e-Commerce

Michael O’Leary’s New Years Resolution

Ryanair have one of the worst images in the airline industry when it comes to customer experience. They almost revel in this thought too with Michael O’Leary constantly talking about ridiculous hypothetical ideas like charging customers for using the toilets on the plane and having all-standing flights. But it looks like 2014 will mark a change in approach.

To add to their much needed website redesign at the tail end of last year, a host of new improvements are to be made to the whole Ryanair experience over the coming months.

Some of these changes include a simplified booking process, allocated seating, a 24-hour grace period for rectifying minor errors on bookings, allowing a second free small carry-on bag, lower boarding card reissue fees and lower airport and baggage fees.

In addition, the airline’s mobile experience is to undergo a complete revamp with a new app being launched in May as well as a new smartphone booking service and, my personal favourite, smartphone boarding passes to be made available from April.

While I can understand why many people find reasons to complain about Ryanair, they are genuinely one of my favourite companies and I’m delighted to see them start trying to “eliminate things that unnecessarily piss people off ” like O’Leary pledged at September’s AGM.

Posted by Rob in e-Commerce, Retail, Ryanair

Amazon Unveils Flying Delivery Drones

3rd December 2013

It might be up to 5 years away according to CEO Jeff Bezos, but that hasn’t stopped Amazon’s drone delivery prototype ‘Prime Air’ capturing the public’s imagination this week. The concept, which aims to make deliveries within urban areas in under 30 minutes, will most likely be reserved for premium deliveries but that hasn’t stopped it whetting commentators appetites.

Despite the multitude of government regulations and practicalities that will presumably have to be dealt with before Prime Air will be permitted to take to the skies in a commercial sense, it shows how serious Amazon are about continuing to disrupt the shopping experience and eroding the gap between bricks-and-mortar and online shopping.

Posted by Rob in Amazon, Drones, e-Commerce

Is Coin The Solution To Carrying Multiple Cards?

While some of us wait patiently for smartphone payments to become a reality, Coin have taken a different approach and developed a device that allows users to ‘carry’ multiple payment options in a single card.

It’s a great product, and I can see it finding a niche among technophiles, but surely there’s a smartphone app out there that’s capable of doing something similar and building a critical mass, although there’s still the seemingly significant hurdle of changing consumer behaviour first, and that’s where Coin might have an advantage.

http://youtu.be/w9Sx34swEG0

Posted by Rob in e-Commerce, Mobile Payments, Tech

Art Series Hotels Late Checkout Campaign

Art Series Hotels and Naked Communications Melbourne put a theory to the test to see how guests would react to not having to check out until their room was actually needed. No more having to pack up and be gone by 11am if the next guest doesn’t arrive until 6pm. Guests could even stay an extra night if their room was not needed at all.

The results? 1,550 extra rooms were sold over a 4 week period with an additional $37,214 spent by guests on room service, not to mention generating an estimated $1.5 million worth of global media coverage.

Posted by Rob in Advertising, e-Commerce, Retail

Dell Use Twitter to Facilitate Customer Feedback And Even Increase Sales

Although this video is not exactly new, it only came to my attention this week through a New York Times article by small business guru, Melinda Emerson, who singles out Dell as one of the first big companies to effectively utilise social media to both listen, and sell, to customers.

It seems that Dell has dedicated some serious resources (like Gatorade did in 2010) to monitoring their mentions on social media. And with the company mentioned more than 25,000 times each day, you can see why. Dell’s social media director Cory Edwards claims that the most important factor in being successful on social media is to really listen to your customers and show them you’re using their feedback to change the way you do business, which Dell has shown with its @DellCares Twitter presence.

On the sales front, by offering exclusive deals to customers through its @DellOutlet Twitter feed, the company is actually leveraging Twitter to increase sales. With ROI presumably easy enough to measure here, they can see what works and what doesn’t.  And with nearly 1.5 million followers, I can only imagine that the @DellOutlet Twitter movement is proving quite fruitful for them.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23WDGRQpi7s

Posted by Rob in e-Commerce, Social Media, Twitter