin seem ok (but I wouldn’t be surprised I’d get an email about them being disallowed in a few hours), yet Google and Amazon are banned for “trademark reasons”!

So, has Google lied to us? Was this just a big stunt to get some publicity and more ad money going their way?

V3 Crowdstorm has arrived - UK & US

Philip Wilkinson on Apr 25, 2008, in E-Commerce, Products, Social Media

Hurray - we’ve finally got our much improved site out there for Crowdstorm UK and Crowdstorm USA

We’re concentrating on making it stable now, ironing out the remaining 67 bugs, and ensuring the speed is high enough. If you see any bugs or want to make some general feedback - use the green link at the top of the page, fill in your comments, then press submit. We’re not making a big fuss about this one as we’ve still lots of things to do to it.

You’ll notice we’re now importing a lot more content in user reviews and expert reviews, and we’ve got a few deals to announce in the next few weeks. Also - welcome to our new Television and DVD Player categories!

Key things still to do:

• Clean & simplify a few of the pages
• Implement new designs for user profiles and dashboard
• Work on a smoother login process
• Make it easier to ask questions and submit other content types
• Improving the algorithms for Crowd recommendations, related review content etc..
• Rewrite and check all the emails and alerts we send to users
• Watch and monitor how everybody uses the site so we can improve things..

Lastly, as mentioned above - this is a quiet release and we don’t want anyone blogging it in the current format, if you don’t mind. Ta very much.

Online Shoppers Trust Each Other

Philip Wilkinson on Apr 06, 2008, in E-Commerce

New research out from eMarketer again, argues that shoppers are increasingly trusting each other when it comes to finding credible information advice about products or companies:

The fact is that knowledgeable and trusted peers provide valuable advice and insight to people trying to find the right products to buy and gain the advice and information they need. In fact, JupiterResearch reckons that online social network users were three time more likely to trust their peers’ opinions over advertising when making purchase decisions:

 So, what does this really mean… Well, I think that people are actually getting more savvy in how they find and absorb information and that people are now looking to credible expert sources and trusted peers compared to just lists and lists of anonymous or not-related reviews. Ultimately no-one wants to be fooled by advertising or biased reviews, and having trusted sources from experts, opinion leaders, peers, and friends - can really help people feel more confident in their product research.

Social Graph + Research + Shopping -> 2008 is the year..
 

Data Portability & The Shopping Social Graph

Philip Wilkinson on Mar 11, 2008, in E-Commerce, Social Media

There has been a lot of talk about the social graph and the best practice for extending, enhancing, and sharing it. Something which we’re following very closely here at Crowdstorm due to the role this graph can play in improving the product research process. Let’s say you are looking for a new 27″ LCD screen for your bedroom and have no idea where to start - a few recommendations or comments from friends and colleagues you trust will help point you in the right direction, especially if they are actually knowledgeable in that space.

Now to get to this kind of implementation, there needs to be that motivation and incentive to use “the crowd” in this way, but firstly you have to provide an easy way to bring in existing social graph connections without having to force people down the “add this person” route over and over again. So, this has led us to heavily research the space of importing connections from other applications and sites into the Crowdstorm registration process:

In an Mark Zuckerberg interview about data portability on facebook on ReadWriteWeb, he stated that “data portability is an important direction in which the web is moving and that fundamental openess between sites is inevitable, yet Facebook must be strict about privacy controls”. The argument is that other applications should not be allowed to share user data as the user loses control over it, which is actually a load of codswallop.

The fact is that you should give people free choice and enough good information to help them make it - which would include whether or not to to give your data access to a piece of software or application and allow what it can do with it. Zuckerberg knows this but is actually stalling while they try and figure out how a feature like this would stop a competitor replicating their site and making it better, porting all that data across.

In my view, the user controls the data, not the site. The process should go along the lines of:

1. Import the social graph data from any chosen site or service
2. Add value to it by enhancing the data within (such as adding trust between people or contextual shopping knowledge)
3. Utilise that data as part of the service to improve the consumer offering
4. Allow that enhanced social data set to be exported again to any other source

This process continually improves the social graph data set through collaboration and sharing. So, back to steps (1) and (4) here, what are good examples of sites that allow exporting of social graph data?

	Twitter	You can bring back a list of people you follow and those that follow you, and while you can’t invite them into the new network - you can get it to find existing people on it and connect with them.
	Flickr	As per Twitter, you can find existing Flickr contacts on the new network and agree to connect, but can’t invite directly via email.
	Gmail	You can authorise access to the gmail contact list and then manually select which of those contacts to invite into the new network directly or connect to people already in it.
	Yahoo Mail	As per gMail / googlemail.
	Facebook	As far as we can tell, you can import most bits of user data from their API except email addresses which means you could at least match up people on the Crowdstorm network who are also connected on Facebook, but not invite them directly.
	OpenSocial	Google’s api specification allows the importing of people relationships and emails depending on what is allowed by the site that implemented the protocol e.g. Bebo
	hCard	A microformat that can be imported into the network and link to other relevant hCards.
	CSV / VCF	Text based file formats for manually uploading lists of contacts and email addresses - only for tech savvy users.

We’re still looking into the Hotmail and AOL mail side of things as it’s not entirely clear what data services they have available for contact importing. So what have we missed? Anything important?

I’ll follow up with another post on our implementation of this and other good examples from around the web - just as soon as we’ve figured it out ourselves!

Technorati Tags: ecommerce, enhancing, graph, crowd, social

Social Marketers Create Communities to Maintain Influence

Philip Wilkinson on Feb 14, 2008, in E-Commerce, Social Media

A february report from those guys at Jupiter, talking about how social marketers should create and engage communities for their brand - in particular highlighting that “the effect of consumer-created content on consumers’ purchasing habits and brand opinion will greatly increase over the next 12 months”:

Source: JupiterResearch

The question of course is where should the conversation take place - everywhere or just the company’s own site.. I think we all know the answer to that one..

Online Shopping and the Difference Between Men and Women

Philip Wilkinson on Feb 12, 2008, in E-Commerce

The Huddlemind blog did a nice piece on the difference between the way men and women purchase products. The gist is that they reckon men search on technical details and want the whole shopping process to be as painless as possible, where as women want opinions, ratings, and choices.

I’m kind of in the mindset that both men and women often do both and it’s not so clear cut. It also depends very much on the product category. I will analyse every single new technical detail about buying a new car where as my wife goes mainly on brand and what looks nice. In contrast, she will spend ages studying the details of a hotel to stay in where I just want to go to a nice five star one with a spa!

So - should you split a shopping site to cater for men and women completely differently?

Search & Filter Updates - pre Typhoon Update

Philip Wilkinson on Feb 08, 2008, in E-Commerce, Products

We’re having to write some new features and code for the next site iteration Project “Typhoon” due in the next few weeks, and thought that we should put some of them live at least on the current site to get some testing and feedback from everyone.

So, as of this morning (taking no responsibility for the bugs) - we’ve deployed a new Site Search and much better Filter Options for browsing attributes and review content types (e.g. video, expert reviews). So in more detail:

Site Search

Before we had some sort of weird hybrid thing whereby you would type something in the box and then it would display the results in a small cramped lightbox. Often there were no results as it was locked down to only matching exact terms for the two categories (cameras and games) tha we have deployed.

Well, know we’ve opened it up to be a full search results page that queries not only products but every single piece of review content we have brought into the platform. That includes expert reviews, user reviews, videos, question and answers, and thoughts:

So we obviously still need to work on relevancy of the thing and of course keep importing more and more content to get better results - but now is a great time to get some feedback on how we could do better when it goes into the new release. So please give it a go, for example with terms such as Canon Eos 40d

Improved Filter Options & Content Types

We’ve split out Expert Reviews & User Reviews so they have their own objects now and also replaced “comments” with Thoughts which is designed to be short pieces of text that people just want to say about a product or about the category generally (e.g. strongly recommend buying blu-ray now as HD-DVD has lost). We’re debating whether we even let people leave these thoughts without having to login… what do you think?

Really would appreciate any feedback so far and any bugs you find.. What would you improve?