farfetch announces $18m round of funding
farfetch.com, the marketplace for independent fashion boutiques, has today announced a further $18m in funding.
Taking the total backing to almost $25m, the company has also appointed Index Venture's Robin Klein to its board of directors. This adds to Klein’s current roles at StylistPick, MyBuilder and Wonga.
ASOS Marketplace sales grow 690% over the past year
ASOS says that its Marketplace sales have grown 690% over the past year.
Established a year ago, ASOS Marketplace allows boutiques, vintage collectors, individuals and designers to open virtual stores, a little like US e-commerce giant Etsy.
Zappos launches lifestyle magazine iPad app
Online footwear retailer Zappos has today launched an iPad app called Zappos Now, presented in the form of a digital lifestyle magazine.
It will be updated monthly, and allow users to shop directly from the app with free next business day shipping with no minimum order value.
Persuasive checkout best practice from ASOS
As a follow-up to my earlier article, Shopping basket best practice from ASOS, I’ve taken a look at the updated ASOS checkout experience. It includes one change which has reduced their checkout abandonment rate by 50%.
The ASOS website delivers an excellent browsing and shopping experience, and I regularly feature examples from the retailer in my e-commerce best practice training courses.
The updated checkout continues this trend, as the earlier version certainly didn’t fit in well with their highly tuned shopping experience up to checkout.
This article will recap on what ASOS is doing well on its shopping basket, look at how it is handling new customer checkout, and the variety of persuasive checkout lessons we can take from them as well as identifying a few areas of improvement.
Will f-commerce succeed?
At the end of September, Magners announced that it is starting to sell limited edition cider directly via its Facebook page.
Asos was the first UK retailer to open a fully transactional Facebook store in January this year.
On the face of it, f-commerce seems to be taking off, so should brands be launching F-commerce stores?
Customer service goes social
Companies have rushed to embrace social media marketing, but there's
more to social media than marketing.
Increasingly, whether companies like it or not, consumers expect companies to respond to customer service inquiries submitted via social channels like Twitter and Facebook.
Unfortunately, it currently appears that companies are generally more adept at social marketing than they are at social customer service.
Five tips for using Facebook for customer service
If we get bad customer service online, we vote with our feet. We stop doing business with the company in question, or take action against it. We call it out on Facebook, Twitter and (in the famous case of United Airlines) we notoriously write songs about it.
Although most brands use social media to market themselves, relatively few provide really excellent customer service.
Here are my top five tips for getting customer service right on Facebook...
E-commerce product videos: best practice tips
While more and more retailers are using online video, there are still plenty of sites which could use it to improve their product pages.
I've been looking at some examples of best practice from retailers that use video on their product pages.
ASOS has the best mobile commerce site: study
A new m-commerce benchmark study rates the ASOS mobile website, which we reviewed last year, as the best among those of 16 UK retailers.
This is the verdict of eDigital Research's latest mCommerce Benchmark study, which uses mystery shopper surveys to assess the customer experience for websites viewed on smartphones.
ASOS: mobile site review
Fashion retailer ASOS launched a mobile site recently, just in time for the Christmas shopping season.
Like M&S and John Lewis, ASOS has opted for a site rather than an app to broaden its reach on mobile, and in response to the number of visits and orders from mobile users.
