by This week in the world of eCommerce….
…Dublin Web Summit
The prestigious Web Summit event took place in Dublin, Ireland this week after months of anticipation from those lucky enough to secure a ticket. The Summit has been hugely successful for the past few years and is really putting Dublin on the map as the Silicon Valley of Europe. The event drew 22,000 people with over 500 key speakers such as John Collison, co-founder and president of payments processing start-up – Stripe, which is based in San Francisco. Eva Longoria was also a speaker, which generated so many tweets I’m pretty sure she almost broke Twitter.
During his talk, Mr.Collison predicted that ecommerce will soon take place on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, and he’s right. As I said in this post last week, the key to turning browsers into buyers is making the purchase as simple as possible, so by integrating ecommerce channels into these platforms, you’re significantly reducing the amount of clicks it takes a prospective customer to make a transaction. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for this prediction to come true, but I’m guessing it won’t be very long.
…Google Announces Enhanced Ecommerce for Google Analytics
This week, Google added new Analytics features which will enable businesses to better track the customer journey and fine-tune their re-marketing plans. With much more insight into the customer journey and content engagement, these features will really help businesses to identify any missed opportunities.
…Amazon launches new Artificial Intelligence assistant – Meet Echo
On Thursday, Amazon released a new hardware product called’ Echo’. Echo is a cylinder shaped artificial intelligence unit that works as a personal assistant and a high quality speaker. The device can provide information on subjects such as music, news, and weather and is controlled by the owners’ voice. It is always switched on and it responds to commands when prompted, by being called ‘Alexa’ (watch out, Siri!). The device is actually quite reasonable at $199 for non-Amazon Prime members or $99 for Prime members, and has been released just in time for Christmas!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkOCeAtKHIc
…Big brother is watching you (aka Verizon and AT&T)
It came to light recently that Verizon has been inserting ‘super-cookies’ into customers mobile browsers to track all of their web activity, which is more than a little unnerving. AT&T have been doing the same thing, to a lesser degree. In terms of ‘super-cookies’, they’re the using the Walmart variety. However regardless of the extent of this unsolicited snooping, their customers aren’t happy and rightly so, as these cookies can’t actually be deleted or disabled. Oh and if you think you’re safe because ‘private browsing’ is enabled on your browser, think again. This function is completely overruled by Verizon and their turbo charged cookie monsters. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is now speaking out against the two companies, with this tweet from Jacob Hoffman-Andrews sparking outrage on social media last month. If you’re a Verizon customer and concerned about your online privacy, please log on to this security website where you can check if this perma-cookie has been installed.
That’s it for today, but don’t forget to check in with us daily on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+ for more ecommerce news, info and updates!