Tealeaf: Visibility. Insight. Answers.

What does $44 billion look like to companies with an ecommerce channel?

That is the question we asked ourselves this summer after reviewing the results of the 2010 survey of Online Transactions commissioned with Harris Interactive. The answer to retailers depends on what they’re selling, but we decided to have some fun and create visual representations that both answer the big question and also illustrate the survey results. (See graphics at bottom of full post.)

2010 survey of Online Transactions Summary:

The survey found that retailers who operate in the online channel may have lost more than $44 billion dollars over this past year as a result of transaction problems on their websites.¹ Since an increasing number of consumers prefer to shop online rather than in brick-and-mortar establishments, the impact of lost revenue from poor online experiences directly impacts businesses’ bottom lines. The study found that more than one-fourth of online shoppers (27 percent) would turn to an online or offline competitor if they encountered an online transaction issue.

Back to the Future

by Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO —

Gas up the DeLorean, crank her up to 88.

Do you remember PowerBuilder, Visual Basic 1.0?

What about porting applications to/from Sun, Apollo, HP, Digital Equipment, MS-DOS, Windows and OS/2?

How about writing installation programs for all of the above, keeping track of a mish-mash of different versions—and of course dealing with a personal favorite, 'DLL Hell.'

As Bob Seger would say, ”Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then.”

The Client-Server phenomenon started with a vengeance in the 1980's as the personal computer market grew at an exponential rate. The technology shifted in the early 90's from 2-tier client server (Client/DB) into n-tier (Client/Appserver/DB) with SAP's R3 success. With the rise of the internet, there was a huge shift away from 'installed applications' and a movement into thin-client (i.e. browser-based) applications—both for internal use (employees) and customers.

And here we are in 2010, about to head back into the Client Server fray.

By all indications, handheld mobile devices (iPhones, iPad, iPod Touches, Android, Blackberry and other smart phone devices) will eclipse the installed base of desktop computing devices within a couple years. Every person will be walking around with a highly portable computational device with network connectivity.

How to achieve excellence in joined-up marketing

By Geoff Galat —

This post is part of the #JUMPchallenge, a blogging competition designed to raise awareness of how to join up marketing and PR, launched to support Econsultancy's JUMP event.

Does this scenario sound familiar? You invest a significant budget on complex marketing strategies that are all designed to push prospects to a particular destination – often a website – only for them to fall at the final hurdle.

The DM is brilliant, the eshot hits the nail on the head, but on the site itself, the visitor has a nightmare trying to navigate from page to page and, at that crucial conversion point, gets a 404 error or their credit card fails to go through properly. All that money spent driving visitors is wasted.

Connect the Dots of Customer Experience

I had a typically frustrating experience with my bank's customer support center today (and I say typical not in reference to my bank, but to calling customer support lines in general). I tried to make a credit card payment, and thought I successfully had, but it never seemed to go through. Read: I was trying to give my credit card company money, but to no avail. After multiple attempts I called in to see what I was doing wrong. Upon reaching a representative (success!), I had to recount exactly what I had done online—what I had clicked, any error messages I saw or did not see, the last page I was on. This all amounted to a 10 minute phone call where my question of “what did I do wrong?” was never answered. Instead, I was walked through the “correct” way to make online payments.

Upon going through the payment process again after the call, I finally realized that when I clicked from one credit card's statement to pay the bill, the site was taking me to a payment page for a credit card that I was no longer using and not trying to pay—a technical issue on their end that I imagine others were also encountering. By the time I figured this out, I had already incurred a late fee and had no way to prove the issue that was preventing me from making a payment online. It’s enough to make one question the real time savings of online bill pay...