If you want someone to give you their money, you better treat them well… So why is so many online businesses speaking to their customers like they were doing something stupid?

It’s the same thing you see over and over again – and even though I love and use a variety of open source software, I have to say that larger open source E-commerce initiatives does a terrible job at handling user input gracefully.

I’ve been there myself, as a developer, I tend to write unfriendly error messages from time to time. I realized years ago that it was time to sharpen up my skills and focus more on the user. After all, that’s what matters the most.

Some time ago, I read an excellent blog post over at Get Elastic called “Losing Customers At The Register: 12 Checkout Blunders” about how e-tailers lose revenue on their site. First point on the list you’ll see unfriendly credit card errors!

I was working with one of our pilot customers, The Wall Company, and did some research looking into their data to see that credit card errors occurred a few times a week.

We changed their error messages from the nasty “Something went wrong, please try again”, to this:

That alone, helped 49 of 126 credit card error turn into success. Data from the past 3 months shows us that 10% of all completed orders have at least one credit card error!

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just add a new product to your store front and get measurable feedback in a matter of days? You always need to get feedback on how your product details are helping you sell the product. How can you know that you’ve set the price right? What about the images? Headline? Page title? How does the product page perform in the search engines?

All these questions are very hard to answer by digging up data from your visitor and sales statistics. Using Google Website Optimizer can give you a good idea – but it’s not the easiest thing to install if you haven’t got the technical skills it requires.

I’ve been thinking about a metric that gives you an idea about overall performance of your E-commerce store. This metric (Site Experience Index) is part of what I call The E-commerce Framework, that will be part of an upcoming Milkshake Commerce release. Let me explain what The E-commerce Framework can do.

Ordinary web analytics data does a terrible job at giving you an overview of how visitors use your site. You get loads of details, but at the end of the day it’s about trends and overall performance. If you could get a site level metric that tells you how much value your visitors brought to you today, divided into areas such as category pages, product pages, shopping cart, about pages, FAQs, contact forms, checkout process – you’d easily get an overview of site performance.

So for each area of your site, you get a score. That score will change from time to time. If you just deployed a complete redesign of your site, you could see if your score decreased, or increased. The score is a relative score, meaning that it is abstracted from site traffic which will make you able to compare your own site to other sites – every day of the week with each one another, and you can compare the score after deploying a new design, adding new functionality and such.

This is more than a conversion rate metric. It’s a metric that tells you the overall experience of your site, with the ability to drill down into certain areas of your site.

Happy New Year!

One thing I generally don’t like when speaking with others about entrepreneurship, is the illusion a lot of people have that you have to have something brand new that has never been seen before to succeed. This is a big misunderstanding, and I even think that most times it’s an advantage to have competitors. If you have competitors people already know what your product is. You don’t have to teach them about that and create a demand for your product.

Competitors will also keep you awake. You have to keep moving all the time, to avoid getting shot.

I recently read an article by Joel Spolsky, called Strategy Letter III: Let Me Go Back!

As Joel writes, there’s nothing wrong with competition:

There's nothing wrong with being in a market that has established competition. In fact, even if your product is radically new, like eBay, you probably have competition: garage sales! Don't stress too much. If your product is better in some way, you actually have a pretty good chance of getting people to switch. But you have to think strategically about it, and thinking strategically means thinking one step beyond the obvious

Joel talks about his experience from working on the Microsoft Excel team when Lotus 123 was leading the market for spreadsheets. The single thing that really caught my attention was his list of barriers to enter. Not barriers to entry, which is something very different.

As Joel writes:

The only strategy in getting people to switch to your product is to eliminate barriers. Imagine that it's 1991. The dominant spreadsheet, with 100% market share, is Lotus 123. You're the product manager for Microsoft Excel. Ask yourself: what are the barriers to switching? What keeps users from becoming Excel customers tomorrow?

And then he provides a list of barriers along with solutions that they needed to get right in order to succeed. And we all know where Lotus 123 is now.

Barrier	Solution
1. They have to know about Excel and know that it's better	Advertise Excel, send out demo disks, and tour the country showing it off
2. They have to buy Excel	Offer a special discount for former 123 users to switch to Excel
3. They have to buy Windows to run Excel	Make a runtime version of Windows which ships free with Excel
4. They have to convert their existing spreadsheets from 123 to Excel	Give Excel the capability to read 123 spreadsheets
5. They have to rewrite their keyboard macros which won't run in Excel	Give Excel the capability to run 123 macros
6. They have to learn a new user interface	Give Excel the ability to understand Lotus keystrokes, in case you were used to the old way of doing things
7. They need a faster computer with more memory	Wait for Moore's law to solve the problem of computer power

That got me thinking about barriers to enter in regard to E-commerce software.

Barriers existing shop owners have when switching E-commerce software:

Barrier	Solution
Having to manually enter existing data	Make it easy to import data.
Fear of losing existing URLs in search engines	Match old URLs with new URLs, so that a 301 permanent redirect is done to ensure search engine positions.
Having to learn a new product/UI	Have in-UI help for every feature. Use question marks with un-familiar input fields with a tool tip that explains in detail. Have a read more link in tool tip, if a more extensive explanation is required.
Fear of having to renew existing merchant account and payment gateways	Add support for merchant accounts and payment gateways as needed.
Fear of losing expensive SSL certificates	It is possible to export and import those. Explain!
Fear of losing domain names	Communicate up front that this is not the case. All domains are supported.
Fear of losing existing e-mail lists	It is possible to import. We keep it safe in our database.

And I hope I’m not done yet.

Think about yourself, and count how many times you’ve actually contacted a company when having questions about their product or services that are not adequately answered on their website. My count is definitely very low, and I think that is simply because we all know that no matter what you’ve found online, there’s another website that offers the same thing. So we just hit the back button to see the search results page and click the next result.

Same thing for users online

Have you thought this way about your own business? Imagine all the small details that people could be worried about. If your product is somewhat complex, there are probably a million questions you have to answer immediately.

It’ll gain you trust, and as a user you’d feel happy about visiting a website or store where you, yourself, found all the answers to your questions you had and decided to buy.

You have to make users happy, and you can do that by making them feel in control.

Providing help for users in web applications, as well as any other application, is important to get right. And with the freedom you have as designer or developer to create your own concept, even more and better help is required if you want your users to understand what they can do, what they should do and how to achieve that.

At the same time, it has to be a no-hassle operation to find and learn from help pages for a web application. How can you do that?

Context-Sensitive Help

The definition of Context-Sensitive Help, from Wikipedia goes like this:

“Context-sensitive help is a kind of online help that is obtained from a specific point in the state of the software, providing help for the situation that is associated with that state.

Context-sensitive help, as opposed to general online help or online manuals, doesn't need to be accessible for reading as a whole. Each topic is supposed to describe extensively one state, situation, or feature of the software.”

It doesn’t have to be difficult, advanced or anything like that. Rich tootips works very well. If something can’t be explained inside a rich tooltip, add a “Read more” link that opens in a new window.

Take a look at some inspiration from a Smashing Magazine article:

Google Reader, that is.

And that was TasteBook

Flashden.net

One question that every entrepreneur gets a lot, when working on a new product in a crowded space is this: “How is your product different/better than other products?”

Of course this is interesting to know. If you’re going to enter a crowded space, like E-commerce software is you must have a clear vision on how to separate yourself from competition.

I’ve seen quite a few businesses that are selling stuff online. In order to run their business, they need E-commerce software to host their website and act as a platform for their business.

Around this platform, come all the online marketing products, such as Google AdWords, newsletters, affiliate marketing, Twitter, Facebook and such.

Every shop owner wants to use those marketing products in their business, but they have huge difficulties in doing so the right way. Take Google AdWords. You are given endless possibilities, if you do things right. You have to know how to set up targeting correctly, if you should use conversion optimizer or not, daily budget must be right etc.

I’m sorry, but people running a business just doesn’t know about those little, but very important details. Neither do they know how to get correct insight of their costs vs. revenue to act in a timely manner.

Another thing they usually forget is the importance of landing pages for each and every campaign they run. And what about optimizing landing pages for conversions, by using e.g. Google Website Optimizer?

Another thing is the web design provided by a lot of E-commerce software products. Templates, they call ‘em. What’s good about using a stock template design for your business? Where’s your identity? It’s like Twitter using stock photo for their logo.

So how are we going to be different?

To address the design and identity issues, we don’t have templates at all. I know we’ll lose some potential customers on this, but we’ll also catch those operating on a higher level of quality. And quality is exactly what you get from a unique design and identity for your business. This will include a web design, newsletter design, landing page “master” design, e-mail communication design (for order confirmations and such).

In terms of marketing, we’ve made “limitations” for the client. So, if you want to use Google AdWords settings are applied for you automatically. Milkshake will help you find negative keywords, based on referrers from broad match keywords that never convert into sales.

Milkshake strongly entices you to create a landing page for your campaigns, by telling you via our alerting features. So we’ve made a landing page builder that uses the “master” design for landing pages. We’ve made it very easy to include Google Website Optimizer experiments. You just have to paste in, the installation URL provided by Google Website Optimizer and all scripts will be included for you.

We download cost data from Google AdWords and displays that for you, compared to your revenue. Our dashboard will show green and red arrows if you either make, or lose money on Google AdWords.

So, instead of just providing E-commerce software where you can sell your stuff online, we want to set up boundaries for inside what is considered best practices to help our customers run a better online business.

Getting to know more about our features

In the next couple of months, I’m going to take every major feature of Milkshake and blog about the problem that feature solves. How your business will benefit from solving that problem, and show you how it is implemented inside Milkshake by taking some screenshots, or maybe even make a small video.

As we’re getting closer to a feature complete product, you can learn more about Milkshake here, sign up for our RSS feed or get on the early bird sneak peak mailing list, that we have.

To have a open comunication whit the media and press is one of the best ways to get free media time.

 

Normally companies always want to teel about all the good things they can do for people.When theres something wrong people normally hide and stay away from the press.

I belive you shall tell everything, even when things are going very wrong.

If you can get time in the televison and make a clear point out to people that you are aware of this issue and you are handling it the best you can. Then you will get more credit then the one that’s hiding

Its even better if you can give people some extra info that suprises them and maybe also the media..

Think in theese lanes and you will get a good mediasucces

Think offensive. Even when things are going downhill

Do you have the idea, that your users have trouble finding what they’re looking for on your site?

Do you find it hard using your own site’s search engine? Or, are the delivered results just not good enough?

In this blog post, I want to take a look at the state of internal site search, as it is today on average E-commerce sites. Do we leave our users and customers more frustrated than they were before?

At last, I’ll give you a checklist of what you need to get right, in order to achieve the internal site search experience you’ve always wanted your users to have.

The state of Internal Site Search

Let me first point out, that I’m not taking the likes of Amazon into consideration. If you look at Amazon’s site search, you’ll know one thing: The more money you have, the more money you can spend on a better site search. Amazon is not the average E-commerce site, which is why I won’t take a further look at their site.

So let me start out by looking at a shop that runs on Magento E-commerce Software - a somewhat popular E-commerce platform. Through their website, I found one of their customers, Homedics. They sell Massage, relaxation and wellness products. A classic mistake with site search is that you get a “no results” page when searching for category names.

Let’s say that I’m looking for Foot Spas, which is exactly what they sell. Like many users, I don’t spent time on figuring out their navigational structure and goes straight to the site search which is located at the top right hand corner.

It’s a nice and visibly clear search box which looks very promising, so I type foot spas and hits the ‘enter’ key.

Much to my disappointment, I get a useless “no results” page simply telling me the frustrating message: “Your search returns no results”.

What’s wrong here?

1. Their product categories are not searchable.

2. Their no results page is totally useless. They could at least give me suggestions to help me get on with my life when I’m stuck like now.

3. Much to my surprise, they have a nice auto complete feature that suggests a search for “foot spa” (not spas). Now this phrase gives me two products as a result. They should’ve included this phrase in my original phrase without even telling me.

Sadly, this is not all.

When I finally got some results, I noticed that I couldn’t filter, sort or search within the current results.

Filtering gives me the ability to trim my results down to as few products as possible, that I can make a decision about later on. Again, much to my surprise they offer filtering on their product category pages. Although it is a very shy filtering feature, it’s useful if you want to narrow down your search results by price.

Sorting is absolutely vital. Sorting is a very useful personalization metric for you as a show owner to use. This gives you a great opportunity to get to know your users. Sorting by price tells you that a user is looking for something cheap. So don’t recommend the most expensive items! Sorting by popularity tells you that the user needs some sort of 3^rd party recommendation of the product, and price is maybe not that important.

Searching within results is needed when you’re trying to find a specific product that you don’t know the exact name of. Searching within lets you forget about price, brand, and popularity and so on.

Sadly enough, we can find even more things that are wrong about this one.

Users come from different countries and regions with different perceptions of the world, different ways of looking at the same things, and different ways of spelling, or should I say that a lot of users don’t spell correctly.

You can’t just ignore misspelled search queries. You have to deal with them, and make the best of them. This work has to be done by your site search engine. Trivial typos, such as “foot saps” instead of “foot spas” should just be silently dealt with.

Spelling this phrase as “food spas”, “fot spas”, “foot sbas” or “foot spaas” must also be dealt with silently. At most, ask the user gently if they meant “foot spas” – like Google does.

Even when I get some results from this site search, I’m frustrated due to the lack of filtering, sorting and searching within results. Especially sorting, which I find very important on a daily basis.

Let’s take a look at another example. This time, I found a site running on another quite popular E-commerce platform, osCommerce. The site I found is Beauty by Nature, an Australian Aromatherapy, Skin Care and Perfume shop.

I’ll do exactly the same thing as I did with Homedics. So I found the product category “ANTI AGEING SKIN CARE”. To increase the odds of getting some results, I’ll type “anti ageing” in the search box. Which was very difficult to find, located at the bottom left of the page layout.

This search returned the, almost expected, no results page. As I mentioned, this is a classic mistake with site search engines, and it will turn out to be very costly for the shop. I think most of the users are searching for anti ageing products on this site leave immediately.

As the last test, I’ve found a Shopify based shop, Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir Photography. I can’t do exactly the same as I did with the other two examples, because they don’t have product categories. So I just did a search for a product, and of course I got a result. But selling photos and not displaying images on their search result page is a huge mistake. And I still haven’t got any filtering, sorting or search within capabilities.

Misspelled words are not dealt with here either, as I actually expected.

The state of site search on average E-commerce sites is just not good enough. They don’t include enough results, and they haven’t got enough features for the user to narrow down and sort search results. This makes the user experience very bad, and it will cost sales.

The Important Features of Site Search Checklist

Sorting is very important for the user, because it is the fastest and easiest way to manipulate the result set without exclusion. Being able to sort, in both directions, by price, name, customer rating, most sold, discount etc. is very useful. You will quickly see that a lot of users will sort by customer rating, simply because most users want another person’s opinion on something before buying, or by price because they’re looking for something cheap.

Filtering is another very useful feature of site search, and product lists in general. Whenever you perform a site search for a very broad keyword, like monitor you will get a huge result set. In order to find a monitor you want, filtering lets you narrow down by a set of properties like brand, type, size, VGA, DVI, HDMI, display resolution, energy efficiency, contrast level and what else describes a monitor.

Filtering is often a set of links on the right side of the page with a title like ‘Narrow down your search’.

Search within to further narrow down your result set. So instead of narrowing down your result set through filtering, you want to narrow down by search. When searching within, all sorting and filtering settings should be kept.

Respect personalization settings: This is one of the most underestimated things on websites. What personalization settings, like sorting reveals about a customer  is a lot more than you think. As a user, you expect your settings to be respected throughout your entire visit to a given site and even beyond visits. So if you’re on the hunt for something cheap, all lists and search result pages will always sort by cheapest first.

This is good user experience, but way too many sites don’t care about you in regard to this.

Misspelled search terms, autocorrect and synonyms. You probably have both non-educated, educated, and over-educated users and I can assure you that they’ll spell even the simplest of things differently. Well, how many different ways do you think users will spell “Britney Spears”, or is her name “Britanny Spears”? Take a look at Google’s report on Britney Spears spelling correction, and think for yourself how many different ways users might spell your product names.

What are those users going to do when they see a stupid no results page that doesn’t help them get on with their life? Yes – they hit the home, exit or search button of their browser and leaves your site!

Logging all search terms is a must have feature for you as an e-tailer. You have to be able to use search terms as Business Intelligence tool that helps you understand your customers better and better. Logging should also include result set size so you can see how many results are returned for each search term, and also a date and time.

Suggest alternate products when a no results page is found for specific search terms. If you do a site search on a website for “Sony TV” but the site doesn’t have any Sony product, but loads of Philips – wouldn’t you be happy to take a look at the Philips TVs?

This is where your search term database comes in handy. As an e-tailer you need a feature that lets you see all search term that gives your users a no results page. Then you need to take the Sony search term, and link it to a Philips search term so the suggestion is made to your users for future searches.

Conclusion

Internal site search on your E-commerce website is extremely important. Yet, a lot of popular E-commerce software platforms don’t give you the quality you need.

Users are left even more frustrated than before, and it’s a very costly not to have a good site search engine for your business.

So go out there and find a 3^rd party site search engine if you are not able to change your E-commerce software. Make sure that you get the features outlined above, and that your results page is shown on your own site, with your site’s look and feel, which is not always the case with 3^rd party search engines. A 3^rd party search engine is not free, but I’m sure it will pay its own price very fast.

Hi

 

We have been in business for 14 days now and I think its going well. We went to a confenrence two weeks ago and it seems that people are needing what we can offer ond our product.

 

Right know the future looks bright

I’m addicted to Twitter. I use it every single day, from my laptop, my work PC, my phone – everywhere. For me it works as a way to stay updated on a certain topic – for me that topic is software development. As the one-and-only Milkshake developer, I want to receive the latest news about software development technologies as soon as possible.

During the last year or two, businesses, politicians and celebrities use Twitter. A local coffee shop doubled its clientele using Twitter. Barack Obama has an astonishing 325.000+ followers, and it is believed that his use of social media – including Twitter – made him able to connect with people and win the election. Dell made $1 million on Twitter advertising last year. And what did they spend? Nothing! $0. Twitter is free! It has loads of users, and if you take a look at their growth rate they will outperform even Facebook…

One of the benefits of using Twitter, as opposed to newsletters or blog posts, is that a Tweet is only 140 characters. The recipient can read and make a decision about an offer, in a matter of seconds.

Another benefit of using Twitter, is that you can be confident that your Tweets will reach its destinations. As of now, users of Twitter don’t have spam filtering. Of course they can chose to Un-follow you on Twitter, but that’s your own fault if they chose to do that.

So how would we like Milkshake to be connected to Twitter? Our customers must have an easy way to do the following tasks in regard to Twitter:

1. Publish a Tweet when a new product is either created, has changed price, has a new picture or a new variant
2. Publish product pictures using TwitPic
3. Publish a special time-limited offer, as a Twitter-only offer, but also as a “global” offer, along with a picture using TwitPic
4. Publish a product review when a customer submits one
5. Link customers to their Twitter profile
6. Publish order status notifications as a direct message to the customer
7. Get a brief overview of what people on Twitter are saying about the company or its products
8. Track traffic from Twitter. See how many sign up to newsletter, place an order or something else

The last task is very important. As one of our core values of Milkshake, the ability to get insight and take action immediately whether it being marketing, pricing or product inventory, will enable you to sell more as a Milkshake customer.

Twitter is working hard to figure out how to avoid spam. So don’t make your followers feel you’re spamming! Give them something for free all the time. Post some great links that are relevant to your customers. Comment on new stuff in your industry. Follow your followers, and enter short discussions. Then every once in a while, send your followers a time limited special offer. Interact first, sell second – as Seth Godin finished his blog post about The Panhandler’s secret.

Linking your customers to their Twitter profile

As with newsletters, Twitter is also about getting people to “sign up” for your Tweets so they can get your updates. If you post interesting stuff, people will start following you, but you can also do something to make them follow you. When a user sign up for your newsletter, you can use the e-mail address to see if this user is already on Twitter. If the user is present on Twitter, you can immediately ask the user to follow you. Or you can send an e-mail telling about what kind of stuff you post on Twitter, and why anyone should follow you.

Why is so many businesses still living in the past, and still trying to do business the very old way? Why do you need all those lousy lawyer-ish, back accountant-ish CEO’s, CTO’s and so on, a boring board of directors that is only killing you? Is it because you’re a VC funded company?

Some businesses wants the biggest customers. Big companies will only kill your innovation. They demand, and their demands are huge. You should’ve delivered yesterday and when you eventually deliver – they didn’t even know what they needed, so the rubber duck you gave them was useless anyway. It’s all down to a bunch of “so yesterday” business people that still live in the 80’s. And they’re killing innovation. Everything must be so cooperate-ish that they become invisible.

Take the top 500 companies in the world, and they all look exactly the same. They are not the ones inventing something new – they’re asleep and loosing market shares as you’re reading this. While they’re sleeping, they want you to be working your ass off, to deliver what they demand. But when working for other companies, you must communicate with them. And man, are they slow! So the big monster is sleeping, and making you sleep as well.

I know it looks very very good on your website, when you have the logos of the worlds biggest companies on your front page. But is it worth it? I certainly don’t think so, because they get to control your business – and more importantly the development of your business and product. And that is the worst thing that could happen. I’d rather make 1000 $ from 10 customers, than making 10,000 $ from one customer! Why? Because with 10 customers, I get more feedback, I can satisfy a common need, I can make a better product, they don’t control me, I’m not fucked if a customer quits or goes out of business.

I have just opened my new account on Twitter and now I really believe in the future of social networks online.

For Milkshake this can be a very important way to connect whit people.

If you are planning your startup in phases and always are aware of the next step, it is possible to avoid many problems.

A good planning is a key element in being succesfull. If you always have your next goal in front of you then you will take many problems and solve them in a way so you can reach that goal.

In milkshake, We have instead of a bussinessplan tryed to build a rocket. There are 5 phases in the rocket and when phase 1 is over, then we are ready for phase 2.

Its pretty simple, but instead of a fine businessplan we have chosen to build our planning up like this

- How many customers do We need to complete phase one.

What do We ned to have ready on the product

Where should our marketing be, to complete phase one.

We have build up some clear goals, and when we have reach them, We are ready for step 2.

This is the best way for us.What is the best way for you?

Teamwork is a key element in creating a succefull business. I do not believe that one man has all the skills or can overcome all things in a startup. There will always be things you are very good at and things that are not so great to be done by you.

Therefore to higher your chances for succes it would be a good idea to find someone to partner up whit.

If you are a Team you will have someone to talk to and discuss whit. Maybe your idea is not the idea that are the best for the company.

Let me say it this way.

If you are good a computers stay good at that and find someone whos good at marketing and economics. Then I believe you have a better chances for succes.

So do what you are good at and let the rest be done by somebody else.

Last week, we was sponsored into the Microsoft BizSpark program by Rackspace UK.

Microsoft BizSpark is all about helping you get started through free software licenses:

BizSpark is uniquely designed to accelerate your success by providing fast, affordable access to current, full-featured Microsoft tools and technologies, plus production licensing for hosted solutions. For support, BizSpark unites a global community of technology and entrepreneurial experts who can guide you through the hurdles of growing a new business.

Basically, if you match the following criteria:

Is in the business of software development,

Is privately held,

Has been in business for less than 3 years, and

Has less than US $1 million in annual revenue.

You enroll through a Network Partner which acts as a sponsor, and you will receive a Visual Studio Team System Team Suite with MSDN Premium subscription:

Quote Scott Hanselman:

• All the software included in the Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System Team Suite (VSTS) with MSDN Premium subscription
• Expression Studio Version 2
• VSTS Team Foundation Server (standard edition)
• Production use rights to host a “software as a service” solution (developed during participation in the BizSpark Program, on any platform) over the Internet, with regard to the latest versions of Microsoft products including:
  • Microsoft Windows Server® (all editions up to and including Enterprise)
  • Microsoft SQL Server (all editions)
  • Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server
  • Microsoft System Center
  • Microsoft BizTalk Server
  • Microsoft Dynamics CRM (coming soon)
• In addition to the core program offering, BizSpark startups will be eligible for other Microsoft offerings, such as:
• Microsoft Azure Services Platform - The Azure Services Platform is the collection of Foundational, Developer and Live Platform Service such as Windows Azure, Live Mesh, Compute Services, Storage Services, Workflow Services, Identity Services, Connectivity Services, SQL Data Services. All developers will have access to the Azure Services Platform developer tools which includes the local development fabric.

 

And the best part is, that it is all free! You only pay 100$ when you exit the program.

I recently read an article at businessweek.com, about crowdsourcing. The article explains how current E-commerce sites is crowdsourcing design of their products. A great example is Threadless, a T-shirt store where users can submit their designs for voting, and when a certain amount of votes are reached, the designer receives 2000$, and the design is up for sale on the website. This gives Threadless not only a new design, but also a good idea that the new design will sell, since a lot of users voted for it.

I was thinking about examples of crowdsourcing in the software business, and UserVoice.com is a good example of crowdsourcing feature idea generation, and at the same time finding out how needed a feature is. Just like Threadless does with their visitors voting up designs, visitors are voting up feature requests on UserVoice.com.

Another similar, and maybe a bit more sophisticated example is GetSatisfaction. Not only is this crowdsourcing feature generation, but also crowdsourcing bug-hunting and support.

Brands like Adidas and Nike is also crowdsourcing design, by letting their customers customize shoes and football boots, and later making their designs publicly available, letting other users get inspired.

Has E-commerce already been crowdsourced?

I think that one of the most common things that are crowdsourced in E-commerce is implicitly the generation of credibility through public customer reviews and feedback. Amazon does an amazing job of this on their product pages where you can find several customer reviews.

What about lead generation? You’ve probably seen loads of ‘Send to a friend’ buttons on E-commerce sites. Also add to del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit and all those online bookmarking services. This will eventually result in link building.

If you’re about to start a new company, website, E-commerce site or something else where you’ll need to design logo, website and etc., those tasks can easily be crowdsourced. Using services like 99Designsyou can make your design tasks a public contest where hundreds of thousands designers can submit their suggestions. You put a prize up for grabs, and designers will start competing for your money. A great way to milk as many ideas as possible.

I really think, that when it comes to creative tasks, crowdsourcing is more preferable than outsourcing – simply because you want to see lots of different ideas, and not just a couple of ideas your regular supplier of creativity will give you.

But what good is talent without experience? And what good is experience without talent? Finding the balance is very difficult. I see loads of companies looking to hire experienced people. You get the question all the time from friends, your boss or family: “I’m looking for a very experienced developer, do you know anyone?”. Experienced developers are usually not available, so I suggest hiring newly educated people. “No way, they’re no good!”. But why???

I don’t understand why so many companies close their eyes, and do the ordinary. And what is the ordinary, anyway? In my opinion it is the exact opposite of innovation. Innovation can be achieved when you disappear from your daily routines and best practices – turn off your brain and try something really stupid. But most experienced people are too obsessed with their own pride that they will never be able to do that. They write off the unknown before it’s even thought of, let alone tried! Who the heck came up with the idea of placing barrels of water, in front of all the junctions on the highway? I don’t know – but to me this is pure innovation. Solving problems in a new, simple and cheap manner… We need people who has no experience, and hold the ability to ask the stupid questions, and come up with new ideas. We need virgins – as I read in David Platt’s book, called Why Software Sucks.

In my opinion, companies neglecting to hire newly educated people, are cannibalizing the entire educational eco-system! Their current staff needs fresh thoughts and new ways of doing their every day tasks in order to learn. If they don’t learn, your company doesn’t learn, nor evolve. You grow old, and die like a dinosaur. Experienced, but rather stupid and primitive.

Not only do companies avoid hiring newly educated people. Furthermore, they “box” employees. By “boxing” I mean making boundaries, and restricting people to their area of responsibility and expertise. People are different, and therefore all people don’t necessarily play well with office hours, or open space office environments. I’ve discovered that I work best in new and changing environments, like in the train with lots of people, at the airport waiting for my flight or in a hotel room. Will the ever evolving mobile computer and 3G internet connection enable this to work on a daily basis? Could you work five days a week on your way from New York to London – to Tokyo and to San Francisco? Now you’re thinking I’m being either stupid or naive? But isn’t that what innovation is about?

I just read on this blog http://www.plumbersurplus.com/Blog/ that Steve Jobs (Apple) is the most influental CEO in recent time.

I would like to ask then. What is Apple whitout Steve Jobs?

I do not belive its a splended idea to build a company around just one person. We all have faults and sometime they will come up, and what will the company do the day their frontman is gone og needs to go?

The best way  is to build a company on values. Then if the headpersons die or get sick, the Business and the whole companystructure have some ideas and values as guidelines.

When you start your Company, it will be good to have some ideas about how to build it. What is the foundation in your business?

Give yourself and your company some values and be more succesfull!

Is it a good idea to start local and think Global?

If you have in mind all the time, that you are going to make business in different countries its important from the beginning of your business that you think international in all things and steps you are working whit.

If you are located in a small country as Denmark whit 5,3 million people some day you will run out of clients. Its very simple.But if we are looking south of the border to Germany whit 80 million people, then you got acces to many more clients and future customers.

If your product is designed only to a small country as Denmark it can be very expensive and difficult to start on the German  or American marked. Because the customers are different from country to country. The way the look on your online shop can be very different.

Thats means that in every single step and direction you move your company you have to keep in mind, that it have to be used by many different people form many different cultures.

 

Whit this in mind we would like to take Milkshake and our customers out in the world

Start Local, Think Global if you want to be succesfull

Starting a new company these days may seem like an impossible task to somebody. But we think it is the best time ever to start something new.

Whatever type of business you plan to start, you can be absolutely confident that your competitors are spending way too much money every day on 5 year office leases, 12 months advertising contracts, more bills than you could ever imagine. It is make or break for those companies! Especially VC funded companiesare throwing away money as we speak. Both founders and investors gambled big-time, and now is the time to pay up.

As a startup, you have the chance to create a solid business from scratch without requiring big amounts of money up-front. Established competitors focus on saving their business, instead of developing it. This is the chance for you to make a difference and go in front.

Jason Cohenrecently wrote a guest articel at OnStartups.com, outlining 6 reasons why now is the time to start something new. He also points out that now is a good chance of hiring extraordinary cheap talent:

It's hard to hire good people because they already have a job.  But right now that's not true -- companies are exploding and laying off everyone, even the stars.

If you're starting a company you're probably looking for a co-founder more than an employee. Even better. In an environment where few companies are hiring, lots of stars (or, better, potential stars) are out of work.

The market is flooded with good people.  Maybe you yourself just got laid off with some co-workers you like!  Just keep your hiring standards high and dig into your social network. (Or go get a social network now. See? That Facebook account really was a good idea.)

Also – when the economy is down and everything is looking bad. You can be absolutely positive that the picture will be different some years forward. So if you built something solid now, the chance that it will strengthen when the economy is booming upwards is more than likely!

Neil Davidson also wrote a guest article at OnStartups.comon why you have to get going now:

3) You need constraints to build great software. If there's one thing we've got plenty of in this economy, it's constraints. Make good use of them.

4) Constraints enforce discipline. You'll need to, among other things, manage your expenditure, focus on making products that people actually want to buy, learn the difference between cash flow and profitability and figure out how to market on a shoe-string. Now is an excellent time to forge those skills. You will need them the next time things go bad.

Today is a good day to startup something new, so why wait? Tomorrow might be too late!

Taking up a new challenge is always going to involve some initial mistakes. In the world of business, this will cost you money. So you have to make sure that 1) Reduce the amounts of mistakes, and 2) Make sure not to make the same mistakes again.

I’ve already touched the importance of Web Analyticsfor E-commerce sites. My main point there was, you should be able to get insight and take action immediately! It is the most important thing about running a business online!

I was surfing the Internet this evening, and came across a great blog about E-commerce. I found a specific post that I really like: Top 10 E-commerce Startup Mistakes.

I think these tips are really great. There’s obviously a lot more out there, but these are some of the most frequently mistakes made, and some of the worse.