Tag Archives: mobile applications

Virtual Gifting [2023 Update]

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The Official Merchant Services Blog continues its series focusing on the upcoming holiday shopping season and how the e-commerce industry is shaping the future of shopping. Yesterday we looked at Mobile Gift Cards and studied their potential to be a popular gift giving idea. They can end up being extremely easy to use and very convenient for shoppers in a pinch, turning the process into a few simple clicks and an e-mail away from delivering a gift card the recipient can then use instantly, no matter the distance between gifter and giftee.

Today we’re going to look at what was a burgeoning gift giving idea last year, that we predict will continue to build steam and become a major choice in holiday shopping ideas: Apps. Smartphones are obviously a very popular part of peoples’ everyday lives. And with that comes the apps that fuel their usage. This makes virtual gifting of those apps a viable and useful purchase option for consumers looking to give someone that perfect, albeit tiny, little gift that they know the person will enjoy. Be it a fun game like Angry Birds or Words With Friends or Plants vs. Zombies, or something more functional like a flashlight or Facebook messenger app, virtual gifts are fast becoming stocking stuffers. And as such, both Android and Apple have created a gift-giving functionality for their apps.

Here’s a story that ran in India’s The Business Standard giving tips and advice on which apps that may work as stocking stuffers for Apple and Android users. The article states: “Mobile applications or apps can keep tablet PC and smartphone users engaged for hours. With hundreds of apps releasing every day, these are the best gift this season for your app-addict friends or family members.” 

List of Virtual Gift Ideas

Virtual Gift Ideas

For iPhone users, the article runs through the process of either using their iTunes gift card service or using their “gift” button to virtually gift an app. It then suggests a short list of gift ideas:

  • Tweet Speaker, an app that lets users hear their twitter tweets in a hands free, convenient process that avoids having to finger through the updates.
  • LoopyHD, a music app that lets aspiring mobile DJs and musicians record music loops, merge them, import them and keep them all in sync.
  • Bobo Explores Light, an interactive learning tool that takes children on an educational journey to discover how light interacts with the world.

For Android users, the article details how Amazon has an Amazon App Store for Android ready to go.  The article states: “Amazon’s Appstore in fact puts Android within striking distance of the iTunes store for the first time, from a functionality and desirability perspective. Amazon’s Appstore gift cards, which you can email, send via Facebook, or even print out for any amount. This way you can give the gift of apps to other Android users, or provide your kids with an app allowance of sorts. To redeem, simply enter the card’s code value while purchasing the app from Amazon store.”

The Android Apps that are suggested are the Paper Camera App that gives you preview functionality through a viewfinder, and the Easy Tether app that lets you siphon off the internet connection from your phone to your computer.

As smartphones ingrain themselves more and more into our society, virtual gifting is going to become a much more commonplace activity. Driving the strength of e-commerce higher and higher. So just be aware that the holiday shopping season of 2023 is going to keep that business sector thriving.

Google plus

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