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Getting Ready for Holiday Shopping

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The Official Merchant Services Blog would like to wish everyone a very happy Halloween. As we speed our way into the last stretch of 2011, the holidays are going to zoom into view. Holiday shopping season officially tends to start on Black Friday. But in recent years, the boom in online shopping has holiday shoppers no longer traditionally adhering to the official shopping season trends. A 2010 survey conducted by Google and OTX found that 35% of internet users start their holiday shopping prior to the end of summer, months ahead of Black Friday.This trend is only continuing to grow as consumers find online shopping convenient to their shopping habits, easy to do, and the wide selection lets them find great deals on price.

This boom in e-commerce continues on past Black Friday. Cyber Monday, a marketing term coined in 2005 to describe a big push with incentives to shop online days after Black Friday, set records in 2010. According to a Star Tribune article from January 16, 2011, Cyber Monday sales rose 16 percent from 2009, and topped $1 billion overall –– marking the first time Cyber Monday hit the billion dollar mark. The record setting didn’t stop on Monday, according to comScore, a company that tracked the sales figures between November and December for the e-commerce industry. Sales on Thanksgiving Day were up 28 percent from the previous year, and overall e-commerce sales topped $32 billion in the holiday shopping period, a 12 percent rise from 2009. Even Black Friday, brick and mortar stores’ biggest holiday shopping day of the year, saw a 9 percent rise in e-commerce to $648 million.

“This trend isn’t going away in 2011. Some preliminary predictions are suggesting that this year’s holiday shopping season is going to be robust, and online shopping will continue its rise in the eyes and wallets of consumers. You can see that e-commerce is heavily predicted to boom in the next four years through previous articles posted by Host Merchant Services. And while The Official Merchant Services Blog prepares to give you ongoing coverage of the holiday shopping season’s impact on the E-Commerce industry, we’re going to take some time to give merchants some helpful tips to get prepared for 2011:

  • Start early. With your promotions and your sales, start getting the marketing as well as the products or services out there to your customers as early as you can. As seen with the statistics above, online shopping is not beholden to the Black Friday start date. Online shoppers make their lists, check them twice as soon as brick and mortar shoppers and start looking for deals from spring on through the rest of the year.
  • Check and re-check your process. Make sure your online shopping cart is running smooth. The biggest draw of e-commerce for many consumers is convenience. So it’s very important for your online shopping experience to be hassle free to the users of your website.
  • Consider your product line. With online business as booming as it is, it can be easy for your site to get lost in the crowd as shoppers surf around. Consider offering something your competition can not offer. A unique item. An eye-catching deal. Basic marketing plan, but even in the e-commerce industry, the basics still work.
  • Gift certificates are a big holiday item, and that does not stop online. In fact tomorrow’s blog post is going to look at something specific to this year’s shopping season that takes gift certificates and gift cards a step forward in terms of convenience for holiday shoppers. One thing to remember about gift certificates is the post-holiday business they drum up for you. They are purchased during the holiday season, but get used after the holidays, giving your online store the potential to attract other purchases beyond the capacity of the gift certificate in the slower sales month of January.
  • SEO and Keyword choices should be focused on with your advertising. Consumers gift shop online using search engines. You want to do everything you can to get your site in front of them when they search for these gifts. The focus of your e-commerce solution for your business should be an online store that your customers can find easily and then use conveniently. This will get them coming back to your site.
  • Free shipping. This is something that if you can offer, you should strongly consider offering to your customers. It is a big boost for the e-commerce industry leaders each year that they can offer free shipping to holiday shoppers.

Those tips are just scratching the surface of things you can do to prepare for the holiday shopping season. It’s certainly not too late to get ready for the business rush that holiday gift-giving provides each year. Host Merchant Services provides e-commerce solutions to our merchants that will let them take payments smoothly and efficiently. And The Official Merchant Services Blog will continue to provide insight on how merchants can maximize this opportunity.


					

		
		
	


	

				

			
						

				Magic 8-Ball on Mobile Payments [2023 Update]
			

										

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Magic 8-Ball on Mobile Payments: Outlook Hazy, Ask Again Later





Mobile Payments are getting a lot of press right now and are being heralded as the future of commerce. There are quite a few media sources playing the role of prognosticator, tagging Mobile Payments as a billion-dollar boom waiting to explode. But as we creep right up on the 2011 holiday shopping season, the actual impact of Mobile Payments is still short of its predicted potential. So today The Official Merchant Services Blog is going to take a brief look at Mobile Payments, shaking the topic up vigorously and seeing what the Magic 8-Ball (a potential holiday gift in itself) has to say about the whole thing.





Sunshine and Positivity





One of the most commonly quoted statistics about Mobile Payments can already be found in Host Merchant Services Article Archive in a story about Mobile Payments and how bright the future is: A Juniper Research study that predicts the value of all mobile money transactions will grow from $240 billion to $670 billion. That’s a hefty number and makes for sexy copy. Other stats cited often from the Juniper Research study are that digital goods will make up nearly 40% of the market that the $670 billion figure is drawn from. And that Asia, Western Europe and North America will make up nearly 75% of the entire market for those goods.





So that’s the good news. What’s the bad news?





Two Big Problems





The bad news is mobile payments haven’t taken off as quickly in the U.S. as the media reports suggest. The Juniper study sets things in four years in the future. So the boom is still very much capable of happening. But two things are holding Mobile Payments back in this country:





    

  1. The technology isn’t developed fully yet.
    2. 




  2. Security issues scare consumers.
    3. 






The technology is sort of all over the place right now. You have a variety of different ways to process a mobile payment. And the biggest competitors in the industry (Google, PayPal, Amazon.com, MasterCard, Amex, Visa) are all still racing to outdevelop each other. Google Wallet is still not fully there yet. Near Field Communication (NFC)  is still only being tested on a small scale in the United States. The phenomenon simply hasn’t taken root.





Security Concerns





Mobile Payment Security Concerns






The other major problem holding a Mobile Payment boom back in the U.S. is security. People are already worried about credit card hacks, phishing scams and the security of their transactions with plastic or with online transactions. PCI Compliance is a hot button issue, especially in light of Sony’s security breach earlier this year as well as the recent DigiNotar Hack. So technology like NFC where people just wave their cell phone at a scanner make people nervous about how secure the transaction really is. And of course it was already shown this year at a security conference that the Square device from Square Up could be hacked and used to steal credit card information.





All is Not Doom and Gloom





While there isn’t much anyone can do but wait when it comes to the technology being developed, Host Merchant Services provides a nice set of tips for addressing the security concerns.





And the Mobey Forum provides a whitepaper extensively reviewing the ability for NFC mobile payments to take hold, and detailing ways to make that happen.





Blogger Keith Cowing also wrote this interesting read on mobile payments, addressing the issue of security and the worries consumers have over eReceipts. In his blog he asks: “The world of retail is changing faster than it ever has before. Nobody had heard of flash sales, group buying, or NFC three years ago. One of the most exciting changes will be the adoption of mobile payments and eReceipts, which will combine to provide a paperless way to checkout and manage your expenses. But when mobile payments and eReceipts become widespread, who will own your purchase data and how will they use it?”





A very compelling question. He goes on to touch on many of the same talking points The Official Merchant Services Blog brings up about mobile payments. I’ll leave you with Mr. Cowing’s final point: “When a customer visits your website, walks into your store, makes a purchase, gets an eReceipt, or talks about your brand on Facebook, these are all touch points in an ongoing customer experience. Your brand is represented by every step along the way and doing the right thing for your customer is doing the right thing for your business. When it comes to mobile payments and eReceipts, providing a convenient and simple solution is part of the customer experience. “





That’s exactly what it’s going to take for Mobile Payments to reach those lofty Juniper Research predictions. The customer has to experience mobile payment as a convenient and simple solution to their transactions. That’s when the mass of consumers will just seamlessly shift their gears (and their dollars) into mobile payments.

					

		
		
	


	

				

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				What Does Google+ Mean For Small Businesses? [2023 Update]
			

										

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With the launch of Google+ this year, most of the media buzz about the topic has been the confrontational aspects of Google+ vs. Facebook. But now that Google+ has started to settle in, there’s deeper issues at play for it and the impact it can have on e-commerce. The Official Merchant Services Blog takes a look at where things stand with Google+ and what impact it can have with small businesses.


Since its start in 1998, Google has been building an entire array of web tools. E-mail, calendars, the vaunted Google Docs, advertising, site analytics, mobile applications and third party apps for everything else, the “Google Universe” now offers a complete lifestyle hub for its users. The only thing it had been missing was social media … until now. Google+ is that last addition, and has the capacity to bring all of the rest of the tools Google offers together seamlessly into a rapidly growing social network.


What does Google+ mean for the small businesses?


Google Apps Marketplace and Google’s Chrome Web Store are extensive marketplaces for web apps that host everything from accounting to project management to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications to Enterprise Resource Planning applications. A full suite of management tools come together through Google and then Google+ Circles provide the interactive connection for co-workers using these apps.


Google+ is poised to become the conversation manager, overseeing all of the apps that are generating activity inside of a business. Google+ offers an expansive, easy to manage unifying force for business communications within Google’s universe. As a result, small businesses are migrating (over 3 million so far) away from expansive on premise software solutions to Google Apps for their IT infrastructure in a cloud computing environment. And this gives Google+ the opening it needs to target small businesses.


Single Platform or Best-of-Breed?


This Google-branded “universe” held together by Google+ also brings up a key issue for businesses regarding their tools: Do they go for a series of best-of-breed tools, the top of the line features available from a mix of companies and options, or do they go for a single source for all their business interactions?


With the former choice the business has the top-of-the-line tools and functionality available. But the usage can be fragmented between different pieces of software and programming. Purchasing managers, IT, and end-users are left juggling a medley of vendors and individual tools that on their own can be the best of what they do, but overall may not play well together. It could be something like Microsoft for IT, Oracle for backend infrastructure, Facebook for marketing and social media, LinkedIn for business to business connections. A series of integrations across a landscape of tools that ends up being complicated and expensive.


With choosing Google, and using Google+ to hold it all together, the business now has a single set of tools from the same source. This unifying force is very appealing to small business owners. As they look to replace desktop software and move toward a web-only environment, Google+ gives them that much more convenience on this path. Online tools offer an ease of use, accessibility and low cost that a series of different software packages can’t match. And even mixing together various web-based apps can be more cumbersome than the single Google toolbox can potentially offer. This extends beyond the document sharing of Google Docs and gives a viable web-based alternative for all that’s needed to keep a small business running day-to-day.


Unlike Facebook, which still focuses on the social aspect and presents itself as a place to hang out, Google+ is placing itself in a unique position to be the catalyst for a small business toolbox that manages all the different things a small business needs to thrive.


Now that the benefits of Google+ are thoroughly defined and out of the way, it’s time to focus on the one glaring negative. Businesses still can’t properly utilize the system yet. The only problem with Google+, and it’s a big one, is that businesses can’t register for the time being. Google says that won’t change until winter 2011.


What that means is you have to take advantage of Google+ currently in other ways. So the potential boon Google+ can bring as a unifying force for small businesses is still waiting for Goggle to finish integrating the features and let businesses in on it all. For now, Google+ remains an incomplete tool that still only works as a social tool like Facebook. That will change. And when it does, businesses will have an entire universe of functionality stitched together and ready made for them to take to the clouds and run things through just the web. Host Merchant Services will continue to monitor the development of Google+ and keep our readers up to date.


In the meantime, here’s a blog that gives some advice on how to use Google+ right now.


And here’s a blog from Forbes that cites 5 Things Small Businesses Should Know About Google+.h