Silkmoth's offices will be closed from 12:00pm on the 24th December and re-open on the 4th January 2011 at 9:00am.
If you have an urgent support enquiry over the Christmas period please do not hesitate to call us. Your call will be redirected to a member of our team. You may be asked to leave a message in which case we will get back to you as soon as possible.
Have a restful Christmas and we look forward to working with you all in 2011.
The Silkmoth Team
We're pleased to announce the arrival of the Zipi Grip golf accessory. A product that will surely take the golf accessory market by storm.
Zipi Grip is not only a product that will be incredibly useful for golfers around the world, it also offers a unique marketing proposition. Zipi Grips can easily be branded with your corporate logos and makes an ideal gift on corporate golf days.
For more details please contact Alison Miller at Zipi Grip.
It's that time of year again I'm afraid...
A merry Christmas and a happy new year to all of our customers and friends from everyone at Silkmoth.
Yesterday morning we received notification from SecureTrading that 3D-Secure was offline. This is a security scheme run by Visa (Verified by Visa) and Mastercard (SecureCode). Notifications from WorldPay followed soon after although SagePay decided to leave until the evening! 3D-Secure is the part of the payment process where the customer hops off to their card issuer to enter their password. Whilst making the whole process more cumbersome it does significantly reduce the risk of fraud. Any website not passing payments through the 3D-Secure mechanism is subject to fines or penalties (usually increased transaction charges). The outage has been caused by a distributed denial of service attack (DDOS) where many hundreds if not thousands of computers have flooded the Mastercard and Visa servers with requests, effectively rendering them useless. There is some suspicion that this is as a result of Visa and Mastercard refusing to process payments on behalf of WikiLeaks. We've been notified this morning that 3D-Secure is up and running again but as a merchant you should check your next statement to ensure you've not been penalised for not using 3D-Secure in this period. See also: Why I Hate 3D-Secure
There's been a lot of talk this week about a report published by internet metrics company Nielsen. The Increasingly Connected Consumer: Connected Devices gives us an overview of who is using Connected Devices (i.e. mobile phones, iPhones, iPads etc.)
The report primarily focuses on App usage which got me thinking about web usage on these devices. We know that more and more people are surfing with their phones but I decided to have a look at our own metrics to see what these consumers are really up to.
I've used data collected using Google Analytics from some of our eCommerce sites. The sample consists of 2.5 million visitor sessions since January 1st 2010. Of these sessions, 98,000 were made by visitors on their mobile devices.
This first graph shows the increase in share of traffic made by mobile device users. In the 20-30 age range this has increased from 2.2% in January to an impressive 7.5% share of traffic in October.
The 30-40 age group, where you wouldn't expect so many early adopters and quite a few technophobes, has also increased dramatically to a 4.8% share.
The increase in growth from the middle of the year is caused by the introduction and adoption of the iPad. This is demonstrated to greater effect by the 20-30 year olds.
I'm particularly interested in the usability of these devices and the effect this has on sales. None of the eCommerce sites measured do anything particularly clever for delivery on mobile devices. It's really about how well the devices cope with a standard website.
The next graph shows conversion rates by device (or operating system). The baseline running through the middle of the graph is the average, overall conversion rate.
You'll see that I've added in the desktop devices for comparison (Windows, Macintosh, Linux). It's easy to see that the small format devices (i.e. phones) have a relatively poor conversion rate. The larger format iPad has a conversion rate that is closing in its desktop cousins.
Finally, let's have a look at how much is spent when visitors are using their mobile devices. The Nielsen report shows that iPad users are far more receptive to advertising and more likely to purchase once they've seen an ad on their device? Is it that they're more affluent than most? Or perhaps they're just more gullible?
The baseline running through the middle of the graph is the average, overall order value. The graph shows, astonishingly, that iPad users spend over 30% more than any other type of user. Macintosh owners also spend more than most. In fact high end touch screen devices all fair very well.
Firstly, knowing this information about your website's visitors is like gold dust. You need to make sure you are capturing this data and also to make sure you've got a partner who can help you understand it.
Secondly, you've got to respond to these findings. We now know that visitors with Macs and iPads spend more money. We'll be working on our eCommerce sites to offer these visitors the more affluential products. Linux users on the other hand will be sent to the bargain basement!
The elves are back...