If a product is mispriced on the till however, this becomes the offer which a shopper can capitalise on regardless of the advertised price.

So what happens online? When something is mispriced on your ecommerce site and payments are automated?

When a consumer buys online, they rarely reach a human being who could spot the error. If you list an item at £100 which should be £1000, your customer will reach the checkout with only £100 in their basket to pay. Your website then makes the offer for the customer to accept or decline. This offer will contain the wrong price and the order will be placed, money will change hands and the contract has been formed. There is nothing you can do but dispatch or potentially face a lawsuit.

However there is a way to protect yourself, ignoring the terms and conditions, if the customer is told that their order has been accepted, whether on screen or by email; the sale contract is formed. Both you and the customer have accepted the deal and any attempt to cancel their order could be seen as a breach of contract.

However in this instance, we miss an opportunity to enter another contract (or amendment to the standard buy/sell contract). This contract is contained in your terms and conditions which a shopper should be forced to agree to as part of the purchasing process. In these terms and conditions many retailers get around the above problem by stating that no order has been accepted until dispatch and that payment will only ensure receipt of the offer but not the agreement of that offer. (Do not try to copy and paste this expecting it to be legally watertight as I’m a web developer not a lawyer.)

In other words the process has been re-ordered slightly. The customer is now being invited to treat, he then makes the offer to pay £100 for the items and it is up to the order processing staff or system to agree, negotiate or decline. This gives you the chance to intercept and correct.

It is therefore important that any post-payment messages on your website do not state that an order has been accepted. Emails and post-pay messages should declare that the order has been received or acknowledged and your terms and conditions should state why.

Human error is common, if you sell products or services online, don’t get caught out!

The inspiration for this article from Yahoo! Finance with real life examples can be found here

Lets bring this into real terms; Today I was looking to replace my office chair. Controversial as it is, I use a kneeling chair. Despite conflicting reports and dodgy marketing, I use it because it’s the only chair style to date which doesn’t result in back pain for me with long term use. The chair I have has worn at the knees and the gas lifting strut has leaked to uselessness. I picked the one I wanted and ordered.

I mention this story because while I’m a business, I’m also a consumer and rely heavily on Google in my day to day life. As such minor changes in Google’s algorithm and structure do not go unnoticed.

Many hours later, I was looking to replace the gas lifting struts for the boot of my car. I searched Google for ‘Gas lifter’ and saw this:

The search results I believe are organic, gas struts have a variety of uses from office chairs, cars, to heavy machinery. The Google shopping results though are noteworthy. Google has obviously taken my search terms and used information about my previous searches to determine my need.

Google has given my search context based on what little it knows about me, and even though I wasn’t searching for chairs, knows that I’m interested in them nonetheless.

When it comes to using Google to advertise therefore, simply ‘getting to the top’ isn’t enough because ‘the top’ is becoming very personal to the searcher.

So here are your new goals:

• If you sell stuff, make sure Google Shopping knows you’re there.
• Make sure you have ample content showing that you are THE go-to company based on your expertise.
• Consider the people searching for you, what are they looking for? Maybe they’re not looking for ‘Web Designer Swansea’, perhaps they’re actually saying “How to get my business online”. Do your research.
• Organic is best; If you don’t have the budget for seo experts, keep your content fluid and natural and try to avoid over using sales cliches. Google is there to give people the information they’re looking for and will only offer ‘BUY NOW HERE’ to people who search ‘WHERE CAN I BUY NOW’.

To install snow on your website:

1. Download this zip file: snowstorm
2. Extract snowstorm.js and upload it to your web server (take note of any folders you add it to, it can go anywhere)
3. Add this line between the <head> and </head> tags of your template or page(s):<script src=”js/snowstorm.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
   (substitute ‘js/’ for the folder you uploaded to, or remove it if it is in the same folder as the page)

   If using WordPress, you might want to include the file in the template url :
   <script src=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_url’); ?>/js/snowstorm.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

4. Upload and check!
5. If using wordpress cache extensions, be sure to flush the cache before testing as like me you’ll waste valuable minutes debugging it when it doesn’t work.

Upload snow storm file, point at it, and you’re done! Snow on your website.

What does this mean? Well actually in terms of speed, very little. But we can assume that speed is inversely proportional to Internet traffic. There is a significant drop in speed leading to business open at 9am, the line tries to steady out but does get progressively slower throughout the day. There is a trough as I would have expected as the children return from school, but not nearly as deep as I would have guessed. It then seems we’re using the Internet most between 9-10pm before everyone goes to bed.

So if you’re getting frustrated at 9-10pm at slow page load times and crashing websites, wait an hour or two or try again in the morning. While this isn’t a fair problem bandwidth limits are bandwidth limits so it won’t be going away any time soon.

So let’s start at the beginning; Mr Spammer runs a dodgy medication selling website. Mr Spammer is in a high competition industry so needs to be found in Google. He’s optimised his site but now needs some links back from other quality sites like yours to show Google that his is popular (which it’s not) and equally full of quality content (which it isn’t). Mr Spammer logs on to blog after blog commenting on as many articles he has time to and all he has to do is make sure he enters his web address into the ‘Your Website’ box. If the blog on your nice site is unprotected, (and sometimes even if it is), his comment will appear, more importantly his name will link through to his website, and Google takes that link as a ‘thumbs-up’ from you giving it a tiny bit more importance.

Here’s the worse bit; when Google realises that Mr Spammer is actually spamming, it may penalise the site in question, and worse penalise every site which links to it… including your own quality, innocent website. He’s made a few sales so happy to relaunch site number 24763 on a new url and you’re made to suffer.

So here’s what you should do:

1. Learn the difference between a genuine supportive comment and a spam one. If they have included a link, it should link to a genuine business website and the comment should add something to your reputation or article. If they link to medicines, abortion pills, weight loss pills etc. you can safely assume it’s spam. Anything in the middle is up to you.
2. Install some anti-spam solutions like the following:
1. WordPress Akismit is one good piece of software, I believe they charge for it now, but that’s evidence of their success. It will stop most spam comments getting in and allow genuine comments through.
2. Self-moderation is the next step, Built into WordPress and others are a number of filters, you can hold all comments for manual approval, or set those with links included for approval. The latter is best and saves you time. If they don’t contain a link, it’s almost certainly harmless. You just have to ensure you check regularly to approve good comments and delete spam.
3. Install a captcha, again free on Wordress and others, this is the box which asks you to type what you see in the picture. This won’t fool determined spammers but the majority of spammers are after quantity not quality so if they don’t get through easily, they won’t waste their time trying and will go elsewhere. If your site happened to be Microsoft, Apple, BBC etc. you would be in for a rough ride.
3. Set nofollow to all user links. This is usually an option in your blogging or site software which allows you to set user links to ‘nofollow’ which basically is a message to Google (and others) saying “Yes I’m showing this link, but I don’t want you to treat it as an endorsement, I’m just the messenger.”
4. Finally, go through your previous comments and delete any which you’ve decided are spam.

Image via Wikipedia

Facebook have apologised for the way they rolled out a new feature with facial recognition. Now when a user uploads a photograph of their friends, Facebook can suggest which friends are in the picture for ‘tagging’. This has upset a lot of privacy conscious Facebook users because the option is switched on by default.

Facebook do have a history of just ‘switching things on’ without warning, whether it’s personal detail displays, photo albums or friend lists. Each and every time Facebook do this, there is an uproar from privacy groups across the Internet… yet they continue to use Facebook.

Here’s my view; Well done Facebook, what a great piece of functionality you’ve added to your website. Considering you have one of the busiest websites in history, you can still run facial recognition software despite the number of duff profile pictures uploaded. Genius! Facebook now knows what I look like… well if I continue to upload my photos, what should I expect?

This comes right back down to my core belief that the Internet is very much open. Facebook, like any other organisation is made up of a bunch of people I don’t know. I therefore only share details with these strangers that I don’t mind other strangers having access to. I feel others need to be reminded of these truths:

1. When you upload something, someone, somewhere receives it… you don’t necessarily know who
2. When this information is displayed online, in any form, other people have access to it
3. When this information is stored, it is backed up [copied]
4. When this information is displayed to others, it is spread and replicated
5. This information is often cached [copied] by archive servers
6. People may use this information for advertising, for ‘sample images’ or even downloaded for school projects
7. If you delete the original information or photo, it may have already been copied thousands of times and therefore is undeletable

The Internet is about sharing of information, by definition, privacy only exists when you aren’t online. If you don’t want Facebook to know what you look like, don’t upload your photos to it. If you don’t want Facebook to distribute your home address, don’t give Facebook your home address. Only one person is in charge of your personal data, and that’s you. Share only what you’re comfortable sharing and you’ll always remain comfortable with what the Internet does with your data.

Like most Facebook updates, there’s no real harm in what we can now do. We should all instead go hooray for technology, what a nifty thing it is! Anyone who can’t do that should delete their pictures and remove their profile.

Image via Wikipedia

As of today, most EU based websites are illegal!

In order to track visitors in analytics software, keep track on a visitor’s shopping basket or to serve adverts, a website uses Cookies. These are tiny files with very basic information in which a website already knows about you and stores it on your computer so that when you come back, it can repopulate the data. They’re wonderful little things and while it may sound intrusive, they can only access the information which they already know, they can’t steal card or bank details, they can’t see whether you bought X product on another site.

Anyway, the EU released a directive that ALL EU websites must actively ask permission from the website visitor before using these cookies… every EU website you ever go on will be constantly asking you whether you accept them or not. If you don’t, your website is illegal.

In the UK, we have a year to comply so don’t panic just yet. 26th March 2012 is the deadline for anyone interested.

Personally I feel this law will be retracted or adjusted because it will be a blow for the EU in a very competitive marketplace: Targeted advertising!

In order to target advertising, cookies are completely necessary, EU advertising companies are going to have to comply to this law more than any other company and that’s going to result in fewer impressions and fewer clicks. Advertisers will instead be forced to outsource to the US or other parts of the world where the Cookie directive doesn’t apply.

There is a loophole however, firstly the law doesn’t specifically mention cookies, it covers any data left on a user’s computer. Secondly it does say that ‘unless it is completely necessary for the operation a user is performing.

This means your Google tracking cookie is out, but the cookie which keeps track on a user’s shopping cart is in.

The ICO’s own website (the enforcers of this law) have one workaround in the form of a top banner. Unfortunately this is so badly implemented that if you try navigating around the site, some pages break and are unusable because they previously relied on cookies!

Further problems I foresee is the ‘terms and conditions effect’ where users are so used to clicking ‘agree’ without a second thought, to argue that they knowingly opted in is questionable. Users could however be tricked into agreeing to anything. Websites aimed at children would fall into difficulties when a person under 18 isn’t allowed to enter into a contract and therefore any content served would need to be confirmed by an adult before the site can legally use cookies.

It’s a minefield and a very badly thought out one at that.

So technically most EU websites are now illegal, it’s ok for another 12 months and we can all hope that someone with some forward thinking steps in and puts a halt to it or amends it in some way before we’re all spending a fortune getting these added, arguing with WordPress (A US company), and others, about building this into their software, and just becoming desensitised further into ‘agreeing’ to online contracts.

Starbucks have just announced that it will be dropping the name and band from it’s logo as it wants to expand away from just selling coffee. Many branding experts think this is a dangerous move and normally I would agree, however here’s why I don’t.

First of all, the name ‘Starbucks Coffee’ cannot really be stamped on a bottle of wine (which is on potential area of growth mentioned by their board.) so their logo certainly does need a change. They could opt for one of the following:

• Keeping the overall look (Green band, Siren and Starbucks name), and either change the word ‘coffee’ per application, removing it altogether or changing it to Starbucks Group/Company etc.
• Changing the logo entirely
• Change the logo enough to show change and development, but keep the overall message.

Starbucks have opted for option 3 which I don’t necessarily agree with, but as they’re changing the logo slightly, why not make a big deal about it? They have decided to keep the iconic crowned siren but I feel removed the part of their logo which makes it stand out from a distance, the green band.

For any other business or company, this is a very brave move, for most companies, a downright stupid idea. But we have to remember we’re talking about Starbucks, better known in the US than most of their car manufacturers, well known in the UK and across the world, frequenting many TV and Film story lines and regularly cropping up in comedic jokes.

Personally I don’t like the new logo, however moving to a single colour will help when printing on a myriad of products, removing the text makes it more globally acceptable and most importantly, it will look absolutely fantastic next to the old logo when we’re looking at those ‘logo origins’ or ‘logo progression’ presentations. Someone who only knows the new logo will spot it very easily on a photograph of today’s high street. Backward compatibility is just as important on the high street as forward recognition. But this is where Starbucks’ strong brand really shines. Remember that the logo isn’t a brand, it is just an anchor to it. Changing the logo doesn’t make the coffee taste different, or change the atmosphere in one of their many bars, or make the coffee service any quicker (sorry ‘or slower’), it is just a logo.

Starbucks’ strong brand will push the logo right past the critics and back onto that pedestal before we know what hit us. Now if Joe’s Icecream tried this, it would probably be suicide, but Joe’s is not yet Starbucks.