Official EchoMerx Blog » eCommerce 101

The Biggest Winner In China In 2015? E-Commerce. – Gady Epstein – Beijing Dispatch – Forbes

EchomerxBlog — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 02:02:48 +0000

Predicting the Chinese economy for just the next year is for chumps. Credit Suisse has taken an ambitious shot at what China will look like in 2015, in this 150-page report, and their call is that the fastest-growing business sector will be — surprise, surprise — e-commerce, led by the dominant online marketplace Taobao of Alibaba Group.

via The Biggest Winner In China In 2015? E-Commerce. – Gady Epstein – Beijing Dispatch – Forbes.

eBay vs. Amazon: 12-Month-Trailing Stock Price

EchomerxBlog — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 06:30:33 +0000

For the best year ever, eBay is chasing Amazon, the 800-pound guerrilla in online shopping in all directions. Most multi-channel marketers agree that except for with Paypal upping their turf war in online payment, eBay still remains a laggard in online shopping. One emerging problem is for merchants in China to sell low cost merchandise directly from their home turf in China. And this drives off many home grown vendor who simply can’t compete anymore. As for investor in both company, Amazon reaps the best reward and symbolizes the confidence consumer on the ecommerce king.

eBay Stock Price, 12/2009 - 12/2010

Now let’s look at the Amazon’s performance for the same period:

Amazon Stock Price, 12/2009 - 12/2010

Once its stock peak in December, eBay starts to taper off and lost steam. On the other hand, Amazon continue to bounce its high and shows much of the resilience in December. With promising holiday online sales and consumer optimism, January 20100 could be another exciting month as for Amazon. As for eBay, we cross our fingers.

Find Tracking Number for Your Amazon Order

EchomerxBlog — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 07:43:33 +0000

At customer service here at Echomerx, the most common inquiry we receive from our Amazon customers is how to find the tracking number for their order. This becomes increasingly common as the Christmas shopping season comes to an end, as some last minute shoppers buy belated Christmas gifts and want to track exactly where their purchases are. From the merchant side, this recurrent inquiry can be a bit of a mystery, since Amazon requires us to provide the tracking number for each and every package we ship. Can’t customers just see the tracking numbers on their account?

Amazon’s “Account” panel gives buyers an organized method of finding pretty much every order they place from Amazon, ranging from order history to merchandise returns and payment setup. Each section is confined to a single row with a border around it for easy identification. To check the status of your order, you will need to go to the first row of “Orders.”

You can use the links under the header “Order History” and “More Order Actions,” but it’s easier to just go for the big yellow “Your Orders” button. The default screen display under “Your Order” will show your order history within the last 30 days. By the same token, Amazon designs each row with much similarity to the rows in previous screens, with each item confined in a row with a bordered line.

At first glance, the tracking number isn’t obvious. But Amazon will mark each order that is shipped with a highlighted “Shipped,” and usually if shipped by Fedex or UPS, the buyer can immediately track their packages by using the yellow “Track package” button to the right. An estimated delivery date will then be displayed, based on the tracking number provided by the merchant. Unlike Fedex and UPS however, USPS does not always track their packages. So if the merchant ships an order by USPS, will the buyer still be able to see the “Estimated delivery date” and a tracking number?

Amazon will display the tracking number for all orders that are updated by the merchant, as soon as it becomes available. So in other words, if the seller updates an order’s tracking number, the buyer should be able to see this update in their account. So the next time you get really excited about an order you’ve placed from an Amazon third party, you will know exactly where to go to find what you need to track your package.

DSL Download Speed & Latency Determine Connection Quality

EchomerxBlog — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 22:39:28 +0000

The recent storm swept through California from north to south, and with it, our confidence in AT&T DSL. From our experiences, our office DSL has behaved erratically in the past, but this time, it was quite a bomber. From all the tests conducted by AT&T, tier 1 support claims there is no connection loss whatsoever. But web pages are loading very slow and usually end up being displayed without the CSS styles. Some Yahoo! hosted websites and Yahoo! small business portals are failing to load at all.

Calls to AT&T’s tech support are usually handled by their tier 1 support. Tier 1 support checks for line speed from their end or asks the customer to check the download speed using third party website like speedtest.com or speakeasy.com. Speakeasy didn’t detect any abnormalities in my connection and the bandwidth was actually shown to be 2.5 mbps, which my tech from India claims is excellent. Speedtest, however, immediately detected the latency error in our dsl connection and would not go further beyond that point.

So why is the download speed okay but the pages are still not loaded properly? The answer lies in the seldom asked connection parameter of Latency. Latency is the delay time that occurs when your internet connection (packets) travels through from node to node through the copper wire phone lines to reach the destination server. Typically, there is a 10 to 100 millisecond delay for each device or node it passes. A simple test you can use to see the latency is to fire up the “PING” tool under the windows command prompt. For example, ping www.yahoo.com will tell you how many hops are involved and each delay time as it travels from your computer to yahoo’s main server. If you see intermittent performance or “Request timed out” message, then you have latency error.

Latency error means several things for your DSL internet connection: 1. Your tier 1 AT&T support probably will not know this issue, since all they do is to test the line speed from their end, which is usually small packet information. 2. You can view some websites but not all of them. 3. You can see some sites at some times, but not at other times. 4. Sites are displayed without the CSS styles (since most sites use CSS style file to dress up website, large packet “style” information are usually lost).

If you have internal DNS server, it can be little tedious to pinpoint the latency error in DSL line. First, have any client PC change its network settings to use the DSL modem for DNS. (All DSL modems are fully capable of being a DNS server.) Doing this will eliminates the window DNS server that may be causing the page loading problems; Second, browse website as usual. If you still encounter the same page loading problems or intermittance issues, this is most likely a latency problem in your line.

Latency error is caused by network over-congestion, or unnecessary routing of information. Using the “Tracert” tool in windows, you can do several traces of your “intermittent” sites and see where they are being routed to. In our case, we found that several of the sites that loaded sporadically could be traced to southern California. The storm could have done damage to the nodes that route the regular traffic and as a result of this, caused the network congestion.

Three days after Christmas, we came back to our office only to find the “latency” error in our DSL line has fixed itself! It’s quite a relief to realize that so many services, from Endicia to order updates, will go back to normal. Luckily we didn’t schedule an AT&T technician visit, as we know the guy will find no problems with our line. Plus the bill would’ve been on us.

Direct Thermal or Thermal Transfer Printer?

EchomerxBlog — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 00:35:50 +0000

For printing involves shipping postage and labeling, you will need printer. Two popular printer types are direct thermal and thermal transfer. The obvious difference is the thermal transfer require extra wax or resin based ribbon and direct thermal will not.

Xi’An, the Ancient City of China’s Outsourcing Center

EchomerxBlog — Sun, 16 May 2010 01:40:57 +0000

Xi'An, The Main Street

Xi’an (as in most online abbreviation “Xa”) is China’s ancient city. As part of our “China South to North” tour of 2010, we finally come to this city of 3000-years old and had an up and personal look at this great city of Terra Cotta and High-Tech Outsourcing.

Xi’an, called Chang’an (means long lasting prosperity in Chinese) in ancient times, is one of the birthplaces of the ancient civilization in the Yellow River area of the country. In its 3,100 years history, 13 dynasties placed their capitals here. Xi’an was the western terminus of the famous Silk Road, which connected East, South, and Western Asia with the Mediterranean World.

In its modern days, Xi’An, with more than 30 Chinese universities and colleges under its belt, boasts China’s most important software outsourcing industry serving Fortune 500 around the world. Multinational companies and organizations such as Google, Baidu, NEC, Fujistu and Siemens amongst others have set up their R&D centers in Xi’an.

e-Park Development Center, Xi'An

The growth of high-tech industries in Xi’an is remarkable. Its landmark, The Hi-tech Industrial Development Zone (XDZ), is part of the organizational network of the APEC technological park and is classified by the Chinese State Ministry of Science and Technology as one of the five national high-tech industrial development sites. It was regarded as one of the six most vigorous cities and areas of China by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO).

Well, as for this innovation, I don't really have a name for it, maybe...terra cotta mannequin?

Software company that is willing to set up presence in Xi’An will find abundant benefits and subsides from the government anything from free rental, interest-free loan to hiring incentive. The place where most startups call home is the Xi’an Software Development Center located at No. 72 Keji 2^nd Road. The staff there will explain in detail all the policy and latest development of the Park.

Further reading on China setting the new trend of global outsourcing, Rebecca Fannin of Chief Executive magazine has published this in-depth article.

According to the article, “Reaching toward its long-term vision of moving up the value chain from manufacturing to services and high tech, the Chinese government has crafted an ambitious long-term plan. In 2006, officials unveiled a $1 billion program that earmarked 10 Chinese cities as outsourcing bases and provided incentives, tax breaks and subsidies to further develop capabilities of the country’s 1,000 outsourcing vendors to serve multinational customers”

Product Experience is Essential to Online Sales

EchomerxBlog — Sun, 16 May 2010 00:50:59 +0000

Google just announced it will stop selling its Nexus One phone online and instead will resort to offline retail stores to carry this line. Google’s executive, when asked about the news, said “As with every innovation, some parts worked better than others”.

As with any online sales, the customer experience is probably the most important elements and will definitely tie up to the products. I admit that I had never known Nexus One up till the moment of this release, so I decide to tour Google’s Nexus One site.

The interface of Nexus One is simple, like any other Google product. The first interfaces for many of its rich features are the apps. Click on the apps and it will demo the use in a flash, to the left side of the phone will keep rolling out relevant instruction. I like the presentation of apps and quickly fumble with the 3D tour for a bit. The 3D tour is a bit cartoon-like and requires deeper interaction.

Overall the presentation is excellent but I like to have a real touch on the phone itself. Part of my urge comes from the experience with my Samsung phone. The phone will do most of the iPhone touch and go thing but lack the flow and smoothness of it at all; besides it can stuck on the soft keyboard.

Google is quick to realize the drawback of its sales pitch and determine to change. But for many other small merchants who are stuck on the budget and marketing guidance, they are slow to recognize that customer experience on their product can be essential to their sales. Regardless of how much technology can help in seaming the presentation in place, lack of personal experience with the product will be the show stopper.

Post-process Product Pictures of eCommerce Website

EchomerxBlog — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 19:52:08 +0000

A beautiful picture can go a long way for your audience. It looks more professional and give a much-needed focus on product details. Most store owners will focus on the infrastructure of their sites, namely the color tone, graphics, and shopping cart and leave this issue alone. Though this is a understandable approach to spend your time when online, shop owners will still need to post-process their item pictures so as to serve their audience better.

Most post-processing will involve a technique called clipping. Clipping can remove background color information from your raw product photo, so the final result will show the product in a solid background, usually white. The most popular tool for photo editing is Adobe Photoshop.

The clipping process isn’t too high-tech, most pictures are manually clipped and separated from their backgrounds. Once the object is clipped, the picture is then sent to various post-processes for all sorts of cosmetic changes to make them clearer, more color-balanced, sharper, etc. During this process, the smallest blemish can be corrected by the tools offered in Photoshop.

In most professional studios where magazine-quality pictures are produced, clipping path is used to save the object for future usage. Clipping path is the profile or perimeter of a object separate from their background that clearly defines the boundary for a given object. Usually the clipped object exists in a flat layer inside Photoshop in pixel format.

Adobe Photoshop offers some simple tools to choose the removed background for beginners. By choosing proximity and tolerance parameters, you can use a tool called Magic Wand to choose the background pixels. Once selected, delete them with just one keystroke. These tools tend to work better when the background color is purer (it doesn’t matter what color it is). Small pockets of impure color still need manual touch-ups to erase, and this can be done by the eraser tool.

There are some online picture processing tools that can perform some of the most basic functions in Photoshop. But the process of uploading each picture and waiting for each job to finish can be daunting, partially because the picture size of a typical digital photo is large and thus requires more server time to download and process online. For product picture processing, this route is still a long way from perfection.

Find an email tool that best fits your business

EchomerxBlog — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 13:05:00 +0000

Email tools are abundant and nowadays, everybody seems to be retrofitted with a gigantic mailbox that will probably never be filled up. Expensive tools are not always the best option for your business, because they often come equipped with functions that, in my opinion, will probably never be used. Let’s imagine a scenario in which someone starts a business that grows and grows. Eventually, that person grows up, gets married, and recruits his family members to his business team. In this scenario, an email structure that started as a one-man band could be different from one used for a family-owned business.

With a one-man team, one person wears the hat that says “I am the sales+marketing+operation+whatever.” It’s true that an email structure can be set up to reflect each of the job titles that this single person holds; however, it’s probably too complicated for that person to handle info@, sales@, marketing@, and service@. He’ll probably end up deciding, “I’ll just use my private email for everything: john.doe@yahoo.com.”

This is probably the best idea in this situation, because at this stage of the game, your business will take the form of that one person’s identity, and building a business upon that personal identity is a smart way to attract more customers.

Using a personal email to conduct business usually means several things:
1. I am in stealthy mode now and not ready to reveal my business identity yet.
2. I am a super neat person: business is business, personal is personal.
3. I want to add a personal touch to the communication process.
4. My business just started and I haven’t had time to get my email personalized.

Regardless of what others think, if you find using a private email address more convenient, then stick to it. Because oftentimes, you can’t be sure of what’s going to happen to your business, so why not spend less time worrying about the email structure and more time on the market? Hopefully your business grows and survives the recession, and if you’re lucky enough, you will find your family teaming up with you to keep your business growing.

Now “1+1=2″right? Well, not in the case of number of email inboxes.

Let’s say you have two-person team now, and you’ve equally divided the responsibility between marketing, sales, service, and so on. Your business has matured and you want to add some professional touches to your email system, and this leads to a bunch of different email inboxes. Now you’ll have to take care of managing all these inboxes, and communicating between service, leads projects, etc. Until now, the one-to-one relationship that existed in the one-person stage just got multiplied, not only by the amount of mailboxes, but also by the amount of information transferred. And, now your relatives want to join your business team because they take your high number of email addresses to mean your business has become more successful. “1+1+n=…???”

You get the picture.

So, how do you know what your current needs are in terms of email? Well, you don’t know. But your customers know. Adding email structure is all about dissecting the information to target customers and market. If you think creating different mailboxes will help you create better customer service and better communication, then do it. If you have a genius way of managing the amount of emails in that one super
box and still can keep up, stick to it. You see, the essence of creating email structure is not just to receive emails and find a place to store them; creating email structure has to, in the meantime, create value for your business in term of better customer service, campaign marketing, or sales. If it weren’t for the reasons of bettering your business, the email structure is an huge load to maintain, upgrade, and sustain.

To build a private label (own domain) email system requires knowledge of the domain name server, mail exchange, and also knowledge on IMAP or POP3. And on top of this, controlling spam will also be needed to keep the bad worms out of your sensitive data. This is no easy task for small businesses, let alone for entrepreneurs completely out of the IT arena.

Before diving into the pool, you need to define your email needs, at least for now:
1. Ask yourself how important a private label email is to your customer. For a PR business that polishes relations for others, you definitely will need that personalized and feel.
2. Assess how do you want to control spam. If you do post regularly at forum or SNS, you could very well be worried about the amount of spam you will receive from that email. (Here’s a tip: Get a dedicated email address for sign up and another email for conducting business.)
3. Do you need to send campaign emails out? If you do send out emails in large volumes, it’s wise to get a paid email marketing system like iContact, because you don’t want to have your email address listed as a spammer. Besides, there are new rules now regarding how to send out mass emails.
4. Web or desktop. Web email is very convenient, but many desktop applications will still need email clients to operate, i.e. endicia. In most cases, businesses will need both.
5. Define the flow requirements for customer service, sales, marketing and shipping. Usually, you will just
need this group inbox for small businesses. Ask yourself: “How can the email information be routed or assigned to the best flow that will benefit both the customer and the teams?” You may want to forward some inboxes to others to simplify the flow.
6. Understand that email systems need to grow with your business. Here’s one example: After implementing our very own CRM system, we switched from Outlook to Thunderbird so we could make better use of the
many open source plugins that Outlook lacks.