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Have you ever used an online coupon site to search for discounts and deals?

Many Internet users have.

Many Google for coupons from suppliers, enter them into coupon code fields at checkout and save themselves hundreds, if not thousands of dollars by taking advantage of deals online.

With a turbulent economy, it’s true that more people than ever are trying to find ways to trim expenditure. The coupon companies will tell you that coupons mean everyone wins. The retailer gets business, the consumer gets a discount and the coupon companies stay alive.

And it’s an industry that appears to be forging ahead.
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We’re cranking up the accelerator. (We get the message, boys.)

It’s official – there is a bit of Top Gun in every bloke surfing around the Internet.

Researchers from Southern Illinois University have done a study and found that blokes prefer fast download speed over easy navigation.

(Actually they aren’t the only ones that think men and women come from different planets. Wharton does too.)

But hey, before you strip every image, object and script from your website, (and just in case you thought life was easy), women prefer something else – they like ease of use, easy navigation, and accessibility.

So, how do you get Adam and Eve both loving your website?

Know How The Genders Behave.

• Women use the Web to develop relationships while men use the Web for information gathering. Fast download speeds make searching for information online more efficient. There is more about it here.
• Men favor coupons over sale items while women prefer sale items over coupons.
• Women are more likely to plan ahead at Christmas time, while men are more likely to get frustrated.
• Women buy strategically, while men buy immediately. A way to think of this is that women want to know more up front than a man does; men are more willing to gamble a bit in the hopes of a greater reward.
• Men and women care about different things – and if you want an illustration of this principle, check out product reviews by different genders to see what they care about.

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Is your business overrun by trolls?

Businesses attract two types of customers – they get those sent from heaven that pay full price, snap up new products early and generate nice healthy profit.

Then businesses get stuck with trolls that suck all their energy, drain that profit and turn a perfectly respectful day into a miserable one.

The troll is going to argue about the price, exasperate staff with their endless rants, grizzles and whines, return purchases and demand their money back. To add to the insult, they buy your product back when it finally goes on sale, load it onto eBay and flog it for a profit. (That’s the same profit they stole from you.)

Sound familiar? Then put a plan into gear to dump the trolls starting today.
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Ok, so here is a great little idea for online retailers.

Cartfly is a type of portable store. It enables a retailer to set up, for free, a cartfly store which can then be embedded into your MySpace or Facebook page. (You can also add it to Friendster, Hi5, Perfspot, Blogger, Xanga, Piczo, Typepad and Tagworld.)

Cartfly charges 3% of each transaction – but there are no set up costs so if you don’t sell anything, they don’t charge you. (So be sure to add enough margin to cover the 3% you’ll hand over to cartfly.)
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Selling online is not rocket science. Selling has been done for hundreds of years.

Way before this photo was taken, outside a store in 1912, people were selling, merchandising, swapping, trading and bickering with each other over price.

The same basic principles apply to selling – whether you operate a store in the bricks-and-mortar world or whether you are online.

You have to have a product to sell that is fit for its purpose, the customer has to believe they need or want it, and the sales rep’s job is to convince that customer that they should buy from his or her company.

In this series of posts, I’m going to talk about online selling. In this post, I’m going to cover off some simple principles that you need to get right from the start.

After that, we’ll take a look at some of the techniques that you can adopt from the world’s finest online retailers, such as Amazon, and apply to your own store. But first to the basics.
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Wondering whether your website is set up to sell? Here is a handy tool that can help you to measure its sales orientation. You can access it at MSN’s adLabs.

Websites tend to fall into three categories. Social, informational and transactional. The intention of this tool is detect the customer intention to either acquire information or purchase online. It is based upon their search queries or recently visited URLs.

MSN built its algorithm by reviewing the accuracy of the tool using human evaluators. The results demonstrate a 90% accuracy rate in determining both commercial and non-commercial intent for a given list of query terms.
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