 This holiday season, more and more people will be going online to find that perfect gift. They can browse hundreds of sites and don’t have to worry about crowded stores or bad weather.
To prepare for this rush, e-retailers must know who’s coming to their sites and how to entice them to buy.
A recent survey from GSI Commerce shows that women, ages 45-54, will make impulse purchases online more often than men in the same age group. Key factors in the purchasing decision were limited time offers and the ability to make free returns.
The survey suggests that limited time offers compel 55% of women, and only 38% of men to buy. Free return offers are equally lopsided with 51% of women and 36% of men willing to buy.
However, since women aren’t the only ones who go online to shop,
e-retailers need to be prepared to serve everyone who comes by.
The survey noted that, among both men and women, a well-known web site is important to their purchasing decisions, but women were swayed -- 46% to 34% -- by a convenient return policy. A professional Web site design was an important or very important feature for 46% percent of women and 47% of men.
The important point to understand regarding this information is that owners of e-commerce businesses would do well to skew their online marketing towards women professionals and consumer friendly business practices will help entice shoppers all year round.
- Nina Menezes
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Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.”
~ Dave Barry
Christmas is a time when you get homesick - even when you're home.
~Carol Nelson
The best of all gifts around any Christmas tree: the presence of a happy family all wrapped up in each other.
~Burton Hillis
May Peace be your gift at Christmas and your blessing all year through!
~Author Unknown
Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want and their kids pay for it.
~Richard Lamm
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Origin of Blogs
In August 1999, Evan Williams in San Francisco figured out how to update his website by just typing text into a text box.
Normally, to update a website, you use an HTML editor, edit the text and add HTML formatting, use FTP to upload it, and the page is then available.
But his new method allowed him to open a webpage, type text into a text box, click Submit, and it was instantly available as a webpage.
This makes it easier to add content to websites without having to bother with HTML.
For example, Eleanor has a website at eleanor.com, where she wants to keep a diary of what she is up to.
- With a blog, she can open a webpage, add a few lines of text, and click Submit. The new text appears on her webpage, at the top of the page, as a new entry. Her webpage is thus a running diary.
- Eleanor can use any computer that has a web connection (at the library, at work, at internet cafes, at friends places, while traveling, and so on) and she can continue to update her blog.
- She can also update the blog via her cell phone with SMS (text messaging). With wireless PDA or a Blackberry, she can update her website while sitting in a coffeehouse. She can be on a train and use her cell phone's digital camera to add photos to her blog. At conferences, while the speakers are still presenting, people in the audience use their wireless PDAs and laptops to update their blogs with the speakers' points.
- Eleanor can also create a group blog and invite several friends to write the blog. She can also make it open, so anyone can write to the blog.
Blogs allow anyone to quickly post text and images to the Web without any technical knowledge. This opens the web to more publishing and distribution of information.
- Jorn Barger coined the term weblog in December 1997 for his Robot Wisdom Weblog, which still exists at robotwisdom.com.
- The first hand-made blogs showed up in early 1999. The first use of "blog" also appeared.
- In August 1999, Evan Williams (at evhead.com) released what was to become blogger.com.
- In January 2003, blogger.com reached one million users.
- In February 2003, Google.com bought Pyra, the makers of blogger.com
I should also mention several more people who have been significant in developing blogs. Dave Winer created the Radio Userland blog tool radio.userland.com. Meg Hourihan megnut.com is the co-founder of Pyra (blogger.com) and she got together the funds that kept the company alive.
Origin of the word Blog
If a diary on the website is a log entry on a website, then it is a web log. This was shortened to weblog, which soon became blog.
There's also the verb, as in "she was blogging all morning."
- Andreas Ramos
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