Types of E-Commerce

E-commerce is the use of Internet and the web to transact business but when we focus on digitally enabled commercial transactions between and among organizations and individuals involving information systems under the control of the firm it takes the form of e-business. Nowadays, 'e' is gaining momentum and most of the things if not everything is getting digitally enabled. Thus, it becomes very important to clearly draw the line between different types of commerce or business integrated with the 'e' factor.

There are mainly five types of e-commerce models:

1. Business to Consumer (B2C) - As the name suggests, it is the model involving businesses and consumers. This is the most common e-commerce segment. In this model, online businesses sell to individual consumers. When B2C started, it had a small share in the market but after 1995 its growth was exponential. The basic concept behind this type is that the online retailers and marketers can sell their products to the online consumer by using crystal clear data which is made available via various online marketing tools. E.g. An online pharmacy giving free medical consultation and selling medicines to patients is following B2C model.


2. Business to Business (B2B) - It is the largest form of e-commerce involving business of trillions of dollars. In this form, the buyers and sellers are both business entities and do not involve an individual consumer. It is like the manufacturer supplying goods to the retailer or wholesaler. E.g. Dell sells computers and other related accessories online but it is does not manufacture all those products. So, in order to sell those products, it first purchases them from different businesses i.e. the manufacturers of those products.


3. Consumer to Consumer (C2C) - It facilitates the online transaction of goods or services between two people. Though there is no visible intermediary involved but the parties cannot carry out the transactions without the platform which is provided by the online market maker such as eBay.


4. Peer to Peer (P2P) - Though it is an e-commerce model but it is more than that. It is a technology in itself which helps people to directly share computer files and computer resources without having to go through a central web server. To use this, both sides need to install the required software so that they can communicate on the common platform. This type of e-commerce has quite low revenue generation as from the beginning it has been inclined to the free usage due to which it sometimes got entangled in cyber laws.


5. m-Commerce - It refers to the use of mobile devices for conducting the transactions. The mobile device holders can contact each other and can conduct the business. Even the web design and development companies optimize the websites to be viewed correctly on mobile devices.

There are other types of e-commerce business models too like Business to Employee (B2E), Government to Business (G2B) and Government to Citizen (G2C) but in essence they are similar to the above mentioned types. Moreover, it is not necessary that these models are dedicatedly followed in all the online business types. It may be the case that a business is using all the models or only one of them or some of them as per its needs.

Keys To Great Email Strategy

Keys To Great Email Strategy

The foundations of strategy don’t change, but transferring it to email require a different level of thinking these days. I was teaching my daughter backgammon and talking about the strategy of the game. She very simply said, “My strategy is to win.” After laughing, I said “Winning isn’t a strategy, it’s a result.” But she had a good point; we seem to think very cause and effect in our business. We either think too narrowly in determining what winning means — or we think so long-term that we lose sight of the strategic things that really worked.

Strategy to me is an evolving thing that includes establishment of goals, objectives, tactics, and an iterative methodology that allows you to create dimensional approaches across many segments, products and channels.

To be successful in email strategy doesn’t start with a communication strategy. It starts with a framework for how you’ll make decisions. Here are some elements that should be included in this framework:

1. What are your monetary goals and objectives for your program, and how do they change by segment and/or product mix? This isn’t just a revenue view; it’s a profit view, a cost of reach, direct and indirect value of response, and the variables associated with the cost of running your program. These are all critical levers you’ll have to make decisions on “in-motion.”


2. What are the consumer actions and motivators that drive a purchase decision? Not just, why do they buy? But, what motivates them to buy, what type of information do they need in what part of the lifecycle? How does it evolve by segment? What type of support does your site, call center, or sales force play in this? What are the tasks your customer must take to complete a purchase — and how does your operations support those?


3. What competitive considerations are important to your business — and how do they impact the ways your customers make decisions? This isn’t as simple as saying, we offer a better product or our competitors offer a competitive product cheaper. You must develop a strategy that can react quickly to market conditions and competitive promotions and adjust to consumer demands. How will you gather this competitive insight, consumer response and make decisions on this information? It’s critical that you set some business rules upfront for how you will react to competitive considerations. This includes creating “and/IF” scenarios and outcomes. If you don’t create strategy around this, you will find yourself in reaction mode without well-thought-out plans, ultimately distracted from your program and strategies.


4. How you create customer segments is critical to effective strategy. You’ll quickly find that if you make it too complex, you’ll never develop a complete strategy that is doable. It’s critical that you create actionable segments that can be catered to in-program. Just because you can create dynamically driven segments and event-driven communications doesn’t mean you will have the time or resources to truly optimize all the segments. Your strategy should define the core primary and secondary segments and prioritize each. I typically put them into “high value,” “low value” and “invest” categories, allowing for variations in approaches and techniques.


5. Lastly, your framework should include simple hypothesis-driven testing. Sounds simple: You want to learn something, so you test it and get a result. But anyone who’s worked in this space long enough knows that test results are rarely “pure” and rarely tell a complete story. At best they inform direction, not tactics. Your strategic testing framework should include how often you’ll test, what hypothesis you want to solve, and what are the actions you’ll take once you’ve proven or disproven this thinking. (it may be frequency, it may be price sensitivity, types of communications that drive what actions etc..). It’s critical that you lay out this framework early in the year. If you wait till the campaign brief to form thoughts around testing, you’ll end up learning little, creating unneeded complexity and generally confused about what works.

Strategy is something that needs investment and fresh perspective. I’ve seen lots of tactics, some that worked and some that didn’t — but I’ve seen very few strategic plans that were set up properly for email marketing or eCRM. With a well-planned strategy, you’ll see fewer and fewer obstacles. “Obstacles are those fearful things you see when you take your eyes off your goals” — and goals begin with a foundational strategy.

Search Engine Optimize (SEO) an AJAX or Web 2.0 Site

Search Engine Optimize (SEO) an AJAX or Web 2.0 Site

One of the three major pillars of Search Engine Optimization is a website’s content, and onsite content optimization. All of the major search engine ranking algorithms have components that relate to the content that is contained on the website. Typically these components relate to Keyword Densities, number of words, content location, and sometimes age of content. In regards to the code that the content is contained in that falls under the topic of structure and not content, and will not be discussed in this article.

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) is an advanced web development method which can be used to create more responsive and interactive dynamic websites. AJAX accomplishes this by making object request calls back to the web server without having to refresh your browser, these object calls are then processed and are typically used to update the content of the page on your website that is currently being viewed. For the sake of this Article I’m going to ignore the XML component of AJAX as the search engines never view any of the XML data. Websites that use Javascript to manipulate content without using AJAX will also suffer from the issues described.

When a search engine sends out a robot / spider to visit your website with the goal of indexing your content it is only looking at what is being presented in the Markup Language. Generally a search engine does not behave like a user when indexing your website, it doesn’t click buttons or links it simply makes note of URLs associated with each page then individually then visits these pages to index them. This largely goes against the goal of AJAX which is to have as few pages as possible by interacting with the web server in a smarter method as the users interact with the website.

To put the last paragraph simply any content that is changed via AJAX or Javascript on a webpage that is not hardcoded in a page won’t be cached by the search engines. This essentially means that if you have great content that the search engines may love but you’re using AJAX you may be missing out on traffic. There are two approaches to rectifying these which may even give you an advantage over sites that don’t utilize Javascript / AJAX.

The first approach is to make sure that your website degrades to normal flat markup language for non javascript capable browsers and search engines. Essentially every time you would have used an AJAX call make sure you have a page with the same content. Unfortunately for a lot of people this could mean a lot of work, for those individual using a database with PHP or ASP it is not too hard to build a site that builds itself with some effective web programming.

The second approach is to use AJAX in a more minimalist fashion. The goal here is to present the search engines with your optimized content while making sure that any AJAX calls a user would do has no bearing on what you want the search engines to see. In fact this can be used to remove content from your website which may negatively affect your rankings such as testimonials. I’ve seen very few testimonials that actually do good things for a sites keyword density, I’ve even been known to optimize testimonials on client’s websites. With Javascript / AJAX you could insert a random testimonial into a page and therefore not affecting that pages keyword density. The only downside to this approach is that some offsite keyword density tools actually use Web Browser rendering engines so they may get false results as it takes the Javascript into account.

Now you may think that I’m anti AJAX from everything that I’ve said, but there are times and places for AJAX, provided it doesn’t affect how the search engines see your beautiful relevant content your trying to rank. AJAX is great to use for Member sections of your website, interactive forms, slideshows, and a lot more it just needs to be leveraged correctly to avoid missing out on search engine visitors. The final thing to keep in mind is that most search engines like to see more than a single page website which many AJAX website appear to be, always strive for at least 5 or more indexable pages as internal links and anchor text can have a lot of value.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Is social media backlinks really worth?

Is social media backlinks really worth?

Social networking profiles

One of the fastest ways to build backlinks is to register on social media sites with high PageRank: Facebook, Xing, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ecademy, Twitter etc. These sites allow you to set up a user profile with information about you and your company, including a link to your website. The only catch is that not all of these sites' links are 'do-follow' - which means your site will not always receive the 'link juice'.

Links in Twitter posts

If you place a link to a web page in your Twitter post, keep in mind that all of Twitter's outbound links are 'no-follow'. Google and Yahoo do not pass the Trust or PageRank power through the 'no-follow' links. Thus Twittering has limited value for your site.

However, such links do have some value. In May 2009, we witnessed the launch of the Topsy site, a technology that transforms Twitter links into a searchable database. Topsy makes it possible for users to search for information (relevancy is determined based on the number of re-tweets). So, any Twitter link now has a chance to be found and followed by Topsy visitors. Remember, increased traffic is the main goal!

Social bookmarks forever?

Is it possible to get permanent links from social bookmarks? Well, yes and no. Most social bookmarking sites will retain your bookmark until it's popular. But as your bookmark loses popularity over time, it will be moved into the archives. Ideally, a permanent link should stay on the same page with approximately the same PR forever, but in reality, most social bookmarking websites remove links after some time.

Nevertheless, social bookmarking sites are valuable for other reasons. If you have a quality article that becomes popular on social bookmarking sites, people will link to that article in their blogs, and post 'do-follow' links on forums.

You can search the Web for the keywords 'do-follow social bookmarking sites' to find the latest lists. Networkers have also created services like socialposter.com or socialmarker.com for automatic submission to bookmarking sites.

The truth about blog comments

Blog commenting is probably the most popular - and in many cases, most irritating (because of spammers) - technique of getting permanent links.

The Google PageRank algorithm implies that the more outbound links there are on a page, the less authority or power this page can pass to each of those links. That's because the page's PR is distributed evenly between the outbound links. If a webmaster wants to add an outbound link, but doesn't want Google to follow that link or for PR power to be passed on to the linked page, then that webmaster has to add the 'nofollow' attribute to the link. Many bloggers do so to prevent their PR from flowing to the pages cited by commenters. However, this practice is no longer encouraged by Google.

A few weeks ago Matt Cutts blogged about a change in the PR algorithm concerning Google's approach to passing PageRank through the links with the 'nofollow' attribute. Although no PageRank and anchor texts are passed through such links, they are also counted when sharing the outgoing 'link juice'. The only difference is that it's neither passed to the linked site nor kept on the page. This means Google disapproves of the practice of using the rel=nofollow attribute for the purpose of not sharing PageRank.

If you own a blog, setting up the 'nofollow' attribute to all comments means conserving your blog's 'link juice' and getting fewer comments. The 'do-follow' principle can lead to more spam, but it's a good way to attract webmasters to your site. On the other hand, if you are a webmaster trying to obtain more links by commenting on blogs, don't rely solely on this method of link popularity improvement. Use a combination of methods, including the time-proven ways of press releases, articles and site submissions to relevant lists and directories, and the newer techniques for site promotion in social media.