Posted by stardigital on Feb 27, 2013 in
Magento,
STAR Digital News,
Web Design 
STAR Digital have been accepted onto the Magento partner programme, and as partners we now have three new Magento Enterprise builds underway.
As users of the Magento open source application since 2008 we know our way around it, and now we are working with both the community and enterprise editions we can offer clients across the retail spectrum a solution to fit their needs.
Our development track record in the Magento application is second to none, and we have performed major integrations to ERP and POS solutions as well as impressive customisations for mobile viewing as well.
Our in-house development team are now preparing to sit the certification exams and we hope to have a t least 3 qualified developers by the Autumn of 2013.
To find out more about the STAR Digital Magento development services please click on the link.
Alternatively give us a call and we’ll walk you through the benefits of Magento ecommerce for your business.
Just uploaded a video via tweet using the Twitter web page and noticed this neat little video icon next to the tweet.
So I clicked on it and guess what? The video plays in the right hand bar – that is so cool. (Also works for linked photos too.) nice one Twitter, think of the marketing opportunities for brands with TV ads, Voxpops etc..
The new Twitter Interface Embraces Rich Media
Posted by stardigital on Dec 28, 2010 in
Digital Marketing,
Marketing Well we just had a double helping of snow in the UK, and with it being the lead in to Christmas it coincided with a particularly busy time in the ecommerce world.
I thought it would be interesting to see what impact this had on traditional supermarkets with ecommerce retail operations, and in particular Sainsbury’s and Waitrose (Ocado).
The marketing that these brands performed via email in the lead up to the Christmas period was based around pre-ordering and guaranteeing your delivery slot for the week prior to Christmas. I would imagine from an operational standpoint that this would enable them to do the following;
- Inject extra cash into the business
- Pre-plan deliveries and staffing
- Ensure stock availability and shelf life
Seems I was wrong.
It would appear that even though the stores have taken these pre-orders they haven’t actually accounted for any of them in terms of stock. So as an example an order is placed in the last week of November for delivery on the 23rd December. You would imagine that the EPOS systems would then kick in to ensure that the relevant stocks are ring fenced at the store level to fulfill the online deliveries?
Well it doesn’t look like that is happening. It seems as if the orders are printed out on the day before/or day of delivery and people are sent through the store to pick the relevant items from the shelves. By the time the orders from both stores were ready for despatch the following problems manifest themsleves, (bear in mind its the 23rd December);
- Out of stocks, so substitution products are added, but in both cases in large numbers, and not always acceptable alternatives
- Short shelf life, so in the case of party food, expiry dates on the next day (24th December)
- Inability to guarantee delivery slots due to weather problems
So the first two problems are operational, and the stores should look to their internal procedures to understand how to deal with these. In the case of Ocado they blamed it on an inability to get fresh stock delivered. But from an online marketing perspective they have failed. They should have informed the customer by email pre-delivery so that they could make alternative arrangements.
The last point is outside of the stores control, but again they need to have procedures in place to deal with this where delivery is critical. Sainsbury’s made an effort to deal with an inability to deliver by phoning their customers telling them to go to the store and pick their order up! Now hang on, its too dangerous for them to deliver, but the stores stay open, and its OK for the customer to go to the store!
OK, so there is an option for the intrepid customers with 4 wheel drive to venture out and pick up their order. So here is the typical scenario, store calls customer, “Sorry your order can’t be delivered because of the snow, would you like to pick it up? We can have it ready for you and our drivers will be here to load it into your car. You won’t of course be charged delivery.” Customer, “Ohh, I rally need that shop, OK I’ll come over and get it at 4.30pm, is that OK?” Store, “Sure, it’ll be waiting for you.”
Now bear in mind that the customer ordered an online delivery, in some cases weeks ago to guarantee their ‘premium’ pre-Christmas delivery slot, and now they’ve got to venture out in the snow, with their to-store journey time taking at least twice as long. Now they get to the store. “Hi, I’m here to pick up my order.” Store assistant, “Sure, it will take 10-15 minutes, I’ll let them know you’re here.” 10-15 minutes. Hang on, the customer told them what time they were coming, why does it take so long to bring a pre-picked order out? Uh-oh. Pissed off customer time.
In fairness, the staff were charming, but the store management need to take learning from this. If the problem occurs in the future they need to work with operations and marketing to find a better way of dealing with it. There was no financial compensation other than a delivery refund, and in our particular order we got it home only to find half a dozen items missing. OK they refunded them, but guess what. We had to go back to the store to get them! In the damn snow! (After a lengthy phone call to Ocado, no doubt there were hundreds waiting to get through, we were given a £15 compensation refund for the short life items – thank you for that)
Sorry but to Ocado and Sainsbury’s from a customer facing marketing perspective, this Christmas YOU FAILED. Take some learning and do better next time. With all the technology and millions you’ve invested in your online operations you are way behind. You need to join some of the systems together so that they integrate properly, and where you devolve to local store management there needs to be checks and balances so that pre-ordered items don’t go out of stock or get delivered with ridiculously short shelf lives. The customer is King online, and it doesn’t take long to lose them to a competitor waving juicy free delivery vouchers in their faces – loyalty is massively important for supermarkets online, and they need to do more when things go wrong.
AND to make things worse, after treating your customers so badly, you didn’t send them an email apology with a voucher, but on Christmas day, yes Christmas day, you started emailing us with your Boxing Day Sales Promos. Come on guys….
As a postscript I also noted how the Graze business was overly affected by the post office in the lead up to Christmas. For our office, where three people use Graze twice a week on average they found that by the end of the first week in December, the weather was fine, their boxes had started to be delayed by up to a week. Graze were brilliant, they refunded when the boxes didn’t appear and they changed from perishable to longer lasting ingredients, but overall they must be questioning their commitment to Royal mail as a reliable partner. As a company that specializes in delivering fresh food to the customer when they want it, the whole experience has been a big own goal, through no fault of their own, Graze have probably lost a whole load of customers who until that point were brand advocates.
It just goes to show how important it is to get the right delivery partnership in place at part of your operational strategy, and more importantly to have a fall back strategy when things go wrong. The guys at our office have cancelled some boxes and put everything else on hold. I fear they may cancel their subscriptions in the new year… And I don’t think they blame Royal Mail, they just want their stuff, when they want it. The brutality of online business eh?
As ecommerce matures as a channel it follows that businesses need to do more to retain loyalty. One of the first things to cause switching in a price comparative environment such as that which the supermarkets operate in is failure to deliver the goods. So when this happens they need to go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that the customer experience is maintained. That the trust in their brand isn’t damaged. Otherwise they’ll end up like Tesco’s – hated. And strategically they need differentiators to survive against a behemoth like that. So customer service is key, more so online than in the actual store.
Looking forward to seeing what happens next year, or will it all be forgotten once the party’s over and the snow has thawed?
Posted by stardigital on Dec 20, 2010 in
Client News,
Marketing,
STAR Digital News We are very proud to be associated with the Charitarian, a Chinese based CSR magazine and organisation that is helping companies looking to trade ethcially in China.
One of the guys that runs this operation is Rob Pearson, who is incidentally the managing director of CIC in Burslem, the packaging and 3D modelling specialists, and a huge fan of digital publishing.
It was while we were chatting before his recent trip to China, he has 3 offices over there, that he asked me what we could do to improve the accessiblity/availablity and awareness of the Charitarian magazine.
STAR Digital currently provide the Charitarian with a customised WordPress Blog and a Page Flip 3D emagazine format, both of which have proved successful, but we hit on the idea of an iPhone and iPad app version to increase uptake in the target demographic. After 2 days of availability and with no promotion we are seeing 50 downloads a day!
James got onto it at our end and within 4 weeks we had it cracked as both an iPhone and iPad app. We then submitted it to Apple, who approved it in 5 days flat.
So now if you are interested in CSR in China you can get the free Charitarian app, and if you are a magazine publisher looking for an affordable method of getting your publications on the iPad give James a call.
Download the Charitarian at the app store, or review it here http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/charitarian-magazine/id409111422?mt=8
Posted by stardigital on Dec 12, 2010 in
Digital Marketing,
Magento,
Marketing,
Web Design The team at STAR Digital have recently been crazy with enquiries for iPhone and iPad app development following the successful launch of the MK Electric app and the impending Charitarian magazine app.
Over a cup of tea and rare chance for all of the team to get some thinking time we discussed the forthcoming impact on web statistics now that iPhone is mainstream and decided to do a bit of digging.
What we found surprised us all.
For the iPhone in the last week we’ve seen that it represents 6.8% of all traffic to the STAR Digital website, with approx 3% of that coming via the use of search! And this on a B2B site, albeit a technically focussed one. So we got to thinking about ecommerce sites, and we looked at the Aggressive Health Shop as an example. We knew this site worked in iOS nicely and gets a reasonable amount of daily uniques.
Here we saw a mixture of iOS, Android and Blackberry use, but the overall mobile usage only represented 2.51% with 2.05% being iOS. Less than we expected, but still in terms of numbers a leap on the last time we looked when it was 0.5%. And here’s the thing, the traffic from the iPhone is good quality, it has a comparable page view rate and dwell time. And here’s the really exciting news. With Magento one Step Checkout enabled we can see that the site received orders via iPhone and iPad with a far higher conversion rate that normal traffic. So it would appear on early investigation that whilst the traffic numbers are low, the conversion to action propensity is high.
What did surprise us is the low volume of Android usage as other marketing reports are citing massive growth and hyping this OS in the market. I think it will be interesting to see how things bed down after Christmas when a plethora of new devices start to be used. The iPad isn’t really showing any cut-through in traffic at the moment, but my gut feel is that this is about to change. We’ll report back on trending early in February.
Right now I know one thing, you’d better start working on your web site strategies to make sure they work on Apple mobile devices! Especially you ecommerce experts, you could be missing out on an exceptional revenue stream as the demographic of that user base appears to have disposable income and gets technology!
Today we were accepted onto the reseller programme for the excellent One Step Checkout for Magento developed to make the checkout process in Magento really simple.
We first implemented it in Mike Nash’s Aggressive Health Shop and we quickly found it was a key to increased conversions from checkout to sale. The abandonment rate dropped and orders flowed freely.
As Cardsave and Sagepay partners we had been looking for a Magento checkout tool that would give our customers the most seamless solution, and now we’ve found it. We plan to implement the tool in all future Magento implementations for our clients to add value to their Magento stores.
Give us a shout if you’d like to know more about this great tool!
Posted by stardigital on Dec 2, 2010 in
Client News,
Hosting,
STAR Digital News,
Web Design Star Digital were proud to achieve the rank of Silver Partner with Rackspace, the world’s no1 dedicated server hosting company, famous for their ‘fanatical support’.
Roger Martin, STAR Digital MD said “We signed up as a partner with Rackspace after performing due diligence for Fellows & Sons Auctioneers as part of their recent website upgrade. It was a major project and we knew we needed excellent support, a fast server infrastructure with separate servers for the web application and the database. From day one when we approached Rob Dobing, we were guided through the process with the technical team to ensure we scoped the right solution to ensure that the Fellows website ran quickly with total uptime, and had scalability for future phases. We’ve been delighted with the result as have Fellows. An all round great job.”
Since completing the Fellows project in September, STAR Digital have gone on to put five more clients on to the Rackspace network and reach the level of Silver Partner.
If you want to find out more about the wealth of server solutions including the all new Rackspace Cloud and thin client solutions please give us a shout.
We recently teamed up with the creative team at Quest Construction Marketing to develop a Joomla web site for our client Fire Design Solutions. The goal was to create an eye catching web site aimed at the architectural market promoting the Fire Design Solutions sister company FDS Consult, a specialist fire safety consultancy.
To create the required look we had to base each page in the site on a different background image and float the content above it. The result is a very different look and feel, but with full CMS control from the Joomla back end making editing truly WYSIWYG.
Other nifty tools employed in the build included Yoo Tools accordions to present more complex data in a user friendly way, and some cool AJAX controls on the meet the team page.
Take a look for yourself, a clean functional Joomla web design for FDS Consult
We are on the verge of something of a digital publishing revolution with the advent of the iPad and the cheaper Android tablet’s entering the market and creating a new channel for publishers and savvy direct marketers.
It’s possible that the way a fair segment of people view publications could be about to undergo a paradigm shift from paper to tablet. It won’t be immediate, but fact that Rupert Murdoch is backing it heavily with the paywall initiative, and with the number of quality publications announcing plans to leverage the channel there is no doubt that this is going to be a growth sector through 2011.
From our perspective, and owning the Page Flip brand, we look at these shifts with great interest. We recently completed a publishing app for the iPad and iPhone for a major US client and realised just how effective a medium it is. The app is very buisnesslike and aimed at a specific audience, but the feedback has been very good with the app being listed in the new and noteworthy sections and consistently sitting in the top 50 B2B downloads section of the Apple app store.
Watching the way that some of the bigger publishing brands were beginning to enter the market we had a chat with our friends at The Charitarian, who produce a quarterly magazine focussing on Corporate Social Responsibility in China, which we create as a page turn version, and asked them if they would be interested in getting their magazine onto an app. Of course they would! And this gave us the platform to begin our publishing tool. The Charitarian is a publication with global reach and carries strong messaging with the approval of the Chinese Government so it is the perfect test bed for our moble publishing platform. All of the beta testing is complete and submission is imminent.
The Charitarian app will be live and ready to download real soon and we will be running a press release to inform the world about it. It has a bookshelf which shows the latest edition at the top and previous editions follow it. You can search the document, view it in different aspects, landscape as spreads portrait as single pages, and the pagination is controlled by a slick swipe movement on the screen. There is a pinch zoom function and a tap to reveal other controls such as socail media integration.
We anticipate that our mobile publishing application will be available to publishers for a lot less than the other market offerings, and we are working on the Android verison now, as well as extra features such as video and other multi media incorporation, hyperlinks, push notifications and subscription payments. The goal is to create a ‘wrapper’ for publishers that has a series of consistent controls so that users feel at ease using the app. They can then ‘scope’ extra functionality which can be added at the publication level to maximise reader engagement. Our goal is to create a platform that is versatile and innovative, allowing marketers and publishers to push the boundaries and innovate.
So all in all it looks like the publishing world is in for an exciting 2011 as we see uptake of tablet and ebook readers increase, particulalrly after the Xmas season. Publishers that can use their imagination to design and scope innovative functions within applications will extend the functionality of their publications, and if they focus on usability and reader engagement they will be the winners.
We believe the key is to create a highly usable interface that allows readers to go further than they can with a straightforward publication through the incorporation of mini apps, games, rich media, social media integration and useful marketing functionality such as nearest location for an advertiser, push notifications for new issues and a bookshelf that gives readers the choice as to which issues they want to see in their app.
Our experience in the online page turn market over the last five years has taught us that this is a technology that when applied properly really works. Our Magento developers are also looking at creating online catalogues that will integrate directly to a Magento store via a shopping list to make direct catalogue marketing replicate on the mobile platform.
So its all very exciting, if you want to chat with us about it, give us a call. We are getting new learning every day, and our foremost goal is to create a valid marketing platform for publishers and direct marketers to get the most out of this channel.
Roll on 2011 and the digital publishing revolution.
