Posts from — November 2009

An interesting article appears from 2007 demonstrating that Sprint had more kahunas than most frustrated customer service reps when it “broke up” with a group of high maintenance customers. The note went like this:

“Our records indicate that over the past year, we have received frequent calls from you regarding your billing or other general account information. While we have worked to resolve your issues and questions to the best of our ability, the number of inquiries you have made to us during this time has led us to determine that we are unable to meet your current wireless needs. Therefore after careful consideration, the decision has been made to terminate your wireless service agreement effective July 30, 2007.“

Sprint explains that these customers impact the service given to other customers causing long delays in service.

This leads to the question of the day. Especially during this recession. Should you break up with high maintenance clients?

You know the old addage that 20% of your customers provide 99% of your income and I’ll add to this that at least 10% of your customers demand 100% of your attention at one time or another and don’t care how many other customers suffer because of this. It’s difficult to offer good customer service with these types of clients.

But more importantly the provider has to set the tone for the expectations of the relationship. Nobody likes fine print but when it comes to customer service and support, it seems to be a necessary evil. There is always at least one of your clients that is going to abuse the privilege and skew the system.

During this recession, some of our clients have reported that a good percentage of people  are willing to abuse the system most likely out of lack of funds and desperation to get things without having to pay for them. Certainly on their side they can claim that something is wrong with your service or product, but the fact of the matter is that for some people it’s time to lay down the law or cut your losses.

Life is too short to let a few bad apples to ruin the bunch. If you find that more than 1% of your customers are taking advantage of you, it’s time to write a bit of fine print and put that out in the view of your customers so they understand what you will and will not do to please them. This is especially true of first time customers.

Even Zappos.com has tiered their services for loyal customers vs. new customers.

The retailer had typically upgraded both first-time and repeat customers to overnight shipping even though it wasn’t advertising that perk. But starting in 2009, Zappos will no longer offer overnight upgrades to first-time visitors. Instead, CEO Tony Hsieh is moving those dollars into a new VIP service for Zappos’ most loyal shoppers. [1]

Sprint may have raised eyebrows when they “fired” their high maintenance customers, but in these hard times it ’s becoming more and more important to cut costs and cut your losses early with problem customers.  This provides you an opportunity to provide the type of customer service to the rest of your loyal customers that is needed to survive in the current business climate.

ProStores recently improved their eBay interface to offer template design that is unparalleled from previous versions.

The image on the left is an actual eBay listing template we tested for one of our clients listing both to their website and eBay. Once the template is installed in ProStores, you simply click a button on the product in the backend that say “List to eBay” using this template (or any other variation you create).

So YES – ProStores does now have eBay templates that can make your eBay listing stand out in the crowd.

There has been a fair amount of discussion about how ProStores can help your business grow and how friendly it is to use. With the recent changes, we say that ProStores has adapted to become a formidable platform for online sellers with ease of use in many ways.

Check ProStores out here

Many sellers who are trying to list to eBay and an online store will find the new feature easy to use and an all-in-one place to sell online. Not only does ProStores feature this new ditty, but it also feeds directly to many of the shopping portals like Googlebase, Shopping.com etc. This means that in one place you can list your items and sell multi-channel without much effort at all. I’d say that is worth the price of admission.

aGenius offers a store design package that also integrates all the elements of the eBay listing template and Prostores Web Design to make it easier to get up and running beautifully.

I love this RGB color picker to easily identify the color and find the RGB code for it. Simple and straightforward. Funny but we have so many clients that ask for Blue, and we say, “What Blue” – there are so many variations of a color. Next time you ask for something from a web designer, take a check here to find out the RGB equivalent and make your web designer happier.

Some people who plan to earn affiliate revenue online never think about formulas to determine how to do it. It’s really an essential to know what you are up against, what you need to do to earn revenues.

If you are an ecommerce site planning to add this to your ecom, think twice. Here are some figures to estimate whether or not it’s worth it.

Let’s say you can get about 3000 unique visitors a month. And let’s say your average Click Rate is about 3% (which is nice and high). It equates to about $50 dollars in Google Adsense revenue, and if you have really good content for your direct visitor, you might be able to get them to view more and more pages, resulting in let’s say 25K in pageviews. Of those page views you could be earning let’s say .50 cents per click on 3% so you might even end up with 375. a month.

Doing some affiliate products that earn more than just a few dollars each, with just the unique visitor count and that click through rate, you might earn say 20. per item you send them to, making it something like $1800 a month.

But let me make something very clear, these numbers are very optimistic. I would rather estimate a 1% click rate on the unique visitors at a mere 4. per clicker to get $360, and keep working to improve my traffic, then to estimate that all my visitors are great big spenders who will want the single widget that I have and read all the content on my website.

If you are running an ecommerce site, most likely you’ll want to forgo this type of advertising, unless you do a blog on your site. Earning affiliate revenues of a few hundred a month, or selling products for many more hundreds (or thousands a month) on a small site is a no-brainer. You don’t want to send your visitor to your ecommerce site off to another site where you may or may not get revenue.

If you are looking to get involved in social marketing, like regular ecommerce marketing, you need to devote an hour a day. Even a few minutes a day is sufficient to get you up and running and make your network grow. It seems like everytime I make a twitter post, more followers come with it. It really doesn’t matter what I say, it’s just that I said something.

How many users are out there that are looking for your perspective, more information or something to fodder with in the realm of your conversation. A Lot.

Take an hour and read about it, engage in it, and have it for lunch. You’ll be surprised how fast you can build a network of socials that are looking for that message that you have to offer.

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