Smartcompany.com.au recently approached me to start writing regular blog posts for their readers on a topic they did not yet cover, so here is a link to my profile of articles:

Operational Optimisation in the Online and Retail space

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I feel the need, the need for speed!

“I feel the need, the need for speed” said Pete Mitchell to Nick Bradshaw in the classic 1986 film Top Gun.   Little did “Maverick” and “Goose” know that 26 years later nearly every Retail Ecommerce Manager would be saying that very same thing to their IT Manager in the lead up to the most important trading time of the year for every retailer on the planet!

Speaking plainly, site speed equals high conversion rates which in turn equals dollars in the bank.  Outside of planning a suite of Christmas campaigns, that are seamlessly executed across the range of digital marketing channels, the next topic on the Christmas planning agenda has to be: how is the website going to maintain high-speed performance during a period of intense load both from browsing and purchasing customers?

This Christmas Cracker usually finds itself on the desk of an already busy IT Manager who is busy trying to get agreement with “the business” on a lock-down of system changes during peak trading times to ensure stability, squeeze some additional capacity from an already overloaded IT infrastructure to bolster retail store performance and populate a Xmas rota to ensure that the department had adequate cover during the holiday season.  

Needless to say, without an accurate prediction of site traffic and predicted transactions and in fact, even with an accurate prediction of site traffic and transactions, finding the budget and resources to implement the IT infrastructure (servers and network bandwidth) required to cope with peak load is very difficult.  

The upshot being that during the Christmas season some online shoppers will be presented with slow and very slow websites that are struggling to keep up with the pace of the voracious demand from the Australian multi-channel retail consumer!

So, what to do?

To ensure that your online customers don’t lose  “that lovin’ feelin” during the Festive Season the answer can be found in a new and highly effective solution: FEO – Front End Optimisation.  FEO is a combination of Content Distribution Networking and Website Acceleration (through software optimisation) that can significantly improve the performance of page rendering on your website, reduce load from your servers to ensure that transactions are handled faster and create a buffer so that spikes in high traffic volumes go un-noticed by your customers!

This combination of content distribution and site acceleration can be implemented within 36 hrs, require 5 minutes involvement from your IT Department, is contract free, pay-as-you-go and has a money back guarantee! 

For more information, contact iceman@hitworks.com.au who will help keep you out of the Danger Zone!

Setting up an online store | Nett

A nice article about setting up your online store... It still however seems to exclude the pitfalls of starting up, creating content, copy, images and data. Also no discussion whatsover about integration to accounting, warehousing etc.

Selling online is like walking through a minefield.

Setting up an online store | Nett:
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iPad Competitions Galore - Do they Add Valuable Subscribers

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I am sure you have all seen the ongoing ebb and flow of competitions used to entice people to subscribe (and refer friends  to go into the draw) to win an iPad. Just today I checked my Facebook page and there for all to be seen, two competitions, one after the other. See image below.

Does giving iPads away bring highly engaged subscribers?  Personally, unless you are an Apple reseller, I doubt they do. I enter these competitions purely to win the iPad. I know this as I recently unsubscribed from an online book reseller after I entered the competition.

Perhaps if I had won their iPad, i would have remained somewhat loyal to their emails out of respect for the prize I would have won!

What are your thoughts?

Infinity-channel retailing

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Forget Omni Channel Retailing, the next BUZZWORD is Infinity Channel Retailing, which sums up the a concept of future smarter computing with far greater artificial intelligence and even deeper cross and multi channel integration capability.




Stuart Bennie Writes in an article in Inside Retailing about the potential future,  where infinity represents WITHOUT ANY LIMIT. Bennie eludes to extremes such as technology capable of walking into David Jones and ordering a McDonalds; where  data is stored as a 'qubit' represented by a quantum system such as the spin of an atom's nucleus or an electron, as opposed to the current  model of our faithful transistor that stores '1''s or '0's... 

And I though I was a forward thinker ! Infinity Channel Retailing. I like it.

Click on the link below to read more about this 
Infinity-channel retailing | IR News | Inside Retail:

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Tarocash launches e-commerce platform

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Wow, after all these years, its nice to see Tarocash embracing eCommerce. With the support of Amblique, they are in relatively good hands to ensure their eCommerce sales and multi channel strategy is implemented correctly


Tarocash launches e-commerce platform:

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Demystifying big data | IR News | Inside Retail

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Big Data, A topic that has very much piqued my interest in the past few months, and something I intend to explore more over the next few!

 Here is a nice article Demystifying big data.

Click on the link below to read more:





Demystifying big data | IR News | Inside Retail:

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