Credit Check: Transactions Shift to Debit
You know when Steve Jobs retires and the Apple world fades to a shadow of its former self? (Okay, I don’t actually think anything like that is going to happen–Steve Jobs can retire all he wants, and Apple will still be a great company. Sorry PC fans.)
The companies that may be headed toward shadow-land are credit card companies, if the government’s tinkering has anything to say. A new-ish law dramatically lowers the amount financial institutions have to pay for using debit cards, and some retailers are planning to encourage consumers to use non-credit card forms of payment (currently including debit cards, but potentially also including Google Wallet or other such technologies). An Internet Retailer study revealed that 17 percent of retailers intend to offer discounts to debit card users, and 70 percent of the interviewed retailers were online.
Read the full article at zippycart.com.
Could Online Sales NOT Be What It’s All About? Nah.
We Content Pingers are all about online sales. Yet, I am about to tell you the story of a store that has, thus far, refused to sell their products online. Before you start guessing–no, it is not a stubborn grocery store. It is Primark, a super-cheap British clothing retailer. While the company is opening hundreds of new stores across the UK and Germany, it has no plans for an online retail segment in the near or far future. Rosie Baker, on MarketingWeek, argues that the strategy makes sense for this shop because the price of their goods does not outweigh the cost of running a transactional site. Sounds reasonable for mobile city-dwellers, but Primark is most certainly missing out on a segment of the population with this strategy. Do you think there are any stores that should not be online, or will the wave of the future sweep away those not experimenting on the Internet?
Read the analysis at marketingweek.co.uk.
Spotting Keywords that Benefit You
Now that your transaction-related gears are turning, I am going to flip a 180 and reveal to the small-and-local-business-owners in the crowd the deep mysteries of keywords. Or rather, I will let Nick Stamoulis of Business 2 Community share a small part of this deep mystery. He tells local business owners to pull out their magnifying glasses and hunt down the keywords that speak to what makes you unique. As a small shoe retailer, you do not stand a chance going after the keyword “shoes,” because you are competing with too many big players. Instead, when you come across a bite-sized nugget, such as “Sandusky Shoe Store,” your keywords should be sprinkled and your site optimized.
Read the article at businesstocommunity.com.
