Redbox Biz Blog

We’ve met many interesting people online throughout our years of business. Maybe it’s because we have a website and a blog (and of course our offline and online strategies too) and we’re ‘visible’ in that way.

Whatever it is, we’re always glad to learn more about other people online especially successful ones who run online businesses.

Two days ago, we had dinner with Yeo (he wants to remain mysterious like Deep Throat of the X-Files fame so we won’t blow his enigmatic cover) and our dinner stretched on for over 4 hours as we chatted about anything and everything - from his love of audio to his love for Roomba. And his Monica and Charlize, Sophia and Maggie. Plus the love letters his fans write to express their love for Monica, Charlize, Sophia and Maggie.

Actually, Yeo is a very successful online retailer and he has been selling his drivers, electrolytic capacitors, audio DIY kits, USB convertors, amplifiers and semiconductor parts since 1998. He makes a good living from his DIY Paradise e-store, selling sexily named products after hot actresses like Charlize Theron, Maggie Cheung, Monica Belluci and Sophia Loren. Continue reading »

While going online with a website or an e-commerce site is terribly exciting for many people (there’s something about buying and selling that connects with the entrepreneur in all of us), it pays to plan for e-commerce BEFORE you jump into it.

E-commerce websites are never cheap; they are costly to build and need time and commitment before you actually get results. It’s not just getting a bunch of your products online and sitting back, waiting for the orders to come rolling in.

It’s never THAT easy.

But do people want to hear that? Nope. They want to hear the ka-ching’s and see cash deposited into their bank accounts. They just don’t want to know the real work which goes on behind the e-commerce website.

The real work comes before you engage anyone/any firm to design your e-commerce website. It comes from your answers to important questions. Questions which you should answer if you want to grow a successful e-commerce.

If you’re seriously thinking of launching your e-commerce website soon, here are some questions you should answer first. These questions are an excerpt from a whole (long) list of questions we ask our clients during the exploration stage.

When we meet clients, we first investigate what they want to sell. What they want to sell, who they want to sell to, and how they want to sell determine largely the type of e-commerce solutions we offer to them. Some want to sell physical products, others prefer to sell downloads/digital products like e-books. Different systems cater to different needs. And yes, cliche as it may sound, everyone’s needs really are unique!

So here are some questions to get you thinking if you intend to set up an e-commerce site. Think about your answers deeply too. It’ll save you a lot of pain, money and heartache if you start with the basics - superb planning!

Related e-commerce posts:

Do your photos entice?
Payment options for your online store
What you can do to improve the buying process
Own your online store now - here’s how

To your web success,
Nic

The amount of money you spend on your website should correlate highly with its usability, right? It means, the more money you spend, the more brains are thinking for you so your website should be easy to use, right?

Wrong.

While I like the fat yellow men in the adverts, and think they’re cool even if Nic thinks they’re ugly as hell, Digi’s website is not user-friendly at all. The website is created to look cool but that’s about it. It ranks very low on usability because there’s just too many moving things happening at any one time!

As I’ve been a Digi user for the past 10 years, their service is much better than Maxis any day. Coverage is good especially in the hilly area where I live. I’ve no complaints about that.

But in terms of going online and navigating the Digi website, now that’s a different matter all together.

I presume it must have cost Digi a bunch of money to get some people to design the website. I know they want to appear hip and cool and be in the thick of today’s technology (hence you will see all those moving-zooming-flying bits which use helluva lot of Flash) but that should never be compromised with true usability. Maybe having Flash justifies the cost of building the website.

When you mouse-over the navigation menu (on the top), everything moves! The minute you move your mouse away, all the bits move again. Is that necessary? Why not have static navigation so that people can focus on what they want to find?

Oh and speaking about finding stuff on Digi’s website, it practically kills me. You won’t find what you’re looking for. I know I didn’t because I was stumped by so many things going on at the website. And I use websites regularly. I spend almost 8 hours a day online. And I cannot find the thing I am looking for!

And you know why this happens? Because the website is designed to look cool, not to serve the needs of its users. It’s an ego trip basically. The website forgets that the first reason for existence is to give users the right information, easily.

And you know what I did after I got frustrated when I couldn’t find the info I wanted? Simple. Go to Google, type in your query (start your query with a “how to”) and bingo - I got to a blog…yes, people, a blog which offered me the info I wanted about Digi. See the relevance of blogs? Blogs which are simple tools can do a better job offering me information than a “cool” website like Digi.

And when I first signed up to use my online account at their website, I didn’t know where to go. There’s no indication of online account for 016 users, until I found out that it’s at OCS (that’s Online Customer Service).

To use the OCS simply means you register an account online so everything can be done at your online account - be it viewing your itemised account, changing call plans, activating GPRS etc. Fine, I get the idea that it’s supposed to make my life easier BUT get this, how can I make my life easier if I don’t know how to get to OCS? Couldn’t it instead be “Your Online Account” or “Your Digi Account” rather than some fancy shmancy thing called OCS?

Plus, so much for Online Customer Service, you don’t get served at OCS; you self-service yourself! Ha! This is what’s called irrelevancy of term - when the words used do not connect with the user, the user won’t find that fancy thing you designed for them!

But to be fair, it’s not just Digi which has its online priorities all wrong. Corporate websites usually are full of bling-bling (”because you know, my CEO likes animation lah and without animation, the website will be so boring”) and information which is totally laughable. Real information is hidden or worse, never gets put online. Then people have to pick up the phone and call the company to find out more.

A usable website (a fave topic of Redbox Studio, by the way) is one that serves up the right information without the need for padding. Padding as in “we are committed to serving you” - of course you are committed to serving your customers, otherwise why are you in business? Tell us something we don’t know. Something honest, real, gutsy. Something that tells us, wow, we would really love to work with this company. Wow, we would really like to meet with these people - they seem to know what they’re talking about!

A usable website is full of commonsense - it pre-qualifies your prospects for you and allows you to automate most tasks and reduce the need for a clerk to answer calls (you may get lots of calls if people cannot find things they need on your website so getting lots of calls isn’t necessarily a good thing!). A usable website is your company profile, brochure, sales person, information centre all rolled into one.

Maybe Digi is the smarter choice but it sure isn’t being smart with its website!

It was a busy week last week. We were invited by KDU Penang to present a talk on blogging (yes, our second consecutive time) on 28 June in conjunction with their Literary Day.

As blogging is our pet subject, we decided to present 7 blog tips in the allocated 45 minutes. The way we figured, it’s usually best to talk for 30 minutes and leave 10 minutes to field questions from the audience, if any. The 7 tips would be just nice enough to tantalize and yet, provide value to the crowd.

Last year, we gave an overview of what blogging was but we didn’t provide handouts or notes. This year, we took the effort to produce a free downloadable PDF file for those interested in the notes.

There’s a good reason why we declined KDU’s offer of helping us xerox our notes - it’s commendable to reduce paper usage and we want to see how many people actually downloaded the file (website tracking is lots of fun and is real solid science). We did not want to give handouts only to see them trashed; anyway, that’s a huge waste of paper.

Also, our presentation slides this year were (we hope) vastly improved. In our early days of talks and presentations (business and academic), we followed what everyone did.

Put lots of bullets and text on the Powerpoint slide.

Show slide. (Horror too if you turned around, back to audience and READ the words out. Don’t do that! Your audience isn’t illiterate. They can very well read for themselves. We have seen this happen at some academic conferences so even the learned do this.)

Watch as audience read the words instead of listening to us!

That made us stop and think. The reason we were there was to give value by speaking. If we were there to show Powerpoint slides and read them, it was better for us to just pass the notes around!

So this year, we took a good look at what we usually presented and told ourselves that we really needed to do some zen presentation.

We needed to communicate with the audience and this meant a few things:

No Barrier Please
We requested to speak with a handheld microphone. No more standing behind lecterns! The audience can’t see us and the lectern is a barrier between us and our audience.

Only the Skinny
We made slides with minimal text. The most we had were 5 words on any slide. The core message was encapsulated in those text. And each slide came with a huge photo to illustrate the point we were making.

Acting Becomes You
We rehearsed at least twice. A good, spontaneous talk which engaged the senses is not so spontaneous after all. Yes, like any good actor, we need to act as if it was effortless. But it isn’t effortless. It took a lot of brain juicing.

Thinking, mindmapping, picking out the best 7 tips to present, writing a skeleton speech, rehearsing, crossing out unnecessary stuff, and yes, timing and pacing ourselves too. You don’t want to go overboard and bore your audience to tears. It’s best to be succinct and then field questions rather than go on and on and have an audience waiting to jump out of the hall the minute you say thank you.

2 Very Cool Links
We cannot claim to be experts but we keep learning and improving the craft of speaking. And we learn from people who do know what they’re talking about. You can check out Garr Reynolds’ website on PresentationZen (lots of tips) or our favourite, Guy Kawasaki’s tips on the techniques of speaking.

If you want to check out some photos or find out who else was invited to speak at KDU Penang’s Literary Day, go to Krista’s personal blog for more. Yes, the free PDF file is available for download at Krista’s blog.