Jon M Wilson

Amazon.com have launched a significant redesign for their home page – bringing digital content front and centre, and fading the physical goods into the background.

Out with the old

The Amazon.com home page, before the revamp

The old design – while clearly showcasing the flagship Kindle e-Reader, still makes it clear that there are such things as physical, paper books for sale here amidst the digital wonders and assorted other categories of physical goods.

As Amazon (with revenues of over $US34 billion last year) expanded, its core offering of paper-and-print books, delivered cheap and fast, started to be crowded out by the other goods. Whether sold directly by Amazon, or through the range of partners, the focus has moved away from print, and squarely towards “other”.

Lately, of course, “other” has largely meant “Kindle e-Reader” and associated eBooks. With the redesign, this move is accelerating considerably.

In with the new

The Amazon.com home page, after the revamp

The new site – again, showcasing the Kindle,  is cleaner, crisper, and unashamedly minimalist. It looks very much at home on a tablet – and will probably look outstanding on the soon-to-be-released Amazon tablet device.

The products listed on the front page will of course be driven by customer habits, but as Amazon.com focuses more on eBooks, and drives customers there, it seems likely that the dynamic content of “What customers are looking at right now” will reflect that.

Books, incidentally, do get a mention on the Amazon.com front page. Right down here in the footer. Sort of.

Books at Amazon.com - in the new design

Conversions will likely take a hit in the next quarter while visitors get to grips with the major changes, but with plenty of time before Amazon’s traditional landmark fourth quarter, Christmas trading should follow the familiar pattern.

Ultimately, it’s not going to be a question of how pretty the design is, or how elegant the tablet experience is with the new Amazon design; it will be a question of the facts and figures, the metrics behind the scenes.

What will the new cleaner, leaner design do to the average order value, value per visitor, average time spent per visit, conversion percentage?

What will the new optimised-for-the-tablet model do to the overall revenue?

And of course, how this will all affect affiliates is another question…

Agreement by Cobrasoft via sxc.hu

Relationships are not built without communication – real communication. Your communication should demonstrate genuine empathy for your customers’ needs which will be the basis for building a mutually beneficial relationship with them.

Another key aspect of building a solid, lasting relationship with your customers will be the attitude you display toward them, and your mindset in dealing with them. Continue reading

Image by slworking2 via flickr.com

Your brand is everything about how you are seen on the internet, and it is increasingly accessible in sophisticated aggregated forms, and there are companies lining up on all sides of the brand management market, for better or worse.

The Gatherers, the Guardians and the Generators are all watching your brand. Continue reading

Dictionary by Jaboney via flickr.com

In the shiny technological age of the internet, sometimes it’s the old fashioned skills that make the difference.

Internet audiences have notoriously short attention spans, and are put off very quickly by something that looks fishy – or phishy for that matter.

In the UK, where internet sales are estimated at more than £527M (USD 848M / AUD 789M) Oxford University’s “Oxford Internet Institute” claim that the simple inability to write without spelling mistakes, and without grammatical errors is reducing revenue.

Website visitors may associate poorly written text with phishing scams and be wary of those behind the scenes.

Technical skills are good, but without basic communication ability it all comes to nothing.

What we need now is for Google to use spell checkers and grammar parsers in their ranking algorithms…

In every process there needs to be a box marked other.

Start of the unexpected incident, end of incident. Review why this didn’t fit the mould. Review how this can be avoided in future.

Unpredictable things happen, but you can have a process for handling kinds of unexpected things.

An emergency kit.

A library of partial plans and resources.

Don’t just call it random and wait for it to happen before picking up the pieces, and pulling together a solution.

The last stage of the “other” process is to ask “Why was this not covered by the normal process?“